Thursday, May 28, 2020

My love affair with TU, by alumnus Gustavo Coronel

Gustavo Coronel, (BS ’55) geology
An April morning in 1951, I left New York City for Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had been studying English for 15 weeks at Queens College before going on to The University of Tulsa to study geology. I had traveled to New York City from Los Teques, Venezuela, a town of about 10,000 people, quite a change of scenery for a 16-year-old, small town boy. I paid $19 for the Greyhound bus ticket and started on my 42-hour trip to Oklahoma.
We traveled from New York to Saint Louis and, from there on to Tulsa, with some brief stops to get something to eat. My first travel companion was a black soldier to whom I gave some Venezuelan cigarettes. At a point in time he stood up and left to the back of the bus. I thought I had said something he did not like but I later found out that we had reached the border of Missouri, where blacks were discriminated......

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