The First to Go
By Mark Mangie. One of the many blessings of my life has been a long association with a group of people with whom I went to college. We met in 1968 at the newly designated Youngstown State University. The old St. Joseph Catholic Church was located at the corner of Wick and Rayen Avenues. It had an old, creaky pipe organ to which, for some unremembered reason, I was given access to play. While practicing one day, a voice called up to me in the organ loft and said he was enjoying the music. He introduced himself and asked me to join him at his club’s headquarters located in the old church rectory next door. That was my introduction to the Newman Student Organization, the Catholic collegiate organization. It was the heady time of flower children and political turmoil. The Newman Center provided an old fashioned “safe space” for us Catholics to delve into the realm of political activism. I was the outsider because I went to a pu...