The Citizen

Joel Glimpse faced his past and future simultaneously.

A Vietnam soldier he'd written to as a fifth-grader presented him, 34 years later, with his diploma at Sunday's Keuka College graduation ceremony.

Glimpse not only earned a bachelor's degree in organizational management 27 years after graduating high school; he received his degree from Daniel Tessoni, a Keuka College Board of Trustees member and the Vietnam soldier whose name Glimpse had picked out of the newspaper as part of a fifth-grade class project at A.A. Gates Elementary School in Port Byron. The year was 1972.

“I guess I wrote that I was worried about people getting killed in the war - whatever 11-year-olds worry about,” Glimpse said from his home in Montezuma.

“I remember him expressing a young person's fear, some level of curiosity wanting to know what it was like to be in a country that was at war,” Tessoni said from his office in Rochester.

Tessoni was 24 years old at the time he and Glimpse corresponded. He had earned a master's degree from Clarkson University only months before he entered the service in October 1970.

“I am supposed to leave Vietnam on May 2, 1972,” Tessoni wrote in his letter to Glimpse that January. “That will certainly be a happy day for me.

“You wrote and said that you hoped the war would be ended by the time you are old enough to go into the service,” Tessoni continued. “Well, I certainly hope so, too. I hope you and your friends never will be forced into fighting a war as all wars are so ugly and costly and sad.”

Stressing the importance of education to Glimpse, Tessoni wrote that intelligence was a quality more leaders of countries could stand to have, if wars were to be at all avoided.

Glimpse was slow to heed Tessoni's words; though he graduated Port Byron High School third in his class, he did not take advantage of a Bausch & Lomb Science Award he received from the University of Rochester.

“Hindsight is 20/20,” Glimpse said in a press release issued by Keuka College.

Glimpse went on to work a series of jobs, spending 14 years as a letter carrier. He said his wife encouraged him to return to school.

In 1995, he graduated summa cum laude with an associate degree in business administration from Cayuga Community College.

While delivering mail in 1999, Glimpse came across a man with the same last name as his former pen pal; he asked the man if he knew Dan Tessoni. The man told Glimpse that Dan was his brother and that he was teaching in Rochester.

Fast-forward to a few years later, when Glimpse made a career change, landing a job as a field technician with Verizon Communications Inc. The company reimburses tuition 100 percent; Glimpse saw another opportunity to further his education.

Seeing a newspaper ad two years ago about Keuka's Accelerated Studies for Adults Program (A.S.A.P.), he enrolled. (Glimpse's wife also enrolled - in a program for a master's degree in management - and she, too, received a Keuka College degree May 28).

Still, Glimpse did not know just how close he was to meeting, let alone hearing from, Dan Tessoni.

He investigated the possibility of pursuing an M.B.A. post-Keuka, and studied the programs offered by the Rochester Institute of Technology. The school's Web site said Tessoni was a faculty member; when Glimpse met with officials at RIT to discuss possible enrollment, he told them about his pen pal.

They gave him Tessoni's e-mail address and the two were in contact for the first time in 34 years last fall.

Tessoni, who grew up in Auburn and now teaches accounting at RIT, said he remembered receiving Glimpse's letter more than three decades ago “like it was yesterday.”

Last winter, Glimpse e-mailed Tessoni to feel out the possibility of the latter handing him his degree at the graduation. He did not hear back, and Glimpse did not press the issue.

But the Friday before commencement, a friend of Glimpse's let the cat out of the bag. Tessoni would be on hand to present him with a degree. The two met for the first time in the school's library before the processional. The meeting, which began with just one exchange decades ago, proved emotional for both men.

“It always gives me the chills to make me think of the fact it'd been 34 years since I'd written the letter,” said Glimpse, who said his mother had actually kept the letter Tessoni wrote back to him in 1972.

“It was awesome to meet him Sunday,” he said, adding that the two can hold a “whole different set of conversations now than we might have had then,” Tessoni said.

Glimpse is looking forward to attending RIT this coming fall, and is naturally looking into the possibility of enrolling in Tessoni's class.

A long-postponed meeting that now seems almost pre-destined may yet evolve into a friendship. Glimpse recalled the last remark Tessoni made to him that Sunday: “Look, this is only the beginning.”

Staff writer Olivia Goldberg can be reached at 253-5311 ext 235 olivia.goldberg@lee.net