Remembering the old Hewitt

Hewitt Union

During our most recent podcast featuring SUNY Oswego CMA dean Dr. Jennifer Knapp, we got to hear about the moment SUNY Oswego has been anticipating for a few years now - the opening of Hewitt Hall, a roughly $80 million building that houses podcast studios to newsrooms to VR labs to screening rooms, and places to relax, grab a coffee, and collaborate with others. You name it, it’s probably in there somewhere. Along with Tyler Hall, which itself was recently renovated at a cost of about $44 million, Hewitt Hall is part of an ‘arts corridor’ on campus, as Dr. Knapp referred to it, that will play an enormous role in shaping the education of College of Communications, Media and the Arts students for decades to come.

On the podcast, Dr. Knapp also shared details about a big three-day event in October that will feature the Dr. Lewis B. O’Donnell Media Summit, a ribbon cutting ceremony at Hewitt Hall, and an open house for both Hewitt and Tyler, followed by a CMA alumni dinner. I think I speak for both Jason and Chris when I say that we are very much looking forward to seeing Hewitt Hall after following its planning and construction over the past few years!

WNYO studio - Oswego’s ONLY Alternative! (Cart decks and CDs and cassette recorders, oh my!)

For me, having attended SUNY Oswego in the late 90s, I will always think of Hewitt Hall’s predecessor, Hewitt Union. (Yes, here comes Grandpa talking about the olden days!) Before the Marano Campus Center existed, with its fantastic hockey rink and student media center and student store and all that good stuff, Hewitt Union was essentially the hub of campus life.

The student store was in the Hewitt Union basement; for many of us, Hewitt was probably the second or third building we ever set foot in, after our dorm and maybe the nearest dining hall. (If you set foot in Culkin before any of those buildings, you have my sympathy.) I remember that fall of my freshman year, being on my own for the first time, and waiting in that long snaking line in the basement to get my books for the first semester of classes - it was both exciting and nauseating at the same time.

WNYO office

More importantly, the basement of Hewitt Union was where the student media center was located. You went downstairs from the dimly lit first floor of Hewitt, which was decked out in furniture that Al Roker probably sat in, and eventually you’d come around the corner, and there was Timepieces (miss those garlic breadsticks!) and then the studio for student-run radio station WNYO was off to the right. A little further down was the WTOP-TV studio; across the hall from that was the WNYO office, and then around the corner and down the hall from that was the student-run newspaper, the Oswegonian.

For me, an aspiring radio broadcaster, WNYO was the first place where I had ever cracked open a microphone, reading all-caps and double-spaced copy that came out of a dot matrix printer. From then on, that Hewitt Union basement was my world, more or less.

WTOP edit suite

I went on to do a whole bunch of stuff at all three student media outlets, and it was an experience I’ll never forget. When we alumni tell prospective students that you’re able to jump right in at Oswego, we mean it - I was a freshman and I was gaining experience that I likely never would have gotten at schools like Syracuse University or Ithaca College until I was a junior or a senior, if I got it at all.

I remember the times when members of the Shaun Cassidy Fan Club would run down the hall and ask me to turn down the speakers at WNYO because the music was drowning them out. I remember the early morning DJ shifts when I was barely coherent. I remember getting up even earlier to get down to WTOP so I could put highlights together for the morning sports update, cobbling together what I could from a SportsCenter that I recorded on VHS the night before. I remember staying waaay late at the Oswegonian, trying to hammer out an article before the paper’s deadline. All important learning experiences that not only taught me what career paths I might like, but also those I didn’t like.

That’s what Hewitt means to me, and I can’t wait to see it in its new form in just a few weeks.