The Rocket

Issue date: 12/7/07 Section: Focus

Media Credit: Submitted Photo Robert Earl Fidoten retired after 17 years as a communication professor at Slippery Rock University. One of his accomplishments as a professor was creating the Communication Age course with fellow communication professor Mark Banks. [Click to enlarge]

Few things are as individual to people as their fingerprints.

It is debatable whether even our most personal thoughts are original in the true sense of exclusiveness. It is not hard to imagine that someone, somewhere, sometime had a notion matching our own.

Yet, there is one phenomenon uniquely written with every breath we draw: the story of our lives. Time, place and the choices we make separate us, just as the endless spiraled-patterns of our fingerprints do.

For most people, life includes a space of time marked by dedication to a profession.

But after retirement the question is, "What happens next?"

This is a question one retiring SRU communication professor decided to answer.

In August, after 17 years of teaching, Robert Earl Fidoten of O'Hara Township made his final rounds on the second floor of the Eisenberg Classroom Building.

A tad under 5 feet, 7 inches tall with thinning strands of frizzy, silver-white hair, Fidoten, 79, wore a black, red-checked tweed sports coat and brown slacks on his 160-pound frame, his big blue eyes peering through a set of thick, brown-framed glasses.

After saying goodbye to a few colleagues, he walked toward a door leading to the staircase of the building. His body slouched slightly as he carried notebook organizers in his left arm, like a running back clutching a football.

"They were day-books. You know, scheduling books," said Mark Banks, a professor in the communication department who once shared an office with Fidoten at SRU. "He always had one for the next year and they were always wrapped together with rubber bands. One year for his birthday, we gave him a big ball of rubber bands."

Continued...

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