Note: This site hosts my long-running running blog. Today I’m using it as a convenient platform to post about the endowed scholarship that my sister and I have created in honor of our mom, Janice Cattarin, who passed away in July of 2020. The first section of this post is a short briefer on the scholarship – what you need to know to donate and enhance the endowment. After that are some additional stories about mom that you may enjoy. And after that, navigate the blog if you’re so inclined. I haven’t written much in the last year, but there are plenty of stories archived for your enjoyment.
For the “Just Let Me Donate Now! Quick!” folks…
Go to www.sunybroome.edu/gift. Under Designation of Gift, check “In Honor” or “In Memory” and enter “Janice Cattarin Scholarship”. If your employer offers matching gifts, the Foundation qualifies!
Janice Cattarin Memorial Scholarship for Women
PO Box 1017
Binghamton, NY 13902-1017 For additional information about the Janice Cattarin Scholarship Memorial for Women please feel free to contact: Catherine Abashian Williams, MPA, CFRE
Executive Director, Broome Community College Foundation, Inc.
williamscr at sunybroome.edu or Gary Cattarin, son of Janice Cattarin at cattarin at comcast.net Note: That's the facts bit. The rest is for your enjoyment. More About Mom and the Scholarship Let’s start with the frank part: Many who’ve run with me, worked with me, or just crossed my path have heard me lament about the trials and tribulations of caring for my aged mother (from afar, Cindy did most of the up-close leg work, bless her…). Truth: The last decade has been a rough ride. Mom did plenty of things I’ve complained vocally about as my form of ‘talk therapy’. Elderly people are frustrating in many ways. I probably will be too at some point, even if I’d like to think that I’ve learned some things not to do from mom. But here’s the other frank part: Before all that, Mom was all the nuts. To use a bad sports metaphor, she wasn’t just thrown a curve ball, she took the proverbial beanball. I’ve mentioned repeatedly – in her obituary, in the scholarship brief above, and many other times – how she was widowed early with two young kids. You know that part. What else you should know is how she got up out of the dust and made it. And not just eked it out, but made it comfortably and with style. She told me once that after dad’s death, she’d considered moving from our home in Upstate New York back to Ohio to be near her parents. But she didn’t. She kept on, and made her own life in New York. IBM was invaluable in making that happen, but they were only the third part of the equation. Her education was the first, her spirit the enabler, and IBM provided the vehicle. Mom & Dad moved to the Endicott area when Dad the engineer took a job with IBM in 1961. In the five years before he passed, he made quite a mark; when I co-op’d there in 1980, people introduced me as Bob’s son. That was an eye-opener. Tom Watson’s IBM took care of their own in those days, and they hired mom the year after dad's death. Sure, they needed every able-bodied brain they could get, but mom’s education opened doors that led past a basic job to a professional career. But I’m getting ahead of myself. As a young kid, you don’t see the significance of a lot of things; they just are. When the Chevy wagon went away for the ’67 Firebird, it never occurred to me that mom was young and single and cool. It just meant that when we piled in the car with the neighborhood kids for a ride to McDonald’s, which in those days was take-out and we often ate in the car, it was a tight fit in a tiny backseat. But somehow we fit; we were little, and she was young and single and cool and on top of that, a professional woman. She wasn’t the only one. IBM was ahead of its time. We spent plenty of time with her professional women friends. It seemed perfectly normal to me. But looking back I can see all the things I didn’t notice then. That small klatch was still an anomaly, even at IBM, and almost non-existent outside that orbit. It was still a man’s world. Mail still came to Mrs. Robert Cattarin a decade or more after dad’s death. She just didn’t let that stop her. She dated a couple of people but never remarried. She finished the job, so to speak, of raising us, all on her own. Sure, she had help. For years she employed our caretaker, Mrs. Lucas to be there when we got home from school, since she couldn’t be (and yes, she was smart enough to file and pay the employer portion social security taxes, unlike a later Supreme Court candidate who didn't). Her parents would move in for a week each year and scrub every surface and fix every broken thing. And we had the best neighbors in the world. Bill next door was there for anything we needed. Not because of sympathy for that single mom next door, but just because that’s who he was (and still is, for that matter). By the time I was in high school it had finally dawned on me that the reason I had to coordinate with mom for dinner plans almost daily over email (yes, in 1980, we were both IBMers, she for real, me as a high-school co-op) was because her calendar was, well, crazy. She was crazy involved. You learn how not to grow moss from such a person. So back to the scholarship. Why? The scholarship is endowed at the SUNY Broome Foundation and benefits SUNY Broome students. SUNY Broome is the new name for what we knew as Broome Community College (SUNY, for those of you non-New Yorkers, is the State University of New York system). Neither I nor my sister nor mom went to SUNY Broome (though my younger kid did get a fine education at another SUNY school). So why there? The year after dad passed, mom joined an organization called the American Association of University Women, or AAUW. I don’t know how she learned about it or what spurred her initial sign-up, but it’s not hard to guess that educated professional women in the 60’s were not in the majority, and that the social and intellectual rewards from hanging out with people of her type were a big draw. Mom had attended Stephens College in Missouri, which at that time was a junior college, and then Ohio University in Athens, Ohio (not to be confused with THE Ohio State University), so she had a degree, which, as I’ve noted, probably made all the difference between just making it and making it nicely. I can’t say that IBM wouldn’t have hired her, but I can speculate that they wouldn’t have put her on professional track without her education. AAUW has been all about advocating for women’s education since their founding in the nineteenth century. Today, when women make up more than half of all college students, that might seem like an anachronism. But when broken down by field, there is still a long way to go. I’m an avid reader of Scientific American, and they’ve run countless columns about how far we are from gender equity in science and research, for example. And even now, there’s no question that traditional women’s roles persist. Not that that’s wrong, but it adds a challenge to a woman trying to come back from life’s curve balls – or beanballs – and lift themselves to success. Mom worked tirelessly on almost everything that AAUW did. And one of those things that AAUW did was to create a scholarship fund endowed at SUNY Broome, targeting ‘non-traditional’ women students. Not teens just getting started, but women who have taken a curve ball or a beanball and are trying to lift themselves and their families to success. That was mom’s story. My story is what it is because she succeeded. When mom passed and we wanted to designate a charity for gifts, because we didn’t want flowers and in the age of COVID had nothing to do with them anyway, so sis and I opted for the AAUW scholarship fund as a worthy target. Then when the dust settled, we decided to earmark funds she’d given us years earlier to the same cause. In light of our substantial gift, the AAUW chapter considered renaming their scholarship in mom’s name, but in the end we opted to set up a separate endowed scholarship in her name with the same goals and selection criterion as the original fund. This means more grants to more students. And hopefully more success stories and successful and happy families. And it also serves as a gift to the community which she called home for nearly sixty years, and which gave sis and I our starts. The scholarship is administered by the SUNY Broome Foundation who’s significant size means the endowment enjoys perpetual professional investment management. The Binghamton AAUW Scholarship Committee will judge applicants, though sis and I can also chime in if we wish, and the Foundation will ensure that if AAUW and sis and I are long gone, they’ll continue to administer the scholarship and award grants. So this really is a perpetual gift. When was the last time you were able to be a part of a legacy? Please consider donating to the scholarship fund. And thanks for reading this. By the way, you can read mom’s obituary here.
