Hobart and William Smith Colleges

20 April 2006 Author Lee Stringer to deliver Srole Lecture

Lee Stringer, author of Grand Central Winter, will deliver the annual Leo Srole Lecture, titled Living Homeless: One Mans Personal Journey, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 27 in the Geneva Room of Warren Hunting Smith Library.

The talk is free and open to the public; a reception will follow.

Stringer is a former crack cocaine addict who saved his life with, as he puts it, a Number 2 pencil, that is, by writing his book on his experiences of homelessness.

Students may remember Stringers walk-and-talk through Grand Central Station as part of the Two Cities course taught by Pat McGuire and Jim Spates. He was simply spellbinding, Spates recalled.

Two Cities: New York and Toronto is the flagship course of the Urban Studies Program; for more than two decades it has been taught by McGuire from the economics faculty and Spates from the sociology faculty. At the heart of the course in addition to the classroom sessions, readings, and films which focus on these premier cities is a mid-semester five-day trip to each city.

Stringer is also the author of Sleepaway School: Stories from a Boys Life.

The lecture series was developed in honor of Leo Srole, who taught at the Colleges between 1941 and 1942, before he was drafted into the Army. After the war, he moved to Cornell Medical School and then Columbia University, where he attained international recognition for his pioneering studies of the mental health of cities. Srole died in 1993 at the age of 84.

The lecture is sponsored by the urban studies program, the provosts office and the HWS department of anthropology and sociology.