How the Wyoming Valley Has Shaped King’s College
By Gregory Bassham, Ph.D.
On May 31, 1996, more than 300 members of the King’s College family, along with many dignitaries and distinguished guests, gathered on the sunlit south lawn of the Luzerne County Courthouse to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the College’s founding. Among the many notables in attendance recognized that day by master of ceremonies Anthony Panaway ’50 was Panaway’s former classmate, Joseph Balz ’50, a Wilkes-Barre native and Navy veteran who served King’s as Chief Financial Officer and in numerous other capacities for over seventy years until his death in 2017. “The first time I ever saw Joe Balz he was setting out chairs before classes began at King’s College in 1946,” Panaway recalled. “And when I arrived early for the ceremony this morning, there was Joe Balz, putting out chairs.”
Panaway was right to recognize in Balz an exceptional kind of devotion to service and community. But a similar spirit is evident in “the Valley with a heart.” As local historian and King’s graduate Dr. Paul Zbiek ’73 notes in his history of Luzerne County, on any summer weekend the Valley’s rich ethnic diversity “continues to be honored through church festivals, bazaars, musical productions, and traditional ceremonies.” Typical church-sponsored bazaars feature live music, raffles, popular games such as Instant Bingo, and delicious ethnic foods such as potato pancakes, pierogi, kielbasa, and cannoli. To keep such family and ethnic traditions alive requires a strong sense of community solidarity and dedication.
In talking to members of the King’s family about how the Valley has shaped the College over the years, a number of themes are repeatedly mentioned. One is practicality. King’s was founded as an affordable, easily accessible faith- and values-based escalator of upward economic mobility for sons of coal miners at a time when the mines, garment factories, and other blue-collar industries that had fueled the Valley’s rapid economic rise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were shutting down. Since its inception, the College has placed a special focus on educating first-generation college students from many ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. This sense of mission, rooted in tough economic realities, lies behind King’s practical, student-centered focus.
When first-year students are asked why they chose to attend King’s, they often cite its “career-focused curriculum.” King’s has never offered majors in comparative literature, anthropology, medieval and Renaissance studies, or classical languages. The most popular majors tend to be those with a clear career-oriented focus, such as Physician Assistant Studies, Business Administration, Criminal Justice, and Accounting. Only rarely do King’s students go on to do graduate work in fields such as philosophy, math, history, political science, or other fields without an obvious career focus. In this respect, King’s reflects both the practical spirit of the Valley with its dreams for a better future and the increasing emphasis throughout higher education for career-centered curricula.
This stress on practicality is also reflected in faculty priorities. In its ads for new faculty hires, King’s describes itself as “a teaching college” of the liberal arts and sciences and professional programs. Though faculty research and scholarship is generously encouraged and supported at King’s, the primary commitment is to student-centered teaching. As it has from its beginning, King’s remains focused on providing needy and deserving students with an economic leg up and a chance at a better life. Although he has produced impressive scholarship since his arrival on the faculty in 2001, Professor of Theology Joel Shuman is equally committed to the teaching-centered mission. Shuman notes, “To offer students from the margins of society the opportunity, not simply to have successful careers, but to understand and work for the common good—for a better society for all persons—is the heart of the King’s College mission.”
In addition to practicality, King’s is characterized by what former College president Rev. Thomas O’Hara, C.S.C., ’71 calls a “lack of pretense.” At King’s there are few of the more extravagant trappings of some college campuses. There are no rock-climbing walls, manicured on-campus golf-courses, or lazy rivers for relaxed afternoon floats. Although you can still discern the bones of its stately beauty, the Administration Building is an aging former coal company headquarters, purchased in 1952. Classrooms and other facilities are serviceable, but often old and somewhat spartan. The offices of the president and senior administrators are comparatively small and modestly appointed. Faculty members typically have the same office furnishings—often decades old—that were in their offices when they first moved in. “We are what we are,” says Hazleton-native Father O’Hara, whose father worked 37 years in the mines and his mother more than three decades in the garment industry. This lack of pretense reflects King’s strong commitment to affordability, but also the unpretentious working-class ethos of the Valley and surrounding communities.
A third way that the Valley has impacted King’s is in its tradition of “favor your own” preferentialism—a tendency to favor one’s own group or enclave over others. As Dr. Zbiek notes in Luzerne County: An Illustrated History (1994), a strong sense of ethnic and religious loyalty has long been a prominent feature of Valley life. In immigrant communities throughout the Valley, such loyalties helped to provide economic security, cultural moorings, and a sense of belonging in what must have often seemed a strange and hostile world. On the downside, in-group favoritism can lead to insularity, unfair stereotyping of outsiders, exclusion, unjust partiality, and, locally, corrupt “NEPAtism.”
At King’s, in-group loyalties can be seen in many guises. One is the exceptional friendliness and “family spirit” that often strikes those who are new to campus. Another is the remarkable number of King’s graduates and locals that have taught at King’s or served in the administration. Many older King’s alumni will fondly remember professors such as Chris Alexander, Henry Nardone, and Brother James Miller, C.S.C., among many other King’s grads who went on to teach at the institution. In recent years, nearly every senior administrator at King’s had either grown up in the Valley or was a King’s graduate. This kind of localism has been a strength in some ways and problematic in others. Economically, King’s has long been a jobs pipeline for highly educated local residents, and in this respect a valuable community resource. The favor-your-own mentality has also arguably strengthened the sense of family spirit at King’s and provided a sizeable number of faculty and administrators who know the Valley and its people in ways that perhaps only natives can. The disadvantages are equally obvious: a lack of diversity and outside perspectives. In recent years, King’s has addressed this lack of diversity with consistently advertising senior positions in national publications, thus attracting a broader pool of applicants.
Perhaps the most visible way the Valley has shaped King’s lies in the College’s physical footprint in Downtown Wilkes-Barre. Many of the College’s current buildings were not built by the institution, but purchased and refurbished by it. Prominent examples include the Administration Building, the Alley Center for Health Sciences, Hafey-Marian Hall, Ryan Hall, the new Chapel of Christ the King, Luksic Hall, the Hessel Hall, and the Mulligan Center for Engineering. In this respect, both the College and the community have benefited from this repurposing of what otherwise may well have been blighted eyesores. For instance, the Chapel of Christ the King was once the Memorial Presbyterian Church, built in 1872 by the noted New York architect Edward Kendall and vacated in 2008. The beautiful old church on the hill likely would have been torn down had King’s not purchased it in 2011 and thoroughly refurbished it. Most recently, the old, vacant Times Leader building just off Public Square was transformed into the Kowalski Center for Advanced Health Care Education, a state-of-the-art facility that brings students, faculty, and staff into the heart of Wilkes-Barre every day.
Certainly, the impact of the Valley has not always been wholly positive. King’s is a liberal arts college, and many of its students come from outside the area. Not surprisingly, occasional town-gown tensions have erupted because of student rowdiness and local perceptions of an “elitist” institution educating students that often choose to leave the area after graduating. A preference for tradition and stability over change and innovation has sometimes hampered both the community and the College.
On the whole, though, the decision by King’s founding president, Rev. James Connerton, C.S.C., to locate King’s in Downtown Wilkes-Barre has proved a wise one (lack of parking notwithstanding). King’s has drawn strength from the strong people of the Wyoming Valley. It has been enriched by the grit, generosity, ethnic diversity, strong work ethic, resilience, community spirit, spirit of sacrifice, and hunger for betterment that have long marked the diverse, hard-working communities of the Wyoming Valley. Despite all the vast changes in the Valley and in higher education since King’s was founded, these values continue to inspire the College and shape its mission. Though King’s no longer educates any sons of coal miners, it continues to serve its historic mission by providing an affordable but high-quality values-based liberal arts education in the Catholic tradition, especially for lower-income and first-generation college students. It continues to be a “no pretense” engine of upward mobility to aspiring students of big dreams but modest means.
King’s has flourished and been a major cultural resource for the Valley because of the hard work and dedicated service of countless individuals over nearly eight decades. No one represents that spirit of sacrifice and devotion more than Father O’Hara, who, as noted earlier, is quite literally a son of a coal miner. After serving as President of King’s College for twelve years, O’Hara was elected Provincial Superior of the U.S. Province of Holy Cross Priests and Brothers, a post he happily served in for six years at the University of Notre Dame. He returned to King’s College in 2019, where he now serves as an academic advisor. When asked why, as Provincial, the 74-year-old O’Hara didn’t retire to Notre Dame or assign himself a cushy position there, he replied, “Notre Dame has over sixty Holy Cross priests and brothers; King’s has nine. I felt like I could make a greater contribution if I came back here.”
Recalling the difficult early years at King’s, Joe Balz commented:
"We all felt this college would grow into something special, and it has. When you begin working on something like this, it becomes part of your blood. We started from scratch, but everyone was fully committed. No one doubted that King’s would become what it has."
Wilkes-Barre native Joe Balz still moving chairs after fifty years. Father O’Hara returning to the Valley to serve. Such people exemplify the spirit of sacrifice, dedication, and humble service that have made King’s College and the Wyoming Valley the special places they are.
Image at Top: A view of the Lehigh Valley Coal Company Building, which would become the Administration Building, in 1952.