CSU Stanislaus celebrates golden graduation year at Turlock campus

This morning California State University, Stanislaus graduates in business and the sciences will be called across the amphitheater stage to accept their bachelor’s degrees. Tonight those getting advanced degrees and teaching certificates take a bow. Friday, “Pomp and Circumstance Marches” will play for liberal arts graduates.

This year marks a half-century of commencements on the north Turlock campus. Fifty years ago, graduates filled the Vasché Library, one of two buildings standing on the newly built Stanislaus State College on Monte Vista Avenue. Some 25 tons of library books were to be moved in the following week.

It was Saturday, June 5, 1965. The Gemini 4 rocket was orbiting, Sony Corp would introduce its first home video tape recorder the following week, and “Ticket to Ride” by the Beatles was playing on the radio.

Sharon Neubaum Arpoika and her late mother, Evelyn Neubaum, were two of 122 graduates in the Class of 1965, which included the school’s first two master’s degree recipients. Arpoika, the student speaker and J. Burton Vasché Award recipient that year, will be one of three Golden Grads to be recognized at Friday’s commencement.

Longtime Merced Union High School teacher Lenard Rhodes of Merced graduated with a degree in Social Sciences that year. He taught for 31 years, and in retirement teaches some classes. He led the Youth Organization for Unity, a nonprofit group home for teenage boys, for 12 years.

Diana Messamer of Manteca taught kindergarten through second grade for 34 years in San Jose. She now mentors fifth- and sixth-graders at Fremont Elementary in Modesto, teaching conflict resolution skills, and coordinates volunteer training for Children’s Disaster Services for the Modesto Church of the Brethren.

Arpoika also taught for a while, but found her real calling at the Stanislaus County Library, where she worked for 35 years, retiring as lead librarian for the children’s section of the main library in Modesto. She lives in Oakdale and still volunteers at the Oakdale Library and with the Friends of the Oakdale Library. She is active in the American Association of University Women and is a past Outstanding Woman of Stanislaus County.

Her mother, who graduated with a history degree, got a teaching credential and taught at Oakdale High. She died in 2011. Neubaum had been a teacher in Nebraska, Arpoika said, “but she had always wanted to go to college.” Once her son and daughter were in high school, Neubaum did just that.

Arpoika and her mom went to Modesto Junior College, graduating together, and later went together to the fledgling state college, then holding classes at the Stanislaus County Fairgrounds along Golden State Boulevard (then Highway 99).

“It was very small. Almost everybody knew everybody,” Arpoika said.

Her graduation speech then was about the benefits of a liberal arts education. “You have a broad education and you use it to follow what ever path you choose. You use it to make the world a better place and you continue to learn,” Arpoika said.

Fifty years later, she said, she would tell these graduates the same thing. “I would still advise them to get a liberal arts education, and to keep reading,” Arpoika said. “It will stand them well. It gives you many directions to go. It may take you down the path less traveled.”

This story was originally published May 27, 2015 at 12:38 PM with the headline "CSU Stanislaus celebrates golden graduation year at Turlock campus."