It is often said that the ACPHS community is so close knit that it’s like a family.
If you think that’s the case in 2022, imagine what it was during the last half of the 20th century, when a married couple who lived on campus for more than 40 years served as surrogate parents or grandparents to students, faculty and staff alike.
They were Scottish immigrants who arrived at ACPHS in the early 1950s to work – Oswald (Ozzie) Kirkpatrick handled maintenance as building superintendent and Margaret ran the cafeteria. And then, when they were ready to retire, the College let them stay, building a new apartment for them in the O’Brien building in the 1980s. Based on the recollections of former and current staff, as well as alumni, Ozzie was more reserved and “a bit of a character,” as several people put it. He would challenge students to a game of chess (Ozzie would invariably win) and, especially on a holiday, invite select faculty and students in for a Scotch (against school rules, of course, and apparently also a poorly kept secret). Margaret was more outgoing, a hard worker, and a nurturer. She’d leave trays of cookies for new students and give faculty a piece of her mind when they were putting too much pressure on them.
“The College was their family,” said Packy McGraw, ACPHS vice president for Administrative Operations.
Early Days on Campus
The couple, sometimes referred to as Mr. and Mrs. K., were in their late 40s when they arrived in 1951 at what was then the Albany College of Pharmacy (ACP). At that time, the school consisted only of what is now the Francis J. O’Brien Building. The current site of the Pharmacy Practice Lab in the basement was the gym, and during breakfast and lunch, tables were pulled onto the floor so Margaret and her staff could serve meals.
Nearly everyone contacted for this story recounted this personal fact about the couple as reason for Margaret’s passionate nurturing of ACPHS students: The Kirkpatricks had an infant who died, or perhaps was stillborn, and then no other children. Maternal by nature, Mrs. K. emotionally adopted ACPHS students as her own.
“Everybody there was basically her kid,” said Brian Bartle ‘62.
Bartle worked for the Kirkpatricks, helping to serve meals, clean bathrooms, and handle maintenance jobs. When work ended on a Saturday, Ozzie would sometimes offer the young men “a tipple.” He remembered Margaret catching them once, swearing at Ozzie in her heavy Scottish accent and chiding, “How dare you teach these boys to drink?” Bartle laughed, recalling that the legal drinking age at the time was 18: “Little did she know everybody there knew how to drink.”
Members of the ACPHS community recalled Margaret as a “lady,” proper and always impeccably dressed, with neatly styled hair.
“That woman, Margaret, she was a princess,” said Gordon Dailey ’57.
Built-In Security System
The Kirkpatricks retired in the early 1970s, said William Cronin, former vice president of Finance and Operations, who worked at the College from 1979 to 2006. Their jobs had not provided them with substantial savings, Cronin said, and in any case, ACPHS was the only home they had known for the previous 20 years. The Board of Trustees decided they could live on campus for as long as they wanted, rent-free. The College provided them with a small stipend, he said. According to a Mortar and Pestle, the school newspaper from several decades ago, the Kirkpatricks provided “round-the-clock security” to the College in their retirement. McGraw explained that ACPHS administrators had given them the job of turning on the security system at 11 p.m., after the last students had left, and turning it off at 6 a.m. It was their “job,” he said, even as they approached their 90s, a way of letting them “earn” their housing. Students involved in campus events knew to end their night by letting the Kirkpatricks know the building was empty, so they could turn on the alarm. Many of them visited with the Kirkpatricks for a while before leaving. The security keypad still sits outside the Department of Clinical Sciences suite of offices in the basement of the O’Brien building, formerly the site of the Kirkpatricks’ apartment.
The Later Years
During the 1980s and 1990s, students who had never known the Kirkpatricks as staff members nonetheless knew them as members of the campus community. Former students recalled that when they left classes or laboratories in the O’Brien building in the late afternoon, the hallways were heavy with the aroma of Mrs. K.’s cooking as she prepared the couple’s dinner. If there was a social event off campus, someone on the faculty would pick the couple up to make sure they could attend. Faculty, staff and students made visits to check on them, especially as they aged.
Faculty members would sometimes join Mrs. K. for tea in the afternoons, complete with formal china, said Vicki DiLorenzo, ACPHS vice president of Institutional Advancement.
And she was also known to speak her mind if the rules were not being followed. Cronin remembered her in her mid-80s, confronting McGraw, who had not long before been hired as basketball coach, and throwing him out of the gym when he failed to notify anyone that he would be the last to leave the building. “There’s procedures here to be followed,” she chided him.
The school threw a surprise 60th wedding anniversary for the couple in September 1990, Cronin recalled, using the ruse of a welcome back party for returning faculty members. Because there was no money allocated in the budget for the event, Cronin and then ACP Dean Kenneth Miller served as emcees and bartenders for the party, which was held in the cafeteria.
In front of 100 or so guests, Cronin teased the couple, asking Margaret if during all those years, she had ever considered divorce. Cronin recalled that Margaret’s response was deadpan, delivered in her heavy Scottish accent: “Never, Bill,” she replied. “Only murder.”
When Heather Bartle (now Ferrarese) arrived on campus in 1991, she already knew the Kirkpatricks well, as she had visited them with her father Bill since she was a child. For Ferrarese, having the Kirkpatricks at ACPHS was like having grandparents on campus.
“If you needed a place to go or a shoulder to cry on, she was there,” Ferrarese said of Mrs. K. “She really was part of what made ACP what it was.”
After Ozzie died in 1993 at age 90, Ferrarese visited Margaret more often, sometimes bringing friends for tea and cookies. When Margaret’s health began to fail, Ferrarese stayed overnight with her one night each week.
There came a time when the care of the ACPHS campus was not enough, and Mrs. K. required hospital treatment. Ferrarese, then 21, visited her and asked if she would like anything. The older woman grinned, saying she would enjoy some Mumm Champagne. Ferrarese was conflicted over the request. Not knowing if Mrs. K. would make it out of the hospital, Ferrarese wanted to fulfill her wish. But she was also terrified to break the hospital’s rules, wondering if she’d be caught and expelled from school. But she bought the champagne and smuggled it in.
Mrs. K. made it home from that hospital visit but did not live much longer. She died on Thanksgiving Day in 1996.
“She died at the College, which was her wish,” Cronin said. “The College was her home.”
At her funeral, the officiant remarked that he had never seen anything like an entire campus taking care of an older couple the way the ACPHS community did the Kirkpatricks, according to Bartle.
Leaving a Legacy
Their memory lives on. The garden near the rear entrance to the O’Brien building is dedicated to them, a donation of the Class of 1998. And a scholarship fund remains in their honor. It was established in part with money that Margaret willed to the College. Instead of putting the money in the College’s general fund, administrators put it toward a scholarship to help students in need, Cronin said.
Bartle recalled that word went out far and wide to add enough to the fund to meet the $10,000 minimum for a scholarship. To this day, he donates to it annually.