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Michael Kail Oral History

 File
Identifier: QMP-0032

Scope and Contents

In this interview, Michael Kail talks about spending the first twenty-five years of his life in a square mile in the vicinity of Queens College. He narrates that he was born in the Bronx but his family moved to Queens at an early age, first to Jackson Heights, then shortly after to the newly-opened Pomonok Housing Project, and then to Aguilar Gardens on Parsons Boulevard. Queens College, along with City College and Brooklyn College, were the city colleges that had the most prestigious reputations when he was growing up. He entered Queens College as a chemistry major, and he feels that he was able to finish a difficult science major partly because of the fulfilling social life he had as a member of the Kingston House house plan. He says that studying at Queens College as a house plan member was, for him and his best friend, "one of the best experiences of their lives."

Dates

  • 2020-08-19

Creator

Access

This oral history is open for research. Media files and transcript can be viewed and/or requested through the Queens Memory Project on Aviary: https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/21/collection_resources/31664?collection_resource_file_id=100300. For help using the site, contact QC.Archives@qc.cuny.edu.

Conditions Governing Use

Interview shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Users are free to share or adapt the material for non-commercial purposes, as long as they meet the terms of the license. See license details at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

Extent

1 Digital Files ; Duration: 01:03:30

Language of Materials

English

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Donated to Queens College and Queens Public Library by Michael Kail and Rebecca Rushfield in August, 2020.

Related Materials

Michael Kail was a member of Kingston House, one of the social organizations in the campus documented in the Queens College House Plans Collection.

Processing Information

Oral history conducted as part of the Queens Memory Project (http://queensmemory.org), a collaborative program of the Queens Public Library and Queens College to collect stories, images, and other evidence of life in the borough of Queens.

Creator

Language of description
English
Script of description
Latin

Repository Details

Part of the Queens College (New York, N.Y.) Special Collections and Archives Repository

Contact:
Queens College Library, CUNY
Benjamin Rosenthal Library RO317
65-30 Kissena Boulevard
Flushing 11367 USA us