Michael Mooney

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Slide - 50 Years, 50 Voices - Michael Mooney - 00:00 
Ok, well, my name is Mike Mooney. I arrived on campus in 1968 which was the
last year of Saint Dunstan's University, a year before UPEI came into being
and I was 17, I'd just turned 17 and hadn't really been away from home
before so that was the, that was a significant time for me, and I graduated
in 2011, after years away from studies, but graduated with a Bachelor's
Integrated Studies in 2011.


Slide - A vibrant campus - 00:51 
Campus life was really, really, active and really kind of vibrant, because
of, especially for the students in residence, so, I was in Dalton Hall in
my 1st year and then I moved into Main Building in my 2nd year but the
campus was crowded all the time, like from early morning classes throughout
the day and in the evening and there were opportunities as a young, kind of
like folk singer to play with some friends on campus, so if there was a
folk night at the coffee house, the place would be packed and the energy
would be really kind of high and anybody that had the nerve to get up and
play in front of the students were totally, you were always well received,
it wasn't a critical audience they were just kind of happy to be part of
the extracurricular, sort of, music scene on campus.


Slide - Living in Dalton Hall - 02:02 
Residences at that time, had a priest or two priests, living on each floor,
in Dalton Hall in particular, and I was on third floor, which is now the
fourth floor, because the basement was kind of a dungeon and that was where
the football team locker room was down on the basement at Dalton…and
there was a football field right at...kind of where, sort of where we are
sitting right now at the Robertson Library, because the library hadn’t
been built, and we could watch the games from my room, even, we'd sit out
on the firescape and open the window, and sit on the window ledge.


Slide - Remembering the Priests - 02:47 
Living in residence was kind of funny because we had the priests on each
floor and they were quite, uh, Father Kelley, I remember used to have a lot
of, even back then, he'd call them 'rap sessions' with the students and
we'd be in Father Kelley's room on, you know, once or twice a week, just
talking about whatever was, kind of... on our minds, and Father Kelley was
a very quiet thoughtful person and we felt very comfortable with him. And
Father Bolger was across the hall, on the third floor, but he was a very
kind of private individual, he got to know all the students, he knew every
student in his classes, and of course we all took the history of the PEI
and the history of Canada with him and I remember the first day of class
for the, his review of PEI, there's about a hundred and fifty students when
we were sitting at the amphitheater at Duffy which had recently been built
in the previous two years, I guess and he went through the student list,
the first class, and for sure he knew all of the Island students but I was
kind of surprised when he mentioned my name, and he knew about my family in
Montreal he knew about growing up there, and of course the connection is my
father, who was a grad from Saint Dunstan's before he had moved to
Montreal.


Slide - Son of a SDU Graduate - 04:27 
But yeah, I came to, well I had applied to Loyola and Sir George in
Montreal but also Saint Dunstan's, as a nod to my, to appease my dad. After
finishing high school I was kind of really looking to get out of the house,
so Saint Dunstan's was my only option. It was, turns out, you know, I
wouldn't have changed anything but having done that, but my father when I
was growing up my father was the president of the Saint Dunstan's
Association in Montreal if you imagined that such a thing existed, but it
did and primarily their mandate was to find summer work for Saint Dunstan's
students which, you know, like there wasn't a lot, you know, work available
in summer. In the spring and summer for students trying to earn money for
their next year in university so there was always a number of students that
would come up. So these were students that my father would've known in the
family but, you know, and there was a, I remember one summer, we had a kind
of a big old rambling house and there were three students that took over
one of the bedrooms one summer, because they couldn't find an apartment but
they had jobs where they lived, so they lived at our place we called them
the boys my mother would call them the boys; 'Well the boys will be back
from work so we are going to have supper at a certain time' and that was
just a normal kind of event and then there would be the social, kind of
activities for any of the students that were coming up from Saint Dunstan's
in Montreal.


Slide - Transitioning from SDU/PWC to UPEI - 06:18 
There were not any real stark differences between my first year which was
the last year of Saint Dunstan's and first year of UPEI. I had already made
some friends, you know, from PWC and they were on campus now although that
first year there were classes that were held on PWC campus and there was a
big old purple bus that you could take downtown and then take it back up to
campus. There were obvious changes, not the least of which was; there was
a, the first year of UPEI if my memory is working properly and John Keaveny
was Student Union Vice, Student Union President and there was kind of a
student demonstration that year over-increased, residence fees, I believe
and maybe a bump in tuition, and we thought that was not fair, and there
was a lot of, sort of, that was for me my first kind of exposure to any
kind of activism, you know on campus, student body activism and it wasn't
an all-out revolution, things got resolved pretty easily although I do
remember the march on the Premier's office and the occupation of his office
and outer office for a little while, until it became untenable. John
Keaveny at the time; he said 'Well, I'm usually here now, we've made our
statement this time, we leave" and some did leave and others took a little
longer leaving.




Slide - Formation of the UPEI Soccer Program - 08:12 
Sports was huge, you know? at Saint Dunstan's of course, and carried on at
UPEI, one thing that was missing in terms of sports on campus, was a
university soccer team, every high school pretty well every high school
from what I could gather had a senior soccer team, and then they would come
to Saint Dunstan's and UPEI afterwards and there'd be no program, so, in
'68 my first year here there were some Chinese students and some kids from
Morell, and myself and a couple of other Quebecers, that we started kicking
around soccer ball on campus, whenever the football team wasn't practicing,
so it would be after their practice and we were just kicking the ball
around having fun and we thought 'you know? there really should be a soccer
team here', so I was, I played soccer all through grade school, high
school, and I said; 'Well, you know what? We should talk to somebody about
it' so, I said, I volunteered to go and talk with Ed Hilton who was the
athletics director at the time football and basketball were the two, and
hockey, were the three, sort of major sports on campus at the time, so I, I
just knocked on his door one day I think it was in the old gym, maybe his
office was, I'm not really sure and I said: "There's a bunch of students
that we've been kicking the soccer ball around with, and we were wondering
if there was any way to get a soccer team going" Well, that really wasn't
on Ed's radar understandably at the time, but he sort of listen, he said
"Well, you know what? You should go talk to Vince" and then Vince Mulligan,
who was a Hockey coach, one of the hockey coaches and he said that's the
closest thing he could come up with as a comparative sport, and so I went
over to Vince's office and talked to Vince a little bit about getting a
soccer team going, and he said; "Well I don't know anything about soccer, I
don't know who would coach it" I said "Well Ed said you'd be a good guy
because you coach the hockey. You know, there's a net, and there's
defensemen and forwards" and so Vince said 'well, yeah, okay' and 'not sure
about that', and we sort of, he said 'but, you know, let me think on it',
so we carried on with the sort of, make, you know, playing, kicking the
ball around that first year. The next year I went and saw Vince again and
he said "Well you know, you put a team together, and I'll try to find some
old sweaters, and maybe I can get you some exhibition games against local
high schools" So, in '69, we ended up playing a few games against Colonel
Gray and Charlottetown Rural I think we went up to Morell one time, because
some of the kids on the makeshift team were Morell grads and they always
had a strong, strong soccer program out there, strong team and so, we
played some exhibition games that fall against the high school teams and
then it kind of, you know, fell off the radar because winter came and
Basketball and Hockey were the main kind of focuses, and so 1970, I went
and saw Vince again, and he said "Well, you know, I've got some contacts
through hockey at the other universities, and said maybe I can get some
exhibition games against them" said there’s no money for it or anything,
we, you know, whatever sweaters he came up with a year before we still had,
so he did manage to get some exhibition games against Mount A; I think we
ended up at St. Mary's one time, three or four games that fall exhibition,
of course and we were the UPEI team by then, and then that year finished,
and then the following year, UPEI entered the soccer, the university soccer
league as a bona fide team, and I was taking some part-time courses, maybe
not quite enough to represent the team but Vince assured me that it would
be okay if I was on the field, and so I played that year and that was the
first year of Saint- of UPEI being in the league. And you know, we, we were
still very, sort of, inexperienced as a university team, but we had a lot
of fun subsequently UPEI did make some great strides and I remember one it
must've been in late 70’s, early 80’s when they had a semifinals game
against McGill, on campus here, the McGill team, so, that was a- the
beginning of what became, kind of a you know, we wouldn't call them a
powerhouse, maybe but UPEI held their own.


Slide - Classes & Professors of the Early Years - 13:47 
Well my first year because I was in the science program, I mean we did have
to take English 101 and I was lucky enough to have Father Ledwell as my
prof back then, which almost made me like, you know, like English it did
make me like it, but if it had been somebody else, whoever that might've
been, it might've not inspired me as much; at that point, I started
thinking "Well you know, if I try to write songs, that's kind of like
writing" and I remember asking Father Ledwell in class that first year, you
know like, "Well, if somebody were to write songs, is he a writer?" and he
looked to me like I was crazy to even ask because of course it was. He
basically legitimized it for me and you know, I can definitely thank him
for that among other things but he, he made me feel it was a legitimate
pursuit, which and in subsequent years, I would have occasional
conversations with him and talk about that. I took French courses aside
from the science courses, I took a French course and met some long time
friends in that class Madame Bernard Delaney I think? was our French prof,
and so those were the two art courses I took the first year and Father
McDonald taught physics and math, and he was an excellent prof and for me,
I always kind of excelled in those courses in high school, so it wasn't an
onerous kind of job to, to carry on with the physics and mathematics.
Professor [Ziwen] he was a very animated prof, and you know, his English
was certainly good but he had some funny expressions and some mannerisms,
and he made for students that maybe didn't sort of get the comedy in
Mathematics he helped establish that for them, I think.


Slide - Beginning a career in music - 16:15 
One of the most significant things in my first year was; I had been playing
guitar and playing music during high school and I met a few like-minded
students here who played music as well and that kind of got me into the
performing end of playing music and there was a group, a little group that
we formed, in '68 and we played around campus there wasn't a lot of music,
live music except for the bands that would come out to the gym and play but
there was a coffee house on campus and then there were events at Duffy
either in winter carnival and in, in the fall so I began playing music as a
kind of second focus as to being here, to go to university was supposedly
the reason I was here but it was pretty well eclipsed. I met and played
with a number of other musicians and made, my very first year I made a long
time musical friend, with uh, guy named John Legendre who is from
[Sept-Iles], I think? or Chicoutimi somewhere, in Quebec and he and I went
to play for a number of years together in Charlottetown. In 1971, we formed
a kind of musical troupe that we used to put on shows at the Confederation
Center and in that group I count three people and maybe four but from the
university days that had sort of, started following a similar path, John
being one of them, Allen Rankin and then my roommate in second year, a guy
from Albany, PEI, Allison Noonan, he became our sound tech. So, that was
the first foray into actually, you know, the profession for me and but the
first couple years performing in front of people was the starting point and
on campus it was all kinds of opportunities to do that so that led to the
next step of considering it, to, a possible profession so it, for me it
came at a time when I was, I realized I was kind of looking at that as a
possible career and after my third year at university I decided to put that
to the side and pursue music as a full-time career.


Slide - Back to school: Forty years later - 19:15 
It was always nagging me in the back of my head that I had done three years
and as my father said at the time; "What's the harm in finishing one more
year and then you can pursue music" and of course at the time I said, "Well
that would just be a waste of time, a waste of year that I could be playing
music" but it was always in the back of my head as something that I
started, didn't finish and it kind of nagged me over the years. I didn't
really imagine at that, or the first few years, in the mid 70’s, that I
would ever bother to come back or ever wanted to come back and that kind of
happened years later when I was living and working in Quebec, in
Lennoxville, and I started taking some courses at the Bishop's University
and when I came back in 2000, I arranged meeting with the Dean of Arts,
Phillip Smith at the time just to have a look at my academic history. So
we, after sort of going back and forth a little bit, we, Phillip landed me
halfway through here so I graduated in 2011, which I guess put me on the 43
year track, '68 to 2011 and other people had, other students in the program
had similar histories, I was the only one on a 43 year track, I do think,
and …so you know, my dad was gone by then, but I know he would've been
happy.


Slide - Courses and Songs - 21:08 
One of the biggest changes for me of course was that, I was probably the
oldest one in the class and that included the prof and so, I was what is
now being called a mature student, and so it was a, I was always kind of
the odd man out, I remember I was taking Psychology as a main focus when I
came back and I took a Statistics course from Fiona Papps actually she was
here and the first class, she said 'Okay, first thing we need to do is, is
we're gonna do a bell curve, and so you guys understand what a bell curve
is, so we are gonna take some data from the class', so she said,'How old?',
she asked every student how old they were. So it came time to me and at the
time I was 51 definitely the oldest in the class and she gathered all the
information before class, and then she drew the bell curve and broad
attention to that little piece of data, that was me my age, way off to the
side close to the X axis and not anywhere in the bell shape and she said
"This is what we call an outlier" and so I heard that term only for the
first time in the context of statistics and I thought "Outlier, you know, I
got a good song out of that, actually". Oh, another thing, in one of the
Spanish courses I took from Professor Coll, it was the history of the
Iberian, cultural history of the Iberian Peninsula and we, she showed a
movie to the class one time about the McKenzie- Papineau battalion and the
Spanish Civil War. After seeing that movie, it struck a chord with me, and
I, so that gave me another song and so for the briefest of times I thought
"What about an album of songs that I've written all based on university
courses that I've taken" so I scoured my brain and kind of wrote another
funny one about Math, but, that notion died on the vine after that but I
got two good songs out of those courses, totally unexpected, you know, out
of the blue and they are still in my repertoire.


Slide - A Final Story - 23:47 
At the time the drinking age on PEI was 21, this is in '68 and I had a
fairly good looking, you know, legitimate looking fake ID so I except for
some of the older students, I was, would often be the one that would go
down to Oak Tree place and get, buy some beer and take it back in campus
and there was this one day, I came back on campus and I was making a
beeline for Dalton Hall 'cuz I was carrying a 24-pack of beer and Father
Kelly stepped out of Main Building and intercepted me and so I stopped and
he said 'Hi Mike' you know, and I stood there had this case of 24 under my
arm he was not saying anything about it, he was ignoring it so I was
pretending it wasn't there as well and he just carried on the conversation
and kept it going, said 'how's your father?', you know, and I said 'My dad
is great' and in retrospective, I realized he was just putting me in a, he
was torturing me because this thing is so heavy but if I stopped to put it
down, it would be acknowledging the elephant in the, you know, in the quad,
and he never said a word about it, he said, "Well I guess you better be
getting back to Dalton Hall, you know supper is in an hour" and I said
"Yeah, I guess I will Father, thanks for the conversation" and then he
turned around and I, [Laughter as video fades to black].