Alumni Authors 

BY GRETA PETRY 

few days before the start of the fall 1981 semester, a new graduate student named Paul Grondahl arrived at the University at Albany campus after a grueling four-day train ride from Tacoma, Wash. He was planning to stay in Albany for two years. He is still here. 
    “I did not know one person on campus,” said Grondahl, M.A.’84, who made the trek in order to study English literature. The campus was quiet as Grondahl found his way 
to the Humanities Building. Walking down the hallway in the English Department, Grondahl found only one office door open. 
    It happened to be William Kennedy’s office. Kennedy was running a workshop on fiction writing that Grondahl wanted to join. The course was filled; the waiting list was for doctoral students only. Just the same, Kennedy graciously agreed to read some of Grondahl’s short stories. 
    “They were pretty bad, looking back,” said the 38-year-old Grondahl, now a feature writer for the Albany Times Union. “But he took the time to read them and write comments. He told me, ‘You’ve got some talent. If you work at it you could be a writer.’” 
    Grondahl has been working at it ever since. He also took Kennedy’s advice to write “one page a day,” which breaks down the seemingly Herculean task of writing a book into small daily steps. Last fall, Grondahl published a biography of the late Erastus Corning 2nd, who was mayor of Albany from 1941 to 1983, longer than any other mayor in American history. Titled Mayor Corning: Albany Icon, Albany Enigma (Washington Park Press, $36), the 538-page book was ranked No. 1 for non-fiction by one large Capital Region bookstore in the Times Union’s local best-sellers’ list. 
    The catalyst for the book was a long profile of Corning’s widow, Betty, which the author wrote for the Times Union in the fall of 1992. “I spent a whole morning with Betty Corning, who was dying of emphysema at the time. I had the sense that this whole chapter in Albany history was passing,” said Grondahl. He felt he had to act quickly or the chance to capture the many stories of the Corning era would be gone. “My purpose in writing this biography was to paint a full portrait of Erastus Corning 2nd, revealing both shadow and light, in an attempt to replace the reverential, one-dimensional view of Mayor Corning with a truthful, three-dimensional picture of the man,” the author noted in the preface. 
    Grondahl conducted more than 200 interviews for the book. “I’d be out at people’s houses until 10 or 11 p.m. and then I would come back and transcribe my notes,” he said. He wrote the book between 9 p.m. and midnight. 
    The lively writing style of the book carries the reader through the intricacies of Corning’s conflicted personal life, his competitive relationship with Nelson Rockefeller, and his annual fall hunting escape to Sabattis, a hamlet in the Adirondack Mountains. Grondahl reveals a Corning who was better known for his longevity in office than for his accomplishments. In Corning’s personal life, Grondahl finds no evidence of an affair between Erastus Corning and secretary Polly Noonan, although they were linked by speculation for many years. At the same time, he found that Corning spent a great deal of time with the Noonan family, so much so that the Noonans were a better source than the Cornings in terms of the volume of stories they remembered about time they spent with Erastus. 
Grondahl said recently that while researching and writing the Corning biography, he came to both like and dislike the mayor. “His complexity made him real. He had considerable successes and failures. I’ve never tried to stop knowing Mayor Corning.” 
    As a reporter, Grondahl has written more than 4,000 stories, most of them about people. Each was a “mini-biography.” This, coupled with his writing training at the University at Albany, laid the groundwork for writing biography. While Grondahl never had a class with William Kennedy, “I feel as though I had an ongoing tutorial with one of the greatest writers of his gen-eration. And, he has always been just a phone call away.” 
    After earning his master’s degree in 1984, Grondahl became a reporter for the Times Union and Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Ironweed. The fledgling reporter wanted to cover the prestigious PEN writing conference in Manhattan, but he didn’t have the proper press credentials. Kennedy marched him into the press room and said, “Let this kid in.” Once admitted, Grondahl met Saul Bellow at breakfast and Norman Mailer in the elevator. 
    Kennedy is the founder of the New York State Writers Institute. As the home of the Writers Institute, the University offers students and the local community access to some of the nation’s best authors. Studs Terkel and U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky are among the authors invited to campus this year. As a feature writer for the Times Union for a decade, Grondahl has long covered these events. But last fall he was the featured speaker himself, reading excerpts from the Corning biography. 
    Kennedy introduced him at the event, saying that Grondahl’s Corning “jumps off these pages at us as a man after all: no longer that charmingly cool and dignified figure in the gray suit; here a flesh and blood creature who worked himself numb in the job, but also found ways to keep his soul throbbing with life.” He said Grondahl is “a stellar reporter for the Albany Times Union and a fine writer, and his book is a substantial contribution to the annals of Albany politics, about which not much of lasting substance has been written in this century.” 
    Grondahl’s own story as an Albany graduate student exemplifies the importance of one of the University’s missions: to provide the best education possible for an affordable price. 
“I was the first person in my family to graduate from college. My dad was a mailman and my mom was a cashier in the bookstore at Puget Sound University,” he said, adding that his mother’s employee discount on tuition enabled him to earn a bachelor’s degree there. 
    At graduate school in Albany, Grondahl was exposed to influences like Kennedy, William Dumbleton and Eugene Garber in the University’s English Department. Dumbleton and Garber have since retired. Dumbleton’s wife, Susanne, was a business partner with Anne Older in Washington Park Press, which published the Corning book. Susanne Dumbleton is now an administrator at DePaul University in Chicago. 
    In his acknowledgments Grondahl says much about his ties to the University: “Three of the first people I met in Albany when I came here in the fall of 1981 for graduate school at the State University of New York at Albany, outstanding literary men all, are deserving of thanks these many years later: Gene Garber, for encouragement and interest and writing a grant application letter on my behalf; Bill Kennedy, the best mentor a young writer could ever find, who has always been supportive and generous to me, and whose peerless reconstitution of Albany in fact 
and fiction has been a source of profound inspiration; Bill Dumbleton, one of my favorite teachers, and now my editor, who took what had become the unbearable weight of the manuscript off my hands at a crucial moment and gave me hope and praise, even while his keen editorial skills helped shape and polish it into a much improved book.” 
    The Corning book was researched and written while Grondahl was working full-time as a Times Union reporter. He pored through “yards and yards” of articles in the newspaper’s morgue to research his subject. In addition, hundreds of boxes of archival papers at the Albany Institute of History and Art had to be culled. 
    Grondahl had never attempted a writing project of this length before. “Until now, my writing has been mostly a series of sprints, but this biography was a four-year marathon that presented many difficulties and challenges, demanding a level of stamina I had not imagined,” he wrote in the acknowledgments. 
    As further evidence of the building momentum of his writing career, Grondahl was chosen as Albany Author of the Year last fall by the Friends of the Albany Public Library. He has won seven New York State Associated Press awards for reporting. In 1997 alone, he won first place for in-depth reporting as well as feature writing. 
    In the foreword to his book, Grondahl, who is the father of Sam, 8, and Caroline, 2, credits his wife, Mary, with believing in his ability to complete the book. Mary, M.A.’83, earned her master’s in Russian language and literature at the University, and is the dean of admissions at the College of Saint Rose in Albany.