For Dr. Bernard Kokenge, PHD ’66, Ƶ isn’t just the place where he earned a doctoral degree he never intended to get. It’s the community where he and his wife started their family and continue to make memories. And it’s where some sage advice from a professor led to a career that took his work—and his name—to the moon and beyond.
“The older you get, the more you look back,” says Kokenge, who resides in Springboro, Ohio, with his wife, Joy. “We look back on our days at Ƶ and how it was so formative for us—not just the academic part but the living. It helped us to prepare for the future.”
The newlywed couple arrived in Athens 60 years ago this month, with Joy expecting their first child and Kokenge accepted for graduate studies in the Department of Chemistry. They moved into old military barracks on East State Street that had been converted into married student housing—14 units total, each housing eight families, and all without air conditioning.
Kokenge came to campus with a goal of earning a master’s degree and becoming a college professor. A qualifying exam given to graduate students at the time instead landed him in the chemistry department’s doctorate program—OHIO’s first PhD program, established in 1956.
“There might have a been a little bit of disappointment in the sense that it looked like I was going to be there a little longer,” Kokenge remembers. “Joy chimed in right way, saying, ‘Let’s stick it out.’ We were there, and we wanted to make the most of it.”
Kokenge was one of approximately 15 graduate students in the program that year—all men and only two of them married. He studied under the direction of the now late Professor Emeritus of Chemistry Dr. James Tong whose research was supported by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. It was research that not only proved valuable in his future career but provided Kokenge a summer grant that supplemented the $1,800 stipend he earned during the rest of the academic year.
“We didn’t have much, and we really had to scrape by,” Kokenge says. “But it was the best years of our life.”
The Kokenges were there in 1963 when comedian Bob Hope touched down at the Ƶ Airport—then located near their military barracks apartment off East State Street—for a performance on campus. They watched as President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered his “Great Society” speech on The College Green in May 1964. And, like all Athens Campus students in those days, their OHIO years were marked by regular flooding of the Hocking River, which the Kokenges remembered turned Peden Stadium into a lake and buckled the floors of Grover Center.
Their fondest memories, however, were of OHIO’s annual Homecoming festivities—and those of 1964 in particular. That was the year that Joy, seven months pregnant with their second child, was name