Nearly 40 Years after senior year, a graduate claims his diploma
Frank Giordano was ready to graduate. There was just one problem: He had never made it to gym class.
It was spring, 1972, and Giordano was finishing his senior year at Rutgers-Camden – or so he thought. But the university required students to have at least one semester of physical education. And Giordano had put it off during the previous three years because of a self-imposed punishing schedule: He crammed all his business and accounting courses into the morning hours and spent afternoons and nights building up his own trailer rental business in Philadelphia.
“The gym class just wasn’t fitting into my schedule,” he said. “I would have to have taken it the afternoon, when I was working.”
In his senior year, with time running out, he broke a bone in his foot, rendering him unable to take gym class even if he had the time. The university informed him he would not receive his diploma until he took the class. And for nearly four decades, he never returned to claim his accounting degree.
But that will change May 24 when the university holds its commencement. Giordano, a prominent South Jersey businessman, who recently became a grandfather, will don cap and gown and walk with the School of Business graduates to get his diploma. And the 59-year-old didn’t have to do push-ups, sit-ups, or even step into a locker room. The university no longer requires physical education.
“This was unfinished business that has been on my mind for a long time,” Giordano said. “The way I see it is that Rutgers helped me get through school, and I am very proud to be a Rutgers graduate.”
From 1968 to 1972, Giordano practically led a double life: one as a college student and another as an extremely driven businessman. He would drive to campus from his home in Cherry Hill and take all his classes in the morning. He then commuted to Philadelphia to work at his trailer rental business – an outgrowth of his father’s trailer repair business.
The business took off – fast.
“When I started Rutgers in 1968, I had two trailers on rent,” Giordano said. “By the time I finished in 1972 I had 800 trailers in my Philadelphia location.”
After his class graduated in 1972, he planned to return right away to get the missing physical education credit. But life has its twists and turns, and by then, Giordano was headlong into his business and starting a family.
“Years went by, and I kept saying ‘I have to go back,’ ’’ he said. “But I had three children and had built a business.”
A phenomenally successful business: By the early 1990s, Giordano owned 22 branches and 14,000 trailers nationwide. He sold half of the company to General Electric and the other half to an affiliate of Berkshire-Hathaway. He held onto one outlet, the Southern Atlantic Trailer Leasing Corp., a 35-acre site in Burlington County where he has 2,500 trailers.
But Rutgers was never too far from his mind. Over the years, he has become involved with the school as a citizen and entrepreneur. He has spoken to MBA classes and served on the search committee for a new business school dean. One day he was having lunch with Law School Dean Rayman Solomon, who at the time was also serving as interim dean of the business school. The issue of the diploma came up in conversation.
After the two talked, Solomon tracked down Giordano’s transcript and had it reviewed by a faculty committee, which approved issuing a diploma from the College of Arts and Sciences. The physical education requirement had been dropped in the mid-1970s.
“It didn’t make sense anymore that he couldn’t get his diploma,” Solomon said. “He couldn’t fulfill the requirement because the requirement no longer exists.”
Giordano hardly needs the academic credentials, given his stature in the business world. But he said getting the degree is a point of pride and a way to acknowledge the role the university has played in his life.
He said he had excellent teachers, especially his accounting professor, the late Fred Bryan. He also said the university patiently worked with him to schedule his classes in the morning.
“The school was just so flexible and accommodating,” he said. “If it wasn’t for Rutgers, I probably wouldn’t have gone to college.”