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The author of “The Shineman Legacy: The Founder Speaks” will inscribe books with personal notes for purchasers and gift-givers from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 5, at the river’s end bookstore, 19 W. First St. at the corner of Bridge Street.
Jeff Rea, a longtime Syracuse journalist and former communications officer at SUNY Oswego, will set up outside the store, weather permitting, during the Oswego Farmers Market. The event will move inside if it rains. This promises to be the bookstore’s first live signing event since the pandemic began in March 2020.
The book, commissioned by the Richard S. Shineman Foundation on behalf of founder Barbara Palmer Shineman, became a “COVID year” project for Rea. His dozen interviews of Dr. Shineman just prior to the pandemic became the living core of a book intended to preserve her memories of the late Dick Shineman and his wishes for a foundation to benefit Oswego County and Central New York.
Rea describes the book as memoir and philanthropic history – and as a romance. Both respected professors at SUNY Oswego, Dick, a bachelor, and Barbara, a widow, met, courted and married in middle age. Few knew that Dick, founding chair of the college's chemistry department, had inherited and further grown a fortune beyond most people's imaginations.
From this intersection, the couple’s lives grew together, forming a combination that ultimately worked much as two elements in a chemical formula to create a potent Catalyst For Change in Oswego County and Central New York -- the Richard S. Shineman Foundation.
Spanning the perilous year of 2020, this book shines a light on the foundation's extensive impact in Oswego County in education, the arts, economic development, historic preservation, sciences, and more. It also traces the history of this unique couple -- with all the twists and turns of their productive, big-hearted and eventful lives.
“The Shineman Legacy: The Founder Speaks” also can be purchased at SUNY Oswego’s The College Store in Marano Campus Center and online through riversendbookstore.com.
