Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
Source: San Diego State University Archives Photograph Collection, 1898—. Series 4: Faculty Photographs and Negatives Box 23 Folder 225: Vittor, Charles Frank. Used with permission, courtesy of University Archives Photograph Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, Library and Information Access, San Diego State University.
Source: The Gallery, 1970: A Photographic Directory of the Grossmont College Staff. El Cajon, CA: Grossmont Junior College District, 1970. p30.
Source: The Gallery, 1974: A Photographic Directory of the Grossmont College Staff. El Cajon, CA: Grossmont Junior College District, 1974. p108.
Source: Private Photograph and Documents Collection. Copyright Homer B. Lusk. Digitally reprinted with permission, courtesy of Homer Lusk, Grossmont College Professor Emeritus and former English Department Chair.
The son of famous emigre portrait sculptor, Frank F. Vittor,1 Charles Frank Vittor began attending Penn State in the fall of 1936 under the sobriquet "Frank, Jr." but, by the end of his sophomore year, he truncated his studies to help at home with his ailing father's sculpting business.
It would be another twenty-five years2 until, in fall of 1961, Vittor would find himself a student again, this time at the newly opened Grossmont College on the Monte Vista High School campus. The following June, he was one of the College’s first graduating class—numbering only eighteen students in total—and earned an Associate’s Degree diploma in Agronomy. Thereafter, he matriculated at San Diego State College and earned his Bachelor’s in 1964. For the next several years, Vittor taught classes at San Diego State College and, at the age of 47, earned his Master’s in literature in 1948 with a focus on Spenser’s view of justice in The Faerie Queene. That same fall, he was heralded as one of twenty-three new Grossmont College instructors and hailed as the first Grossmont College graduate to return as a fully fledged faculty member.
Vittor’s time at Grossmont earned him respect as a dogged advocate for faculty rights and a firm believer in community college education. He served for two years as Department Chair, hiring five new English faculty during the first of those years. Overall, though, his tenure would be accompanied by an atmosphere of general unrest on campus. Not only were students banding together in protest of the Vietnam War, but also faculty and administrators were embattled over the issue of collective bargaining. In a farewell interview with The Daily Californian’s Dell Hood, Vittor recalled an episode in his classroom where, inspired by the Columbia University protests of 1968 when students took over the campus and occupied the buildings, several of Vittor’s own students threatened to take over and “reconstitute" the instruction of his class. Vittor didn’t acquiesce. In 1975, in the battle between faculty and administrators, he placed himself on the front lines to picket outside Governing Board member Sydney Wiener’s house.
In the classroom, though, C. Frank Vittor was widely acknowledged as one of Grossmont’s finest instructors. Selected “Teacher of the Week” in 1970, he was praised by students for his signature Mythology course being “‘…an exciting odyssey into the world of mythology and the English language.’ ‘His mythology figures are so vivid that they make the movies shown about them seem colorless and dull.’” Besides traditional skills courses and developmental composition, Vittor frequently drew from his graduate studies to teach courses about classical literature, including Masterpieces of Drama and Advanced Studies in Greek and Roman Literature. In well rounded contrast to these, however, Vittor also had a lifelong affinity for science fiction, fantasy, and graphical literature.
In fact, as a young child, Vittor frequently found himself on the Pittsburgh trollies reading magazines such as Amazing Tales, from which he drew his inspiration to create Grossmont’s first literature course in the genre, Fantasy and Science Fiction, which would become Vittor’s signature course for the remainder of his tenure. The course was so popular, multiple sections were sometimes offered in one semester.
By 1981, however, Vittor had suffered nine separate heart attacks, the last of which forced him to curtail his activities drastically and hand over the wizard’s wand of Fantasy and Science Fiction to Homer Lusk. Finally, taking his son’s offer to help part-time at his company in the Gulf Coast, Vittor and his wife packed up his office in May of 1983, concluded his sixteen-year career in the District, and relocated to an island ten miles out from Heron Bay in the Gulf of Mexico.
After a “bucket list” trip to the Grand Canyon, Vittor passed away in Mobile, Alabama, in April of 1985.
"Vittor, (Charles) Frank." The Gallery: A 25th Anniversary Photographic Directory of the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community Faculty, Administration, and Staff. El Cajon, CA: Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District, 1987. p116.
Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
8800 Grossmont College Drive
El Cajon, California 92020
619-644-7000
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