On the bright side, you met Ithaca’s only black person and learned a valuable lesson.
As for Ithaca, I still have vivid memories of clouds racing across a cold lake Cayuga. Eerie and beautiful.
We lived there five years 1960-1964. It was beautiful, indeed. Had a gorgeous elementary school in Cayuga Heights, but the Junior High was downtown and I suddenly became a commuter on the school bus. The demographics of the city were a bit different from up on East Hill, even then.