Archive for December, 2008
Jealous? Me?
I’ve been keeping an eye on the live.psu.edu site, vicariously experiencing the activities of the Penn Staters who are out in Pasadena for the Rose Bowl. Today there was a video interview with our Alumni Association colleague John Black, who has written The Football Letter for a bazillion years, along with a slide show of a behind-the-scenes tour of the making of the Rose Bowl Parade floats.
Never mind that here in State College, the temperature is supposed to drop to a low of 13 degrees tonight! I’m sure that my Alumni Association colleagues who are staffing the Rose Bowl tour and associated events are working very, very hard out there in Southern California. :-)
The game airs tomorrow on ABC-TV at 5:00 p.m. Eastern time. I’ll be hosting the magazine staff and a few others to watch the game in my living room, on my brand-new 40″ TV.
(I wonder if it’s important to wear white, even if you’re just watching the game on TV?)
Go Lions!
Tina Hay, editor
An Enjoyable Three Minutes
A couple of weeks ago, Penn State President Graham Spanier e-mailed to students, faculty, staff, and others a copy of a Penn State-themed holiday video. I must have been feeling swamped at the time, because I never got around to looking at it—until they showed it on the overhead video monitor at the Lady Lion basketball game the other day. I thought it was great fun, and I dug up the link so you can check it out for yourself. It lasts about 2:49 and it’s worth watching. Basically a bunch of people from the Penn State community—everyone from Faculty Laureate and cellist Kim Cook to volleyball All-American Alisha Glass to Mike the Mailman—offer their New Year’s resolutions. The resolutions run the gamut from “call my parents more” to “demonstrate a crystalline wire solar cell that has an efficiency comparable to current crystalline silicon solar cells.”
It makes me realize I need to give some thought to my own New Year’s resolutions. I suspect that whatever I come up with will be pretty lame compared to the solar-cells thing….
Tina Hay, editor
Coming Soon to a Mailbox Near You
I’m told that our Jan-Feb issue has “dropped,” as the printer puts it, meaning that all 127,000 copies or so are in the mail to Alumni Association members as we speak. (We actually have more than 160,000 members, but with some members married to other members, we only mail about 127,000 magazines.)
Our printer is in Strasburg, Va., so the first people to get their copies are typically the readers in northern Virginia, Maryland, and south-central Pennsylvania. We can kinda “watch” the magazine make its way across the country as we start getting e-mails and letters to the editor from Texas and Colorado and California—and typically that’s a week or so after the folks on the East Coast get their copies.
The new issue has four feature stories, some of which we’ve already mentioned:
—Senior editor Ryan Jones’ account of his week spent at Paternoville (the cover story);
—A profile on Doug Moorhead ’56, owner of Presque Isle Wine Cellars in Erie;
—A collection of readers’ tales of how they and their college buddies have kept in touch and held informal reunions over the years; and
—A story on the work of Andrew Bieniawski ’89 and others in helping remove Soviet-era nuclear materials from eastern Europe. As mentioned earlier, we actually sent a writer to Hungary to accompany Bieniawski and his crew. The title of the story is “The Hungary Job” and its subtitle gives you a good idea of what the story is like: “A road trip across the Eastern Bloc with dozens of mustachioed Hungarians, a few jolly Czechs, two Slovenians, four Russians, three gung-ho dudes from the U.S. Department of Energy, one Penn Stater, and enough highly enriched uranium to destroy a city.”
Look for the new issue to arrive soon.
Tina Hay, editor
Joe Paterno = “A Bag of Nails”?
Mark Johnston / Associated Press
The news media in southern California are writing a lot of stories in the run-up to Thursday’s Rose Bowl game, and yesterday’s Los Angeles Times had a highly complimentary story about Joe Paterno—in particular about his toughness in the face of the physical challenges he’s faced the past few seasons. The writer at one point calls him “the steeliest bag of nails on Penn State’s roster.”
I saw two minor inaccuracies in the piece. In talking about the three games Joe has missed in his 59 years at Penn State, it made mention of the trampoline accident that seriously injured “his son, Daniel.” I’m pretty sure Joe doesn’t have a kid named Daniel—it was David, if my memory serves me. And, in talking about the recent announcement that Joe will coach another three years, the story says, “Paterno might opt out sooner, but at least now there seems to be an end game.” I’m not sure that the Penn State announcement created an end game at all. In fact, it said that “…the parties might … alter the arrangement by either shortening or extending its length as necessary.” Who knows—Joe could well end up coaching beyond the 2011 season.
Still, the L.A. Times piece is a good read.
Tina Hay, editor
Penn State Welcomes the Katz Building
The new Katz Building, as seen from East Halls, across Park Avenue.
For whatever reason, I don’t seem to have much occasion to drive down the Park Avenue Extension between the Nittany Lion Inn and the stadium. But I happened to be driving that way the other night and was astounded to see the new Katz Building, the University Park home of the Dickinson School of Law, all lit up and looking very close to being completed. I don’t know how that managed to sneak up on me. (Clearly I need to get out more.) I went home and got my camera and took a few pictures.
And then, sure enough, we got a news release yesterday saying that the Katz Building is indeed finished and that the University Park-based Dickinson folks moved into their new digs on Monday. Students will begin taking classes there in the Spring Semester, which starts next month. The building is located across from East Halls in an area formerly occupied by a parking lot (and maybe a bit of the Flower Gardens, though I think the vast majority of the Flower Gardens are still intact). Click on either of the two photos here to see a larger version.
We’ll have to put this stunning new building on the list to cover in some way in a future issue of the magazine. In the meantime, here’s a link to a photo of what the building looks like during the day—or did, at an earlier stage in its construction.
Tina Hay, editor
Losing “Little Mo”
Don't try to read this tiny version—you'll get your Jan-Feb issue soon enough!
Today’s our last day before the University shuts down for a week-long holiday break. We’re gorging on the Garrett’s popcorn that a colleague sent us as a holiday gift, and trying to get some things taken care of for the March-April issue (which we’ll start work on in earnest after we get back). And we’re also trying not to notice that today is Maureen Harmon’s last day.
Mo (Penn State Behrend, class of 2000) has been a part of the magazine staff since 2001; she’s one of our two senior editors. But when the new year starts, she’ll begin a new job as editor of the Denison University magazine, in Granville, Ohio. My good friend Paul Pegher, the current editor of that magazine, is stepping up to a broader role at Denison and recruited Mo to replace him as editor. It’s a great career move for Little Mo (that’s what we call her—don’t ask me why, because I don’t remember anymore!), but needless to say it’s a big loss to us—and to you, as readers. She has done so many great things for The Penn Stater in her time here.
I talk about all of this in some depth in my editor’s column for the January-February issue, which should be mailing in the next week, so I won’t go on at great length here. Suffice it to say that Mo has been an uncommonly good staff member and we will all miss her something fierce. We’ll also miss seeing her husband, Nate (also Class of 2000), and their little boy, Sam. Luckily we have iChat on our Macs and will be able to talk with them by video chat from time to time. In the meantime there have already been some tears in the office this morning and I’m sure there will be more before the day is over.
Tina Hay, editor
Why It’s So Cool to Work at a University
Our division had a holiday party in the alumni center’s Robb Hall this afternoon, and to my surprise, we had entertainment—in the form of Richard Kennedy singing holiday music while accompanied on piano by Tony Leach. So I ran upstairs and grabbed my camera.
Richard Kennedy is a wonderful tenor who teaches in the School of Music; I sing in the State College Choral Society and we’ve sometimes had Richard as a soloist for our concerts. Tony Leach is also a faculty member in the School of Music and the director of the highly regarded student group Essence of Joy. We’ve talked as a staff several times about doing a story in the magazine on Essence of Joy; we just haven’t moved it up to the front burner or even figured out exactly what our approach to the story would be. One of these days….
Anyway, just a nice treat, and a reminder of what a great workplace a university can be.
Tina Hay, editor
Coming in 2009: A Steve McCurry Exhibition
Rajasthani men participate in the the Hindu festival of Holi. 1996, Rajasthan, India; chromogenic development (Lambda) print; © Steve McCurry, courtesy George Eastman House
Just got a call from Joyce Robinson, curator of the Palmer Museum of Art, with whom we did a Q&A in our July-August 2008 issue. Among other things, she was calling to tell me that the museum has booked an exhibition of the photographs of Steve McCurry ’74 for next summer. Woo hoo! We love Steve McCurry. He’s a National Geographic photographer who is most famous for his image of the Afghan girl with the haunting green eyes, but who has many, many other wonderful photographs. We feature his images in the magazine every couple of years, usually in conjunction with a new book of his—or whatever excuse we can find. :-)
Anyway, the exhibition is called Face of Asia and will be at the Palmer next June 21–August 16. So if you’re coming to University Park for the Arts Festival, you should definitely plan on a stop at the Palmer.
Tina Hay, editor
Gary Eberle’s Funky Truck
My friend Elaine Keller ’68, who is rapidly becoming my top source of blog fodder, passes along this photo from friends who are currently vacationing in California’s wine country. One of the spots they visited is a respected winery owned by former Penn State football player Gary Eberle ’67. The friends report:
“We are in Paso Robles heading into our third winery—Eberle—and see this funky truck painted blue and white with ‘Penn State Forever’ painted on the front. After a few glasses of wine, Gary Eberle comes out from back and we start asking him about the truck. He played defensive tackle for Papa Joe, and is going to the Rose Bowl. We had to buy a few bottles of vino from him!!!”
As a side note, you may remember that The Penn Stater won the Sibley Award as the best alumni magazine in the country in 2007. It’s customary for the editor of the Sibley-winning magazine to send a bottle of wine to the editor of the following year’s Sibley winner, so when the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine won the 2008 Sibley, I sent editor Sean Plottner a bottle of 2007 Estate Chardonnay from the Eberle winery. Sean reported that it was excellent.
Tina Hay, editor
Not Fair-Weather Friends
If you were on campus in the pelting sleet this morning, you probably noticed all the cars lined up outside the dorms, flashers blinking. Today’s the last day of finals (and commencement is tomorrow). It made me think of a December day 22 years ago when I finished up my undergrad career and said goodbye to the guys I knew in my hall. I haven’t talked to most of them for more than two decades, which is kind of sad. While I’ve stayed good friends with a core group from my high school days, my college friendships just didn’t last as long.
I’m definitely not in the same league as the more than 100 readers who responded to our call for “Penn State buddies” stories. We heard from folks who’ve held reunions for more than 50 years, groups who go on yearly camping trips, others who’ve started their own tongue-in-cheek holidays to get together. Our January/February issue will feature some of the best of those stories. Look for the magazine in your mailbox late this month or early in January, depending on where you live.
Chas Brua, contributing editor
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