Posts filed under ‘Famous Penn Staters’
Obituary: Former Ebony Editor Herbert Nipson
One of Penn State’s most prominent journalism grads, Herbert Nipson ’40, has died at the age of 95.
Nipson spent 38 years at Ebony magazine, the last 15 of those as executive editor. He started as an associate editor there in 1949 and was named editor in 1972, so he was on staff throughout an important time: the U.S. civil-rights movement.
He’s credited with expanding the magazine’s reach substantially during that time, according to an obituary in the Los Angeles Times: “By the time he retired … the magazine enjoyed national recognition and mainstream appeal for both its issue-oriented reporting and its cultural coverage.”
Nipson, a Penn State Distinguished Alumnus, grew up in Clearfield, Pa. He’s thought to be the first black student on the staff of the Collegian; he started there in 1936 and eventually was named assistant sports editor. He also ran cross-country for Penn State.
You can read more about Nipson at BlackHistory.psu.edu.
Tina Hay, editor
Penn State Night at the Emmys
He was nominated for an Emmy Award last year, but this year Ty Burrell ’97g actually won the thing.
Burrell captured an Emmy last night for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy, for his role as the dorky dad Phil Dunphy on the ABC sitcom Modern Family. The show itself also won for Best Comedy, and Ty’s on-screen wife, Julie Bowen, won for Best Supporting Actress.
You can see the entire list of Emmy winners here. Note that it includes another Penn Stater: Don Roy King ’69, director of Saturday Night Live, won an Emmy for Outstanding Directing. Not a bad night for Penn Staters, huh?
By the way, King will be speaking at Penn State next spring.
We did a profile of Ty Burrell in the magazine back in Jan-Feb 2010. That story got its start when I was trying to recruit Vicki Glembocki ’93, ’02g to write a story for us on some other topic, and she wrote back: “How about Ty Burrell??? Are you watching Modern Family? I can see the subhead: How does a guy become the most lovably annoying dad in America?”
Vicki usually knows what she’s talking about, so I took her up on the offer, and I’m glad I did.
You might enjoy reading Vicki’s tale of what it was like to meet Burrell, and that’s also where you can download a PDF of her story in The Penn Stater about him.
Tina Hay, editor
An Hour With Gerry Abrams
Members of the Penn State Class of 1961 are in town this weekend for their 50th reunion, and yesterday several hundred of them crammed into an assembly room at the Nittany Lion Inn to hear one of their more famous classmates speak.
Gerald Abrams ’61 has been a television producer for more than four decades, with credits like Nuremberg, Florence Nightingale, Flesh and Blood, Found Money, and The Gift, among many others. (He’s also getting to be equally known for being the father of J.J. Abrams, director of Mission Impossible, Star Trek, and now Super 8.) Abrams was joined in the session by Matt Jordan, an assistant professor in the College of Communications.
Jordan first took the audience on a little tour of the history of television, then played the role of James Lipton and lobbed a few questions at Abrams. After that, Abrams’ classmates got to ask him some questions as well.
Here are couple of the questions from Jordan and the audience, along with Abrams’ answers:
How did Penn State prepare you to work in TV? “It didn’t. There was no television curriculum when I attended. The television curriculum today in the College of Communications is so sophisticated. They’re now teaching things like how to produce interactive game shows, for students who might be interested in that field.”
What can be done about the decreasing quality of television programming in our country—profanity, sex, etc.? (more…)
An Honor That Alan Furst is More than OK With
The novelist Alan Furst ’67g is the 2011 recipient of the Helmerich Award, a literary prize given annually by the Tulsa Library Trust. Furst recently told the Tulsa World that he appreciated the award because it “goes to really good writers,” and he wasn’t kidding. Among the authors honored: John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Ian McEwan.
A cool coincidence (we assume): Furst’s most recent novel, 2010′s Spies of the Balkans, is partly set in Tulsa. His next book is due out in the summer of 2012.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Think Pink
If you end up missing the mark with a certain someone’s Valentine’s gift, or forget it all together, you are in luck. The Lady Lion basketball team launched the Pink Zone Auction this week, which is being hosted on charitybuzz.net. There is a wide array of auction items, 46 in total. 
You could bid on a chance to meet Tony Bennett, spend an evening with ex-CIA spy Valerie Plame Wilson ’85 and her husband, experience a taping of Saturday Night Live in New York with Penn State President Graham Spanier and his wife, or collect a few signed (and used) Paterno items. My favorite item in the bunch is the chance to have Chip Kidd ’86, famed book jacket designer, design a cover just for you.
The goal is to raise $150,000 with proceeds benefitting breast cancer charities. There is still plenty of time to bid. The auction opened this past Monday and goes until March 2.
To view a full list of auction items click here.
If one auction isn’t enough for you, another Pink Zone online auction is taking place at gopsusports.com. It also runs until March 2. Happy bidding.
Jessie Knuth, graphic designer
So, I Was Talking to Steve McCurry Today…
Now there’s something I don’t get to say every day.
But we’re doing a photo essay on famed photographer Steve McCurry ’74 for our forthcoming March-April issue, and I was hoping I’d be able to talk to him in order to write the text that’ll accompany the piece.
You’ve probably seen some of our past photo essays with McCurry, such as the September-October 2006 cover story shown here. The occasion for our latest piece is that, when Kodak announced in 2009 that it was discontinuing production of its workhorse Kodachrome slide film, McCurry asked if he could have the honor of shooting the last roll.
McCurry used that roll to shoot images in New York City and in India, as well as a few in Parsons, Kansas, where he took that last roll to be developed. The project will be the subject of a National Geographic documentary to air in May, and we’re lucky to be able to publish a few of McCurry’s final Kodachrome images in the magazine.
McCurry is based in New York City, but good luck finding him there. He spends much of his time in Asia on various photography projects, and in fact, to interview him today I had to call him at a hotel in Myanmar, where he’s running a photography workshop. I got to talk to him for about 20 minutes, and in addition to what we’ll put in the magazine, I’ll post a condensed version of that Q&A here on the blog closer to the time the next issue comes out. Check back around the first of March.
(Which reminds me: If you’d like to get our blog in the form of a daily e-mail, just click on the “Subscribe / by e-mail” button on the upper right of this page.)
Oh, and one other thing. In the course of working with McCurry’s office in New York on this piece, I learned about a nonprofit organization he started called ImagineAsia, which aims to help schoolchildren in Afghanistan. Looks like they’re doing some very good work.
Tina Hay, editor
A Conversation with Tom Verducci
I remember Sports Illustrated‘s Tom Verducci ’82 from back in the late 1970s/early 1980s, when I was covering Penn State football for State College radio station WRSC and he was a sports reporter for the Collegian. What I most remember was his willingness to ask Joe Paterno tough questions at the news conferences after football games. I think Joe found it a little irritating (but then, Joe finds most members of the news media irritating at one time or another), but I remember that they were smart questions and I was impressed with Tom for asking them.
Here we are 30 years later and Tom is one of the most respected sportswriters in America. A senior writer at SI, he has covered baseball—especially the Yankees—for years, and wrote the SI piece that blew open the steroids scandal in 2002. He’s also the co-author of Joe Torre’s book The Yankee Years, and in 2009 SI published a book called Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci.
Last night he spoke in the HUB as part of a series sponsored by the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism. And one of the things he mentioned was (more…)
The Best of The Penn Stater Blog, 2010
As we wrapped up 2010 and kicked off 2011, we at the Penn Stater blog took a look back at the most popular posts from our second official year in the blogosphere. Check out the five posts that earned the most hits in 2010 and got you, our readers, talking:
1. “A Snowy Penn State Wedding”
On New Year’s Eve 2009, when Tina Hay stumbled across a frigid pre-wedding photo shoot starring bride Kaitlin Infield ’07 and groom Nicholas Bevins ’07 at the Nittany Lion Shrine, the result was one hot blog post—the most popular of 2010, to be exact. Not only were readers impressed by the newlyweds’ PSU dedication, but some even credited the wedding party’s cheers for securing Penn State the Capital One Bowl win vs. the LSU Tigers the next day.
2. “How DO They Get Those Pants So Clean?”
You ever wonder how PSU’s football players keep their uniforms—especially those pristinely white pants—so, well, white? Thanks to senior editor Ryan Jones’ February blog post, thousands of you now know the answer. In a video featuring Kirk Diehl ’96, ’05, the Nittany Lions’ facilities coordinator, we learned that (more…)
In Case You Can’t Get Enough of the Paranormal
A couple of years ago we profiled a bunch of Penn State students who were running around the East Coast chasing ghosts and the like. We sent writer Patrick Kirchner to hang out with the students—members of a club called the Paranormal Research Society—one weekend as they looked for Mothman in West Virginia. The article ran in The Penn Stater just as the PRS was about to get some national attention in the form of a reality-TV series on A&E.
Well, you probably know the rest. Paranormal State is still going strong nearly three years later, and the leader of that group of students, Ryan Buell ’06, has practically become a brand. He lists his job as “full-time paranormal research investigator,” and now he’s got a book out as well. Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown was just released 10 days ago by It Books, a Harper Collins imprint.
In conjunction with the book’s release, the Paranormal Research Society has some events scheduled locally this weekend. On Saturday Buell will be signing books at the State College Barnes & Noble on Saturday, and he and others will speak at PRS headquarters on such topics as “Paranormal Investigation 100,” “Paganism & Occultism 100,” and “Paranormal Photography.” On Sunday there’s a “paranormal scavenger hunt” on Sunday. More details are available at the PRS website.
Paranormal State begins its fifth season on A&E Oct. 17.
Tina Hay, editor
Patrick Fabian, Silver-Screen Exorcist, is a Penn Stater
I’m feeling a little sheepish that we didn’t know this until now, but the star of The Last Exorcism, which debuted in movie theatres nationwide on Aug. 27, is a Penn Stater. Patrick Fabian ’87 plays the Rev. Cotton Marcus in the film, which is a horror movie—but one that somehow managed to get a PG-13 rating.
It was Joyce Hoffman, the alumni coordinator in the College of Arts and Architecture, who called my attention to Patrick Fabian. If Fabian looks familiar to you, it may be because he’s been on a number of movies and TV shows—he was a semi-regular on Joan of Arcadia, Big Love, and Veronica Mars and appeared on an episode or two of CSI, 24, and Will & Grace, among others.
The Last Exorcism was No. 1 at the box office its first weekend, and has since gone on to gross more than $40 million (it cost just under $2 million to make). I don’t think it’s in too many theatres at this point, but it’s scheduled to be released on DVD on Dec. 1. You can check out Fabian’s website here and read an interview with him about The Last Exorcism here.
I’m much too squeamish for horror movies, so I’m not sure I’ll ever see this one! If you’ve seen it, scroll down to the comments section and let us know what you think of it.
Tina Hay, editor
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