Posts filed under ‘Pattee Library’
A Morning Run, 324, and a Classic Commericial
On my way into the office Wednesday morning, I walked through Paterno Library, where students and fans and alumni are leaving memories of Joe on Post-It notes, some attached to bulletin boards, others stuck to a Stand-Up Joe.
Among the snippets that stood out:
Waved and asked how I was during my morning run.
You’ve made a proud Paterno Fellow out of me.
” … and all you cool cats.” JoePa at Football Eve 2009.
Joe, I love you. 324.
B10 commercial. Come to Penn State.
The last is my favorite, I’ll admit. The Big Ten Network commercial from a couple of years back is hilarious; it’s Joe at his most deranged. Here’s a YouTube version that’s a little fuzzy. Watch to the end. Enjoy.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
A Detective Story—And Some Fascinating Civil War Research
I love the circumstances that led to the lecture I attended last week at the Special Collections Library titled “A Local Detective Story: Deserters and Loyalty in the Civil War.”
A history professor, Sally McMurry, was going through old tax rolls in the basement of the Centre County Historical Museum in Bellefonte, and she needed a break. (Understandably.) She happened to notice a hunk of what appeared to be deteriorating leather on one of the shelves, and when she opened it, she discovered it was records from the Civil War, a list of deserters from Pennsylvania.
So she alerted her colleague, William Blair, head of Penn State’s George and Ann Richards Civil War Center, who was amazed. “I’d never seen anything like this in my life,” he said. “That’s not easy to do these days.”
Thus began some detective work for Blair, whose current research focuses on northern homefronts during the Civil War. This was a detour, but (more…)
Anniversary of Betsy Aardsma’s death drawing notice
With the 40th anniversary of the murder in the stacks at Pattee Library approaching, you can expect to see a lot of stories about the still-unsolved case and the victim, Betsy Aardsma. Journalists often use anniversaries as news pegs for stories; that’s what we did in our September/October issue, in which we published a story about the murder investigation and Sasha Skucek ’99, ’07g, an English lecturer and journalist who has been looking into the case.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette weighed in Sunday with this story, in which investigators talk about the crime and how it still resonates after so much time. Said Centre County district attorney Michael Madeira, “It sounds like an urban legend, except it’s real.”
The anniversary is Nov. 28.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
Our Hard-Working Photographer
Look for Clair Poletti on our Everyday People page, probably in the Nov-Dec issue.
One of our favorite photographers for the magazine is Bill Cardoni, who lives in the Poconos, or maybe New York City—I’ve never been clear which—and who doesn’t mind traveling here to do shoots for us. We usually try to come up with two different shoots on the same day to make the trip worth his while. Once in a while—like yesterday—he actually has three assignments in a day. Which is a lot, considering not only the travel time but also how much setup and teardown is involved with each shoot.
Ryan Jones, one of our senior editors, thought it would be fun to show up at yesterday’s shoots and take pictures of Bill taking pictures. So here are a couple of shots for you of Bill in action. The one above is from the first shoot of the day—it’s Clair Poletti, who is in charge of Penn State’s film office and who will be profiled on our Everyday People page in an upcoming issue (most likely November-December). Clair basically is the liaison to anyone who wants to film on campus, whether for a Hollywood movie, a Discovery Channel documentary, or whatever.
Nikki Greene will probably lead off our Sports section in Nov-Dec.
The second photo above is also from the Clair Poletti shoot.
Bill’s next assignment was across campus at the Jordan Center—the subject was Nikki Greene, a highly touted freshman on the Lady Lion basketball team. She’ll be the athlete profile that leads off our Sports section, most likely in the November-December issue.
(The Nikki Greene shoot was taking place at almost exactly the same time that Lady Lion head coach Coquese Washington was giving birth to her new daughter, Rhaiyna.)
Nikki checking Bill's work.
And the third shoot was back here at the alumni center and involved Sascha Skucek ’99, ’07g, whom you’ve probably never heard of, but who is a very interesting guy. He’s a lecturer in the English department who has spent quite a bit of time and energy in the past 10 years or so trying to help solve the murder of Betsy Aardsma, the grad student who was stabbed to death in the stacks in Pattee in November 1969. With the 40th anniversary of Aardsma’s death approaching, we’ve got a feature article in the September-October issue on the subject, and Sascha’s efforts play a big role in that story. He’s in the final photo, below.
Sascha Skucek plays a role in a feature in Sept-Oct, on the ongoing attempts to solve the murder of Betsy Aardsma.
By the way, if you visit Cardoni’s Web site and click on some of the links—like Portrait I, Portrait II, and Print—you’ll see quite a few photos you recognize, from past issues of The Penn Stater, as well as shoots he’s done for Philadelphia Magazine and others.
As always, if you click on any of these photos, you can see a bigger version.
Tina Hay, editor
A Peek at the Blockson Collection
As prep for a photo essay we’re planning, a couple of us took a field trip to the Charles L. Blockson Collection at Pattee Library the other day. Blockson ’56 H&HD has collected hundreds of thousands of
Sculptures in the collection. Photo by Carole Otypka.
items documenting African-American history and the African Diaspora, and he’s donated more than 10,000 of them to Penn State. (He’s also given about 500,000 items to Temple University’s libraries.)
The Blockson collection at Penn State includes books spanning the past 400 years … sculpture … “ephemera” such as postcards and matchbook covers … sheet music. One of the most recent, and most heartbreaking, donations was a set of slave shackles.
Look for our photo essay in the Jan./Feb. issue.
Chas Brua, contributing editor
Treasures on View
Charles Blockson ’56 H&HD has made it his life’s mission to document the history of African-Americans. And he’s been very generous with his historical treasures: more than 500,000 items donated to Temple University’s libraries … more than 10,000 volumes donated to Penn State’s Charles L. Blockson Collection … countless hours spent teaching and speaking to groups.
Cover illustration by Romare Bearden, from the Blockson Collection
Friday’s Centre Daily Times spotlights an exhibit, curated by Pia Deas ’04g, that offers a glimpse into the collection Blockson gave to Penn State. The exhibit will be on display in Pattee Library’s Diversity Studies Room (109 Pattee) until March 2. (For information about visiting the larger Blockson Collection, call 814-865-1793.)
Blockson will also be speaking at an Alumni Association “City Lights” event in Philadelphia this coming Thursday, Feb. 12. He’ll be talking about “African American History, Above Ground and Underground in Philadelphia” at the Independence Seaport Museum.
Chas Brua, contributing editor
John Updike at Rest
A page from Updike's "Buchanan Dying" manuscript, housed in Pattee Library (click to see larger)
I used to joke that John Updike wrote his novels and many other works faster than I could read them. Now, sadly, with his death yesterday, I have a chance of reading them all, since there will be no more. But I wish there would be.
Updike has been one of my all-time favorite writers since the early 1970s, when I read Rabbit Redux as an exchange student in Germany. Though the novel deals with many serious and troubling issues, for me it was for a kind of refuge from my struggles with my studies (all in German) and a link back to my home state of Pennsylvania. (Updike and I are from neighboring counties, me from Lehigh, him from Berks.)
As a grad student at Penn State I worked with the original manuscripts of Updike’s play, Buchanan Dying, in Penn State’s special collections library. Updike was kind enough to respond to a letter I wrote him about the play, and a few years ago, I met him and we chatted a bit. He was affable, approachable, courtly, self-effacing—and a bit elusive. I was lucky to meet him.
Alan Janesch is director of the Alumni Association’s Grassroots Network and an occasional contributor to this blog. You can read the New York Times story about Updike’s death here.
“If You Want to Understand War…”
I seem to be on a kick lately where I’m attending a lot of faculty talks. We on the magazine staff don’t do enough of this; we don’t get out nearly as much as we should. It’s so easy to get caught up in meeting our deadlines and skip the lunchtime concert or the late-afternoon seminar—and yet every time I make the effort to go to one of these things, I come away glad that I did.
Sophie de Schaepdrijver looks up an image for a Huddle attendee after her talk
So today I went to the final Huddle with the Faculty program of the football season, this one with a faculty member in the history department by the name of Sophie de Schaepdrijver (pronounced, as nearly as I can tell, as “shepp-driver”). She’s from Belgium and has been on the Penn State faculty for eight years. One of her areas of study is World War I, and her talk—called “Memories of Mass Death: the Great War in Europe”—was fascinating. I learned what an incredible impact the war had on Europe—for example, she said that U.S. forces in all wars put together (Civil War, the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, etc.) suffered 2 million casualties, while France suffered three times that many just in World War I. Can you imagine a small nation having 6 million dead and wounded in a single four-year war?
There’s been a resurgence in interest in World War I in the past 20 years. For reasons no one can fully explain, more scholars are studying it, and more people are visiting museums and cemeteries related to it. At the Menin Gate Memorial, which is located in the Flanders region of Belgium, buglers perform a Last Post ceremony at 8 p.m. every single evening to this day. Just this past month, de Schaepdrijver presented a paper at a scholarly conference on World War I, held in France.
I sat there taking notes and trying to figure out what we might do with de Schaepdrijver in the magazine. We’d need some sort of “news peg” to write about her—or, as our former senior editor, Vicki Glembocki, used to put it, a raison d’être. Maybe if de Schaepdrijver has a book coming out, that would be our excuse. The anniversary of Armistice Day would be another good news peg—except that we just missed the 90th anniversary, and I don’t think I want to wait 10 years until the 100th.
We’ll think of something.
There are certain kinds of content that I’m not especially savvy about how best to cover in the magazine. Scholarly work in history and the humanities is one of them. We don’t have a lot of experience with writing about faculty who study this stuff. But just as I was thinking this during de Schaepdrijver’s talk, she mentioned that she also studies war diaries of that era, and oh man, did my ears perk up then. Something tells me that a story based on some diary excerpts could be fascinating and compelling.
In particular, de Schaepdrijver told us about a 50-year-old woman who lost her son in World War I and documented her grief in a 1921 memoir called La Priere Sur L’Enfant Mort (Prayer for a Dead Child). It’s a very rare book today, but oddly enough, there’s a copy in the stacks at Pattee Library. The mother who wrote the memoir had a very difficult time coming to terms with her son’s death; she rejected religion, she rejected patriotism, she rejected consolation of any kind. De Schaepdrijver read to us some very moving excerpts from the book. The only one I got a chance to write down was this one: “The most sublime of causes cannot make me accept that my child is no longer.”
De Schaepdrijver ended by quoting Ecclesiates: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” If you want to understand war, she said, “the house of mourning is the place to start.”
Tina Hay, editor
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