Posts filed under ‘Penn State alumni’
Photographic Memories
We love when readers tell us that one of the archival photos featured in the magazine has sparked a memory for them. And because some of these photos are perplexing (remember this one?), it’s even cooler when a reader can explain just what’s going on in the shot.
In our latest issue, we printed this photo (above) and invited readers to tell us what the shoeless gentlemen were up to. Milton Critchfield ’63, ’65g did exactly that. And he should know — he’s the one sitting on the table, removing his socks. Over the weekend, he sent us this letter (below):
Thanks for publishing the photo from 1964. I instantly recognized myself sitting on the table taking off my socks and Richard Twark ['67 PhD] sitting to my right on the sofa. Rich and I believe most or all of the others had just completed walking in the so-called “Atlantic Walk” of 50-mile duration. Penn State had been challenged by the University of St. Andrews in Scotland to compete with them on the walk. We began at 8 pm on Saturday night and had until 8 pm Sunday night to complete the 50 miles. The route started at the HUB and took us through Bellefonte, Pleasant Gap, Pine Grove Mills, and back to the HUB.
The photo is one of nine that was published in the Centre Daily Times on April 15, 1964. The spread is entitled “It was a Long, Long, Long, Hike.” I still have the original page from the Times. According to that article, there were 772 starters in the walk. I had the honor of being at the end of the entire column with a walkie talkie. My job was to help anyone who required assistance and to keep an eye out for stragglers. By 2 am, we were spread out over 20 miles and our communications system finally broke down. At that point, they gave me permission to compete at my own pace, so I began walking rapidly trying to make up for lost time. That was a mistake, as I developed a full set of blisters at 34 miles and finally dropped out at 42 miles. I had a lot of encouragement from friends to keep going, but the pain was too unbearable. The Atlantic Walk also occurred the following year in 1965. I entered the walk again and successfully completed it.
Rich Twark called me yesterday to see if I had seen the photo, and we had a great time catching up after nearly 50 years. Thanks again for publishing the photo and making our day.
Do you remember the Atlantic Walk? Has one of our Nostalgia Photos ever jogged your memory? We’d love to hear about it! Email us at pennstater@psu.edu or comment below.
Mary Murphy, associate editor
Cool Shots of the Space Shuttle Over D.C.
The Space Shuttle Discovery gave Washington, D.C., residents quite the photo op yesterday. The retired orbiter flew on the back of a NASA 747 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida up to Dulles Airport, where it will have a permanent home next door at the Udvar-Hazy Center, part of the National Air and Space Museum. But before heading to Dulles, it flew a few passes over the nation’s capital.
Maxwell Kruger ’09, whose photography we featured in the magazine a few years ago when he was still a student, got himself up on a rooftop for the flyover. You can see one result of his efforts above, and more at this blog entry.
Tina Hay, editor
Ganim Wins Pulitzer for Sandusky Coverage
If you’ve been following the Sandusky scandal, I’m sure you’ve noticed the tenacious reporting of Sara Ganim ’08, whose March story first alerted the public that Jerry Sandusky ’66, ’71 MEd H&HD was being investigated by a grand jury, and who was at the forefront of the coverage when the scandal became national news in November. She was honored Monday afternoon with journalism’s highest prize, the Pulitzer.
The citation, for local reporting, reads like this: “Awarded to Sara Ganim and members of The Patriot-News Staff, Harrisburg, Penn., for courageously revealing and adeptly covering the explosive Penn State sex scandal involving former football coach Jerry Sandusky.”
“This is definitely a win for the whole newsroom,” Ganim says in this video, which is upside-down. “For everybody standing here. And more important, I think it’s important for everyone in every newsroom just like ours for every newsroom across the country. because better than any award., the most rewarding thing in this whole process is people telling me this story and our coverage has changed their minds about local reporting.”
Ganim, who’s 24 years old and one of the youngest Pulitzer winners, is one of a very small group of Penn Staters who have been so honored:
Norman C. Miller ’56 of the Wall Street Journal won the 1964 prize for local, general, or spot news reporting for a “comprehensive account of a multi-million dollar vegetable oil swindle in New Jersey.”
Rod Nordland ’72 was part of a team from The Philadelphia Inquirer that won the 1983 prize for local, general, or spot news for coverage of the Three Mile Island accident.
Janet Day ’82 was part of a team at The Denver Post that won the 2000 prize for breaking news for coverage of the Columbine shootings.
Novelist Richard Russo, who taught at Penn State Altoona, won the 2002 prize in fiction for Empire Falls, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke taught at Penn State from 1936–1943. Additionally, archivist Paul Dzyak ’92 tells us, Donald Bartlett, half of a dynamic investigative duo with James Steele, briefly attended Penn State. Bartlett and Steele won the 1989 Pulitzer for national reporting for an investigation into the 1986 Tax Reform Act. And Mark E. Neely Jr., McCabe-Greer Professor of American Civil War History, won the 1992 prize for history for The Fate of Liberty.
Thanks to Dzyak and Vicki Fong ’81, manager of public relations for the College of the Liberal Arts, for helping to compile this list. If you know of anyone we missed, please let us know in the comments or at our Facebook page.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
P.S. Additionally, Diane Ackerman ’70 was a finalist for the Pulitzer in non-fiction for One Hundred Names for Love, which we excerpted in our July/August issue.
Inspiring Future Entrepreneurs at IST Start-up Week
Am I the only one with a pen and paper?
I wrote this sentence at the top of my notebook page this morning as I glanced around the lecture hall and noted the sea of iPads, MacBooks, and smartphones surrounding me. Although I shouldn’t have been surprised: I was at a talk for the College of Information Sciences and Technology’s Start-up Week — in a classroom called the “Cybertorium,” no less.
During the week, which started Monday and ends Saturday, IST alumni and young entrepreneurs returned to campus to talk to current students about turning their own ideas into successful start-ups. Lucky for me, the two talks I attended were less about the latest tech gadgets and more about entrepreneurship.
Neilye Garrity ’04 is the co-founder of Candid Career, a video-based website for job seekers, and Matt Miller ’01 is co-founder and CTO of CyberCoders and CareerBliss, two job-hunting websites that streamline the recruiting and hiring process. Both alums offered some advice and answered tons of questions, which audience members could text or Tweet during the talk.
Here are some of their best tips for aspiring entrepreneurs:
—Don’t let others’ reactions discourage you. When Garrity told her family she wanted to quit her cushy job at IBM to work on her website full time, “they thought I was nuts,” she says. “But I believed in what I was doing, so that didn’t stop me.”
—Do your research. “Learn everything you can about companies with similar products, even if those companies failed,” Miller says. “Learn from their mistakes.” (more…)
Three Questions for the Board of Trustees Candidates
How on earth do you differentiate among 86 candidates for the three open alumni seats on the Board of Trustees? I had been asking myself that question for a while—even before I knew the final number of people on the ballot. It seemed like every time I picked up a newspaper, someone else was declaring his or her candidacy. I lost count of how many.
By the time the final number—a record, by far—was determined, I thought I had a good handle on what the candidates thought about the trustees’ handling of the Sandusky scandal. The media coverage—understandably—focused on it. And when the official position statements (which you can find here), were released, most of them dealt primarily with the scandal and its aftermath, too.
That wasn’t enough for me. As a journalist, a Penn State alum, and a Penn State employee, I had more questions. Penn State has other large issues it must confront in the coming years—particularly the annual fight for state appropriation dollars and the steady rise of tuition. I think it’s important for the Board of Trustees candidates to address those issues, too. We brainstormed for a bit at the office, and we crafted three questions we thought could add to the discussion.
Sure, we’d love to hear all of the trustees—not just the ones currently running for the board—address these wider issues. But alumni can vote only for the nine alumni seats on the board, and only three are up every year. We decided to focus where we could shed the most light—the candidates in the most prominent trustees election in Penn State’s history.
So we emailed the three questions to the 86 candidates. We weren’t sure what to expect, but a week later, 72 of them had responded. That’s 83.7 percent. In the research world, they call that a “robust” response. We’re thrilled.
We are presenting the responses to you exactly as the candidates wrote them; click here to read them, either by candidate or by question. If responses exceeded the 250-word limit, we trimmed them, and if something was particularly unclear, we contacted the author to clarify. Otherwise, their responses are unvarnished and unedited.
The candidates raise many important points, and they float some interesting solutions. It’s a lot to digest, we know. But we hope you’ll take some time to learn about the candidates before you vote, and we hope you’ll let us know what you think, too, in the comments below or on our Facebook page.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
P.S. This is just one of two initiatives that Alumni Association is doing to help alumni make an informed choice. There’s a Meet the Candidates event from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, April 21, before the Blue-White game, and we hope you’ll be able to attend that, too. You can find out more about the event here.
A Comedy Connection
Keegan-Michael Key '96g and Jordan Peele (as Barack Obama) in a sketch for their Comedy Central show.
It’s not often that scripted television makes me laugh out loud. As a full-fledged reality TV junkie, I’m far more likely to crack up watching the latest Real Housewives blowout or a melodramatic rose ceremony on The Bachelor.
So you can imagine my shock when I found myself in hysterics during Key and Peele, a new sketch comedy show on Comedy Central. The sketches are smart — politically incorrect, but not mean-spirited. And both title stars are very, very funny.
Some of our readers might remember that the “Key” in the title is a Penn Stater: Keegan-Michael Key ’96g earned his MFA at Penn State, and doubly cool, he’s buddies with Ty Burrell ’97g, from ABC’s Modern Family. Both actors have roots in Utah. In this interview from The Salt Lake Tribune, Key mentions their connection, and Burrell made a cameo in a recent Key and Peele sketch.
Key and Peele premiered in January, and it’s been earning rave reviews, like this one from the Los Angeles Times. It airs Tuesdays at 10:30 on Comedy Central.
Mary Murphy, associate editor
Remembering “Dr. Mel”
Mel Goldstein, an iconic New England meteorologist who publicly and cheerfully battled cancer for more than 16 years, has died.
“Dr. Mel,” as he was known, died yesterday at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He was 66.
I first learned of Goldstein ’67 back in 2002, when the Alumni Association’s receptionist at the time, Kay Tomczuk, showed me a profile of him in the Hartford Courant. Kay had lived in Connecticut for many years, and Dr. Mel was pretty much a legend up there—for his meteorology smarts, his upbeat on-air personality, and his determination and relentless good humor in the face of a diagnosis of multiple myeloma.
We liked the Courant profile so much that we end up reprinting it in our November-December 2002 issue. If you click on the magazine spread above, it’ll take you to the story as it originally appeared in the paper.
Since then, we’ve followed the ups and downs of Dr. Mel’s cancer fight—the disease typically has a life expectancy of only three years—and were saddened last June when the physical pain of the disease finally forced him to give up his on-air role.
You can watch a video remembrance of Dr. Mel and his contributions—to meteorology and to humanity—below.
Tina Hay, editor
Reflecting on Two Months—and Two Scandals
My mom didn’t get it.
In our phone conversation on Nov. 11, it was clear she didn’t understand the weight of the allegations against Jerry Sandusky, the firing of Joe Paterno, the nuclear fallout that was Penn State in those first few days.
“Imagine this happening at Syracuse,” I said. She instantly understood.
I’m not a Penn Stater. I grew up in central New York, as did most of my family and friends. And while the Sandusky scandal shook me as an employee of the University and writer for The Penn Stater, the feeling was, for the most part, once removed.
I didn’t grow up worshiping Paterno, spending Saturdays in Beaver Stadium, or bleeding blue and white. The only way I could begin to empathize with Penn Staters, and the only way I could convey the crisis to my mother, was to imagine the same scenario rocking the biggest college in our proximity, and my alma mater, Syracuse University.
Exactly one week later, it did. (more…)
Guaranteed to Cheer You Up
Our former Alumni Association colleague Sara Jones, who now works at Michigan State, passes along a wonderful video that I feel fairly certain you will love.
If you go to the website for the video, you can read a bit more detail about how this guy Chris set up the situation with Danielle. Or you can forget about that and just enjoy the video. Four minutes of pure love.
Tina Hay, editor
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
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