Posts filed under ‘State College’
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
Another Unbelievable Day
I took this photo at 3 p.m. today. It’s a bunch of Penn State students gathered on the Old Main lawn to mark 100 days until the 2012 edition of THON, the largest student-run philanthropy in the world. These kids and their countless hours of dedication represent much of what remains great about the University.
It’ll be a monumental challenge in the coming months to remind the world that Penn State is more than what has come out over the past five days.
The latest news—and it remains strange to type—is that in addition to the pending departure of Joe Paterno, who has announced his retirement effective at season’s end, multiple outlets are reporting University president Graham Spanier will soon step down as well. What will tomorrow bring? Not a clue.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Happy PARK(ing) Day
Anyone looking for a parking space Friday in downtown State College will have three fewer options than usual. And for good reason.
Friday is PARK(ing) Day, a loosely connected international event started in 2005, when some artists in San Francisco decided to make a statement about the lack of open public space in American cities. They picked a parking space, filled the meter, laid down a roll of sod, added a tree and a park bench, and voila, a temporary oasis of green squeezed between a couple of parked cars. Since then, the idea has spread internationally to hundreds of cities, one of them being State College. For students from Penn State’s Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, it’s a chance to make a point and get some experience that’s applicable to their future careers.
Starting before sunrise Friday on the first fall-like day of the year (I know because the heat clicked on in my house this morning), students began setting up their “parks” in three downtown parking spots, on South Allen Street, West College Avenue, and East Beaver Avenue. Each project forced the students (more…)
‘Buy Local’ Borne Out by Research
A while back someone called my attention to The 3/50 Project, which aims to support independent brick-and-mortar stores by encouraging you to think of three local stores you’d hate to see go out of business and spend 50 bucks at each one.
For me, the obvious one is Stitch Your Art Out, a wonderful little shop in Pine Grove Mills where I learned to knit last year; where I’ve since taken classes on making hats and mittens and socks; and where I love to browse the shelves and buy yarn I totally don’t need.
Plus, what’s not to love about a shop co-owned by (more…)
It’s Always Creamery Weather — But Especially Right Now
I’m the type of guy who will eat Creamery ice cream outside in late January—I just love it that much. But days like today, when it’s supposed to be 98 in University Park, certainly seem like more ideal ice cream weather. So the timing was perfect this week for Pittsburgh Post-Gazette food writer Rebecca Sodergren to share her personal connection to the Berkey Creamery, as well as some facts even I didn’t know. Like a lot of alumni, I always wondered why the Creamery didn’t make its ice cream more readily available outside State College; the very good reason, as it turns out, is that it doesn’t want to compete with its own graduates.
The piece also features the official Creamery recipe modified for home use. As Sodergren writes, “I didn’t think it tasted exactly like the Creamery’s. But it sure is good.” I imagine I won’t be the only one sampling the real stuff this weekend.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
A Signature Penn State Voice, Gone Too Soon
The Penn State community has lost one of its signature voices. Pat Boland ’91, a fixture in State College radio for two decades, died Tuesday morning after a lengthy battle with cancer.
Pat covered pretty much everything there was to cover on campus and in town, and as co-host of the WRSC morning show, his was the voice many Happy Valley residents woke up to. I met Pat in the mid ’90s while I was a Daily Collegian reporter covering the men’s basketball team; when I returned to town a few years ago, I was glad to see he was still here, running the press-row attendance pool at the Bryce Jordan Center. The radio call-in show he hosted after Penn State football games was a must-listen, often for the unintentional comedy provided by emotional fans. Pat navigated it like the pro that he was.
As of a few weeks ago, Pat’s health had deteriorated to the point that he could no longer carry on his radio duties, and he took a leave of absence. He kept himself busy with physical therapy, reading up on World War I, following his beloved Pittsburgh Pirates, and starting a blog. His final entry, titled “exhaustion,” was posted last Friday; he admitted to being wiped out both by his illness and attempts to combat it, but wrote, “I’ll be back soon.” He was 42.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Rosanne Cash at the State Theatre
One highlight of the Fourth of July weekend for country and folk music fans in the Penn State community was a concert by Rosanne Cash at the State Theatre last night—her first time ever in State College, she said.
The State Theatre, which was a plain-old movie theatre when many Penn State grads were students, underwent a major renovation and reopened as a performing-arts center in 2006. Today, under general manager Harry Zimbler ’90g, it offers a mix of films, local theatre, and concerts by nationally known performers.
Cash with her sideman and husband, John Leventhal.
Cash and her sideman/husband, John Leventhal, played a terrific 90-minute set. The opener was a local bluegrass group called the Allegheny Ridgerunners—its members are Kurt Kroeker ’09; Will Hancock, a faculty member in bioengineering, Celia Millington-Wyckoff ’80g Com, and Keith Miska, a staff member in the Penn State Energy Institute.
I’ve become a fan of Rosanne Cash’s music pretty recently, thanks to her 2009 release The List. The story goes that (more…)
An Unexpected Celebration in Beaver Canyon
My wife and I were about to turn off the TV late Sunday when I saw the news scrolling across the bottom of the screen on ESPN: Osama bin Laden was dead. I watched President Obama’s speech confirming the news on TV, but if I’d opened a window, I might have heard the noise of a celebration downtown.
A scroll through Twitter brought up a number of photos from Penn Staters celebrating the news in downtown State College. The impromptu gathering was centered on Beaver Avenue, and it looks like something those students won’t forget.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Back When We (Literally) Weren’t on the Map
A reader in Florida, Diana Storch ’47, sent me this postcard that she’s apparently had for quite a while. The postmark on the reverse side is from 1938. She was amused—and so am I!—by the fact that State College wasn’t yet big enough, or maybe wasn’t yet important enough, to merit a mention on this map. (And yet places like Ridgway, St. Marys, and Butler were.) Times certainly have changed since then.
It’s also fun to notice the roads on the card. The beginnings of route 322 are there, in the northwest part of the state, but there’s no Pennsylvania Turnpike, and no I-80. You can click on the image to see all of this stuff bigger.
By the way, the postcard got mailed for a whopping one cent. It wasn’t until 1951 that postcard postage went up to two cents.
Tina Hay, editor
Nice Shot of the Lunar Eclipse
I briefly considered trying to photograph the lunar eclipse that took place early Tuesday morning, but, well, the operative word there is “briefly.” Once I weighed the fun and challenge of shooting a colorful moon against the fact that it involved getting up at 2:30 a.m. and standing outside in 15-degree weather, the choice was clear: I’d much rather be in my warm bed.
I did actually wake up around 2:30 a.m., for no apparent reason, and decided to at least go take a look. So I went outside in my nightshirt, slippers, and a ski jacket and looked up into the night sky, and saw … clouds. It had been clear in State College when I went to bed, but the sky apparently had since clouded over. So I went back to bed.
But luckily for you, there are photographers who are a lot more patient and persevering than I am. And my favorite local shooter, Andy Colwell, apparently stayed up for the whole thing, waiting along Blue Course Drive with his tripod and hoping for a break in the clouds. He finally got one around 3:20 a.m. and shot the photo you see above.
(You really should click on it to see it larger; I especially love the fact that you can see some stars in the shot.)
Andy used a Nikon D300 and a 200mm lens plus a 1.4 teleconverter; he made a three-second exposure at f6.3 at 1600 ISO. It was so windy that he had to use his Jeep to shield the tripod.
We’ve featured Andy’s great photographic talents on our blog before—some examples are here, here, and here. We’re talking about running a photo essay of his work in our March-April issue. Stay tuned.
And if any of you photography fans have a shot or two from the lunar eclipse, let me know, and we might post them here on the blog.
Tina Hay, editor
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