Posts tagged ‘Vicki Glembocki’
‘Street of Our Lady’ Wins National Award
Penn State filmmakers Judy Maltz, Barbara Bird, and Richie Sherman have shared some good news with us: Their documentary No. 4 Street of Our Lady won a Golden Eagle Award during the spring CINE competition.
Francisca Halamajowa
The movie tells how Francisca Halamajowa, a Polish Catholic, hid Jewish families from the Nazis. The 15 people she saved—including Maltz’s father and grandparents—were among only 30 Jews who survived in the town of Sokal, out of an original 6,000.
Past winners of the CINE Golden Eagle have included Ken Burns, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese.
You can find out more about the film in Vicki Glembocki’s award-winning story from the Nov./Dec. 2008 Penn Stater (note: clicking on that link downloads a PDF) and at the film’s Web site.
—Chas Brua, contributing editor
Two Articles Worth Reading
I mentioned the other day that we hadn’t won anything in the overall magazine category in this year’s CASE awards, but that we did win two gold medals in the category called “Best Articles of the Year.” I thought you might want to see the two articles that won.
One of the gold awards was for “The Family Tree” (Nov-Dec 2008), a story by Vicki Glembocki ’93, ’02g, about the film No. 4 Street of Our Lady, which chronicles the heroic efforts of a Polish woman to shelter several Jewish families from the Nazis during the Holocaust. The film is the work of three Penn State faculty members—one of whom is the daughter of one of the Jews who was saved.
As for the other gold award, well, a year or so we learned of a Penn State grad, Andrew Bieniawski ’89, who leads a U.S. government effort to track down and remove nuclear materials that are still scattered throughout eastern Europe, remnants of the Cold War. The effort often involves delicate negotiations with other countries, and lots of secretive work under cover of darkness. We sent Jason Fagone ’01 over to Hungary to follow one such cloak-and-dagger mission, and the resulting article, “The Hungary Job” (Jan-Feb 2009) is one of the most engrossing reads we’ve printed in a long time. It won the other gold medal.
You can download a PDF of “The Family Tree” here and a PDF of “The Hungary Job” here.
And, if you don’t already get the print version of The Penn Stater magazine, you can have it sent to your mailbox six times a year simply by joining the Penn State Alumni Association. Click here to sign up.
Tina Hay, editor
Vicki on Oprah!
Our former senior editor, Vicki Glembocki ’93, ’02g, who is now a freelance writer in the Philly area, wrote a book last year about being a new mom—and often said one of her goals with the book was to get on Oprah.
Well, it’s about to happen for her. She’ll be on Oprah next Monday, April 6, at 4 p.m. Eastern, as part of a panel of moms Oprah calls “the boldest moms in the country.”
“I’m not in the studio,” Vicki says. “I ‘Skype’ in, and there’s tape of me ‘confessing’ things. Oprah doesn’t mention my book (or any of the mom’s books), but sends people online to find out more.”
I’ve got my DVR set.
Tina Hay, editor
Ah, We Knew Her When
Former Penn Stater senior editor Vicki Glembocki ’93, ’02g is really seeing her freelance-writing career take off. In addition to the book she released last year and the stories she does for Philadelphia Magazine (and The Penn Stater), she’s got two new articles in major magazines this month.
The April 2009 issue of Reader’s Digest includes a story by Vicki called “You Be the Judge: Should This Soccer Mom Go to Jail?” The subtitle reads: “A woman escaped from prison at 20 and led a law-abiding life for the next 32 years. Should she be required to serve out her sentence?” Vicki tells me that “You Be the Judge” will be a regular feature in the magazine, in which she finds court cases that could go either way, and then present them without bias, letting readers “be the judge.”
Vicki also has an article in the new issue of Parents magazine, called “Should We Have One More?”
Oh, and she’ll be on the Oprah show on April 6! More on that when we get more details.
Tina Hay, editor
Time Travel in Altoona (and Elsewhere)
Ronald Mallett
You might have heard of Penn State grad Ronald Mallett ’69, ’70g, ’73g, who has spent the better part of his career trying to build a time machine—and whose story has attracted the attention of filmmaker Spike Lee.
Mallett was 10 when his father unexpectedly dropped dead of a heart attack, and ever since then, Mallett has been obsessed with seeing his father again. He wanted to go back in time to warn his dad about the dangers of his two-pack-a-day smoking habit and thus maybe change the outcome. Sounds crazy, huh? But today Mallett is a very respected physicist—he teaches at the University of Connecticut—and has shown that time travel is not as far-fetched as once thought. He was named an Alumni Fellow of Penn State a year or so ago and wrote a book called Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality, which Spike Lee is turning into a movie for release in 2010.
The reason I mention all of this is twofold. One is that Mallett will be speaking at Penn State Altoona (where he attended before finishing at University Park) next week. He’s scheduled to appear Monday, February 9, at 7:30 p.m. in the Slep Student Center; he’ll read from his book, talk about his work—and about being the subject of a Spike Lee film—and sign books. The event is free and open to the public.
The other reason I mention it is that we’re planning a feature on Mallett. We sent Vicki Glembocki ’93, ’02g up to Storrs, Conn., to hang out with him yesterday, and she came back raving (in a good way!) about the experience. Mallett is a great interview, she says, and she got to see the prototype of the time machine, which, she reports, “is in a lab in a building far from campus, back in the woods, next to what’s known as The Puppet Museum. It’s like UConn was like, ‘We’ll just keep the time machine and the puppets WAY back here, where no one EVER goes, so no one will ever know….’”
I can’t wait to get Vicki’s story. It will probably run in either the May/June or July/August issue.
Tina Hay, editor
“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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