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Paul Clifford on Penn State nostalgia, Mount Nittany, and Old Willow
Paul Clifford, chief executive officer of the Penn State Alumni Association and associate vice president for alumni relations for Penn State, recently wrote in his Penn State Alumni Association “Insights” column on Penn State nostalgia, Mount Nittany, and Old Willow: Nostalgia is defined as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for…
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Penn State’s ‘Century of Service to the Commonwealth’
Penn State celebrated its Centennial in 1955 and commemorated its first century of “service to the Commonwealth”:
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WeStillAre
WeStillAre was a student-created project launched in November 2011 in response to the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State. During a time of intense media scrutiny and institutional pessimism, Penn State students created WeStillAre as a way to gather community remembrances and spotlight historical memories that captured the best aspects of the Penn State spirit…
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‘The Class of 1950: A Nostalgic Look Back’ by Thomas E. Morgan
“The Class of 1950: A Nostalgic Look Back” were the remarks of Thomas E. Morgan, Penn State Class of 1950, delivered February 29, 1980: No one could have mistaken Penn State for a sedate Ivy League college during those strained elbow-room-only days of ’46-’50 when GIs and their little sisters and brothers crammed into Pollock…
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Penn State’s ‘State of State’ Conference
I spoke to Penn Staters at this year’s “State of State” conference about the “spirit of place” that pervades the Nittany Valley and what Penn Staters (and every friend and visitor) can do to conserve that spirit and pass it along to new generations.
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Penn State and State College in their early years
Eric Porterfield, a friend of the Mount Nittany Conservancy, recently shared these historical State College photos. These photos show in a dramatic way the development of State College from something less than a speck on the map into the place we know it as today. They’re a witness to our community’s past, to Pennsylvania’s past,…
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In Search of Evan Pugh, or, a Challenge for Penn Staters to Honor Their Founder
Three Penn State presidents have been laid to rest here in Centre County. President Atherton is famously interred right along Pollock Road adjacent to Schwab Auditorium, while Milton Eisenhower finds his final repose in Centre County Memorial Park along the Benner Pike. Evan Pugh, Penn State’s founding president and one of the most consequential personalities…
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Penn State Football Remixes Its Past
Suffering through a prolonged period of frustration and despair, the Penn State football team faces a do-or-die moment in an early Big Ten contest: Trailing in the fourth quarter and needing an unlikely game-extending play to keep hope alive, the Lions thread the needle, capping off a precarious come-from-behind win with an explosive score from…
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Bog Turtle Brewery’s ‘Evan Pugh Vanilla Porter’
Penn State’s first president Evan Pugh was born in 1828 at Jordan Bank Farm, three miles south of the city center of Oxford, Pennsylvania, an hour west of Philadelphia, in Chester County. One-hundred eighty-nine years later, an Oxford brewery is honoring one of the preeminent champions of public higher education in the form of a delicious…
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Yule Ales Add to Advent Spirit
Today, it is not unusual to enter a bar and find a laundry list of exotic beers on tap or to hear news of a local brew pub or microbrewery opening up. Such was not the case in 1984 (only five years after the legalization of homebrewing) when the editor of the Centre Daily Times…
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A Salute to Veterans and the Veterans’ Education and Advancement Fund
The great stories of any age are often best understood by tracing the tiny threads of personal experience. In following these winding strands, seeing where and how they intersect, we come to understand how the collective weight of countless individual acts underpins the forces that shape our world. On the afternoon of April 11, 1945,…
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The Penn State-Wisconsin Rivalry That Never Was
Recently, I found myself caught in Park Ave traffic behind a car adorned with an obnoxiously large Ohio State Buckeyes magnet. With merely a glimpse of it, my pulse quickened and my palms tightly gripped the steering wheel. As an ardent Nittany Lions fan, I recoiled at the unwelcome reminder of our rival. And there…
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Why Honoring Joe Paterno Still Matters
Writing anything about Joe Paterno at this point is futile. If you’re reading this, your mind has already been made up. If you are not a Penn Stater, we’re an unapologetic cult. If you are a Penn Stater, you’re probably nonplussed, irrationally angry that the news about Paterno being honored before the Temple game is too little too…
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Why Learn the Penn State Story?
The creation of a Penn State undergraduate course on the university’s history is a source of great excitement and pride for many who dwell in body and in spirit in Mount Nittany’s gentle shadow. In early 2013, Sean Clark and Zach Zimbler suggested that Penn State ought to offer a class on the history of…
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A Brief History of Penn State Astronomy
For years, they stood unused and largely unremarked upon: Two single-story brick structures capped with white domes adjacent to the Eisenhower Auditorium. In the years before they were torn down during one of the latest campus facelifts, people would occasionally ask about them. These buildings obviously served some function related to observing the night sky,…
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