Almost everyone has some fond memories of campus experiences, whether you’ve graduated from high school, trade school, college or military boot camp (well, maybe not fond memories of boot camp). If you’re a Penn State Alumni Association member and receive the Penn Stater Magazine, you have undoubtedly enjoyed the periodic articles about campus memories.
Most recently alumni shared their memories from Rec Hall (“Rec Collection,” May/June, p. 38). Some stories are funny, some sad, some nostalgic, and many touch on all three of these emotions.
My own special Rec Hall memory from my undergraduate years was an amazing display of strength, grit and determination from Penn State gymnast Pam Loree. While doing a routine on the balance beam, she slipped. As she was falling she grabbed onto the beam, never touching the floor, which would have come with a mandatory point reduction. With the encouragement of the raucous crowd, she pulled herself back up and finished her routine to a standing ovation. It was incredibly inspiring and an example of real toughness that I used in many a speech over the years.
This past weekend my family (Heidi, Brianna, Jonathon and Ryan), all Penn State graduates, met for a long weekend in Happy Valley. Ryan was a groomsman in the wedding of Lindsey Carmack and Matt Steyers, Ryan’s childhood friend, baseball teammate and a college roommate. Jonathon and Brianna were hosting an open house for the new “family” townhouse out by the State College airport. It will be our home away from home and it will be available for use during football games and graduation. Heidi and I were tagging along but had a wonderful time catching up with friends, and I got a chance to walk around campus and may have stopped by the Creamery. Well, actually three times.
I always loved August in State College as the students were finishing summer term and there was a short respite before the fall onslaught of freshmen and returning students. It’s not often that you get to walk around campus on a beautiful summer day with hardly anyone else in sight. As I walked up the Allen Mall onto campus, I saw a strange sight. Two whole sections of Sackett Building were gone. It was sad for me because it’s where I first met my future wife, Heidi Smith!
The actual section of the building where Heidi and I first met on campus in the fall of 1980 is no longer there. The Sackett Building is where we held that year’s fall recruitment meeting for volunteers for the Hockey Management Association, which was the business arm of the Penn State Ice Hockey Club. Back in those days we weren’t part of the varsity world. We did gratefully receive support from the Club Sports office thanks mainly to former Club Sports Director Vance McCullough.
It was my junior year, and I was the vice president of the club in charge of marketing. My former teammate from both Penn Hills High School and Penn State, Jim Pollock was the president. We were opening up the brand-new Greenberg Ice Pavilion that season so there was a buzz about being involved with the hockey program. Not quite the buzz of this year’s varsity recruiting class that includes Gavin McKenna, the projected number one NHL draft pick for 2026, but nonetheless there was genuine excitement because of the new Ice Pavilion and the return of hockey on campus.
As expected, we had a large turnout there in Sackett. Early-on two young ladies came through the door and caught my eye. A couple of upper-class co-eds from Simmons Hall, Paula Sotir from Hazelton and Heidi Smith from Erie were approaching the new member sign-up table. I elbowed Jim and said, “Hey, check out the two blondes that just came in!” So, I was a bit distracted as they came to the table to sign up. I got the chance to give them my spiel on how we needed people to help sell ads for the game program and to sell the programs at the games. So, they signed up and I struck up a short conversation with the young lady from Erie. She was in her first semester at University Park as an Earth and Mineral Sciences major after spending two years at Penn State Behrend.
Heidi had this popular and cute Dorothy Hamill-style “Hamill Camel” wedge hairdo, and I immediately thought she was beautiful. As the season went on, I would see her at our hockey club meetings and join her occasionally going around town going to local businesses to solicit program advertisements. We became fast friends, but we never dated that first year. We did attend some social functions together and started to play racquetball on occasion. I even attended her 21st birthday party.
Growing up in Erie she lived very close to the Erie Blades Arena, home of the minor league hockey team that was just 2 miles from her house. She even dated a hockey player in high school and later on we would realize that she was in the stands watching a game between her then boyfriend’s team against my Penn Hills Indians high school hockey team. (For the record, we defeated her alma mater.)
Call it fate or a God incident, but I kept a picture of Heidi and her roommate Paula holding up the original programs for the 1980-81 season when we started playing in Greenberg Ice Pavilion. Heidi was also one of the very first “Score-o” contestants trying to slide a puck through a narrow opening in the Score-o board from 60 feet away.
It wasn’t until my senior year that I finally got up the courage to ask her out on a date. It was a traditional dinner and a movie, and I so impressed her that we didn’t date again until six years later when we both moved back to State College for work. What is noteworthy to me is that long before cell phones and the internet, we stayed in touch by sending each other birthday cards and Christmas cards and an occasional old fashioned hand written letter.
We were friends way before we really started to date. There was a certain feeling of destiny that we would meet again. Fast forward to 1987 and we both ended up working in State College, going to oldies nights at the ‘Gaff, playing racquetball, catching movies and, after she played hard to get for a year, we officially started dating in the summer of 1988 (finally!).
Being in State College this past weekend was a walk down memory lane for sure. Despite the changing downtown landscape, the Waffle Shops are still bustling. Hi-Way Pizza and Faccia Luna are still making great pizza. Even the ‘Gaff is still in business! Oakwood Presbyterian Church, where we were married on Aug. 12, 1989, is still there but the Sheraton (later a Days Inn) on Pugh Street where we held our reception, is no longer there, replaced by more modern apartment buildings.
The old Greenberg Ice Pavilion has been repurposed into the Morgan Academic Center and a training table for varsity athletes. My wife and I, and eventually our three kids, spent a significant amount of our lives in that rink from the time it opened in January 1981 to its decommissioning as a rink in fall of 2013 when we opened Pegula Ice Arena.
As we celebrate our 36th wedding anniversary today, our many campus memories are still special. Now that we have a home base back in Happy Valley, we get to create even more campus memories in the future.
