December of this year will mark the 100th anniversary of the day Scottish cattleman Alex Buchan arrived at the campus of the Pennsylvania State College, now known as Penn State University. Buchan had accepted a position as the school’s first beef cattle herdsman. And, according to Buchan’s grandson David Buchan, this initiated a century of continuous employment with the university for the Buchan family, covering four generations.
“It’s kind of a family business,” David says.
David explains that, in an unbroken chain through the intervening years, one family member or another has worked for Penn State. Since Alex Buchan began in the cattle barn, David’s father, John; his uncle Thompson; David himself; and now David’s daughter Samantha have continued what became a sort of tradition for the family.
“I started after school when I was in high school in 1959,” John recalls, “I worked in the Creamery, taking out trash and cleaning the floors.”
After high school, John continued working at the Creamery in the milk room and the ice cream room, having accepted a full-time position. He remembers the 300-gallon batches of ice cream mix—a blend of milk, sugar and cream—blended in the ice cream room.
“I was so thin,” he says, “that I would drink that mix just to gain weight!”
John left the university in 1965, a year after his brother Thompson began working in the department then known as Continuing Education. That particular department now forms part of the World Campus and Commonwealth Campuses.
An audiovisual technician, Thompson had responsibilities including setting up projectors and other types of equipment for conferences.
“After working in audiovisual, in 1968 I began working with computers and information technology,” he says, “In 2003, I retired from the Commonwealth College IT department.”
In the meantime, David, the fourth Buchan to join the staff at Penn State, started work at the steam plant in August 2000. He initially worked with the steam crew, the group who maintains the underground labyrinth that circulates the hot vapor throughout the campus. “The steam goes through there,” he explains, “and a lot of times, you can see that the snow has melted on one side of the sidewalk and not the other.”
After two years, he began working with the Office of the Physical Plant (OPP).
In August of 2010, David left OPP to work with Penn State University Press. He continues to work there as a shipping and receiving clerk.
“I do enjoy working there,” David says, “I especially like dealing with the authors whose books we handle, like Bill Russell, the local author who wrote the Field Guide to the Wild Mushrooms of Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic.”
David’s daughter Samantha has worked at Penn State for the past nine years. Although she followed in her father’s footsteps by working with OPP, she doesn’t venture into the underground tunnels.
Her tasks with OPP include keeping the Earth & Engineering Sciences Building clean to give staff and students a place to work, study and teach without distractions. She works with a team to achieve this goal and describes herself as “proud and honored to be part of the outstanding, continuous, generational employment at Penn State.”
“Working for Penn State has given me the opportunity to go back to school and reach my goal of getting a degree in the health care field,” she says.
Samantha’s great-grandfather, the Buchan who started the tradition, appeared as the subject of a Town and Gown article in March 1984.
“Alexander S. Buchan was born in 1898 on the North Sea coast of Scotland—the Buchan Coast, it’s called,” according to that piece.
He learned cattle herd management there and in May of 1920 arrived in the United States on a ship filled with seventy-five Aberdeen Angus and one hundred shorthorn cattle. His adventure in the country led him on a circuitous route, including stints in North Dakota, Missouri and Chicago, before he ultimately landed in State College in 1923.
Forty years later, Alexander retired, leaving his descendants to carry on the next stages of Buchan employment with Penn State.
“I just think it’s pretty neat that Pap started all of this,” David says of the Buchan family connection with the university. T&G
Anne Dyer Walker is a Bellefonte freelance writer.
