Welcome Aboard!

The 2022 45th class reunion is in the history books!

We had a great time visiting with classmates and partners catching up and remembering times past. Altogether we had 42 people attend, 29 classmates and 13 partners.

We had a raucous meet up in the hotel lobby Monday evening followed by a walk down to Champs for dinner, after which we closed out the hotel bar (okay, yeah, only 10pm, but hey..).

Tuesday ‘teed off’ with a golf foursome hacking it up on the Blue Course while everyone else walked up to the impressive Penn State Arboretum for a peaceful stroll. Then on the the All Sports Museum and its spectacular new exhibit on Penn State athletes in WWII. We all converged at the HUB for lunch and sampled from a wide range of modern comestibles – no mystery meat on a cafeteria tray anywhere in sight. The HUB sure looks a lot different from how it looked back in our day (no ride boards!).

Tuesday afternoon we had a campus tour escorted by backwards walking Lion Ambassador Dexter Mills (ex Army Airborne). We started at the Lion statue in front of Rec Hall, wandered by North Halls, down past Dieke, Reber, EE East & West, and Sackett with a view towards Hammond.

And yes, apparently there is still a preacher person out in front of Willard building when classes are in session.

We crossed the Old Main lawn and spent some minutes at the Michael Murphy Memorial on the side of Old Main, impressive & sobering. We wandered by Davy & Osmund Laboratories, past Boucke building to Ritenour – which is now a state of the art VET service center with 24 hour access, grad student tutoring, gedunk and coffee and project/meeting rooms. A very impressive asset for the veterans community, thanks to Ted Timmerman for his part making it happen. More than a few of us were heard to mutter that we might have gotten decent grades back in the day if we’d only had such support!

We wandered past Fenske Lab and the Chem Eng building and then down to Wagner Building. CDR John Kerr (PSU 2000) is the NROTC unit XO and he graciously agreed to give us a tour of the third deck and a short talk on their current status. One thing that stuck out – Sproul 9/10 is no longer the Navy dorm, somebody thought it would be a good idea to put all ROTC cadets & midshipmen in the same dorm bulding so they are all together in Synder Hall. What could go wrong??

After touring the unit – and finding that our marching and shooting trophies are missing somewhere – we moved to the creamery for a scoop before heading out to the Mountainview Country Club for dinner.

The Mountainview Country Club facility was perfect for us, roomy dining room, nice bar set up, excellent food and first rate audio visual gear. Returning classmates found name tags with both their name and their NROTC commissioning picture – just to help us recognize each other! A number of us had not been back to the campus in 45 years, and for many others it had been 15 years (since the 2007 reunion). While we were dining we had period music (think Sloop John B) and a projector showing 450 pictures on a loop. To top the evening we took a number of classmate group photos.

Wednesday morning a bunch of us were hiking up Mount Nittany Trail with Teresa Timmerman (wow, much steeper than I remember from my younger days!) and we finished the hike with a hula hoop session because, well, Teresa just happen to have a dozen hula hoops in her trunk…

Wednesday lunch at the Corner room brought back a lot of memories, and by then the campus was crawling with people getting ready for Arts Fest. A dozen of us ventured out to Nittany Valley Winery to sample some local wines in the afternoon, it’s a truly lovely venue if you are ever looking to do some tasting in State College.

Lastly, we met at the Federal Taphouse for our farewell dinner Wednesday evening. A bit hard to find (on top of the Target downtown) but a great place for beer and eats and we had a great time.

Please check the Gallery section for a selection of pictures from the reunion. We hope to provide a Google Album in a bit which will have downloadable pictures with meaningful captions (who are those people?). If you attended and have pictures from the event please send them to our email: