The Special Olympics PA provides year-round sports training and competition in Olympic-type sports for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, giving them opportunities to develop physical fitness, demonstrate courage, experience joy, and participate in a sharing of gifts, skills, and friendship with their families, other Special Olympics athletes, and the community. It’s one they look forward to all year.
And on Friday, thousands of athletes, coaches, families, and friends met at Penn State University for their annual Summer Games. It is the largest statewide competition, attracting more than 2000 athletes and 750 coaches.
It was a real joy to volunteer at the Games, along with several of my co-workers. We were assigned to the Track staging area, helping the athletes get checked in and lined up for their races: 100 meter walk, 200 meter run, 800 meter run and walk, 5000 meter run, and the pentathlon 400 meter dash.
If you’ve never interacted with such pure-hearted people as those who compete in the Special Olympics, seek it out: you’ll be enriched from the experience!
For our 44th wedding anniversary, I escorted my lovely date to a reception honoring another milestone celebration: the 50th Anniversary of Penn State’s Campus Weather Service, in which I served as Thursday night forecaster while a senior meteorology student.
Our 44th wedding anniversary portrait.
We visited the sixth floor of the Walker Building, which houses the meteorology department. The wall where dozens of newly-generated paper weather charts had been tacked up every hour, and the separate enclosed room that housed the noisy teletype and facsimile machines have vanished. (No surprise there!) As befits the world-renown university program, the Joel N. Myers Weather Center (named for its famous student and the founder of Accuweather) is now equipped with all the state-of-the-art-and-science tech. (I was fortunate in the 70s that Joel was still teaching for my first forecasting course—and to attend his self-professed “famous tornado lecture.”)
A historical pic of my Meteo Dept. Head, Professor Blackadar, demonstrating the cool tech of the facsimile machine; old weather geeks from the Class of ’78; and a hand-plotted weather map.
In the days before satellite imagery, 24-hour video feeds, and endless data streaming, we received the raw stats through a monstrous teletype machine, plotted each weather station’s data in a mix of symbols and numbers on a map, and then drew in isobars, areas of precipitation and frontal boundaries. Once plotted, analyzed, and interpreted, we’d hand-write a forecast for the subscribing radio stations, pick up the phone and call it in.
Here I am warning about the exploding fireball about to hit Beaver Stadium in the green screen studio. (Actually, it’s the fierceness of the stadium lighting!)
Today’s students have the opportunity to polish their forecasting skills along with live broadcasting techniques in a cooperative venture with Weather World on PCN cable TV.
We enjoyed Penn State Creamery ice cream, a tour of the studios, and running into two of my classmates from 1978. I donated an autographed copy of Kaleidoscope Sky, my 2007 book on atmospheric optical phenomena—the fascinating varieties of rainbows, halos, auroras, mirages, etc.
Accuweather’s operating floor where meteorologists generate consensus forecasts; one of its several broadcast studios; and the control room.
We were also treated to a tour of nearby Accuweather’s World Headquarters (just down the street from my office in State College). While I took a different career route from my initial plan of synoptic forecasting, it was exciting to see the incredible progress of the science and technologies from my undergraduate days.
And, after you’ve been married for 44 years to such a sweet and understanding wife, and she gamely accompanies you in a night dedicated to one of your other loves, let’s just say that it’s good that there were also cookies and ice cream!
I’m grateful for many healthful recreational and cultural opportunities this summer.
We’ve enjoyed a couple of healthfully engaging days lately, as we continue to recover from the strains and fatigue of long-covid.
a smattering of engaging summertime pursuits
On the professional front, each third Friday in July is National Park and Recreation Professionals Day, and my office was quite busy sharing the various promotions, tributes and recognitions across the state, as we honor the many behind-the-scenes workers who keep our parks and public facilities clean, safe, and ready to use. Now in its fourth year, and celebrated by thousands of colleagues nationwide, it is quite gratifying to see the worth of my original concept embraced by so many park lovers throughout the country.
The Central Pennsylvania Festival of Arts returned to town and campus with a big welcome after a two-year pandemic hiatus.
Carol and I attended a community sing-along in which Poppa & Picker, a guitar-banjo duo, accompanied the crowd in such old favorites as In the Good Ol’ Summertime, The Happy Wanderer, This Land is Your Land, Let There Be Peace on Earth and many other timeless tunes of generations gone by. And when we picked up on You Are My Sunshine, two little preschool girls in the audience, in all their youthful zeal and abandon, lustily belted out the song they apparently knew so well, enhancing the evening’s entertainment! The Orpheus Singers punctuated the singalong with a few of their own special selections.
(I noticed that the 20-something sound tech guy wearing his ball cap backwards, didn’t sing, but kept his face and lips pressed in a slightly amused arrangement, alternating with a thumb-tapping duet on his smartphone. He did, however, suggest we sing Will the Circle Be Unbroken.)
We just missed getting the last seats for an Improv Comedy show, but did attend the Essence 2 choir concert, strolled through hundreds of artists’ booths admiring their attractive wares, and enjoyed some Peachy Paterno ice cream from the Penn State Creamery. We took in a bit of a tour of the known universe with a planetarium program and stargazing on Davey Lab’s rooftop observatory.
We dined downtown amid the crowd of collegians and soon had our fill of them. One observation I wasn’t looking to make (but regretfully have): College women’s summer fashion can be described as revealing as much of the 4 Bs as possible—breast, belly, back and bottom.
We attended a State Theater screening of the highly entertaining 1920 silent adventure film The Mark of Zorro, starring Douglas Fairbanks, accompanied by live musicians. The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra is the world’s only year-round, professional ensemble re-creating the syncopated sounds of early musical theater, silent cinema, and vintage dance. The director encouraged the audience to interact with the show the way our young grandparents did—hissing the villains, oohing the flirting romance, and cheering the appearance and ultimate victory of Our Hero! Upon the conclusion, the audience was “kindly invited to perambulate to the Egress” during the exit music.
Speaking of the arts, I was recently able to pick up an old pastime of mine: leathercraft. On Saturday, I finished refurbishing my father’s old axe. I replaced the broken handle, buffed off the rust, sharpened the edge, and constructed a custom leather sheath. Now to fashion one for its smaller version, my old Boy Scout hatchet.
We planned to attend the Cardboard Regatta at Welch Pool, just a walk down the trail from our home. Unfortunately, the race proceeded more quickly than our arrival, as the fun flotilla of 50 colorful cardboard crafts didn’t float for very long. We did witness the soggy remains, however. (Photo courtesy of Centre Region Parks and Recreation.)
Other honorable mentions from the weekend include, but without photo coverage, are the high drama of a pair ruby-throated hummingbirds duking it out at our feeder, and witnessing a sharp-shinned hawk raiding what appeared to be an owl’s nest, and carting away a squeaking morsel in its clutches.
The lawn is crunchy in our current dry spell, but our tended-to flowers are displaying their best blooms to the mid-July sun. And we’re grateful for the physical and mental health benefits, and the life-enriching cultural opportunities that public recreation offers us this summer!
