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[Musical Interlude] >>Mike Beaver:I came to Penn State as a student
-- before WWII. Got a year in.
Went in the service. Came out early with an injury.
And I ended up working at Carpernter Technology. Sort of was a disillusioned young man,
having been hurt, and so on. And worked at Carpenter.
Married my high school sweetheart. She became a secretary at Penn State
in the school of Forestry and I went on into metallurgy
as a result of my experience working at Carpenter. Got my degree and came back to reading in
1948. And at that time,
Penn State was offering extension courses for certificates
through WPI the Wyomissing Polytechnic Institute. And I was asked to come aboard
as a nighttime instructor for adults and did so for three years teaching metallurgy.
In the meantime, my career was advancing through Carpenter
and I got to see the value of what was going on at WPI,
because we were hiring many of two-year graduates of the WPI program into middle management.
Penn State was involved and would honor the schooling from WPI
towards the bachelor’s program at Penn State, and I became a great supporter of that program.
So, when finally Penn State took over, because the families that were involved in
WPI did not want WPI to just disappear
and wanted it to continue in some way and offered it to Penn State
and Penn State took it over with Harold Perkins becoming the first chief executive
officer. And he was a dynamo.
There was no development staff. Harold was it.
It took some of us, the Tom Handwerks, the Jim Stoudts – people
that type – to really come aboard and help do the job
of developing this campus. An interesting part of the history of Penn
State Berks is how the various buildings on the campus developed
here and why we are where we are now as far as
location is concerned. We started out in the old WPI building,
and then we ended up in what is now the borough hall in Wyomissing
-- the Thun family home then became our campus building
and then we finally got to this site We got on this piece of land for two reasons:
One, Irving Cohen granted us a piece of land where they’re now building a shopping center
behind Best Buy and the decision was made
that’s not a good piece of land for the long-term future of Penn State Berks.
And Irvy turned around and bought back the land from Penn State
even though he donated it to us in the first time.
At the same time, looking for the other location, were the interest of the Thuns and the Jannssens
to grant us options to buy land here at a good price
once we got here, we had to build buildings. The first building was the Luerssen building.
That was state money. That came out of the state.
That was to be THE campus. Administration, faculty housing, classrooms,
laboratories, that was it. The next building came along was built locally
by local money upon approval of the capital campaign review board of Berks
County. That granted us approval to campaign for the
monies to build what became the Perkins Building
– again a general purpose building
of theatre, classrooms, food service, student union at that time.
That was the Perkins building. It was not so named at the beginning.
It was a building to do those activities. They approved that and it was a very successful
campaign which was headed by Louie Thun
From that came another campaign ten years later to build another multi-purpose
building a gymnasium, a large convention type center
on the campus and that became eventually the Beaver Community Center.
Which was a surprise to me. I had the honor of chairing that campaign.
Both the naming of both the Perkins Building and the Beaver Community Center was not something
we knew about. That was engineered by Kim Murphy.
She really engineered that through trustees and so on to get those buildings so named.
So the capital campaign review board approved the Perkins building campaign,
the beaver community center and then later on the Franco Building.
The Franco building campaign was chaired by my son,
Thomas Beaver. For a long time there was no other campus
that came close to this one in terms of the percentage of the capital
buildings that were here.. Berks County recognized the importance
of having a major university presence in berks County –
being part of a major research university. So when capital campaigns identified Penn
State as a recipient it would be OK to have a campaign,
people came aboard, industry came aboard. Unfortunately, today many of those businesses
are no longer here. The Danas, in terms of major manufacturing,
but they always supported it in a big way, and even though we have over 10,000 Penn State
graduates in Berks county, we get very little support at the Berks campus.
Less that 500-600 graduates support capital campaigns.
It’s mainly been the local community that has done that,
rather than the graduates helping to build this campus
or even build University Park any future capital campaigns
we must work much harder with faculty, staff, and most importantly alumni.
For the most part the alumni have not come to the party.
Thun campaign built the Luerssen building, the Beaver campaign, the campaign that I chaired
built the Beaver community center, and my son’s campaign built the Franco building.
Tom Beaver, who is a Lehigh graduate, my son, built that building.
And the most recent addition to the Library, was a Bob Cardy,
headed capital campaign. [Musical Interlude]