Lee Stout, Town&Gown

As of late March, America was combating the spread of the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, by adopting social-distancing measures. In response, Penn State, along with many other colleges and universities, moved to remote instruction, telling students not to return to campus from spring break through the rest of the semester. Commencement ceremonies were cancelled. …

In September 1990, Witt Yeagley, editor, and Mimi Barash Coppersmith, publisher, invited me to write a monthly column for Town & Gown magazine, and I happily accepted. With this August 2018 piece, my skein reaches 300, and I’m turning over my space to new writers and new ideas. Writing “Penn State Diary” has been…

As a history guy, I naturally tend to see events as taking place within a larger context. Recently, I’ve found a book that does this for me in both history and geography. It’s The American College Town, by Blake Gumprecht, a professor of geography at the University of New Hampshire, published in 2008. Like…

After 10 years of retirement, I don’t get many “questions for the archivist” anymore, but I had an unexpected one not too long ago. My wife and a group of friends from the University Women’s Club were touring the campus of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Lunch had been arranged in a…

My mailing address says, “State College,” my tax bill says, “Patton Township,” but when someone local asks, I say I live in “Park Forest,” and most people in the “Centre Region” will know where to situate me. But these geographic facts don’t tell us much about the evolution of places in which we live and…