Lucille Musser Arking
Penns Valley High School, Class of 1953
Occupation: Nurse and administrator (retired)
Lucille Musser Arking describes her childhood in Penns Valley as “idyllic” — filled with days of digging wild owers and walking in the woods — except for a speech impediment that caused her to be teased by other students at school. Rather than letting that get her down, though, she used it as the basis for what would become an established career in nursing.
Arking, the fifth of 10 children born to Boyd and Anna Musser, first had the inkling to become a nurse while riding with one to a speech-therapy appointment on Penn State’s campus.
“I was transported by the public health nurse, who seemed like she knew everything in the world,” Arking says. “She stopped to interact with clients along the way to Penn State, and I very impressed with her.”
After graduating from Penns Valley High
School, Arking moved to Philadelphia and attended the Episcopal Hospital School of Nursing and the University of Pennsylvania. She also met her future husband, Bob, who was a graduate student at Penn.
The Arkings moved around the country as Bob held faculty positions at various universities. They eventually settled in Troy, Michigan. Lucille earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Wayne State University and transitioned from patient- focused nursing into administrative roles
at hospitals and nursing-home facilities, focusing on staff development and training.
In 2009, she received the Florence Nightingale Award for Nursing Administration, one of the highest honors in the field, for her work training nurses to work with Alzheimer’s and dementia patients.
“I taught my staff how to handle people with dementia instead of treating them as children or not paying any attention to them,” she says. “I was motivated to do that because my mother was in Centre Crest with Alzheimer’s for seven years and I knew that there were other things that could be done with those patients, and that really interested me.”
Arking’s work focused on changing the culture of nursing to create a team-oriented atmosphere where nurses could support each other when working with challenging patients.
She retired in 2013 and is now active in the Troy community, volunteering at political events and helping to campaign in local races. She also enjoys genealogy and has traced the lineage of each of her four grandparents.
She also has embraced social media as a way to keep in touch with friends from Penns Valley and every place she’s lived along the way.
“I’m very active on Facebook,” she says. “Anyone from Penns Valley who remembers my name can look me up, and we’ll connect that way!”
Gerald Hoy
Bald Eagle Area High School, Class of 2000
Occupation: Service Forester, Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources Bureau of Forestry
Gerald Hoy’s education allowed him to foster his love of the outdoors. Hoy, now a service forester with the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR), says his teachers at Bald Eagle Area High School and the Central Pennsylvania Institute of Science and Technology gave him a fi rm foundation in environmental science and principles he still uses today.
“Over the winter months, we studied wildlife, agronomy, environmental sustainability, and green energy,” he says. “This is where I first learned the concept of sustainable forest management, and today I’m teaching many of those same concepts to students, teachers, and forest landowners alike.”
In 2010, Hoy was selected as DCNR’s Service Forester of the Year. He also has been awarded with two DCNR Secretary Awards.
His work is split between emergency management and outreach to schools and community organizations. He also has been called to assist in seven other states, including Alaska.
“In a typical week, I could visit a private forest-landowner’s woodlot on Monday, be guest lecturer at a high school or college on Tuesday, meet with municipal of officials to help resolve street-tree conflicts on Wednesday, be dispatched to fight a wild fire on Thursday, inspect and certify forest-management practices on Friday, and then get dispatched to search for a lost hunter on Saturday,” says Hoy, who lives in Clinton County with his wife and two daughters.
While in high school, he was a starting pitcher on the baseball team and pitched a perfect game during his junior year in 1999. He says that baseball also in influenced his career path.
“When it came to baseball, I learned just as much from my failures as my successes,” he says. “I think it was great preparation for life and a career. Like on the pitcher’s mound, when I fail at something, I really try to analyze why it happen, what I can learn from it, and ‘shrug it off,’ meaning I don’t dwell on failures.”
Laurie Nelson
Philipsburg-Osceola High School, Class of 1986
Occupation: Physician, Penn State Hershey Medical Group
Laurie Nelson’s life has been full of unexpected twists and turns. She graduated first in her class at Philipsburg-Osceola High School and was all set to attend the US Naval Academy when she broke her leg while playing softball, forcing her to consider other options. She ended up enrolling at Penn State.
Softball was not her only activity in high school. She also was on the basketball and cross-country teams, a member of student council, and played trumpet in the school band.
“I applied to several of the different academies, and it was my brother-in-law that challenged me to do it,” she says. “I had no idea what a military academy was. [It] wasn’t something that a lot of people necessarily do … but I wanted to be an engineer, and the academies are good engineering schools.”
Nelson did attend the Naval Academy after completing her bachelor’s degree, and she served on the Civil Engineering Corps in the Philippines during the Gulf War. She completed the remainder of her service commitment as a government contractor
in San Diego, where she had her children, Meghan and Nate. Meghan is following in her mother’s footsteps and will study engineering at Penn State starting this fall, and Nate is a rising senior at Middletown Area High School.
In 2001, a horrible, unexpected twist happened to Nelson as her husband, Joe, was killed in a car accident.
“A few years after the accident, I did a lot of thinking about what I wanted to do with my life. I sold everything I had in California and went to medical school at Penn State,” she says. “It wasn’t very easy being a single mom going through medical school.”
Nelson is the youngest of nine children. She says her parents, George and Pat Wood, were skeptical of her career change initially, but ultimately supported her through the transition. She completed her residency at Penn State’s College of Medicine two years ago and now works as an assistant professor of medicine and staff physician for Penn State Hershey.
“It’s a nice mix of having commitments to patients and students. I enjoy both parts of that,” she says. “It’s been a long road, but I’ve landed where I want to be and doing exactly what I want to be doing.”
David Vogan
Bellefonte Area High School, Class of 1972
Occupation: Norbert Wiener Professor of Mathematics, MIT
During a time when the majority of his classmates attended Penn State, David Vogan struck out on his own, eventually landing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, where he’s been since 1979. He is a mathematics professor at MIT and credits high school teacher Leo Lipner with sparking his interest in the field. Lipner began teaching in 1964 at age 54, after running a clothing store in Bellefonte.
“I remember that he was really excited about math and the things he had been learning,” Vogan says. “I remember finding his story really inspiring then, and I still do now.”
During his tenure at MIT, Vogan has served as department head and chair of the graduate committee. He also has served as president of the American Mathematical Society. His research combines mathematics with physics to nd new ways to solve equations.
“I’ve had a lot of very fantastic students, and it’s just constant delight to watch them doing things, being good at things, and teaching other people,” he says.
Vogan, who lives in suburban Boston with his wife, Lois, encourages young people in Happy Valley to move outside of the Centre County bubble, just as he did more than 40 years ago.
“There’s a lot of great stuff in Centre County and at Penn State, but it’s a big world and there’s a lot of great stuff in other places, too, and it’s often worthwhile to take a look and see what else is out there,” he says.
Something he enjoys doing with his wife as the two have traveled extensively, including visiting China, Brazil, and Italy. Vogan returns to Centre County a few times each year to visit his father, David Sr., in Pleasant Gap or to collaborate with researchers in the math department at Penn State.
Sunil Yapa
State College Area High School, Class of 1998
Occupation: Author
Though Sunil Yapa has traveled around the world, he considers State College to be home and the foundation for his career as an author.
His first full-length novel, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, was released in January. The book is about a young man
named Victor who becomes involved with the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests. The book has received positive reviews, and Yapa appeared on the cover of the January issue of the monthly book review publication BookPage.
The character was inspired by Yapa’s interest in geography. Yapa earned a bachelor’s degree in geography from Penn State and studied with his father, Lakshman, who is an emeritus professor in that field.
“To grow up in a college town is an incredible experience,” says Yapa, who now lives in Woodstock, New York. “I grew up with an intellectual curiosity, and the idea of being a writer and being an academic is a great way to live your life.”
He describes his high school experience as a dichotomy.
“I was a National Merit Scholar at State High, so I was definitely in AP classes, but all my friends were stoners, and that’s what I was, too,” he says. “I had a very high GPA, but I was still cutting class my senior year.”
He was an active member of the State College Presbyterian Church and says its youth group helped him find focus and balance in high school. The group impacted him so much that he became a leader while attending Penn State.
“It was a really positive influence in the community and a place where mis ts like me could go and feel welcome and represented,” he says.
His interest in writing developed at State High and was further fueled by creative writing instructors at Penn State who thought he might be able to make a career of it. He moved to New York City and earned a MFA in creative writing from Hunter College. His parents were supportive but apprehensive about how their son would make it work financially.
“I think, like any parents, they were worried about how I was going to pay the bills and the financial insecurity that comes with writing and being an artist,” he says. “But that went away pretty quickly when it was clear that I had the discipline to do it and I’d found a way to make money and pursue art.”
While at Hunter, he received the Alumni Scholarship and Welfare Fund Fellowship, a grant given to one MFA student every three years, and served as a research assistant to novelists Ben Marcus and Zadie Smith. He also worked as a fiction writer for Esquire magazine from 2009 to 2010. In 2010, he won the Hyphen Asian American Short Story Contest for his story, “Pilgrims (What is Lost and You Cannot Regain).”
Lakshman Yapa says any doubts he had about his son’s potential as a writer were put to rest the minute he opened Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist.
“I think it’s brilliant because it’s almost
like a movie,” he says. “There are these flashbacks, and I had to write notes to myself at the end of each chapter. It also reflects
his politics and the fact that he grew up in a politically aware household.”
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist took six years to write, so Yapa says he’s not in a hurry to write another book. He held a book signing at the State College Barnes & Noble in February and hopes to have another signing and lecture at Penn State in the fall to tie the novel’s themes to current events.
“I started this book before there were any protests in the news, but as it’s been published, we’ve had Ferguson and Baltimore,” he says. “Now with the election, globalization and free trade have become huge issues, and I’m interested in exploring them further.”
