Tom Shakely

Tributes

  • Queen Elizabeth II, RIP

    Queen Elizabeth II’s extraordinary life and extraordinary 70-year reign have come to an end. Elizabeth died on the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. May God rest her soul and save her people.

    Tributes abound, from Jordan Peterson to Sebastian Milbank to Edward Pentin to Carl Trueman to Yuan Yi Zhu. And Peggy Noonan writes:

    “Now I am imagining the royal funeral, the procession, the carriages of state going slowly down the mall, the deep crowds on each side. The old will come in their chairs and the crowd will kindly put them in front, the best view, to wave goodbye to their friend, with whom they had experienced such history together.”

    I know that some Americans find it puzzling that we should be moved by the goings-on of a monarchy in a country from which we long ago declared independence. I think there are a few reasons why we should care, and why the monarchy is in fact owed our prayer for its continued flourishing.

    First, despite American independence we should be able to look across the Atlantic and see the obvious: the reason that the United States and United Kingdom have been described as having a “special relationship” is because our peoples are related. We’re cousins, and have the chance to retain bonds like those of family should we choose.

    Second, with the time of kings and kingdoms apparently past, the persistence of the English monarchy nevertheless reminds us that there are some things in the cultural and political life of our nation we that do not simply make but that we inherit. In this way, the monarchy can remain a symbol even for Americans. The strength and success of our constitutional system relies in powerful part on the same virtues of gratitude, responsibility, filial piety, and frankly awe for those good and lasting aspects of our public order that we did not create and can only hope to pass along to the future.

    Finally, the Commonwealth of Nations, whose members now recognize King Charles III as their head, consists of some 2.5 billion people. That is a remarkable association of peoples that seems worth paying attention to.

    I also have ancestral and familial reasons for my Anglophilia, for my gratitude to England and hope for her wellbeing. Genetically, I’m 92.8% British and Irish and 5.1% French and German.

    Michael Shakley (1735-1817), meanwhile, emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1754 from a town today known as Walzbachtal in the German Rhine Valley. In 1763, Michael was naturalized at the Pennsylvania State House—what we now know as Independence Hall. Nicholas Alleman, another early ancestor, was born in French Alsace and fought in the War of Independence. It’s thanks to Nicholas that I am a life member of the Sons of the American Revolution. Nicholas’s daughter Elizabeth would marry Michael’s son, and the family grew from there. We owe our lives and the life of our family, in a very real sense, to what the British built in Pennsylvania—both to what encouraged Michael to come from the old world to the new and what led Nicholas to fight in the War for Independence.

    (Truly, although we often talk about the “American Revolution” it’s far more precise and sheds far more light to call it the War for Independence. Our American ancestors, whether ancestors by blood or spirit, did not fight for a “revolutionary” system of government—most fought for their independence for the sake of attaining in America the rights and liberties they felt the crown was wrongly denying them in practice. “We claim nothing but the liberty and privileges of Englishmen in the same degree,” declared Virginia’s George Mason, a founder and later father of the Bill of Rights, “as if we had continued among our brethren in Great Britain.” The cause of independence was unifying because it sought to secure for Americans the rights and responsibilities they understood as their English inheritance. There was, in this sense, no “revolutionary” change, but rather an attempt through independence to more firmly root an ancient inheritance in a new way.)

    In any event, knowing the story of my family—both those who emigrated to Pennsylvania and those who were already colonists—and the reasons for separation from Britain are reminders for me to be grateful for those who came before and who built so much of the world as we know it. We have many challenges, just as we have much to be grateful for. It would be wrong to deny the gift of the “liberty and privileges” for which all Americans today rightly give thanks. I think we owe thanks to God for all that we enjoy and, yes, to the peoples across the Atlantic who were the original architects of so much of the American order.

    As an aside, my grandfather John Shakely spent much of the decade after he graduated from Penn State sailing and working overseas. He happened to be in Nassau, The Bahamas in the days leading up to Elizabeth II’s coronation in June 1953 and took these photos:

    That’s the Bahamian Parliament in the first photo, and my 26-year old grandfather with his bike in Nassau in the second photo.

  • David McCullough, RIP

    David McCullough, America’s greatest contemporary historian, has died at 89. Miles Smith remembers McCullough as “a historian of the people” who “wrote about an America he loved:”

    In many ways, McCullough represented the last vestige of an older way of thinking about the United States. He claimed to be a historian of the people, and for McCullough those people were a relatively unified body of Americans who gloried in their flawed but nonetheless remarkable past. In an era of increased social and cultural Balkanization, McCullough’s works, his public speaking, and his presence pointed an imperfect people to aspire to the type of citizenship and nobility that Americans high and low could achieve. …

    Nature, and especially the seeming unquenchable American desire to conquer nature fascinated McCullough. His books on the creation of the Panama Canal, the Wright Brothers, the Brooklyn Bridge, Theodore Roosevelt’s time in the Dakota Badlands, and the settlement of the Ohio River Valley showed how Americans rose to the challenge when confronted by natural obstacles to the progress of civilization. 

    McCullough’s appreciation of civilization, and particularly American civilization, is what made him so popular in his own era, and perhaps what made him less popular with the present generation of academic historians. His last book, focusing on the late 18th-century settlement of Ohio, was criticized by “a new generation of historians, scholars and activists” who “took to social media to accuse McCullough of romanticizing white settlement and downplaying the pain inflicted on Native Americans.” This is now typical fare among historians, who embody a zealous binary amid their ideological venting. The particular book, The Pioneers, did nothing of the sort.

    What made McCullough so different from his critics is that he maintained affection and charity towards the United States and its peoples despite its flawed history. McCullough had the courage to admire American civilization and its virtues. He understood that history is not always good versus evil or in linear directions. History is complicated. McCullough understood this in ways that much of academic history does not.McCullough had the courage to admire American civilization and its virtues.

    Affection for his subjects characterized McCullough’s works. His critics complained about his obvious sympathies, but the proposition that a biographer or historian can truly remain neutral towards their subject has always been at best an aspiration and at worst a sort of fiction that academics tell themselves. McCullough was never an academic and even though he received an elite Ivy League education he never seemed interested in writing for the adulation of the guild. This, perhaps more than anything, gave him the courage to love his country, its story, and its people.

    In an era when the idea of preserving any transcendent national identity is often called a dog-whistle for far-right politics, McCullough’s books offer a substantive vision of an American nation committed to virtue, the common good, and human liberty.

    I think McCullough’s 1776 was my entree to his works. I still haven’t enjoyed all his books, but so far The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris ranks as my favorite.

    A decade ago Brian Bolduc at The Wall Street Journal interviewed McCullough, and he shared an observation in that interview that’s stuck with me ever since: “[Y]ou can’t love something you don’t know anymore than you can love someone you don’t know.”

    David McCullough helped us get to know both the somethings of our history and so many of the someones of our history. Those encounters with our own story that McCullough offers, with the good and the bad alike, make it possible to have a rightly ordered love for our country.

  • • •

    Kobe Bryant, RIP

    Tom Hoffarth and Steve Lowery on the late Kobe Bryant’s faith:

    In the immediate aftermath of Bryant’s sudden death along with eight other people, including his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, in a helicopter crash Jan. 26, it soon became known that Bryant stopped by Queen of Angels, located a couple miles from his Newport Coast home, for a few moments of reflection and prayer, leaving just 10 minutes after that 7 a.m. Mass started to head to John Wayne Airport.

    Father Sallot later confirmed to various local news outlets that he had seen Bryant after he had prayed in the chapel.

    “We shook hands, I saw that he had blessed himself because there was a little holy water on his forehead,” Father Sallot said. “I was coming in the same door as he was going out … we called that the backhand of grace.”

    Though Bryant was well-known for his discipline (Mamba Mentality), cosmopolitan ways (giving interviews in multiple languages) and, most of all, love, admiration, and devotion for his daughters (the trending hashtag #GirlDad among the tributes), the fact that Bryant took his faith so seriously seemed to take many, including those in the media, by surprise.

    The media may have first met him as a star in Lower Merion High School in Pennsylvania before the Lakers obtained him in a 1996 NBA draft trade, but considering Bryant started living in Milan, Italy, at age 7, since his father, Joe, played seven seasons in the Italian League after his own NBA career ended in 1983, Catholicism seems to have been as natural a part of life as basketball.

    Bryant was willing to talk about his faith with anyone willing or wanting to listen. It was there, he said, at both his highest and lowest moments.

    “I have nothing in common with lazy people who blame others for their lack of success. Great things come from hard work and perseverance. No excuses.”

    “If you do the work, if you work hard enough, dreams come true… and if you guys can understand that, then I’m doing my job as a father.”

  • Roger Scruton, RIP

    “He seemed bigger than the age.”

    Roger Scruton, rest in peace. There are so many tributes and memorials being shared to this man who embodied so much of England and possessed so many of the best instincts of the West. I had the chance to see him speak at Penn in 2017, and will remember that for a very long time. His thinking and his way of living have provided me with a great deal of surety about our culture and confidence in daily life.

    Who was Roger Scruton? Why Beauty Matters helps answer this, as does Of Beauty and Consolation, as does How to Be a Conservative, as does this performance of his Lorca songs, set from the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, murdered in the Spanish Civil War. And there’s his writing itself.

    I’ll share a few excerpts of his and a few tributes that have been circulating. First, on the imperative to conserve:

    “Conservatism … is the instinct we all ultimately share, at least if we’re happy in this world; it’s the instinct to hold on to what we love.”

    And: “The real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment. They have made a lifelong distinction between the things that nourish and the things that threaten…”

    And: “Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.”

    What makes Scruton’s conservative instincts remarkable is they did not arise from a lived experience; that is, that he was not born into the privileged place of a life already worth conserving, but the opposite. He speaks to this in his “Of Beauty and Consolation” appearance:

    “I was very fortunate in having an unhappy childhood, so that my desire from the very beginning was to escape from it. My childhood home was one of violence and quarrels and discord. Perhaps, of course, this has given me an underlying sense of something missing and that I must recreate it.”

    Second, from his book The Face of God on beauty and the transcendence that lies beneath beauty:

    “The sense of beauty puts a brake upon destruction, by representing its object as irreplaceable. When the world looks back at me with my eyes, as it does in aesthetic experience, it is also addressing me in another way. Something is being revealed to me, and I am being made to stand still and absorb it … What is revealed to me in the experience of beauty is a fundamental truth about being—the truth that being is a gift, and receiving it is a task.”

    Third, a reflection on incarnation and death, and the otherworldliness we intuit when we encounter the body of the dead. Those are moments where we can acknowledge the sacred nature of that moment or desecrate what we encounter:

    Death too presents us with the mystery of our incarnation, though it does so in another way. In death we confront the body voided of the soul, an object without a subject, limp, ungoverned and inert. The awe that we feel in the face of death is a response to the unfathomable spectacle of human flesh without the self. In fact, the dead body is not so much an object as a void in the world of objects—something that ought not to be there, since it ought not to be there as a thing. The sight is uncanny, unheimlich, and demands to be rearranged—though rearranged metaphysically, as it were, so as to heal the void. Hence in all societies the dead are treated with reverence: they become untouchable, precisely in the moment when the self retreats from them. Somehow this body still belongs to the person who has vanished: I imagine him as exerting his claim over it, but from spectral regions where he cannot be touched. In encountering death, therefore, our imagination reaches spontaneously towards the supernatural. The dead body, by becoming sacred, exposes itself also to desecration—a fact upon which the drama of Antigone turns. Just as sex and death provide us with two of our primary experiences of the sacred, therefore, they also present us with a primary threat of desecration.

    Here is Chad Pecknold’s tribute: “Sir Roger Scruton has died after a long battle with cancer. A champion of conservative ideas, eloquent defender of the civilizing effect of procreative realism, who made an argument for God from a life of meditating upon beauty. Requiscat in pace.”

    And here is Scruton: “The psalmist goes on to remind us of the remedy: ‘Be ye sure that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.’ This sentence contains all of theology.”

    He concluded his public life with this: “Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.”

  • Jean Vanier, RIP

    Sohrab Ahmari honors Jean Vanier, who has passed away:

    Jean Vanier, the Canadian Catholic philosopher and humanitarian who died on Tuesday aged 90, was a giant of a man. Well over six feet tall, he towered over me when I visited him for an interview in Trosly-Breuil, France, in 2015. In Vanier, however, even his height and bearing were transfigured into a source of warmth and humility; I ended up describing him as a “gentle giant” in my write-up.

    He was due to receive the $1.7 million Templeton Prize that year, in recognition of his “exceptional contributions to affirming life’s breadth of spiritual dimensions”. Yet he was painfully reluctant to talk about the prize. I remember how he lowered himself somehow (again, both physically and emotionally) when I brought up this great honour. “Don’t push me up, don’t push me forward,” he insisted, in a voice that was almost a whisper.

    Vanier would have preferred that I write not about him but about his friends at Trosly-Breuil, the site of the first L’Arche community he established. L’Arche, or the Ark, is the movement of people with disabilities and their non-disabled peers (called “assistants”) who live together as friends and equals.

    Today L’Arche is among the most luminous examples of what it means to live Catholic social teaching and Gospel values in the modern world. It’s also the most powerful counter-witness to the culture of death and the eugenic revival that has some countries boasting of having “eliminated” Down’s syndrome.

    Vanier’s story, and that of L’Arche’s founding, are legendary, though these are true and well-attested legends. …

    L’Arche has grown to some 150 communities on five continents. Part of the point is of course to help people with disabilities live lives of laughter, dignity and happiness. But the non-disabled who come to L’Arche soon learn that they need as much help and healing as the disabled do. The non-disabled helpers are also counted among the poor at L’Arche.

    “What people with disabilities want is to relate,” Vanier told me in that 2015 interview. “This is something unique. It makes people who are closed up in the head become human. The wonderful thing about people with disabilities is that when someone important comes, they don’t care. They care about the relationship. So they have a healing power, a healing power of love.”

    I got a light touch of that healing power during my own visit to Trosly-Breuil. After interviewing Vanier, I was invited to lunch at the Ferns, the group home that serves some of the most severely disabled residents. I’ll be honest: all the spitting and gurgling of food at first discomfited me. As an only child, my heightened sense of personal space was also at risk. But then we held hands and thanked Almighty God in song, and I opened up. By the time the meal was over, I didn’t want to leave the Ferns.

    Afterward, I asked Vanier what people like me, who can’t give up married and professional lives to live in community, can do to help. Here’s what he told me:

    “Try and find somebody who is lonely. And when you go to see them, they will see you as the messiah. Go and visit a little old lady who has no friends or family. Bring her flowers. People say, ‘but that’s nothing’. It is nothing – but it’s also everything. It always begins with small little things. It all began in Bethlehem. That was pretty small.”

    I learned of L’Arche only this past fall as part of Leonine Forum.

  • • •

    Jack Bogle, RIP

    Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard, has died. Art Carey and Erin Arvedlund report:

    John C. Bogle, 89, who revolutionized the way Americans save for the future, championed the interests of the small investor, and railed against corporate greed and the excesses of Wall Street, died of cancer Wednesday at his home in Bryn Mawr, his family confirmed.

    Mr. Bogle, a chipper and unpretentious man who invited everyone to call him “Jack,” was founder and for many years chairman of the Vanguard Group, the Malvern-based mutual-fund company, where he pioneered low-cost, low-fee investing and mutual funds tied to stock-market indexes. These innovations, reviled and ridiculed at first, enabled millions of ordinary Americans to build wealth to buy a home, pay for college, and retire comfortably.

    Along the way, Vanguard, which Mr. Bogle launched in 1974, became a titan in the financial-services industry, with 16,600 employees and over $5 trillion in assets by the end of 2018, and Mr. Bogle earned a reputation as not only an investing sage but a maverick whose integrity and old-fashioned values set an example that many admired and few could match.

    “Jack could have been a multibillionaire on a par with Gates and Buffett,” said William Bernstein, an Oregon investment manager and author of 12 books on finance and economic history. Instead, he turned his company into one owned by its mutual funds, and in turn their investors, “that exists to provide its customers the lowest price. He basically chose to forgo an enormous fortune to do something right for millions of people. I don’t know any other story like it in American business history.” …

    While Mr. Bogle was facile with numbers, he was much less interested in counting than in what counts, and his intellectual range was broad. He revered language, history, poetry, and classical wisdom, and frequently amazed and delighted people by reciting long passages of verse. …

    Mr. Bogle had hoped that the Vanguard model — “structurally correct, mathematically correct, and ethically correct” — would goad other investment firms to give customers a fairer shake. While index funds have become widely popular, Vanguard’s competitors often have been less than keen about following the company’s penny-pinching lead. …

    When he was not touting the advantages of the Vanguard mode of investing, Mr. Bogle, a self-proclaimed “battler by nature,” was lambasting his professional brethren for “rank speculation,” reckless assumption of debt, “obscene” multimillion-dollar paychecks, and golden parachutes, and saying they had abdicated their duty as stewards in favor of self-interested salesmanship. …

    Along the way, Mr. Bogle attracted his share of critics. He was called a communist, a Marxist, a Bolshevik, a Calvinist scold and zealot, a holier-than-thou traitor and subversive who was undermining the pillars of capitalism with un-American rants. Mr. Bogle characterized his pugnacious relationship with the financial industry as “a lover’s quarrel.” His mission, he said, was simple: to return capitalism, finance, and fund management to their roots in stewardship. …

    A man who believed in the value of introspection and who was always questioning his own motives and behavior, Mr. Bogle sought to define what it means to lead a good life. It was not about wealth, power, fame and other conventional notions of success, he concluded.

    “It’s about being a good husband, a good father, a good colleague, a good member of the community. Everything else pales by comparison. The accumulation of material goods is a waste — you can’t take them with you, anyway — and the waste is typified by our financial system. The essential message is, stop focusing on self and start thinking about service to others.”

    When I was in Philadelphia this past weekend I happened at one point to be speaking with a Vanguard person, and asked about Jack Bogle. “He still comes into the office, still eats in the cafeteria with everyone else. He’s the most down-to-earth man.”

    Jack Bogle forged Vanguard’s incredible reputation, and through index funds provided generations of average Americans the means to save and invest. My grandmother was one of those Vanguard disciples, and her frugality and farsightedness helped make possible a comfortable retirement for my grandparents and helped provide for the family over the years.

    Antonio García Martinez reflected in light of Bogle’s death: “One of the key emptinesses at the core of modern secular liberalism is a convincing answer to the question: what is a good life? The ability to attain a felt (or acknowledged) dignity, irrespective of high or low material attainments, is an essential component of a sane society. The Greeks of course had their best minds wrestle with the question. We don’t dare even ask it anymore.”

    RIP.

  • •

    George H.W. Bush, RIP

    George H.W. Bush, rest in peace. The 41st president died in Houston last night. Rod Dreher shared Joshua Treviño’s H.W. reflection, and I’m sharing that same reflection here because I think it’s one of the best:

    Here is the one thing you need to know about him, among all the things of his crowded and extraordinary life: his most enduring legacy is the war that did not happen. It is a commonplace that his predecessor in the Presidency defeated the Soviet Union, and there is truth to it, but it is not the whole story. President George H.W. Bush was the man who managed, deftly and successfully, the Western portion of the implosion of the Soviet empire. It was a perilous passage — the abrupt collapse of an imperium and a pillar of world order — that would have almost certainly produced great-power war under nearly any other circumstance. It did not largely because of the men who were President at the moment: President, that is, of both the failing USSR and the ascending United States.

    Think back to the revolutions of 1989, and the triumphant scenes of Europe liberated at last, of the Second World War reaching its final conclusion after six long decades. Think back to the realization that Soviet Communism, the specter haunting free men throughout most of the century, was in its death throes. Then think back to what you didn’t see: American triumphalism in Europe, the imposition of terms, the march of Western armies to the Oder and Vistula, the spiking of the ball.

    President George H.W. Bush, unnoticed and uncredited by his nation, steered a victorious America — flush in the defeat of its sixth empire in just over seventy years, standing upon the precipice of global hyperpower — with restraint, prudence, and even modesty in its moment of triumph. It was an exemplary achievement not just for the virtues inherent in those qualities. It was an exemplary achievement because of the people who lived.

    Under nearly anyone else, in nearly any other era, the generation of 1989 would have been sacrificed to wars of succession, wars of revision, and wars of revenge. Under George H.W. Bush, these men and women lived, and their children are with us today.

    It is a curious thing to have as the most enduring achievement a thing that did not happen. The former President understood it. The American people did not. They still don’t.

    I was a small child living with my mother in Bayreuth, West Germany in November 1989 when the Berlin Wall began to fall. She was on a Fulbright there, and I was along with her. We visited Berlin, and we brought back a piece of that wall when we came home. Here’s a photo of us in Bayreuth’s Hofgarten from that autumn:

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    In reading Joshua Treviño’s reflection, I think about how easy it would have been for President Bush to have “spiked the ball” in some way that would have blown up in our faces. Even in Daniel McCarthy’s blunt epitaph for a man he believes essentially created our present geopolitical dilemmas, he points out the sort of restraint Bush demonstrated in presiding over the U.S.S.R.’s collapse:

    Bush refused to encourage Ukrainian efforts to break free from the Soviet Union in summer of 1991 and warned of ‘suicidal nationalism’ on the part of Ukraine. Bush was right, not because the Ukrainians did not deserve their independence—which they soon peacefully obtained—but because US involvement would have been a goad to Russian nationalism and could only have complicated the necessary work of dismantling the Soviet Union, work that could only be carried out by Soviet subjects (including Russians) themselves.

    I was in Kennebunkport, Maine over Memorial Day in 2010 with friends, and we had the chance to meet Bush briefly. He had a tradition of coming out for the Memorial Day parade there. It was one of his last years before age and disability made a wheelchair a necessity, and he was milling about and greeting everyone in a low key way. Shaking his hand and offering him a simple “thank you” for his service was a memorable moment, the sort that I hope continue to exist even despite the increasingly imperial nature of the U.S. presidency. I hope, through the countless number of Americans who have similar experiences with our presidents, that the best instincts of an older America are carried forward for generations to come.

  • • •

    Wally Triplett, RIP

    Wally Triplett died in Detroit earlier this month. He was 92 years old, and both an American and Penn State athletic hero:

    Wally Triplett became the first African-American to start on the Penn State Nittany Lions, play in a bowl game, and be drafted by the NFL, where he set multiple records. He was a key inspiration for Penn State’s iconic “We Are” chant, which came to signify unity as Penn Staters in the face of racial segregation.

    Kevin Horne wrote on “Wally Triplett and the Men of ‘47” earlier this year:

    Triplett’s modesty is a tenant of his personality today, as it has been for virtually all of his 91 years on this earth. But those now-weathered eyes witnessed one of the most beautiful Penn State stories ever told—one in which he was the central figure, transcending the bounds of time and, even if not the literal inspiration, embodying the meaning behind the phrase “We Are Penn State.”

    The story is told in two-parts. Triplett saw limited playing time in 1945—becoming, along with Dennie Hoggard, the first African-American to take the field for Penn State—and earned a varsity letter in 1946, also the first black player to do so for the Nittany Lions. Triplett made the switch from tailback to wingback early in the 1946 season and was the team’s most adept kick returner.

    But Wally Triplett is defined more by the game he didn’t play than the ones that he did.

    Triplett first felt trouble when he noticed that familiar name on the team schedule after he returned to campus in the fall of 1946. The University of Miami, the same school that revoked his scholarship less than two years prior because of the color of his skin, was scheduled for a home game against Penn State on November 29.

    Not only did Miami not let black players on its team but, like many southern schools, did not even allow black players on its fields with visiting teams. Miami officials alerted Penn State that traveling with Triplett and Hoggard might prove problematic. The situation gnawed at Triplett — Penn State had a solid squad that year, with only one 3-point loss to Michigan State mid-way through the season and were poised to make a run at a postseason bowl.

    Triplett has recounted what happened next hundreds of times. As the legend goes, the team met at Old Main to discuss the situation. They knew of Miami’s stance that bringing Triplett and Hoggard on the trip would make it, as their officials put it, “difficult for them to carry out arrangements for the game.”

    The team discussed the situation and held a vote. It wasn’t close. A revote was held, however, so that the few holdouts could make it unanimous. “There was no second thought,” voter Joe Sarabok recalled to the Penn Stater.  Penn State would bring all of its players, or it would not play at all.

    The dean of the School of Physical Education and Athletics, Dr. Carl Schott, relayed the team’s decision to the Daily Collegian in the November 6, 1946 newspaper:

    “We recently advised the University of Miami that two colored boys are regular members of the Penn State football squad,” Scott said, “and that it is the policy of the College to compete only under circumstances which will permit the playing of any or all members of its athletic teams.”

    There would be no game. It would not be rescheduled.

    “I call it ‘that team’,’” Triplett recalled during a visit to the All Sports Museum in 2009. “The tradition of leaving your colored players at home was going to be tolerated no more.”

    To add to the mythology, it is said that All-American captain Steve Suhey, the coach’s future son-in-law whose family line would produce generations of great Nittany Lions, stood up after the discussion and declared that the team would never have a vote of this sort again. It would never be spoken of; they already knew the answer. It was decided forever.

    “We Are Penn State,” Suhey said. “We play all or we play none. There will be no meetings.”

    Kevin relates Triplett’s story through Lincoln Hall in State College and a host of familiar, tangible landmarks that bind and unite Penn Staters:

    Penn State student government leaders voted in 2016 to use the student facilities fee to erect a monument to Triplett near the location of Old Beaver Field, and though the project went in another direction once it reached the administrative level, it is a testament to the enduring appeal of his inspirational story that today’s students were willing to honor him in that way—nearly 70 years after Triplett and “The Men of ‘47” stood in their place.

    But what compels such devotion? What is the Spirit of Penn State? Answers can be found through experiencing the ways in which the echoes of our shared past still reverberate through the places that we love. It is revering Mount Nittany. It is tipping your cap to Old Willow and admiring the remaining Elms on the Henderson Mall. It is celebrating the unique vision and singular determination of people like Evan Pugh, George Atherton, and Joe Paterno. And it is remembering places that never should have needed to exist at all, like Lincoln Hall, and the quiet dignity of the pioneers who lived there. It is learning and cherishing – and thereby keeping alive – the story of noble Lions like Wally Triplett, Steve Suhey, and a band of teammates who were ahead of their time.

    The Spirit is still there if you want to experience it. Try it. Walk down North Barnard Street and stop in front of the second house on the right. Close your eyes. If you try hard enough, it’s not difficult to imagine Wally Triplett, the African-American son of a Pennsylvania postal worker, his smile reaching ear to ear, bounding down the wood-covered concrete steps of Lincoln Hall, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, on his way to catch the team bus to the Cotton Bowl, ready to change the course of history.

    I hope Penn State administration comes to its senses and commissions a lasting stuatuary monument to Wally Triplett someplace near Beaver Stadium. Wally Triplett, rest in peace.

  • •

    Gerry Lenfest, RIP

    Gerry Lenfest, 88, died this morning. I’ve written about Lenfest a few times before; his and his wife Marguerite’s public spirited generosity in creating a better Philadelphia will be remembered as one of the high points in the city’s history. Peter Dobrin reports:

    H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, 88, who substantially remade the educational, cultural, and media sectors of the city and well beyond to become one of Philadelphia’s most dynamic civic leaders of the last century, died Sunday morning…

    Mr. Lenfest, who had been in declining health in recent months, parlayed the sale of the family cable business into a second act as the area’s leading philanthropist for nearly two decades, giving away more than $1.3 billion. …

    “Gerry has had a huge impact on the renaissance and renewal of Philadelphia and all of its institutions,” said Philadelphia Museum of Art president and chief operating officer Gail Harrity. “I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that he has shaped Philadelphia for the future.”

    Said David McCullough, the author and historian: “I think he was one of the most memorable and lovable men I’ve ever known. A devoted Philadelphian if ever there was one. His love of that city and its history, and his willingness to be not only generous with his philanthropy but to work hard to attain a worthy objective, is something we could all take a lesson from on how to go about life. He was a terrific man.”

    “We’ve lost our greatest citizen, there’s no doubt about that,” said Ed Rendell, former Philadelphia mayor and Pennsylvania governor. “He impacted the lives of Philadelphians at every level, in the city, in the neighborhoods.” …

    Mr. Lenfest was born neither to wealth nor the social status enjoyed by some of his fellow philanthropists. A lawyer by training, Mr. Lenfest and wife Marguerite built up their cable business over several decades, selling Lenfest Communications Inc. in 2000 and undertaking a philanthropic spree that put the Lenfest name alongside those of Girard, Widener, Curtis, Annenberg, Pew, and Haas – the city’s historically most generous families.

    He was “one of the greatest philanthropists the city has ever seen,” said Comcast Corp. chairman and CEO Brian L. Roberts, who had several close dealings with the businessman before Comcast ended up taking over Lenfest Communications. “He has changed our city and so many institutions.” …

    After making plans to donate all his wealth, Mr. Lenfest became an éminence grise to the city’s arts groups. He was chairman of the board of old-line institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Curtis Institute of Music, successfully convincing other supporters that even great traditions needed to be expanded upon and brought up to date.

    And he willed new ones into existence. He established the Lenfest Ocean Program, and believed in the new Museum of the American Revolution to the tune of more than $63 million in cash donations, becoming its largest donor. He lived to see it become a reality, greeting guests from a wheelchair when the museum opened its doors in April 2017. …

    “In Spanish we call it duende, a presence around someone,” said Roberto Díaz, who started as president and CEO of Curtis as Mr. Lenfest became board chairman. “There’s a very quiet strength there.” …

    “I don’t think any of it would have happened without Marguerite’s blessing. She is a force,” said Curtis’ Díaz. “Some of the most consequential conversations we had about the needs of the students actually were with Marguerite as much as with Gerry, and sometimes with her first.”

    The way they structured their generosity heightened its impact. Other philanthropists placed their billions in foundations to exist in perpetuity, giving out grants each year paid essentially out of investment income. The Lenfests, however, chose to spend down the entire endowment, and the effect on the nourishment and growth of hundreds of recipient institutions over a dozen and a half years was exhilarating.

    The Lenfests gave away more than $1.3 billion to 1,100 organizations – providing scholarships to high school students in rural Pennsylvania, contributing to pay off the Kimmel Center’s construction debt and keep Curtis tuition-free, supporting career assistance for youth, underwriting new buildings at Columbia University and Abington Hospital-Jefferson Health, giving free billboard and TV advertising to arts groups, helping to save the Temple University rowing program, and on and on. …

    At Columbia, Mr. Lenfest’s giving started at the law school, of which he was a graduate. “But there again,” said Bollinger, “he was willing to follow the lead of the institution as to what was important. When we wanted to build the center for the arts in West Harlem, he was right there with that gift. When we wanted to build out the Earth Institute and worked with improving conditions for impoverished people, he was right there.” …

    Lenfest made an incredible philanthropic impact in Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere in the space of about two decades. He modeled for wealthy persons in Philadelphia and nationally how to deal with wealth effectively, which is essentially that one grows and benefits in the proportion that they give themselves away; they grow in proportion to their willingness to diminish, in effect. This is one of the great paradoxes of human life, I think.

    Relationships mattered enormously. In 1999, Mr. Lenfest took notice of a man emptying the trash bins in his office, became curious about his story, and struck gold with an enduring and mutually beneficial relationship.

    “I was in medical school and business school, but I had a commercial cleaning business, and I was dumping Gerry’s wastebasket,” said Keith Leaphart, “and only Gerry would tell the janitor to sit down in his office to talk, and that’s literally how we became connected. He said, ‘Something is different about you. I need to know your story.’ I think he recognized my grit, my determination, I was an entrepreneur, some of the things he saw in himself at a younger age. Gerry wasn’t a silver-spoon kid, he worked really hard to get where he went as a billionaire philanthropist. I think it was mutual fondness.”

    A few years later, in 2007, when Leaphart was considering a run for Congress, he approached Mr. Lenfest for support. Mr. Lenfest agreed (Leaphart eventually decided not to run), but before he left, Mr. Lenfest asked Leaphart for something in return.

    “He said, ‘Sit back down, Keith, I have some things I need you to help me with,’ and it was really about making an impact here in the city, some ideas about putting kids to work, employment, and what we said was we would work together.”

    Leaphart became involved with issues like ex-offender reintegration, and today chairs the Lenfest Foundation board.

    What a great story, and what an incredible rise for Keith Leaphart.

    And Jim Friedlich, executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, reflects specifically on Lenfest’s impact on Philadelphia journalism:

    I first met Gerry Lenfest in 2015, not long after he purchased sole ownership of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com. Gerry told me at the time, “I just figured out how to become a millionaire in the newspaper business. It’s easy. You start out as a billionaire, and you buy a bunch of newspapers.”

    I met Gerry, who died on Sunday, after a long career at the Wall Street Journal. After leaving the Journal, my team and I had a business that advised major American newspaper owners on the digital transformation of their businesses. The question we always heard from a Chicago Tribune, a Los Angeles Times, or a Baltimore Sun was fundamentally the same: “How do I save my newspaper?”

    The question from Gerry Lenfest was much more expansive and profound: “How do we sustain great journalism writ large?” Gerry was especially focused on the business challenges. He asked me, “How can digital technology be used to enable and ennoble news, rather than to destroy it?” He sounded liked an 85-year-old millennial.

    But Gerry’s most keen observation — and this was in 2015 — was that we were entering an era when questions of credibility would challenge the news industry. He warned that as the news business got tougher, some in power would take advantage of its weakness. As Gerry put it, “On the internet you don’t know what’s real and what’s not. Before long, we won’t know what to believe.” …

    The Lenfest Institute for Journalism was founded on the belief that a strong local press is fundamental to the health of civic life in the Philadelphia region and to our democracy writ large. Gerry saw a critical role for the Institute in helping fund and protect journalism in Philadelphia. He also saw Philadelphia at the epicenter of a national effort to protect and transform local news in the digital age and to protect the democracy we serve.

    So now in mid-2018, what is happening here in Philadelphia is one of the most closely watched experiments in American journalism.

    Requiescat in pace.

  • •

    Remembering Michael Novak

    Remembering Michael Novak

    Yesterday I wrote about knowing Ben Novak for ten years, and toasting to his 75th birthday. Today I’m sharing the program from a program honoring his brother Michael at Catholic University of America here in Washington, DC:

    A Legacy of Faith and Reason: Honoring Michael Novak

    Join the Busch School of Business and Economics for a very special event honoring Michael Novak – a mentor, colleague, and friend – on the occasion of the first anniversary of his death.We will welcome the Novak family and hear from a number of voices, celebrating and reflecting on Michael’s life and work, as well as our role in carrying forward his legacy of faith, reason, and service to both our Church and our country.

    Schedule

    • 8:45 a.m. – Registration and continental breakfast
    • 9:30 a.m. – Welcome and introductory remarks, Dr. Andrew Abela, provost, The Catholic University of America
    • 9:45 a.m. – Dr. Jay Richards, The Catholic University of America and host of EWTN series “A Force for Good”
    • 10:30 a.m. – Break
    • 10:45 a.m. – Panel of Catholic University colleagues including Dr. Michael Pakaluk and Dr. Max Torres
    • 11:30 a.m. – Fr. Robert Sirico, founder and president, Acton Institute
    • 12:15 p.m. – Lunch and screening of “A Force for Good”
    • 1:30 p.m. – Panel of former students
    • 2:15 p.m. – Remarks from Ms. Mary Ann Novak and Dr. Ben Novak
    • 3:00 p.m. – Mass in the Crypt of the Basilica of the National Shrine
    • 4:15 p.m. – Reception

    I was standing just a few feet from Michael when the photo above was taken in Ave Maria, Florida, in front of what was then Ave Maria University’s Oratory. I think he was a bit tired that day, but his joie de vivre shines through in it nonetheless.

    Michael was a joy to be around, even and especially when he was admonishing you for some failing and maybe especially when he was encouraging you to work harder, because in those moments you realized you were with someone who really cared about you, and really wanted you to strive for something greater, and to reject self-satisfaction and laziness.

    I’m here today to hopefully honor that spirit of his, and to keep the flame alive. They’re streaming the event:

    Robb Klucik from Ave Maria also sang this short, adapted version of Hillaire Belloc’s “Benedicamus Domino” in honor of Michael:

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