Logo Lament
In your November
issue you unveiled a new athletics logo featuring
the school mascot, our beloved Husky. My immediate impression was that
it was grotesque, with a face more likely to be found on the university
gargoyle (if we had one). Also, the paws that are now on our athletics
team uniforms leave me cold and show a lack of imagination. Where do these
ideas come from?
Alfred J. Pacelli, E'46
Osterville, Massachusetts
Cadets and Citizen-Soldiers
Allison Perkins's article on ROTC at Northeastern ["Fighting
for Survival," November 1998] was outstanding. She cited all the
important issues that face ROTC cadets at a nonmilitary school. I clearly
remember the strange looks I got while wearing my uniform on campus and
maturing as a cadet in my senior year. Balancing the demands of school,
working, buying groceries, paying rent, and ROTC gave me an edge over my
military-school counterparts. ROTC-commissioned officers were more empathetic
in handling soldier-family issues. ROTC-sourced officers juggled these
life events during school and understood the hardships soldiers faced.
In contrast, a typical military school graduate has food, clothing, and
shelter provided for him and is less equipped to deal with these issues.
The Northeastern community and the current administration should do
all it can to champion citizen-soldiers. The graduates of the Liberty Battalion
are a continuation of an American tradition that began at Lexington and
Concord-a tradition worthy of Northeastern's support.
Thomas D. Gabrielle, BA'86
Indian Orchard, Massachusetts
The November 1998 issue featuring ROTC at N.U.
brought back many memories, especially when I read the caption on page
twenty: "A mortar-loading demonstration in 1966 by N.U. cadet Frank
Castellano, LA'66." However, the picture above the caption is not
the one described. It shows three cadets from the Counterguerrilla Group,
to which I belonged also (those were different times). I was also a member
of the Scabbard and Blade Society. The picture you suggest was taken at
the 1966 summer camp at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. A British sergeant
major was instructing me on how to fire a 4.2-inch mortar at an old tank
in the distance.
Because of ROTC, I continued my career in the U.S. Army Medical Department
as an operations officer, serving at the small-unit level to the Department
of the Army at the Pentagon during the Gulf war. I have since retired from
the Army as a colonel, and I am currently working in the computer industry
in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Francesco Castellano, LA'66
Medford, Massachusetts
Picky about Banjos
Thank you for the 1930 banjo club photo and caption [Huskiana,
November 1998]. It was thoroughly enjoyable and gave me an idea of the
student look around my father's time (Alfred Kaplan, C&F'27). I do
feel, though, that the text paints a picture of the banjo as an archaic
and long-forgotten instrument. In fact, the banjo is very much alive and
well today in bluegrass, old time, Irish, jazz, and other music settings.
It is true that the popular style of music performed in the 1930s has faded
from popularity, but the banjo is very much still with us. Béla
Fleck and the Flecktones is a good example of the instrument's prominence,
as is Alison Krauss's band.
Louis Kaplan
Newton Centre, Massachusetts
Upon Further View
You almost have it right now with the comments of reader John Murphy
regarding the picture you have used of students returning from Symphony
Hall [Letters, November 1998]. It was the
practice in the '50s to, once a term, have a distinguished speaker address
the students at noontime. Attendance was mandatory, including the faculty,
who sat up on the stage with the speaker. When it was over, all the students
overran Huntington Avenue on their way back to campus. At one of the convocations
Dr. Ell introduced Senator Muskie, the speaker, as Senator Huskie! As the
faculty grew to be too large for the stage, we just sat in the audience.
With the retirement of Dr. Ell, the practice was discontinued.
Robert S. Lang
South Weymouth, Massachusetts
Lang is a professor emeritus of the College of Engineering.
Class Communiqué
Here's a report on a technique I found quite effective in dredging up
news of yesteryear's graduates. Other alumni might want to follow a similar
procedure. I know it works!
When I realized I'd lost contact with all my classmates, I turned to
N.U.'s Centennial Directory. There, I found addresses for about fifty 1939
graduates from the School of Engineering, and to those fellow graduates
I mailed notes that read: "Would you like to know what happened to
your classmates between 1939 and 1998? If you would, please send me a one-page
summary of what happened to you during that period. If I receive ten or
more replies, I will make copies and mail you a complete set."
Nineteen men responded to those notes, so now we know what twenty engineers
did during the past fifty-nine years. With war clouds on the horizon in
1939, most careers started in either the armed forces or the defense industries.
But five men elected to continue their education, earning advanced degrees
from Yale, Harvard, Lehigh, Fordham, and the Illinois Institute of Technology.
One of the five became a college professor, another studied law and still
practices with a major law firm, another became a senior v.p. of a leading
U.S. corporation and a lifetime trustee of N.U.
All twenty alumni had productive careers, some as engineers, some as
scientists, some as administrators, others as constructors or marketers
or entrepreneurs. Relatively mobile, they changed jobs five times on the
average. Some changed ten or more times, like the adventuresome chap who
wrote of one short period, "Traveled around the world a couple times,
then went to Greece for one year-back and forth to Saudi and Spain and
then to Iran. Three years in Iran and when the Shah was thrown out, home
and worked in maintenance-then off to Langdon, North Dakota, on a missile
site for a year."
At present, all surviving members of the class of 1939 are in their
eighties, and ninety percent of them are at least ninety percent retired.
They live where they want to live, in eleven different states. Including
Florida, of course.
M. O. Ricker, E'39
Hinsdale, Illinois
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Northeastern University Alumni Magazine, 360 Huntington Avenue, 598 CP, Boston,
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