La Salle University La Salle University Digital Commons La Salle Magazine University Publications Summer 1982 La Salle Magazine Summer 1982 La Salle University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/lasalle_magazine Recommended Citation La Salle University, "La Salle Magazine Summer 1982" (1982). La Salle Magazine. 103. https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/lasalle_magazine/103 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the University Publications at La Salle University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in La Salle Magazine by an authorized administrator of La Salle University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Summer 1982 A QUARTERLY LA SALLE COLLEGE MAGAZINE CAM PAIG N FOR THE 80's Robert S. Lyons, Jr., '61, Editor Volume 26 Summer, 1982 Number 3 James J. McDonald, '58, Alumni Director Mary Beth Bryers, '76, Editor, Class Notes ALUMNI ASSOCIATION OFFICERS John J. Fallon, '67, President Philip E. Hughes, Jr., Esq., '71, Executive V.P. Donald Rongione, '79, Vice President A QUARTERLY LA SALLE COLLEGE MAGAZINE Anthony W. Martin, '74, Secretary Paul J. Kelly, '78, Treasurer (USPS 299-940) Contents 1 A NIGHT TO REMEMBER Charles Fuller and the late Dan Rodden take center stage as Music Theatre celebrates its 20th season of song. 5 THE DEVELOPMENT REPORT For the fourth consecutive year, La Salle’s many benefactors contributed a record level of support to the college. President’s Message, Page 6 16 THE NEW DORMITORY A progress report on the college’s $6.6 million dormitory and cafeteria project. 30 AROUND CAMPUS La Salle’s commencement, Holroyd Lecture, and athletic activity highlighted campus events this spring. 35 ALUMNI NEWS Holroyd Lecture, Page 30 A chronicle of some significant events in the lives of the college’s alumni plus a new feature, “Alumni Association News.” Alumni Reunions, Page 36 CREDITS— Cover photograph by Lewis Tanner; pages 2-3 (upper), Charles F. Sibre; 2-3 (lower), Karl B. Wrightman; 7, 39 (center), Bachrach Photographers; all others by Tanner. La Salle Magazine is published quarterly by La Salle College, Philadelphia, Penna. 19141, tor the alumni, students, faculty and friends of the college. Editorial and business offices located at the News Bureau, La Salle College, Philadelphia, Penna. 19141. Second class postage paid at Philadelphia, Penna. Changes of address should be sent at least 30 days prior to publication of the issue with which it is to take effect, to the Alumni Office, La Salle College, Philadelphia, Penna. 19141. Member of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). Music Theatre's 20th Anniversary A Night To Remember For a Pulitzer Prize Winner and a Beloved Founder Brother President Patrick Ellis dedicates the Dan Rodden Theatre with the Rev. Gilbert V. Hartke (center) and Claude F. Koch, '40. L a Salle Music theater began its 20th anniversary cele­ Rodden, a long-time professor of English at La Salle bration on July 6, with special ceremonies prior to its who died in 1978, was widely-known and respected in opening night performance of GYPSY when Pulitzer Prize­ theatrical circles as an actor, director, and producer. winning playwright Charles H. Fuller, Jr., was awarded an Founded in 1962, La Salle’s Music Theatre remains today honorary degree and the College Union Theatre was re­ the nation’s only college-sponsored professional summer named in honor of Music Theatre Founder Dan Rodden, music theatre. ’41. Brother Emery C. Mollenhauer, F.S.C., Ph.D., the col­ Fuller, who attended La Salle College’s Evening lege’s provost, sponsored Fuller. ‘‘We admired Charles as Division, received an honorary doctor of fine arts degree a person, not a playwright, when he was a student here,” from La Salle College President Brother Patrick Ellis, said Brother Mollenhauer as he presented Fuller for his F.S.C., Ph.D. He was awarded the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for degree, “ because he so typified what the Evening Division drama for his critically-acclaimed Off-Broadway prod­ stands for. He came to La Salle after his army service for uction, “A Soldier’s Play.” a second chance at an education. He was older, wiser, La Salle, Summer 1982 1 20th— continued married, and a father anxious to make a better life for his family. In other words, he was a fairly representative Evening Division student— except for one thing. He was ON THE OCCASION OF beginning to write plays. “ I would like to say they were good plays, but honesty compels me to report that they have been recently de­ scribed by their creator at ‘best forgotten.’ An artist learns from experimenting, however, and Charles kept writing while working as a city housing inspector in the day and attending classes at night. “A writer must be an observer and a reader, and Charles was getting plenty of opportunity to study people in the daytime and literature at night. To put it another way, he was learning his subject by day and his method by night. He recently acknowledged as much in a gracious note to one of his professors in which he said, ‘I hope everyone in the English department is well and still pushing story and craft. I know that when I left La Salle I was carrying both of them— and when I arrived I was empty-handed.’ “ Charles saw his early efforts at story and craft bear fruit in a production of The Perfect Party’ at McCarter Theater in Princeton and later in an Off-Broadway theatre. Al­ though he himself now describes it as ‘one of the world’s worst interracial plays,’ it was good enough to win critical praise and launch his career as a promising playwright. He and the Negro Ensemble Company joined forces in 1974 and worked and matured together until ‘A Soldier’s Play’ became that rare and wondrous event— the Hit Play. It was the 15th anniversary of the Negro Ensemble and the twenty first play Charles Fuller had written. “ Far from being an overnight success, then, he has earned the rewards of the past fourteen years as a struggling playwright. He has shown he has what it takes to be a writer— the discipline to keep writing. We at La Salle can take pride in having played a small part in the making of an artist. “ Charles has honored us by his association with La Salle and we now take the opportunity this evening to pay tribute to him as a man of La Salle, a man of Phildelphia, and a man of the theater. “ I am especially thrilled tonight to have the opportunity of honoring a former La Salle student who has brought To remember Dan Rodden honorably is to see him distinction to this College by achieving the highest literary warts and all. He deserved no less of us. recognition,” said Brother President Ellis. Inscribed over the interior of the North Door of St. Paul’s “ In honoring Charles Fuller the playwright, La Salle is Cathedral in London is the tribute to Sir Christopher Wren: but one voice in a chorus of praise. But in honoring Si monumentum requiris, circumspice (“ If you would see Charles Fuller the man, who grew up in the Catholic the man’s monument, look around” ). Dan would not object schools of Philadelphia, we have reasons for feeling a at all to that allusion at this moment— the comparison it special pride and kinship. Not only have you practiced the implies. “ Rodden and Wren” — and Dan with top billing. He objectives of this college in providing the ‘informed service never suffered the inhibitions of modesty. I can hear him and progressive leadership' we envision in our college say: “Well, it isn’t exactly inappropriate, Claude.” catalog, but you have also grown in maturity in all human Some of us loved him, warts and all. But perhaps we did relationships. You have honored those of us who were not realize it until he had died, taking with him that your teachers because you have honored your father and capacious and often cruel wit that not a single one who mother, and been a caring husband and father. knew him for any length of time failed to delight in. And to “ ‘My soul has grown deep like rivers,’ wrote the poet suffer from— for Dan required admirers, not friends. One Langston Hughes, and you have shown this growth in your thinks of Evelyn Waugh. life as well as in your development as a playwright. I hope he is mocking me at this moment. I want to hear “ It gives me the greatest pleasure to complete the him pontificate in his thunderingly superior manner: "I told journey you began in the Evening Division many years ago 2 THE DEDICATION OF THE DAN RODDEN THEATRE (Remarks by Claude F. Koch, Professor, English and Communication Arts) Clockwise from top left: Dan Rodden backstage after a 1970 Music Theatre performance of Bitter Sweet with Peggy Wood; with radio-television personalities Joe McCauley and Ed McMahon during a 1967 testimonial dinner in his honor; a 1972 performance of the American premiere of Ambassador; scenes from first two Music Theatre productions, Carousel and Annie Get Your Gun. you that.” Because I find in the precision of the Oxford came to him and whose talent for various aspects of the English Dictionary the term that identifies him. It is genius theatrical art he sensed unerringly, he drove them to — not simply in the sense of a titulary spirit of this place (he surpass themselves, to do unexpected and beautiful things is indeed that), but as one having instinctive and ex­ with and on this stage.