When the intrepid librarians ventured into the attic of the original building on campus, Hayfield House, this past summer to rescue and make sense of the campus’s history, they recovered A LOT of photographs. Great photographs, spanning the history of the campus from Coughlin High School down in Wilkes-Barre to the completion of the Academic Commons building on their current campus in Lehman, PA.
With old photographs we naturally lock on to the ones of the places we know, the locations we work in the walk through every day.
We wanted to share these photos. We approached Dr. David Chin of our English faculty and his English 50 Creative Writing class and proposed a contest to them. Choose from scanned copies of some of the photographs of the campus, and take “then and now” photographs with them. Use the new photos to write a poem about this experience. Simple enough. Seventeen students went out with photographs and captured the changes in the campus. Of those we choose three for having the best photos and poems.
Step forward to your future
Your foothold is strong
Cherish your time here
It doesn’t last long
100 years of Lion Pride
Increases as times pass
Lehman may be small in size
But the reach you gain is vast
Many have been here
Many more to come
Pathways split at the end
But remember where they’re from
100 years gone by
Step back into the past
Look around
Memories made to last
The staircase looms large in the history of the campus. It’s hard to miss as you pass through the hall in Hayfield House between the grand entrance and the rest of the rooms on the first floor of the east wing. Its “Do NOT USE this Stairwell” sign adds to the allure to walk up this unsupported floating masterpiece, similar in elegance to the one at Winterthur. Almost any formal dinner or award presentation in Hayfield features the participants in a formal photo in front of the stairs. The staircase is also featured in many myths about the house; that it came from a Venetian castle, that only John and Bertha Conyngham were allowed to use it. This prominence is what drew Caitlyn Traver, a senior and an English major, to the photograph. She has always admired it as she passes and posed by it.
Taking then and now photographs is not as easy as it seem. After failed attempts to hold the old photo in place while she snapped the new one, Caitlyn had her friend Michelle hold the picture while snapping the photo.
Her poem provides excellent illusions to the split between old and new in the photo she took.
She talks about stepping forward into life after PSU and back into the past that extended not just to her freshmen year, but back to the Conynghams. The split in the stair case between the new and the old photo and her line “Pathways split at the end/But remember where they’re from” is a reminder to the reader to keep a foot in both images when looking at the campus around them.
Caitlyn uses both her photo and her poem to illuminate how something we think of as being of our time does in fact had a past life in a very different time. It is of and not of our world all at the same time. Like the staircase, Penn States influence reaches through time for its graduates. Lion Pride remains.
axl17 says
Great job, Caitlyn !!
gas23 says
This is Wonderful Caitlyn! Great job! I love your poem and the photo chosen.
Gail Stevens