A Lifetime of Achievements

Husband and wife. Political scientist and sociologist. Teachers both—at Penn State Altoona. While Lou and Anna Leopold worked in different fields, they shared many interests that came together in retirement.

Lou had a vast and varied career before, during, and after his time teaching at Penn State Altoona (1963–85). After earning a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and serving in World War II, followed by graduate work at the University of Chicago, the School for Asian Studies in New York, and The Hague Academy of International Law in the Netherlands, Lou became a real estate and insurance broker. His interest in government and politics found an outlet when he began teaching political science at Penn State Altoona; former students, such as two who became Penn State Alumni Fellows (articles here and here) and one who was elected as the youngest ever member of the Pennsylvania Legislature, credit Leopold as a significant influence. Lou himself served as a National Convention delegate in 1976, worked on many committees, and was elected, volunteered, or appointed to serve the community and the country throughout his life.

Anna, a sociologist, received her MA and PhB at the University of Chicago, and taught at Penn State Altoona from 1957 to 1968. Her research was focused on subjects near to her hometown heart—industrial-community relations, unionism in a railroad town, and modern community trends. During the course of her career Anna continued to write or act as editor for numerous publications. She also cowrote (with her husband) a book titled Remembering Linds Crossing: Charles Lind’s “Summer Home Farm,” about Lind’s Crossing, a place on the Pennsylvania Railroad line between Petersburg, Huntingdon County, and Hollidaysburg, Blair County.

Lou and Anna shared a love of photography throughout much of their lives, participating as members of the Altoona-Blair County Photo Society, exhibiting their work and winning awards, but retirement gave them the opportunity to further their writing and photography by doing volunteer work for the Southwestern Pennsylvania Heritage Preservation Commission, part of the US Department of Interior. Between 1985 and 2006 the Leopolds wrote and photographed for more than forty articles for Westsylvania magazine, which focused on the history and heritage of western Pennsylvania.

Both Lou and Anna Leopold have made significant contributions to the preservation of Western Pennsylvania’s industrial heritage. Lou passed away in 2009 but we are fortunate to have access to some of his work. Nineteen of his photographs appear on the Photographic Society of America’s website. And while Anna and Lou coauthored the Westsylvania articles, at one point Lou wrote an essay about what he wanted to accomplish in retirement and a reminiscence of his undergraduate days at the University of Pennsylvania (see below). The essay illustrates his enthusiasm for education and his passion for learning new things, whether it was tackling new technology or working to preserve history.

—Therese Boyd, ’79

Keeping Active in Retirement

Lou Leopold

With the baby boomer generation now looking ahead to their retirement years, some events in the lives of their World War II predecessors may point up some options from their undergraduate learning, explorations, and experiences open to them in their planning for the coming years. The increase in life expectancy means that many future retirees will have real opportunities to meet fun challenges and accomplish really worthwhile goals.

            Twenty years ago, as I was planning ahead to a 1985 retirement, I started with a list of what I wanted to stop doing:

Cyprus and Eastern Mediterranean-Middle East International Security

Intercontinental flights with 36 hours from check-out to check-in, as Moscow or Brazil to New York

Pennsylvania politics

Real estate transactions

University bureaucracy

Each of these had been part of my working life, and, while I enjoyed some of them at the time, I had no desire to continue them.

There was another list in the back of my mind, less definite and not yet well formed, that I wished to spend more time doing:

Photography

Leisurely travel

General studies—the “stories” of our industrial heritage and American civilization (though I had no idea how)

Recreational reading, especially fiction

Many of these had their roots in my undergraduate days at Penn.

General American Studies

Starting freshman classes in October 1940 in Wharton, those of us who joined the brand-new Naval Reserve Officers Training program and received our BS in economics degrees and ensign USNR commissions in October 1943 might not seem to have much time for extra choices and activities, but beyond our “must-take” Navy courses and drills, and a wartime-reduced or waived group of Wharton requirements, our real challenge was to find courses that could be plugged in around must-takes to get enough courses to graduate, in three years and a summer session, while taking advantage of what else was going on around us.

Of the academic courses that helped prepare me for my retirement “things to do” in industrial heritage and American civilization, it was Dr. Shryock who focused on how people worked and lived. His History 70C (American Social and Cultural History), given late in the afternoon, mostly for an enthralled group of schoolteachers, and History 173 (American Cultural History to 1865) unfolded a new way of telling the stories of time and place. He brought us the Dr. Rushes of this world and showed us that the understanding of what was going on in history was more than top politicians and wars. This was a radical and delightful new approach then. It is at the heart of today’s heritage studies.

Sculley Bradley’s course on the American novel was American studies before the term was invented, not just an English novel study applied to those who lived here.

The grand old Frank Furness Library made railroad-towners from Altoona really at home, with its feel of the Pennsylvania Railroad. It was a delight for finding new and unusual stories as a break from exam study. There I discovered the Hakluyt Society’s publications, including the story of Sir Anthony Sherley and brothers. Sir Anthony wrote of his great adventures as ambassador from Persia to Europe in the days of Elizabeth I.

It was only in retirement that I realized that his nephew was an early colonial ancestor of mine, arriving on the Ark and the Dove. Perhaps it was the Shirley pattern of providing the last peer of the realm to be hung in Britain, and the first Blair Countian to be hung here in Hollidaysburg, that quieted family bragging. My cousins, heavily into such things, claimed for years that it was a McGraw that came with Lord Baltimore. My grandfather kept quiet about the Shirley side, because it proved that he was part English, and he was too much an Irish activist to admit that. In 1996 as part of Blair County’s 150th birthday celebration, the Shirley trial was reenacted, without the hanging.

Photography

My first serious photo interest came with the brand-new Argus C3 35mm “candid camera” that introduced me to how to use images to tell stories of what was really happening in a rapidly changing world. Life and Look magazines were pointing the way.

My 1941 photo of Franklin Field illustrates that year’s arrival of television coverage of Penn home games, which were telecast to an elite audience of state-of-the-art viewers. At the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair television was an exhibition. Here it was in actual use. Never mind that the sexist PA system chimed in with “Women of Penn are getting better and better, but give us the girl in the yellow sweater.” With that the TV cameras indeed swung their lens in her direction. Neither they nor my C3 had color film yet. From Penn days on, I learned to use cameras to tell stories for fun, teaching, and storytelling.

Professor Dorezas in our economic and political geography courses was even more famous for demonstrating how photo images could get class attention and encourage learning. Dr. Mike’s apartment was next to my freshman dorm room, and since he had Olympic gold medals in wrestling and was a Penn football great he had no trouble maintaining dorm order.

While at Penn we heard the stories of ENIAC—the computer. A naval officer assigned to train our NROTC on electrical was on dual duty, so at least the concept was familiar early—something that was to really enrich research, writing, and contemporary photography.

Travel and Heritage

As part of updating material for a Political Science Comparative Government–Western Europe course in 1978, I refocused on how government and politics was totally changed with the coming of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, and raising the question of what changes would arise from the deindustrialization then very apparent in England. My wife, Anna, an industrial sociologist, joined me there with our cameras and recorder, for three weeks in the rain, with cameras in plastic bags.

We found many of the pioneer industrial sites still intact, with planners and government agencies attempting to use heritage museum efforts to provide jobs and restore sagging morale. There was a wonderful mix of canal, railroad, factory, and town sites, complete with locals in grand eighteenth-century surroundings. One resident of the English midlands told us he hoped we would find a nicer place to go for our next holiday. The Ironbridge-Coalbrookdale area was busy preserving its 200-year-old bridge, pioneer coke-fired blast furnace, Coalport potteries, and early steam engines, while trying to save some of its remaining industrial jobs. We got to meet with some of the industrial heritage pioneers and appreciate their challenges.

In the 1980s we visited New England heritage sites—Slater’s Mill, Lowell, the Blackstone Valley; explored possible living sites in Florida; visited family in California; and took in one more international exposition in Vancouver in 1986. But the call to relocate never really came. For both of us, roots run deep in central Pennsylvania. We decided to stay here.

What did we want to do in retirement? Guided a bit by the casual list of things we wanted to continue, we had already begun the leisurely travel in pursuit of industrial heritage. But if we had made one of those five-year career plans so encouraged in academe, we could not have planned the details of what followed. They were serendipity in its purest form.

The Heritage Project

Local friends had gotten us interested in upgrading the Horseshoe Curve site on the railroad main line near Altoona, and a collection of historic railroad photographs by the Philadelphia photographer William Rau was attracting national attention. They had come to the Altoona Area Public Library when the Pennsy folded, and had rested on a table in their Pennsylvania Room for years, admired by some of us, but quietly. Then they were discovered.

An exhibition of Rau photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called attention to his work. All of a sudden collectors were bidding for them. Some of us thought that they should stay in central Pennsylvania. We went to a public hearing called by Randy Cooley, who headed an effort to find out if there were attractions in southwestern Pennsylvania that could do what we had seen at Ironbridge—harnessing and conserving heritage sites to create cultural tourism and jobs today using partnerships among federal, state, local and private groups. We asked Randy for his help in keeping the Rau photographs. He asked us to volunteer for his project, which was initiated by Congressman John Murtha. He did. We did, and it has been a full-time enthusiasm of ours ever since.

The project was formalized by Congress in the Southwestern Pennsylvania Heritage Preservation Commission, informally known in the early years as America’s Industrial Heritage Project, and now simply called “Westsylvania.” . . . The full story of our experiences in the project would take a book. Here, we’ll just show a few snapshots:

Item: At a time when silver prices were high, we sold the family sterling and bought our first computer, and learned Pagemaker and Photoshop. Though we had used mainframes in teaching, this was our introduction to PCs. At a time when friends were boasting that they knew nothing about computers, it got us out of that rut. We’ve never been sorry.

Item: In the early years of the effort, there was a lot of basic research to be done. We got to work on committees and blue-ribbon panels with bright, young graduate students and young scholars from all over the country. Thirty or more books resulted—inventories of engineering and industrial sites in nine Pennsylvania counties, stories of canal towns, refractory sites, coal patches, rail and steel towns. The social and industrial history of southwestern Pennsylvania is there for the reading.

Item: We cochaired the task force for a companion effort, the Allegheny Ridge State Heritage Park, now the Allegheny Ridge Heritage Area. It started life as JAWS, for Johnstown, Altoona, and Windber, but soon took on the theme of the mountains that had been such a challenge to the move west. Governor Casey named it a park in 1992. It has been working for twelve years, and it has been rewarding to see the attractions along the ridge develop. Something we didn’t foresee in the beginning was the primary role that trails would play in Ridge efforts. The Millennium Legacy Trail,   for example, will follow the path of the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg.

Item: We found ourselves in an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working on the Plan for the Allegheny Ridge, using state-of-the art 1992 graphic techniques, which have now become commonplace. When published, the report was in great demand, and is now hard to find.

Item: Some of the William Rau railroad photographs are still in central Pennsylvania, under the stewardship of the Altoona Area Public Library and the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, and are exhibited periodically in their own gallery at SAMA-Altoona. But this took a lot of effort on the part of many people over long years, and was expensive.

Item: In 1997 Westsylvania, a heritage/lifestyle magazine to tell the stories of the area, was born. To date we have written and photographed three dozen articles for it, under the heading of “Wayfinders.” It’s our job to find interesting places in the region, tell people how to get there, and what they will find when they arrive. This summer we spent a lot of time down on the Lincoln Highway, Route 30, through Jennerstown, Stoystown, Bedford, Everett, and McConnellsburg. It was our first coast-to-coast highway, and the Lincoln Highway Heritage Corridor is calling attention to it with murals; a “gas pump parade,” decorated by Pennsylvania artists; Picture-Yourself-on-the-Lincoln spots; informational panels, some with audio and music; and other attractions. This will make two articles.

We knew in general what we wanted to do in retirement. We could not have planned how to carry it out. What are the chances that the frontier of our industrial heritage interest will take place in our very own neighborhood? We’ve been busy for almost twenty years with everything we thought we’d like to do, except the recreational reading. So far there hasn’t been time for that—maybe when we really retire!