I had followed the career of my friend Paul Pesthy over the years and when I passed some information on Paul (after he passed away last year), some of the old athletes of my era thought others might enjoy knowing that JC once had a true Olympic athlete and many times World champion attend JC back in 1961 and 1962. They asked that I draft up a quick article and pass it along your way, to be used as you may (or may not) see fit.

Earl Samuel
Class of 1965
27 Lehman Avenue
Dallas, PA 18612
570-674-3120

Back in 1961, I enrolled at Juniata College and joined the cross country team that fall as well. During this period of time, Juniata had a very successful cross country program and had been undefeated for seven years.
We went a week early to go to “training camp” on campus and began strenuous training for the fall campaign. Our captain was Bob Berthold ’64 and our coach was P.M. “Mike” Snyder, a long-time fixture in the athletic department at JC.

A week later, an older runner (older than the other guys on our team) showed up and asked to join the team. He was a young man in his mid-20’s by the name of Paul Pesthy and he had just moved here from Texas and was interested in running with our team.

Paul was a fairly good runner and became our #7 or #8 runner that year. He was muscular, athletic in general and had a foreign accent. He quickly became a favorite on our team, since he had been on a prior Olympic team and sported flashy official Olympic warm up gear. We were impressed!

His first meet with JC was at Elizabethtown, who had a good team that year also. Instead of our regular Juniata sweat gear, we asked Paul to wear his blue Olympic gear with the large Olympic emblem boldly printed across the front. The air quickly went out of our opponents that day when Paul led us out onto the field prior to the meet. Not only did E-town have to beat a great JC team that day, but JC somehow recruited an Olympic athlete to lead their team that year. The meet was won before it even started!

Paul Pesthy was married and lived with his wife in her grandfather’s home in downtown Huntingdon. They had little money and drove an old VW beetle. Paul had come to JC due to the free room and board he got via his wife’s family, but also because we were a cross country team that had a great reputation for developing fine runners over the years.

Paul was working on improving his talents for his specialty at the time … the Modern Pentathlon in the Olympics. The Pentathlon consisted of fencing (his best sport), horseback riding, swimming, shooting (rifle marksmanship), and running, which was his weakest event. Hence, his need to improve his running skills and the reason he came to Juniata.

We finished undefeated in 1961 again, then went into winter training for spring track and field.
Paul left Hungary in 1956 with his father, who was the Hungarian Olympic coach in fencing, and eventually came to America. A friend of Paul’s family was the Hungarian Olympic running coach, famed Mihaly Igloi, who developed some of the first sub 4 minute milers in the USA, such as Jim Beatty. With Paul’s help, and letter on training from Igloi, I was able to break the 2 mile college record that spring in track. In addition to his help training, I also learned a great deal about international competition from Paul.
After leaving Juniata in 1962, Paul attended Rutgers University and there he earned the title of National Collegiate Fencing (epee) Champion in 1965. However, Paul had much greater success on the international athletic scene. He won individual national championship titled in 1964, ’66, ’67, ’68 and 1983 (at age 43!), the most national fencing (epee) titles in history. He was a member of the U.S. Olympic Fencing Teams of 1968, ’76 and ’80, and a member of the U.S. Olympic modern Pentathlon team in 1964, winning an Olympic silver medal. In 1962 and ’63 Paul’s team also won World Championship bronze medals. Paul was one of the very few athletes in history to compete in two different sports at the Olympic level. In the Pan-American Games he won the gold medal in fencing in 1967 and 1975 and was elected to the United States Fencing Hall of Fame.

Paul earned his doctorate in Philosophy of Education and taught Kinesiology at San Antonio College in Texas for many years. He also had an illustrious coaching career for more than 32 years. Paul was the architect of a four-year period where the U.S. won World Championship gold medals in the Pentathlon from 1997 to 2000 and coached one of his athletes to winning a silver medal at the 2000 Olympics.
Sadly, Paul passed away at the age of 70 in October 2008. Paul told me many times over the years that Juniata played a key roll in his athletic development and the small town atmosphere with the excellent academics – as well as a great running team – had helped him set his life goals in the right direction. Even though JC only had Paul for just one brief year (1961-62), he nevertheless left a lasting impression upon some of Juniata’s finest athletes of that era and he went on to have success in Fencing and the Pentathlon, which led to national and worldwide recognition of this tremendous abilities and skill.

Thank you,

Earl Samuel
Class of 1965
Sports Hall of Fame Class of 1997

Bob had a deep passion for the living world and for the people who crossed his path. Though he was often “up to his (rear end) in alligators”, he never saw “draining the swamp” as the solution. It was far too much fun to jump into the murky water and wrestle the problem into submission. He once arrived in my office complaining that the custodial staff was not keeping the small, upstairs, animal room well cleaned. That there were about 30 live timber rattlesnakes housed in lightly covered aquaria in that room didn’t strike Bob as a deterrent to good housekeeping.

Central to Bob’s professional persona was the imperative to observe living forms in their natural haunts. To that end he organized and pursued a long list of “field based” laboratory trips for his students, experiences which I suspect may constitute, for a number of you reading this, your most fond memories of him. In short, if your topic was the “out-of-doors, it was highly probable that Bob had looked at it, collected a piece of it, scuba-dived to photograph it, flown over it, sent one of his dogs to fetch it, stayed up all night to think about it, thrown a net over it, stuffed it, swapped for it, tramped through it, hunted it, shared it with his students, or eaten and digested it.

The present Field Station facility and program is both a “monument” and a legacy that would not exist absent Bob’s original vision and his long, and often lonely, commitment in time, sweat and personal resource to set the College on the path to “field studies.” Though others now stand in his place, he was the initiator and catalyst that brought the Station to a viable place among Juniata College’s many resources.

Let me end with a quote that struck me, when first I read it many years ago, as the very essence of Bob.

From John Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez:
“We sat on a crate of oranges and thought what good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world – temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy. The true biologist deals with life, with teaming boisterous life, and learns something from it, learns that the first rule of life is living. Having certain tendencies, he must move along their lines to the limit of their potentialities. And we have known biologists who did proliferate in all directions.”

Robert Lynn Fisher was my good friend and colleague for more than 45 years.

Ken Rockwell ’57, professor emeritus of biology

Peter Marzio ’65

Director of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts

Peter Marzio died Dec. 16 after a battle with cancer. He led the Houston Museum of Fine Arts since 1982.

During his time there, the museum’s attendance increased from 300,000 to 1.6 million and the museum’s endowment grew from $5 million to $1.1 billion. The museum’s budget increased from $5 million to $52 million and the museum’s permanent collection has nearly tripled to 57,000 works of art.

He earned a bachelor’s degree from Juniata in 1965. He received a master’s degree in 1966 and a doctoral degree in 1969 from the University of Chicago.

At the University of Chicago, Marzio served as research assistant to Professor Daniel J. Boorstin, working on “The Americans: The Democratic Experience,” which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

Marzio, a native of Governor’s Island in New York City, moved into his museum career in 1969 when he became curator of prints and chair of the Department of Cultural History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of History and Technology. In 1978, he became director and chief executive officer of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. During his time in Washington, he also taught as an associate professor of art history at the University of Maryland from 1967 to 1977.

He wrote extensively about art and history. His most recent book is “A Permanent Legacy: 150 Works from the Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts,” published in 1989. He was editor and a contributor to the Smithsonian’s Bicentennial book “Nation of Nations” and wrote two acclaimed histories of American drawing and lithography, “Art Crusade” (1776) and The Democratic Art” (1979). He also wrote “Rube Goldberg: His Life and Work” in 1973.

Remembrances

(Peter) and I have been casually promising to get together for years, and if my travels had ever taken me to Houston I was actually planning to do it. No hurry though, because we’re all immortal. Life teaches us differently every day of the world, but it’s still a tough lesson to grasp. He was a terrific guy, and almost the perfect Juniata story.

Bruce Davis ’65, director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Pete graduated two years before I came to Juniata, but Steve Barbash was SO proud of his accomplishments as a student that he spoke with great admiration of his climb to direct one of the excellent art museums in the country. Pete’s commitment to furthering the arts was exemplary; he had great social skills, and was a superb fund-raiser. I hope he had a whole passel of understudies. Such champions of the arts are much needed and always will be.

Jack Troy, Professor Emeritus of Art

Editor’s Note: This story covered Juniata’s historic first national championship and also documents Erin Dodson’s role in inspiring her teammates. Erin passed away May 1, 2011.

“No Woman Left Behind”

As typical, Santa showed up for his first visit of the season to Rochester, Minnesota, the day after Thanksgiving, 2004. He also stopped in at the Mayo Civic
Auditorium bringing hearty good luck wishes to the teams playing in the Division III NCAA Women’s Volleyball Final Four Championships. That’s when the miracles on Civic Center Drive started to happen.
Washington University, St. Louis, Mo., (enrollment 10, 500) Bears fans donned their red and white school colors and wore tee shirts that read “Wash, Rinse, Repeat.” They were looking for a second straight national title.

Dressed in black and white, a smaller, but stylishly urban chic New York University (enrollment 52,000) Violets fan club, screamed, “nyU, nyU, nyU, nyU,” hoping the mantra would get them one better than last year. They had lost to Wash U in the 2003 finals.

A small group of fans from ULV, that’s the University of La Verne, (enrollment 1, 600) La Verne, California, looked, well, cold, as temperatures dropped into the teens in southern Minnesota. Last year the Leopards had hosted a “warmer” national finals and came out with a third place finish. They hoped to do two better this year and also to see the Mall of America.

The parents of the Juniata Eagles (enrollment 1,400) chartered a bus from Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, and drove for hours on a quest toward an allusive first time national title. Last year, NYU kept them from the final four, but in total they have made 24 NCAA playoff games and 19 final four appearances. Their coach of 24 years, Larry Bock, has the top winning percentage of any coach in any division of women’s volleyball and over 1,000 wins. The Eagle fans, decked out in blue and gold Juniata paraphernalia, are used to being confused with the Hispanic name Juanita. But this time a Minnesotan with a Norwegian brogue asked one parent, “Is that pronounced Juniata or Hoon – i – ata?” Juniata is actually named for the trout filled river that winds through central Pennsylvania.

In the first semi final game, Wash U defeated LaVerne 3-0, setting them up for a repeat championship.

During warm ups before the second game, Juniata fans rose to their feet lifting cheers and pom poms to the floor below. The Most Valuable Player for Juniata entered the court and the miracle began.

Erin Dodson, freshman outside hitter, had left the hospital for the first time in two months to drive to Minnesota for the Final Four. From her wheelchair, supported by her mom and sisters, she gave a victory sign to the Juniata crowd. She removed her hat waving it in the air showing that 31 chemotherapy and radiation treatments had taken her hair but not her spirit. In early September, Erin had complained of severe headaches. The doctor delivered the bad news that a golf ball size malignant brain tumor was causing internal hemorrhaging. They performed emergency surgery.

The team had visited Erin twice in Eastern Pennsylvania and Coach Bock as often as he could, shaving his head in a show of solidarity. Erin’s fighting spirit carried over to the Eagles who were bound and determined to show their warrior instinct and win a national title for Erin.

Coach Bock’s philosophy, like most coaches in any sport, has always been about teamwork, the “one for all” mentality. Players readily admit that there’s not one girl on the team who plays for herself. But Erin’s presence added the complete equation, “all for one.” For the Eagles, it was like the Marines,“no (wo)man left behind.” And the formula worked in the first game as Juniata downed NYU 3-0.

This set up the final showdown between Wash U and Juniata. Just like the night before, when Juniata players took the floor, Erin was there. Her teammates gathered around giving high fives. As players were introduced, a teammate wheeled Erin onto the court as the announcer read,” Erin Dodson, outsider hitter from Altoona, Pa.” Cheers and tears from Eagles fans. She took her place to behind the bench, clutching a teddy bear ready to cheer on her girls.

And the miracle continued.

Fans held up cell phones in the air playing the last minutes of the game for former players listening at home. Others from across the nation sweat bullets as they listened to the final minutes on the Juniata website. The “all for one” formula worked again as the senior outside hitter put down the final ball to win one for Erin, for her coach, and for all the players who had gone before her in three games. Larry Bock and the Juniata Eagles had their first national title.

Players scampered forward to claim their championship rings, hugging the NCAA official. Two players wheeled Erin to receive her ring. Wash U coaches hugged Juniata coaches. Wash U fans congratulated Juniata fans. The Eagles whipped out cell phones and the echoes of “We won,” bounced off the walls of the Civic Center. Coach Bock and his daughter, a former Juniata player, locked in embrace. Juniata president Tom Kepple and his wife Pat, two vocal and faithful volleyball fans, wiped their brows in relief. A national championship trophy would take its place along side the 18 others in the field house display case. An exhausted. Erin, her mom and sisters left the arena.

In the southeastern corner of Minnesota, a small school in front of a small group of fans had just done something very big. They had stayed for the lesson for 24 years –assuring Erin and all former players that this win was for all of them. No woman would be left behind.

- By Merrie Sue Holtan

** Johanna Holtan played for the Juniata volleyball team for four years and attended three final four championships.

The virtue of parents is in itself a great legacy. – Italian Proverb