Our family had to run an errand lastnight and cut through BV, and we had to take at least 3 detours for downed trees and power lines.  I have never seen so many firetrucks and police cars in one place.  It was so strange. 

When I got to work this morning, I could see that campus did not seem to be affected.  MSD is closer to the NW part of the city, which seemed to come off relatively unscathed (I live about 3 miles away and all we got was a sprinkle, compared to the hail and wind the rest of the city took). 

Many Deacs live in Ardmore and BV, so please send some positive thoughts their way that they are OK.  

Go Deacs!

Beyond just his athletic and academic prowess, he was known as being one of the good guys.  Polite.  Respectful.  Ambitious in the best of ways.

After Wake Forest, he went on to play ball with the Chicago Bulls and even was on one of their championship teams.  And then he found his way back home to NC and has been at Forsyth Country Day as the athletic director there.  During his tenure, he has instituted a pro-am summer basketball league that is quickly becoming the talk of the town.  

Here is a bit from the W-S Journal about Rusty and the league.  Enjoy!

“Rusty LaRue’s eyes always light up when word comes that Chris Paul is in town and wants to drive out to Forsyth Country Day School and play basketball.

LaRue’s Triad Pro-Am Summer League, in its fourth year, is the best summer-basketball league in the area. And when CP3 makes a guest appearance, it’s doubly good.

That was the case Monday night when Paul showed up and played with FCD players against a team that included Wake Forest’s L.D. Williams and Al-Farouq Aminu. That could be the case again Thursday night if Paul wants to get in one more summer-league game before heading off to train with the U.S. Olympics team in preparation for its trip to Beijing.

Twelve teams play in the Pro-Am, with games on Mondays and Thursdays.”

The rest of the article is worth your time.  Here’s the link:  http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2008/jul/16/larues-league-is-a-good-thing-for-deacs/ 

And so the question:  what is being filmed?  Is it a movie?  Rampant rumors that a Jon Abbate movie is being made on campus right now.  Some think it might be a video to advertise one of the summer camps that is being held on campus.  I have checked with a couple people here and I can not substantiate anything yet.  If you have the inside scoop, please comment and tell me.

—————

Edited to add:  today’s gold star goes to blog reader David, who had the answer about the movie being filmed:

There is a movie being made for the big screen called the Fifth Quarter - The Luke and Jon Abbate Story.   Its the story of Luke’s death and the inspiration for Jon taking the #5 to honor his brother and how the Wake Forest team rallies around this tragic event to have the best season in school history and win the ACC championship! It is a great story and is being filmed in part in Winston-Salem - due out in theaters March of next year.

David, to quote Stephen Colbert and The Colbert Report, you are one of the “heroes” out there : )  Thanks for the scoop!

——–

Edited to add:  I just received some additional scoop.  Evidently there is going to be an Abbate movie filmed, but it looks like it will start in late fall.   What I am told is going on today is the following:

Worldview, the organization that has a camp going on this week here. A video production crew is working on a promotional video for Worldview, which has been bringing campers here for many years.

Thanks to Kevin (also a hero) for the update - and David, it seems like the Abbate movie is going to be filmed here, just later this fall.  They are finalizing the releases now for film rights.  (You are still a hero too!)

I sheepishly confess that every time I get a note from Ed - always handwritten, always generous and kind and encouraging - I save it.  One of the greatest joys of my job is that I get to work with him from time to time.  We had some joint projects this past year - mostly for the financial aid initiative that he and Mr. Palmer are championing.   And so now I have another little note to remind me of this very special gentleman and scholar.  It has made today a good day.

There was a lot of activity on the Quad yesterday.  Lots of teens playing frisbee and running barefoot on the Quad grass.  I think they were the students from the international program - seems to me that when I walked to my car yesterday, I heard people speaking English with distinctly non-American accents.  I hope that some of them find their way here permanently as students. 

It is a beautiful day in the forest of Wake, as Skip Prosser would have said.  Speaking of, there has been a bit of momentum toward rolling the Quad at midnight on July 26th, in honor of our Skip, who used to say to students after games “See you on the Quad at midnight!” when they’d all roll the Quad.  I think it would be a wonderful tribute to a man that we still very much mourn and miss. 

There is other news to share on campus.  Yesterday I was at a departmental staff meeting and Martha Allman, Director of Admissions, was there.  She talked about plans - a couple of years down the line most likely - to build a new admissions building.  I did not realize this before Martha told us, but they had 13,000 students visit last year.  That number is just students - not including their parents, siblings, or great Aunt Minnie who came along for the ride.  So the admissions house is seeing an awful lot of traffic and from plumbing to parking could use an upgrade.  Makes sense to me.

The house - named Starling Hall after the late great Bill Starling, our much beloved Dean of Admissions who died suddenly (at the Alumni Admissions Forum, which I was running - the worst day of my professional life) - is a major piece of WFU history.  Until 1989 it had been the president’s home.   Some of you perhaps don’t know this, but after Bill died, Martha chose not to use his office.  She made it into a conference room or a place where you could hold admissions interviews.  It is a big beautiful room, paneled walls, tons of bookshelves.  When Bill was alive, his office was notoriously messy - one story goes that when admissions was still located in Reynolda Hall, someone reported that his office had been broken into and the campus police called him to come in and survey the ransacking that the burglars had done to it - and in reality it was just as Bill had left it - stacks of paper everywhere, piles, ashtrays, you name it.  Martha told us yesterday that finally she has moved into Bill’s office.  Because of expansion of their staff over the years, her old office is now housing 4 people. 

Since I am reminiscing about people who have since passed on, I can tell you something I learned at the Summer Leadership Conference this past weekend.  Our great Trustee Al Hunt was doing a session on presidential politics, and to introduce him, there was a video montage of some of his more memorable TV moments.  The final clip was of him at Tim Russert’s memorial service. 

When the clips ended and Al Hunt took to the podium, the first thing he talked about was Tim.  He said that Tim was a real Wake Forester - that he was a sports fan and would always call Al whenever WF won a big game - and would not ever call when we lost…until Luke Russert started at Boston College, then all bets were off if BC beat us : )   Then Al Hunt disclosed that part of Tim Russert’s Wake Forest connection was that he had been scheduled to be the commencement speaker for 2009.  You could have heard a pin drop.  It was just so sad.

————

Edited to add:  There was a great story in the W-S Journal yesterday about our alumnus and friend Jamie Dean, who graduated in ‘05 I believe and is finishing his JD/MBA here.  He is a rower (and actually rowed with my niece, an ‘05 grad) and will compete in the Paralympics in Beijing I think.  Jamie is the real deal.  Wonderful and gifted human being.  (Side note about Jamie, I was in love with his old guide dog, Paul.  Paul was this fabulous yellow lab - who had broken a tooth and actually had a big silver tooth in its place.  He was a great dog.  I should have offered to keep him after he got too old to guide - I would have loved it.  Jamie, if you read this, put me on the list as a caretaker for your new dog!)  http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2008/jul/14/from-carolina-to-china-blind-wake-forest-student-t/

The conference was fantastic.  We had about 300 people total (including spouses) join us for a weekend of information and updates on Wake Forest.  Select highlights:

Martha Allman gave a really stirring presentation on the SAT optional decision and why this is the right move for Wake Forest.  I will not do it justice here, but I may try to get her to let me have the text to post later.

Deans Morant (Law) and Reinemund (Business) had a conversation about their backgrounds, philosophy, and more as part of our meeting.  It gave a lot of insight into what makes these two leaders tick and what they feel their roles are in educating attorneys and businesspeople, respectively.

We had a program on Saturday with Al Hunt, our Trustee and famed political journalist.  He gave a very candid insider’s perspective on the election this fall (he thinks that all signs point to Obama winning, unless there is a major incident).  Mr. Hunt was just as I remembered him - brilliant and charming and funny and self-effacing and genuine.  One of the biggest thrills of my weekend was to get introduced to him again, because I am an admitted political junkie, grew up in the same neck of the woods as he did.  And in my book, anyone who is that smart and that good to Wake Forest is someone I want to have the privilege of knowing. 

What most people will talk about from the weekend was the banquet program, featuring two other iconic Wake Foresters:  Ed Wilson and Arnold Palmer, who were interviewed by President Hatch.  Someone who was present posted a synopsis of this on the unofficial WFU message boards (thank you, BeachDeac!  I have a guess about who you are but you are welcome to out yourself to me if you want).  I will post it at the end of this blog entry.

I got to have my picture taken with Mr. Palmer - another huge thrill, and will make my widowed mother’s entire year if she gets a copy, since my late father was an enormous golf fan.  I got to shake his hand, talk to him in a pre-banquet walkthrough.  He is the personification of a gentleman.  Kind to all, funny, charming.  Amazing.

We walked through the lobby of this hotel and it was like the parting of the Red Sea.  People saw Mr. Palmer coming and they’d stop and sort of almost bow to him and say “Mr. Palmer” with a little bow of the head - or would say “Good evening, Mr. Palmer!”  I felt like I was in the president’s entourage.  As we continued walking, we saw a young man with 2 beautiful daughters, maybe 2 and 4 years old, and Mr. Palmer stopped to pat them on the head and smile at them.  It was really a lovely moment to watch this man, arguably one of the most famous in the world, play with these two angelic girls.

Here is the recap of the banquet - again, with thanks to my friend BeachDeac:

Last night at the WFU Summer Leadership Conference (for the members of all the advisory boards of WFU) Dr. Hatch conducted a ‘conversation’ with Mr. Palmer and Dr. Wilson. To call it a ‘magical’ moment might come close to claiming the feeling of the moment.The first query was to ’tell us how you came to Wake Forest’.Arnold told of his friendship with Buddy Worsham, who had already decided to come to Wake. They were at a junior tournament in California when Worsham asked Palmer to join him at Wake. Turning down offers from Pitt, Penn State, and Miami, Palmer asked ‘can you play golf year round down there?’

Campus is host right now to a large number of students from Europe as part of the Benjamin Franklin Transatlantic Fellows Initiative.  There are 70 teens from 37 countries here - broken into groups of “Founders” and “Diplomats”.  One of the professors teaching them is the excellent John Dinan, who was our lunch speaker one day for Katy Harriger’s Lifelong Learning course on “Winning the White House” - he was fantastic and so interesting, and made me wish I’d been one of his students.  Here is more on our foreign students visiting:  www.wfu.edu/news/release/2008.06.25.p.php

I will be slow to blog over the next few days, as I will be at our Summer Leadership Conference, where we gather together the alumni councils and boards of visitors for all the schools of the Reynolda Campus.  We have probably 250 people coming and it should be great.  With any luck (and a good wireless connection), I will be able to keep you apprised of interesting news from the conference.  A couple of key highlights:  the legendary Ed Wilson and Arnold Palmer will be our banquet speakers, reminiscing about their days at Wake Forest and talking about their role as public spokespeople for our financial aid initiative.  (Brief aside: my late father would have given his right arm to meet Mr. Palmer.  He was so excited that AP was the commencement speaker in 2005, when my niece was graduating from WFU).  Then on Saturday, our Trustee Al Hunt, whose career in political journalism is legendary, will be our keynote speaker on Saturday, presenting a panel on presidential politics. 

Can I confess that I sat up tearfully to watch the Tim Russert memorial, in which Mr. Hunt did a lovely speech?  He got the greatest line of the evening in there, about Tim Russert’s much adored son Luke.  He said something about when Luke was born, he and his wife Judy went up to see “the most celebrated baby in 2000 years” - no doubt true.  Anyway, I have such admiration for the way he carries himself on television and he is such a gracious person for one so famous.  I met him once and he was just lovely to me. 

Finally, the last bit of news - I have a new job.  I am moving from the Alumni office to the Development office to become the Director of Volunteer Leadership, which means I will have strategic responsibility for programming and messaging for all of our volunteer boards and councils on the Reynolda Campus. 

Even though I will not be in the Alumni Office, I am still going to blog.  (I have decided to take a page from the esteemed show “Melrose Place” and bill myself as “Special Guest” - as they did for Heather Locklear).  Emily Smith - our incredibly talented and multifaceted Assistant Director of Communications here - also has rights to the blog, and I hope that as she is able, she will add her own posts here.   So you will still see me here, just as a “Special Guest” : )