The Academy of Distinguished Alumni
ushers in four new members who haven't
forgotten their Mountain State
(and WVU) values.
It's one thing to have an impressive résumé.
But it's something else altogether to have that résumé—while remembering exactly who you are, and exactly where you came from.
And just who it was who helped you along the way.
Which just might explain Edward Buckbee's reaction this past February at West Virginia University.
Buckbee, in fact, set the tone of the evening as he stood in front of the Erickson Alumni Center microphone and acknowledged the growing applause that rumbled around him like the booster of a rocket readying for liftoff at Cape Kennedy.
The former NASA public-relations-man-turned-administrator has traveled the world on behalf of that agency and is even known across the globe in science circles as the founder of NASA's famed International Space Camp.
But on this brisk February night, the man who now lives and works in Huntsville, Alabama, had touched down back home at WVU, where he and three others—federal judge Charles Haden II, advertising icon Pamela Maphis Larrick, and mutual fund guru Robert Reynolds—were being inducted into the WVU Alumni Association's Academy of Distinguished Alumni.
"Folks," Buckbee said, as his family beamed and members of the University community clapped, "this is a big deal for a guy from Romney, West Virginia."
Thing was, he really meant it. And that sentiment, Alumni Association Director Steve Douglas said, is what makes WVU—and its academy of honored alums—special.
This is the 17th such class of alumni to be ushered into the Academy, and this quartet has now answered the call with other Mountaineer luminaries like basketball legend Jerry West, acclaimed author Jayne Anne Phillips, and U.S. Air Force General Robert Foglesong, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"It doesn't matter if you come from a major city or small-town West Virginia," Douglas said. "You're going to get a well-rounded experience at WVU, and you're going to learn just what you have to do to succeed outside of the classroom. Our inductees this year represent the best our University and our state has to offer. They show us that if you study hard and work hard, you're going to achieve. That's all there is to it."
This year's crop of inductees is inclined to agree (at least with the part about WVU), and here's a closer look at their lives and times.
ED
BUCKBEE was working in The Daily
Athenaeum (DA) newsroom the night America found out
about Sputnik. It was October 4, 1957. Buckbee was a year away
from his graduation from journalism school.
And the Cold War had just gotten white-hot.
Wire services that night ran with the announcement that the Soviet Union had commenced with a successful launch. Sputnik, by today's technology, was a humble satellite that really didn't do much more than merely orbit the Earth while emitting radio beeps. But for America, Sputnik's tentative emergence into suborbit was the equivalent of an invasion from Mars.
The UPI teletype machine, a cumbersome, black-metal beast so big it was housed in its own room at the DA, clanged ten bells—and began chittering out copy about the Soviets, and that something they sent up there.
"Ten bells meant you were really in for it," Buckbee said. "It was going to be major. And none of us really knew for sure how to spell or pronounce 'Sputnik.'" Former journalism professor Paul Atkins rounded up a Russian expert on campus to verify the wire copy—and Buckbee and the other staffers spent the night pounding out the story.
Buckbee didn't know it, but it was an introduction to a career. After he graduated, he served a tour of duty as a U.S. Army officer as part of his college ROTC obligation. He signed on after the service as a civilian employee of NASA's newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center.
"I
had my toes in the sand, watching Alan Shepard blast off from
Cape Canaveral," he recalls. "It was pretty amazing
how fast it all happened for me. It was four years from Sputnik
and the DA newsroom to Alan Shepard and the Cape."
He quickly befriended Shepard and the other Mercury 7 astronauts, the former fighter pilots who were the first Americans in orbit.
And the guy from Romney reported daily to a boss who burned with an intensity just as bright as that Saturn 5 liftoff. His supervisor was Dr. Wernher von Braun, the famed rocket scientist credited with finally getting America's space program off the test pilot tarmac—and past the pull of Earth's gravity.
It was von Braun who in 1968 plucked Buckbee to be the first director of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where Buckbee continues to live and work today.
"I had a minor in business administration, thank goodness," Buckbee said of that tenure that included tours of spaceflight facilities in Russia and China.
The International Space Camp, a side project he founded in 1982 in Huntsville, turned into a $25 million-a-year international business—providing an outer space experience for more than 500,000 students and teachers from 70 countries.
Buckbee retired in 1994, capping a 30-year association with NASA. But he still stays involved with the agency. And he still carries in his orbit lessons learned at his alma mater.
"I got three things from WVU," he said. "I got a commission in the army. I got a degree in journalism, and I got training in business and administration. I still use all three."
JUDGE CHARLES HADEN twinkled a
bit at his understatement as he talked to media before the beginning
of the ceremony at the Erickson Center.
"Yeah, I guess I stirred things up a little bit with that one," said the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Southern West Virginia who earned a business degree in 1958 from WVU and a law degree from the University's College of Law in 1961.
Haden had stirred things up more than a little bit in the ruling from five years ago to which he was referring. No, this one was more like an atomic blender. The reaction churned up by the judge in his landmark Bragg v. Robertson ruling on coal mining in 1999 was heard all the way from the Kanawha Valley to Capitol Hill.
The issue was mountaintop removal, a form of mining that strips off the tops of peaks to reveal coal seams underneath. It's a quick, cost-effective way to get coal. It's also one of the more destructive methods of mining out there. The coal, of course, is hauled away. But what happens with the rock and dirt left over?
Up until the lawsuit heard by Haden, the aforementioned by-products of mountaintop removal had simply been dumped into hollows and streams. Bragg v. Robertson begged to differ, and the lawsuit charged two federal entities, the Department of Environmental Protection and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for failing to properly monitor the disposal stage of the mining process in the first place.
Haden said no more to the dumping, deeming it an environmental hazard as per the Clean Water Act—while also contending state agencies had failed to enforce laws already on the books regarding the mining practice. His ruling resulted in a three-way tug of war between the political, coal, and environmental interests of both West Virginia and the White House.
President George W. Bush cried foul as the legal wrangling continued, as did then-Governor Cecil Underwood and U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd, all of whom said the Haden ruling could sound a death-knell for the coal industry in the Mountain State.
Haden took the heat, though, saying it was West Virginia's environment and scenery that would suffer. He hiked to mountaintop mining sites himself and flew over them in helicopters. He wanted to be engaged and involved. That's just the way the man who has worn the judge's black robes for 25 years does it, his friends and colleagues said.
By the time he was 26, the Morgantown native was a family man, a lawyer, and lawmaker who held seats on the Monongalia County Board of Education and in the state House of Delegates.
He was still a young man at 38 when he was named a federal judge. And this judge was one who put justice in the express lane. According to popular legend, the judge, when traveling across his West Virginia district for trials, would sometimes announce in advance that what he would be hearing was a "two-shirt" case—meaning that he'd packed just enough clothes and that the trial would be over by the time he needed to wash them.
He had a national reputation to go with the numerous awards he held from WVU, including the Justitia Officium award, the highest honor the College of Law can bestow.
So how did the judge handle the attention that Saturday night in Morgantown?
He referred to himself as "Chuck" Haden—then publicly thanked his clerks who had been associated with him over the years. Two of them were in the audience. It's a long way from homeroom at Clarksburg's Washington-Irving High School to the highest levels of business success in Boston and Manhattan.
But
high school buddies Pamela Maphis Larrick and Bob Reynolds
made that leap, and then some, to become business icons after
earning degrees from WVU's Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism
and College of Business and Economics, respectively.
Right after her 1972 journalism school graduation, Larrick and three of her college roommates tossed a coin—heads for New York City, tails for Washington, D.C.
The coin came up New York—and the advertising business hasn't been the same since.
Larrick parlayed an $85-a-week receptionist's job at a health care advertising agency—she had to spring for a Betty Owens typing course—into an account executive post at another. There just weren't a lot of women in advertising back then, but she worked hard and she worked smart.
And she had something else—simple, common-sense advice imparted to her by her parents, the late Allan and Elviera Maphis.
"They told me two things," she remembered. "'Be yourself,' and 'Always put yourself in the other person's shoes.'"
Her client list grew and grew, and it wasn't just about making the sale. It was about making relationships. "Understand the client," she said, "and you understand the product. Understand the product, and you create effective ad campaigns." Effective campaigns like the ones for MasterCharge, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft cranked out by McCann Relationship Marketing (MRM) Worldwide, the New York agency currently headed by the Clarksburg native.
Under Larrick's leadership, MRM has won prestigious awards while making an international reputation for itself, and her, in an ultracompetitive industry.
The agency with 64 shops in 37 countries is a leader in "relationship marketing," an industry standard pioneered by Larrick on the foundations of her WVU learning, and her parents' advice of wearing that client's shoes.
"I couldn't do it any other way," she said.
As president and chief operating officer, she frequently travels to other countries on company business. When the invariable question, "Where are you from?" comes up, Larrick always answers the same—because she couldn't do that any other way, either.
"I always say, 'Well, I live in New York, but I'm from West Virginia.' My friend always laughs at that. She'll say, 'Do you think that person even knows where West Virginia is?' Well, he does now." After all, she said. It's all about relationships.
Robert
Reynolds never forgot the relationships
he formed back in the Mountain State, in his hometown of Clarksburg,
on the Washington-Irving gridiron (he was a football letterman
and Larrick was a cheerleader), and in the West Virginia banking
industry that was his springboard to Boston-based Fidelity Investments,
the number-one mutual fund company in the United States.
Put WVU in there, too. The 1974 business graduate recalls being hounded to no end by professors like John Sweeney and Fred Wright—and for that, he's eternally grateful.
"They were always pushing us to work hard and to be prepared. There's not a day that goes by that I don't use something I took away from WVU."
Reynolds' bottom line in business makes his old professors proud. He did indeed make himself prepared, learning every aspect of the banking industry from his first job in West Virginia as trust manager of the former Wheeling Dollar Bank, to senior administration posts at Charlotte, North Carolina-based NCNB Corp.—to Boston, and Fidelity, where the former player tackled that company's big-league 401(k) business.
In eleven years, he grew Fidelity's 401(k) assets from an already sizable $9 billion to a phenomenal $224 billion, the largest such fund in the country.
Today, as vice chairman and chief operating officer of the trillion-dollar firm, Reynolds marshals his employees in the ways of the best football coaches. That is to say, he knows the game, and he wouldn't ask his employees to do anything he wouldn't—or couldn't—do himself.
"To operate any other way would mean tossing down a yellow flag," said Reynolds, who spent 15 years of college football Saturdays as a referee, wearing his stripes from stadium to stadium across the country. "
See, it isn't all about work," he said. Pursuing interesting hobbies—and having a sense of humor—are all part of his equation for success.