SSU-UIS 40th Anniversary

Hello, I received an M.B.A. from Sangamon State University in 1981. It was a very exciting year there...The Public Affairs Center was dedicated that Spring. I attended the celebration and still have the framed poster on my wall. My experience at SSU was exceptional, including a Graduate Assistantship. The campus was small and the instruction was exceptional. An excellent educational experience. Cordially, Betty Kelly Jeanne Dace

SSU helped change the course of my life. I was a dissatisfied teacher who had no idea I could actually be paid for writing. Thanks to Bob Spencer for helping create Sangamon State and for allowing me to meet then-Lt. Gov. Paul Simon, who introduced me and 14 others to public affairs journalism and guided us to the profession I felt privileged to join. I served my Capitol reporting internship under John Camper, who was bureau chief of the Springfield office of The Chicago Daily News, Mike Royko's home paper. I met so many fascinating Daily News journalists, including Henry Hanson and Charlie Nicodemus, for whom I did a lot of legwork in the corporation division of the Secretary of State's office. John taught me about the legislature and its operations and how to cover it all. He helped me conduct an investigation of 'double-dipping' legislators, who got paychecks from both the state and from local governments. He even shared his byline with me. The pressroom, then overseen by Shelby Vasconcelles, was in a huge, cavernous room, divided by partitions for each bureau. I remember Shelby yelling, "Tribune! Pick up your phone!" when someone wasn't answering an incoming call. We interns met such great reporters as Tom Laue, Mike Robinson, Bob Kieckhefer, Burnell Heinecke, Larry Kramp, Gregg Ramshaw, Taylor Pensoneau, Simeon Osby, and Al and Mary Lou Manning (and many more I've forgotten at the moment). We met and worked alongside the gifted photographers Les Sintay and John Filo, who just two years before had won the Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography for his shot of the girl kneeling, pleadingly over the body of a Kent State student who'd been killed by the Ohio National Guard. SSU and Paul Simon gave me superb training that led to a newspaper job, and gave me friendships that have lasted for a lifetime. My musings and occasional investigations can be read at www.penningthoughts.com, the tag that had been, for 19 years, my Penning Thoughts newspaper column, which was the only regular newspaper column in our urban suburb of Arlington, Va., and ran in the Arlington Courier and later The Arlington Connection. The paper decided I was too hot to handle in '08, when I became the subject of fierce blog postings on at least two gun blogs. It was when they ran my column, "Honey, Grab the Derringer, We're Taking the Kids to McDonalds!" a story on how an anti-gun bill, 'Guns may not be carried into bars,' got turned into, 'guns may be carried into bars, as long as the gun-toter doesn't drink'! Thanks to Bob Spencer, Paul Simon and SSU for all you did to help me become a newspaperman and columnist who made it to Washington, D.C., where Mary Ann and I raised four daughters and today celebrate our 42nd anniversary.

I took a course in implementing computer systems into organizations back in the early 1970s. The SSU course recommended process was to implement it bottom up, focusing on the day to day needs of system users, not the whims of upper management. Also, training had to be implemented from the bottom up, so that the data entry staff would have some idea what it was doing, and why it would be to their eventual benefit. There were other guidelines and recommendations as well, and virtually everything that the state agency I worked for at the time was doing the very opposite. I wrote a ten page paper on how backwards my state agency was with regards to implementing its computer system, and the problems already being encountered due to going about it the wrong way. I shared my paper with my immediate supervisor at my agency before submitting it, and he said for me to go ahead and turn it in -- but that it had better not be ever shared with my agency director and other top staff. I did turn it in, and I had a heck of a time getting it back from my SSU professor. When I did get it back, it was dogeared had obviously been circulated throughout the academic staff at the university, to everyone's great amusement. Len Lieberman MA in(Public)Administration 1972