Can We See Honey From the Inside?

Honey, fore view, before.

A lot of people (no one) have asked me to show them what it looks like inside my office on wheels, Honey.

She's actually (My friend David K. hates adverbs) an office, bedroom, kitchen, bath, dining room, living room, bar and exercise room on wheels.

Because I have been parked for three days, she's a little messy right now.

Here are some photos showing Honey in her "working" condition and Honey in travel mode. I'm about to head up I-79 to Erie and then I-90 to Rochester.

See blow for the battened-down version of Honey.

Honey, aft view, before.

A partial list of stuff in the photos: Coffee pot doormat two bags of trash box of file folders hiking boots laptop norelco electric razor cigarettes lighter more cigarettes pillow battery charger orange handled clamp coffee cup reporters notebooks ashtray soap and soap dish counter top schmutz and orts '90s era Braves tomahawk Seth Thomas office clock mini pretzel.

Shipshape Honey, ready to sail.

Partial list of stuff visible in aft-facing photo: Clock radio dirty socks unmade bed towel folding chair in bath tub gas can dirty oxford cloth button down shirt dirty wife-beater pillows bathrobe cardboard box Falcons fan towels two blue dish towels two red oven mitts soap and soap dish range range hood microwave refrigerator orange handled clamp toolbox strap for laptop bag mostly used roll of paper towels Falcons schedule sink.

Email me if you spot anything else

Central Catholic loooms

Sports and the Bill of Rights at CMU

Success in UAA athletics often turns on continuity in coaching. Carnegie Mellon has several coaches who have been on staff more than 10 years and a few who have been there more than 20 years.

Under the jacket, Lackner is wearing a Steelers shirt.

Rich Lackner, the head football coach, graduated from CMU in 1979 and never left. He's in his 25th season as head coach (166-74-2), but what's more unusual is the fact that his offensive and defensive coordinators have been with him the entire time.
That's continuity cubed.
Recruiting is key, too, and Lackner is up against the top small colleges in Ohio and Pennsylvania and he's up against the Ivy League, which has some pretty fair schools.
When it gets to the dotted line, Lackner is looking for smart kids who want to compete. As an NCAA Dvision III school, CMU is eligible for the national tournament.
"If a kid doesn't want a chance -- at least a chance -- to go to an NCAA playoff game, I'm not interested in him. I want those kids who have visions of championships and making the NCAA playoffs."
Lackner and his staff are Pittsburgh through and through. When someone asks him what the sports scene is like, he has a ready story. "If you go to a Steelers game, you'll find a guy who's a plumber sitting next to a guy who hangs drywall sitting next to a guy who's a vice president of U.S. Steel. And the guy with his face painted is the guy from U.S. Steel.
"That's just Pittsburgh."

Been here forever

I also dropped in on Dario Donatelli, the cross country and track coach who joined the staff the year the UAA was founded, 1987. Donatelli and Gary Aldrich, associate track head coach and Slippery Rock graduate, were watching film (video) of the big meet held the past weekend at Schenley Park. Film day in cross country? It wasn't what I thought. The reason they go over the video is to make sure each runner's finish was recorded in the right order and with the right time.

Donatelli, right, and Aldrich review cross country video.

Another beauty of D3 sports is the emphasis on academic achievement. If you can't win on the field, you can win in the classroom because most sports honor the teams with the highest grade point average. Last year, the CMU men's golf team won the top honor for their cumulative Grade Point Average. Head coach Rich Erdlyi, who has been on the staff 25 years and graduated from Pitt, received the plaque marking the honor recently but hasn't had time to put it on his office wall yet. Actually, there's barely room for it among the dozens of other plaques already hanging there.
Oh, forgot to mention, Erdyli's teams usually win on the golf course, too.

New kid on the block

Yon Struble got cut from a club soccer team when he was 7. Good thing for Carnegie Mellon University that he didn't give up. Today he is in his first season as the head women's soccer coach at CMU, after coaching at Union College, Western Carolina and Georgia State University. Although he's new to Pittsburgh, it sounds like he likes it here, and he uses CMU's unique urban campus setting as a recruiting tool.
"What we've got here is the best of both worlds," he tells recruits. It is a real college campus in the middle of a big city. "Pittsburgh's clean and green and safe. You can get out and explore, but at the end of the day you come back to a real college campus."
On Sunday, his team got clocked by 4-0 by Washington University, and Struble was not happy. Not because of the loss, but because of a lack of effort in the second half. And he let the girls know it.
"You said one of your goals was to beat Wash U, and you really didn't do it. You didn't show respect for what they can do."
From his first spring practice, he told the girls that their goal was too out work other teams, because they might not have the same level of talent, but they wouldn't lose because they were outworked. Saturday they were outworked, he said, "And they knew it."

Later, I talked to Elsa Wu, a sophomore midfielder from Ellicott City, Md., who summed up her reaction to the game. It's a response that also suits Carnegie Mellon athletics and athletics at every UAA school:  "Good enough just isn't good enough."

Can I See the Bill of Rights?

One of four known first edition copies of the Bill of Rights is in a vault in the middle of the Carnegie Mellon campus. It's kind of rare and valuable, so they don't bring it out that often, usually on Constitution day.
It's kept in the Posner Center and belongs to the Posner Collection, which is housed in a kind of dark-wood paneled, quiet, underground LEED certified building that has fabulous shrubs growing on the roof. There are a lot of things named Posner on campus.

Behind this door ...

I asked Gloriana St. Clair, Dean of University Libraries, and Erika Linke, associate dean, if I could see it. (They are two of the funniest, coolest librarians I have ever met. Wonder why I think of librarians as serious. Maybe it's because of the Bookman episode from "Seinfeld.")
"No" was all they said.
But they did let me see the door to the vault where it is housed. Because I know the Bill of Rights by heart, I wasn't that disappointed.

What's on tap
Today, Oct. 12 (my sister Melanie's birthday), I head for Rochester, N.Y., the fourth stop on the road trip.
I Googled the directions last night, hoping that I would only get lost once.
Weird, but Google Maps came back with this: "Drive north to Erie and turn right."
Check.

WUSTL Men Win, Pittsburgh Is Smokin'

Second-half action in the Carnegie Mellon-Washington University game.

Washington University men celebrate win over Carnegie Mellon

The temperature in Pittsburgh Sunday was 84, which is not normal. Record high for Oct. 10 is 82, which was set in 2007, way back when George W. Bush was president. Average high is 67.
Hot-burghers in the steel town.

Seems as if I am bringing good weather with me.

What I am not bringing is good luck for the home teams. The Carnegie Mellon men's and women's teams fell to Washington University. The men's game ended in the first overtime on a goal by Cody Costakis, a 5-5, 150-pound midfielder. The Wash U women beat the Tartans 4-0 in the 11 a.m. match.

The standings after this weekend show how competitive the UAA is. Emory, NYU and Washington are tied for first with 1-0-1 records. Rochester and Carnegie Mellon are tied at the bottom at 0-2. Last year, CMU and UR won the UAA with 5-1-1 records while Emory and NYU were 2-3-2. The new polls come out Tuesday and there's going to be some shuffling.
On the women's side,  the University of Chicago tops the standings at 2-0, Wash U is second at 1-0-1. Four teams are tied at 1-1.

In volleyball, Emory and WUSTL (no surprise) are tied at 3-0 after the first round robin. Over the weekend, they both won non-conference matches as did Case Western Reserve and Brandeis. The next round robin is Oct. 16-17 at Brandeis, and Case Western Reserve hosts the championships Nov. 5-6.
 

The scene at Carnegie Mellon
   Sunday's games were played on CMU's new soccer field, which sits just beyond the football stadium at the corner of Forbes Avenue (Remember Forbes Field, where Bill Mazerowki's homer beat the Yankees in the 1960 World Series?) and Margaret Morrison Drive.  Margaret Morrison was Andrew Carnegie's mother, and the women's college founded in 1903 as part of Carnegie Tech was named for her. Several of the UAA schools were founded as male institutions but had affiliated women's colleges.

The field is new and almost shiny. It's Field Turf, which is top shelf these days, and is a special "soccer cut," which means the blades of "grass" are shorter than the football cut. There is a small set of gray, aluminum bleachers on the north side, which is tree-lined and has picnic tables beside the street.
There are also several food vendors set up in small trucks, much like Honey, who cater to Carnegie Mellon students and faculty.
The stands were filled today with Carnegie Mellon fans, but also with a large contingent of Wash U parents and relatives, who make a good showing and provide great chow at every away event.

Brain game triple threat Akshay Upadhyay.

After the match they treated the girls to a picnic lunch, included two huge vats of pasta-like food. After eating, some of the players hunkered down to their homework, a staple of the UAA road trips.

Inexplicably, I was drawn to the food carts. I asked one student eating there about his favorite, his major, etc.

What I ate. $4.50.

His name is Akshay Upadhyay, and he is senior from Rutherford, N.J. Akshayay reckons he studies 100 hours a week (no way for me to verify that) and is a triple major in Economics, Statistics and Math (100 hours seems reasonable).

His hardest class this semester is 88-365 Behavioral Economics and Public Policy, which was not offered when I attended the University of Colorado.

Akshay recommended the pad thai. It was awesome, but the cook/owner/server insisted also on giving me chicken basil, teriyaki and pork palo. She said I would need water, and she was right.


This and that
Overheard cell phone conversation: "It's in the freakin' '80s. I can't believe this is Pittsburgh."

Coach, you are correct: Carnegie Mellon had 12 players on the field at one point, and it was discovered right when a corner kick was called. Washington coach Joe Clarke, understandably and politely, told the referee he thought it unfair that the Tartans had a extra player AND a corner kick. The ref agreed.

Carnegie Mellon mom on what to say to your daughter after a 4-0 loss: "Let's go eat."

Everyone pitches in: When a ball was kicked over the fence and onto Margaret Morrison Drive, it was retrieved not by a student ball boy, but by Tony Wingen, the men's basketball coach and an associate director of athletics.

Getting here: Honey and I arrived late last night, our trip extended because I took a wrong turn. I'm camped at the Morewood parking lot, which is blessedly level.

How smart are these kids? One dad, Chip Gerfen, told me his son was a little taken aback on his first road trip with the CMU soccer team when an argument broke out in the airport about quantum mechanics. Don't these kids have anything better to talk about?


I need help (duh)
Two questions: Can anyone tell me if there is a bike shop within walking distance of the Morewood parking lot? Need to get a flat tire fixed. And, I have a fistful of stickers from UAA schools to adorn Honey, but I can't figure out how to stick 'em on my windows. The last time I put a decal on something was in 1959 when I built a B-17 model and soaked the decals in water before sliding them onto the plastic fuselage.

What's on tap
Monday and Tuesday I have a round of interviews with CMU coaches and players at Skibo Gymnasium. Tuesday afternoon I leave for Rochester, N.Y., which is 288 miles and four hours and 58 minutes away. At my rate and with my sense of direction, it will be 323 miles and seven hours and 11 minutes. Just watch me.

This blog has been corrected to change Prescription Turf to Field Turf.

From Cleveland to Pittsburgh

Good morning from Pittsburgh.

I'm camped in a parking lot on Forbes Avenue, across from the campus of Carnegie Mellon University. The greatest feature of this parking lot? It's LEVEL, and so is Honey.

Beautiful morning. A great day for college soccer. The CMU men play Wash U at 1:30. The women play at 11 a.m. The CMU men (8-1-0) are ranked 11th and Wash U (7-0-3) 12th.
CMU's only loss came last weekend at Chicago, 2-1 in double OT. It's tough to win on the road in the UAA. The Wash U men tied Emory (Ranked 9th) last weekend in Atlanta.

Getting to Pittsburgh
It only took me 4 1/2 hours to drive 120 miles last night.
Pretty good for me. Everything's more complicated when your transportation is actually a small house.

Best lesson learned yesterday: There's and RV dump station at the service area on the Ohio Turnpike. Woohoo.

I did miss an important turn right at the end, the exit for I-79 South. Had to drive an extra 12 miles to the next exit before I could turn around. Luckily for me, that stretch of road was under construction and the shoulders were closed, so I got to hone my skills at driving 60 mph in a 7 1/2 foot wide RV in an 8 foot wide lane. Thankfully the road was incredibly curvy and hilly. Love it (As Lisa would say).

The day in Cleveland

I saw the Case Western Reserve University women beat NYU in the first match yesterday. The NYU men beat the CWRU men 2-0.

After the match, the Case women were treated to a great outdoor feast by their parents and grandparents. The previous week they lost at Brandeis.

At the other end of the field, the NYU women were taking the loss hard. Every loss is tough for kids who love to play and want to win.
It was picture perfect day at CWRU.

Early in the morning, near the football/soccer field, the football team and cheerleaders were boarding buses for a game at Oberlin. CWRU won 48-36. At the baseball diamond across the driveway, the team was practicing before a double-header with Denison. Two blocks away there was a softball game with the faculty and staff.

Dogs, parents, athletes, little kids all mixing it up amid the red brick modern gabled gothic dorms that ring the stadium. Lots of grass and trees starting to turn colors and a clear blue day. This is why I'm making this trip.

'How It's Supposed to Be'

I love Cleveland.
Cleveland rocks.
Cleveland is on fire (at least the Cuyahoga River was on fire once).

Cleveland is the home of the Cleveland Browns, the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Clinic, the Cleveland Indians, Dennis Kucinich, the Cleveland Cavaliers and Case Western Reserve University.
Cleveland is so cool they made a TV show about it. Cleveland is so cool that almost everything in Cleveland has the word "Cleveland" in it.
An old friend of mine told me once the story of how Cleveland was founded. A group of pioneers was traveling heading from New York State in search of a better life when they encountered a storm on the lake so fierce that they were forced to halt their progress and hunker down. Josiah Cleveland, who was leading the group and traveling under an assumed name, said, "We'll make camp here until the weather breaks."
One jewel in Cleveland's crown is Case Western Reserve University, a federation of the former Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University. Case, as it is now widely known much to the dismay of Western Reserve alumni, is located on Euclid Avenue, east of downtown, in an unpretentious hub of ethnic, cultural, medical and educational excellence known as University Circle.
Case and Cleveland are unpretentious. They have no chip on their shoulder. They don't shout out with self-conscious boosterism. They know how good they are. Case and Cleveland get up every day and get it done.

Case Western Reserve University is one of the founding members of the University Athletic Association, a sports conference of the top private research universities in the East and Midwest. The UAA is founded on the principle of providing top-notch athletic facilities, coaching and competition for true student athletes. For kids who love play sports for the love of the game, but whose main priority is getting a great education.

Hiram players greet Anna Kennedy before Wednesday's match.

Photo: Elizabeth Vaci

The athletes of the UAA -- and Case -- practice and play in relative obscurity on their campuses. I attended a women's soccer game Wednesday night against Hiram College, and there were no more than 30 people in the stands. I looked for the ESPN crew but couldn't find them. I looked for agents ready to hand out big checks but couldn't find them. What I did find was a bunch of bio-chemistry majors and chemical engineering majors and loyal parents and grandparents. And a big dog.
Before the match, something happened that brought me close to tears.
The Case goalie has cancer. She found out this summer and started chemo immediately. Now her head is bare, but she is back minding the net for the Spartans. Right before the kickoff, the Hiram players formed a line at the Case goal and every one shook the hand of Anna Kennedy.
Sports is ritual. Every event has its rituals. On that night, the girls from Hiram transformed the ritual into a transcendent moment of care.

Dave Diles, the Case AD, is really tall.

Who wouldn't cry?
Dave Diles, the athletics director at Case told me a story about meeting with the women's soccer team before the season to go over rules about NCAA compliance and UAA policies. He asked the group how their summer was, and Anna spoke up first. "I had the best summer ever."
Dave is an avid (understatement) golfer and was the AD at St.Bonaventure before he came to Case six years ago. He has a 4 handicap, which he doesn't want publicized because it makes it harder for him to get strokes when he's playing a match. He's a total dog guy, and always brings dog biscuits to games for the pooches in the stands. When I asked him how many rounds he plays a year, he said "Not enough."
And Dave is a UAA guy all the way. He loves the academic emphasis, the training of the "whole student" and the opportunity to get to know the kids in his program. (Actually, everyone I talk to who is associated with the UAA seems to have drunk from the cooler of UAA Kool-aid. They all get it. And I do not mean this disrespectfully in any way. Everyone I know associated with the UAA understands the philosophy of academics and athletics, but academics FIRST.)
What's so special about athletics at Case and the UAA? "It's all student centered, and it's about the educational outcomes for students."
What does it mean to be an AD at a UAA school? "The things that were important to me at the beginning of my career are abundant in my life every day."

Tiffany Crooks' office overlooks the soccer practice field.

So the UAA is a way of life, a way of education, a way of holding the academic opportunities high while providing a first-class athletic experience.
In the office down the hall from Dave, Tiffany Crooks gets it, too. She's the head coach of the women's soccer team, and not a bad player in her day, which wasn't that long ago.
Tiffany was the keeper from 1998-2001 for Ashland University, where she had 28 shutouts and a 0.64 goals against average.
When I asked her why she coaches at Case, her immediate response was about the kids.
"They're very committed to their academics and their athletics. They love sacrifice and they love to get better.
"Every kid on my team will tell you they play because they love it, but if forced to make a choice, every kid will chose academics."
Then Tiffany put the whipped cream on top of the Case and UAA athletics sundae:
"That is how it's supposed to be."

A Real Zen Moment

Rarely does a person have the chance to snap a photograph that includes both the house they grew up in and the house where they live now. The only example I can think of is when a person lives in the house next door to the one where they were raised. What are the odds of that happening?
This week, I experienced the past, the present, and the future captured for digital eternity in one photograph.
Here it is.
You can clearly see Honey, my sainted, 1984 RV, parked on Eliot Road in Erie, Pa. (Oddly, it was cold, windy and drizzly that day). Honey is where I live now and where I will live for the next few weeks as I travel to each of the eight schools in the University Athletic Association.
In the background, I think you can make out another house -- the one where I was raised. It was built by my father in the early 1950s (He had a civil engineering degree from Carnegie Tech and ran the family construction company, which was founded in 1908 and is still operated by my brother, Cle. When he was in his late '70s he bought a small van-camper and took several trips to sites around the Great Lakes).
My friend, Lisa Lifeline (the kindly neighbor lady), jokes that my former house isn't good enough for Honey.
I love that house.
I love the den, the laundry shoot, the back stairway, the milk box that opened inside and outside, the rec room in the basement, the bay window in the living room. But most of all, I love the closet at the end of the breezeway (That's the long entry way in the front that connected the garage with the den and the living room and the hall to the kitchen. Houses don't have breezeways anymore).
Every night, when my father came home from work, he would park his car in the garage and come through the door to the breezeway and open the closet on his left and hang up his coat and take off his felt fedora and put it on the shelf. He was home.

NYU visit, Sept. 30-Oct.2

The first "official" stop on my road trip was New York University, which is at the corner of -- actually, it's at about a million different corners, all over Greenwich Village in Manhattan.

To say that NYU doesn't have a traditional college campus is to overstate the obvious, which is one of my gifts.

There are dozens of buildings, mostly in Greenwich Village. It's been said that NYU is second largest property owner in Manhattan, after the city of New York. Attending NYU is kind of like working in Manhattan, except your job is going to college. It's a great school. I know because my son graduated from NYU in 2008.
Highlights of my visit:

• Sept. 29: Canceled all my appointments because I was still in Virginia.
• Sept. 30: Parked Honey, my 1984 recreational vehicle, on Mercer Street in front of the Coles Athletic Center. Jeff Bernstein, the SID, met me on the street and presented me with my parking permit, but was quick to point out that it was no guarantee against ticketing or towing.
Thirty or more NYU athletes stopped by while I was parked there to chat and autograph the banner I am carrying with me. I met a cross country runner from Fort Morgan, Colo., soccer players and swimmers. Have to admit it takes a while to explain to them exactly what I am doing -- a road trip to visit all eight schools in the University Athletic Association.
Honey did attract some attention on the street. I must say she was the only RV I saw in Greenwich Village that day.

Janice Quinn in her office.

Headline for the day: Honey actually made it to Manhattan and the first UAA athletes signed the banner.
• Oct. 1: Janice Quinn is the quintessential UAA coach and administrator. She's a fast-talking, non-stop promoter of the country's first non-geographic athletic conference. She has nothing but respect for the kids who compete and their coaches. They carry heavy academic loads at top universities, practice or train 30 hours a week, and then travel just about every other weekend for three days.
> She was a top-notch coach and has the national championship to prove it. Her NYU women's basketball team won the Division III national championship in 1997, beating Wisconsin-Eau Claire 72-70 in the finals. The game's winning basket was scored by Marsha Harris, the team's leading scorer, who now a surgeon in New York. She's as intense as Bobby Knight, but she's not about herself. She loves and respects the kids, and thinks the UAA is the epitome of college sports.
> Before the NCAA championship game, she was talking to Satch Sanders, who played led NYU to the NCAA Final Four in 1960 and played on eight Boston Celtics championship teams, about the team's season and the finals. Some people would be happy just to be there, but Satch told her to get after it and win the whole thing. Her girls did.

NYU captains Jane Barrett, Katie Gaston and Rebecca Assing

> Bobst Library is rough and red-sided 12 story building on Bleeker Street, designed by Philip Johnson, who is one of my architectural heroes. It's from his pre-post-modern period and features an atrium and a black and while marble lobby floor based on the floor of an Italian Cathedral. Despite the digital revolution, the library remains a haven for students, Lucinda Covert-Vail, director of public services, told me during a tour. In fact, the number of daily visits has risen steadily in recent years. Bobst has all the usual library stuff, meaning books and journals, but it also is wired from top to bottom so students can connect. Among the most interesting holdings: The Downtown Collection, which documents the SoHo and Lower East Side arts scene of the '70s, '80s and early '90s and a cookbook collection that includes more than 12,000 volumes and 5,000 pamphlets.
• Oct. 2: It's the opening day of league play in soccer. NYU is taking on the teams from the University of Rochester. The UR men are ranked No. 8 in the country in one poll.

NYU women led Rochester early.

> The games are being played at the College of Staten Island, one of four venues that NYU soccer calls "home" field. It's very much a family affair, with dozens of parents, siblings and significant others lining the fence around the field. Not a single vuvuzela can be heard.
> Starting at 11 a.m., the NYU women take an early 1-0 lead on a goal by Rebecca Assing and win by a final of 2-1. How competitive is the UAA? Last season, the UR women won the conference and the NYU women were last.

> In the men's match, keeper Matt Stieve kept NYU in the game with two remarkable saves in the first period and was named UAA athlete of the week for his performance. The game ended 0-0 after two overtimes. Rochester dropped from No. 8 to No. 9 in the national rankings. Three other UAA schools, Carnegie Mellon, Emory and Washington University are also in the top 25.

On the road again
I am traveling from New York to Cleveland this week and will be at Case Western Reserve University from Oct. 6-9, where the Spartans take on the Violets in soccer Saturday. Then it's a quick trip down the road to Pittsburgh for Carnegie-Mellon against Washington University on Oct. 10.