Proud Temple alum has a Hall of Fame moment

I was on a happy mission, driving through the heart of North Philadelphia one bright October morning. My destination was the Great Court of Mitten Hall at Temple University, where a bunch of swells, including yours truly and metro-sensational war- and natural-disaster TV correspondent Anderson Cooper, were going to be honored during a scholarship fund-raising luncheon.

As I approached the main campus, marveling the entire time at the continuing transformation of North Broad Street from a sad, derelict inner-city thoroughfare into a once-again vibrant, well-lighted shopping and entertainment destination, I saw for the first time Temple's newest branding slogan on a banner high on a wall near the top of the historic administration building, Conwell Hall:

"Self Made. Philly Made. Temple Made."

Perfect. It touched all the bases: pride, passion, purpose. It represented everything Temple was to me and my peers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when we felt like real big-city newspaper reporters, because we were. We wrote, edited, and published the Temple News, a daily newspaper during some of the most tumultuous times on college campuses in American history.

Draft riots, sit-ins, the Chicago Seven antiwar moratoriums, campus bombings, Kent State - once, comically, a National Guard tank broke down on Broad Street in front of McGonigle Hall and Temple students swarmed over it like gleeful Viet Cong - Jackson State, black power, white flight, Frank Rizzo, Earth Day, be-ins on Belmont Plateau, hippie squatters on South Street, women's rights, antinuclear weapons, civil disobedience, law-school student strikes.

It was glorious madness, and as it was happening we could feel ourselves being made, being tested, being forged and hardened. Streetwise and Temple tough.

Sadly, in those days, Temple pride was more of a cult following than a movement. There was a then-famous Philadelphia bank president, John Bunting, of a then-famous bank, First Pennsylvania, who used to say in talks before various groups in the city that he attended "Temple O." When asked why, he'd reply: "Because whenever I'd tell people I went to Temple, they'd always say, 'Oh.' "

Fast-forward 40 years. After Anderson Cooper received the Lew Klein Excellence in Media Award from Temple's School of Media and Communication that October day, his first words were "I should have gone to Temple." The Yale graduate was reflecting open admiration for the "Temple made" stories of the six alums being inducted into the media Hall of Fame, from movie producer Fred Bauer, Class of '64, to Harlem-born radio personality Dyana Williams, Class of '97.

All of us - and I am so proud to be among those six - spoke about this huge, urban subway-served factory of learning as if it were family. "I am Temple made," said Amy Caples, Class of '85, whose 20-year career as a TV reporter and anchor was nurtured by Temple faculty. "I came here as a 19-year-old transfer and this place opened my eyes to people and ideas and opportunities I never knew existed."

New York Daily News sports columnist Dick "Hoops" Weiss, Class of '69, is known around the country as Mr. College Basketball. In the video introduction, Ray Didinger, his sports editor at the Temple News, recalled Weiss asking to cover men's basketball. Instead, Didinger assigned Weiss to the swim team.

Didinger proved to be a better writer than evaluator of journalistic talent. "Walking with Dick at the Final Four is like walking with Gandhi," Didinger said. "Everybody knows who he is. People in the stands are shouting: 'Hoops! Hoops!' "

Weiss, who grew up in Drexel Hill, mentioned legendary Temple teachers like Lee Carl and Chuck Newman. "These people were there for me. They really made me feel special," Weiss said. "And they made me feel that Temple has a special part in my life."

"I feel honored to be here and blessed to be Temple made," said longtime Connecticut TV reporter and anchor Kenn Venit, B.A. Class of '66 and '68 (his master's). He attended his first class 50 years earlier, but named his teachers as if it were last month. "These were my mentors," Venit said. "And I idolized them."

Fred Bauer, whose credits include producing The Buddy Holly Story, described what it felt like to arrive at Temple as a 20-year-old and instantly know it was the right place to be.

"For the first time in my life I was in a room full of like-minded people who were my peers," he said. "They were my age. They knew the things I knew. And they were smart and they were witty. That's when I knew I was going to learn what I needed to know and meet the people who could help me take my ideas and chase my dreams."

Although I was born in the city, I didn't become a true Philadelphian until Temple made me earn it. When it was my turn to speak, I looked at my wife, Sara, and our three children, proud city kids since birth. "It was at Temple University where I first fell in love with the city of Philadelphia," I said when it was my turn at the microphone. "The idea of it. The glory. The failure. The grace. The specialness. The sense of personal identity. The magnificent reality of the city of Philadelphia. Temple taught me to love this city of diamonds. Its history. Its architecture. And especially its people.

"I am so proud at this moment to be able to tell you this. To paraphrase the immortal and well-chosen words of Rocky Balboa after he had defeated Apollo Creed at the end of Rocky II: 'Other than the birth of my children, this will go down as the greatest day in the history of my life. Yo, Adrian!' Yo, Sara!"