Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University
Lucy Sack Interview
November 5, 2008
Bailey Library, Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania
Interviewed by Teresa DeBacco
Transcribed by Teresa DeBacco
Proofread and edited by Angela Rimmel, Rebecca Cunningham and Judy Silva
TD: Today is November 5, 2008 and I am Teresa DeBacco for the Rock Voices Oral History
Program. I‟m here today with Mrs. Lucy Isacco Sack. How are you today?
LS: I‟m fine, thank you.
TD: We‟re going to get started with a few questions. Can you tell me a little biographical
information about yourself: your full name, date of birth, where you‟re from, some educational
information?
LS: Sure. I‟m Lucy Sack. My maiden name was Isacco when I was a student here. I live in
Grove City but I‟m from this area. I actually was born in Grove City and lived in Slippery Rock
as an infant to about two years old, and then we lived in Forestville. That‟s where I lived when I
attended Slippery Rock as an undergraduate student. Then when I was married we lived in
Boyers and then we moved to Grove City. So I‟ve always been in this area of Slippery Rock.
TD: Why don‟t you tell me a little bit about your education?
LS: As I said, I went to Slippery Rock High School, and there I was a cheerleader and [on]
student council and lots of activities like that. I wasn‟t sure that I wanted to go to college; I didn‟t
make my decision until the summer before I started. Fortunately, I was going to be a commuter
because I couldn‟t afford to live on campus. So I was able to be accepted with a late application.
So I almost didn‟t get here [laughs].
I did the health and physical education major. I thought about English, because my high school
teacher encouraged me in that direction, but I‟m kind of a claustrophobic person and the idea of
being in a classroom still makes me very uncomfortable. The gym was better: it had more space
and outdoors was fine also. So I danced my way through the physical education major and
graduated in January of 1967, which was three and a half years because I was able to go to
summer school, because I lived close by and had all the coursework in. So, I did that.
I student taught in what is now the Moniteau School District. I was in the elementary schools and
at the high school. I was hired there for the rest of my school year from January of ‟67 to May. I
taught the job that I student taught in. Then I taught the next year at Rochester High School in
Rochester, Pennsylvania. It was girls‟ physical education only, and I coached the gymnastics
team and sponsored the cheerleaders there.
Then I applied for an assistantship here at Slippery Rock and came back for master‟s degree
work. When I finished my master‟s degree it was 1970: January graduation. So I had a year and a
half in the public schools and a year as a graduate assistant and then I was hired [as] temporary at
Slippery Rock for one year. Then it became a permanent position the next year and I [have]
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stayed here ever since. So when I retired in 1999, in January, it was with twenty-nine and a half
years here at Slippery Rock and a year and a half in the public schools, and a graduate
assistantship.
In addition to the master‟s here, I decided to study dance in more detail. My friend who was on
the faculty said, “You should try the University of Utah.” She had started there. She said, “They
have a really great dance program.” So I went out and checked it out and applied and was
accepted, and I was terrified because I didn‟t know—I‟d only been at Slippery Rock and I didn‟t
know if I could cut it in a big university, but I did. I did very well and I loved all my classes and I
have used every class that I took here at Slippery Rock in some way to continue where I was and
where the programs were and to enhance them. So I felt—even though I was ABD, that means
all but my dissertation, I did everything except finish the doctoral dissertation. So I really never
became Dr. Sack.
TD: What Slippery Rock era were you here? The teacher‟s college, the state college, the
university?
LS: When I started as a freshman in 1963, it was Slippery Rock State College and people were
still getting used to not calling it Slippery Rock State Teacher‟s College. I can remember that
explicitly. Then during the eighties we became a university. I was on the faculty, and that was a
big deal and it made a big change in things at the school.
TD: Why don‟t you tell us a little bit about the changes between the state college and the
university?
LS: Well, because we had a union contract with the university system, it changed the workloads.
Coaches were given credit for [pause] well, wait a minute . . . did we have a union before that? I
can‟t remember [laughs].
I don‟t remember, but what I was going to say was before, when I began coaching, we didn‟t get
release time that was comparable. They counted credits differently and it seems as though under
the university system that was all more controlled and specific. So it was better for the faculty to
have the union and then to become the university.
TD: I read in my research that you were very instrumental in beginning the dance department.
Can you talk a little bit about how the dance department got started, some obstacles, some other
people that helped you begin that program?
LS: Yes, from the time I was a student here I had hoped that I could study dance, but that was
not possible. There were only four classes in dance: dance I, II, III and IV. Dance IV was a
modern class and dance I and II were folk, square and social dancing. [Pause] And oh, there was
a course on teaching dance to children; it was for physical education majors.
So I‟d always had in the back of my mind that Slippery Rock should have a dance program.
There‟s a lot of dancing that‟s goes on in western Pennsylvania and [there was] even then, when
I was a student. I had come from a dance studio. I had worked in studios in Grove City and
Butler and knew the number of students that were interested in dance, but when they came here
they could not pursue dance. So that was in the back of my mind. I added to the curriculum the
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art forms of dance: the ballet class was the first one and the jazz class; then the tap class, then
level two in jazz and level two in ballet. So we were able to teach the artistic forms in more
depth, and the students seemed to really enjoy that and they were able to use those credits toward
their physical education classes.
I went to start my graduate degree in 1973 at the University of Utah and I was in—it was an
exercise science program and I explored the dance area there. It was an outstanding program and
the chairperson, who was Dr. Elizabeth Hayes, very well known in the dance world—I talked
with her and she really said, “You know, you can really take whatever courses you think you
need to take for what you want to do at Slippery Rock.” So she gave me permission, within some
restrictions (I mean I couldn‟t go in and take advanced technique, because I wasn‟t an advanced
technician with those dance majors at the University of Utah [who] were twelve years younger
than I was at that time). But she did allow me the flexibility to kind of design my program from
what I needed and that was wonderful because it really worked out for me and for Slippery Rock.
I went there on sabbatical, and stayed there for the whole year and got to take in-depth and from
one quarter—they were on a quarter system—from one quarter to another [for] all those courses.
It was just complete immersion in the world of dance as an art form. They also focused on
teaching and they focused on choreographing, because according to Dr. Hayes, dancers will have
to teach and may want to choreograph, so they should be able to do all three. And that was the
philosophy that I brought from Utah to Slippery Rock as we developed our program here.
When I came back to Slippery Rock from my sabbatical, I was informed that they had hired a
male dance teacher, who turned out to be a wonderful friend, Thom Cobb. And Thom and I sat in
my office and we talked about where we came from and what we‟d done and what we hoped to
do, and we both found a common ground in wanting to bring dance to a higher level at Slippery
Rock. So we immediately started thinking dance major program, mostly from my influence from
Utah, because Thom had started dance late in life but had a wonderful passion for it. So the two
of us really made a commitment that we were going to try to get this thing to work. That‟s
when—in your question—we changed from Orchesis to Slippery Rock University Dance
Theater, SRUDT, is what we called the performing arm of our program.
So we tried to write a curriculum, [but] with two people on the faculty we realized that it was
impossible to do a dance major program, and so we petitioned the higher-up people in the
administration and said, “Look, we need a person with an MFA. We need a person with a
Master‟s in Fine Arts who has done the artistic level,” because Thom and I had not done that and
we were teachers. So the physical Education department had a slot to help teach the fitness
program and then we were able to hire.
We actually had three different faculty with the MFA degree. We had Rebecca Rice Flannigan,
who was here for one year. And then we had Della Cowell, who actually was the person who,
with Thom and [me], got the program written and submitted to the state and approved. So the
three of us wrote the dance major program and then Della left and we hired Nora Ambrosio, who
is now the chairperson of the dance department. Nora was the spark that we needed to really put
the program at a level of artistry that we had been lacking.

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Throughout the recruitment of students and the flexibility necessary, we had to demonstrate
problem solving: trying to get this young, fledgling program moving with maybe five or six
people who wanted to major. We started out with twenty minors: people who were in elementary
ed./physical education and a variety of other majors who wanted to do a dance minor. They were
kind of like the whole thing for a while, with a few majors. But we worked very hard at it. Nora
would come in and she would [say], “We really need to do this, and we really need to do this,”
and I said, “Nora, I‟ll take care of it. Just go back to the studio and make your dances and let me
deal with this.” And so I did.
Another thing that was helpful was, prior to developing our own dance department, I was
assistant chairperson in physical education and that gave us the support in that program to do
some things in dance. We were very beholding to the physical education people because they
supported us. They liked what we were doing and they didn‟t get in our way. When it was time
to move to our own department, the dean supported us because she saw that we were doing our
own scheduling, we were taking care of our meager facilities [and] we were taking care of
advising students. She said, “The only thing you‟re not doing, is you don‟t have any control over
your finances and the money part of it. You don‟t have a budget.” Although physical education
was very generous with us, we still couldn‟t do our own thing in a timely manner, which is when
we developed the Dance Department.
So that went a lot more smoothly than what had happened at Utah and what I had learned in my
administration classes there: how it can be very conflicting. People not wanting to separate and
losing the dance [classes] and not knowing if we could do a dance department. But as you see in
the last—let‟s see it would be probably close to fifteen years—the program has developed, the
department has mushroomed in people, not in space, but in people and it‟s nationally known. The
program has grown and been able to sustain itself, and students have been successful in their
teaching and choreography and performing. The faculty has been enlarged, enhanced. We have
accompaniment; we have different cultures being represented in the faculty [and] lots of
opportunities for our students and our faculty to do dance.
TD: What buildings did you work in? Obviously it‟s harder to find studio space for dancing as
opposed to classroom space, which is just lecture.
LS: Yes, that‟s true. What we really need is space. That‟s all we really need and we don‟t have it.
We started out in the Field House dance studio with most of the dance classes and then they put
an elevator in there so that the building would be handicapped-accessible. That took all of our
storage area so the studio kept shrinking. We taught in East Gym [and] we taught in West Gym,
and that was via physical education, because they had control over those spaces. They were
dungeons and it was always a challenge. You didn‟t have a sound system that was adequate and
you would have equipment in there from different sports activities and it would have to be
cleared out. Then you would teach your class [and] it would have to be put back in again. It was
less than ideal. These [were] classes like folk, square [and] ballroom that the physical education
majors were taking. Not technique classes. Sometimes we did jazz up there in East or West Gym.
We also taught in McKay gymnasium.
This story, I think I‟ve told before, but to me it‟s worth repeating. When I was a seventh grader,
bused from Forestville to Slippery Rock to school, before they had the new school, I took
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physical education class from university professors in that gym. I can remember Teresa Pletz, my
teacher, putting me up in front of a physical education class and we were doing wand routines.
Now, wands were long, round dowel rods and it was an old European gymnastics type of activity
where people, in unison, did routines. Well, to me it was like—I twirled baton and everything so
. . . and I had a dance background. So she loved me because I was—she used to say, “Oh, you‟re
so graceful, you‟re so graceful. Come up here.” So I‟m doing this movement, and I can
remember that. Our locker room was that little office that‟s off of McKay.
TD: Very small.
LS: There were showers, lockers; we had to do the whole scene. Okay now, fast forward to me
teaching Introduction to Creative Dance, which was one of my fortés in teaching elementary
education people how to deal with children‟s dance, and I‟m up there doing this swing
movement and I have this déjà vu, where I‟ve been here before and I think back and here I am:
I‟m a college professor and I haven‟t moved out of the building and I‟m still doing the same
movement that I did when I was in seventh grade and it was like, “Bong!” you know, kind of a
really strange feeling. So I always like to share that story because it‟s hilarious about . . . you
think you‟re making all this progress and you‟re educated and you‟re still doing the same thing
that you did in seventh grade—in the same place!
So McKay was really bad. The floor was as hard as a rock, it was uneven, it had basketball
hoops, it was drafty, and the noise rebounded off the walls and probably that‟s why my hearing
is not as good as it used to be. But we had our tapes and our record players and we taught dance
in McKay. As a matter of fact, we were the only people that did anything in McKay. It wasn‟t all
that clean either, but between the Field House, East and West Gym and McKay—[and] once in a
while we taught in the new student union. It used to be a checkerboard floor which . . . you‟d get
so dizzy you could pass out. Where else did we teach? I think I even taught a class downtown at
the Grange Hall once, just to have some space. It‟s hard to find space but let‟s fast forward
another twenty years and here we are with a hundred dance majors . . . .
TD: In the same space.
LS: Maybe more than that. We still have the dance studio. We have an expanded version of East
Gym. We have a studio in McKay, but we do not have our own performing space. We do not
have adequate dance studios to reflect the caliber of our program and I‟m sure that the National
Association of Schools of Dance are going to be dismayed that we haven‟t had any progress in
that area. We have enhanced the spaces: they‟re not [as] primitive as they were before. That‟s
discouraging when I look back at what we did and what we had and what we‟ve done, and we
still don‟t have the space that we need.
TD: Do you feel that‟s been one of the major obstacles? Getting support to bring in the extra that
the dance department needs?
LS: [Pause] I would say that we have had wonderful support from the president all the way down
through most people, with the exception of space. Grant funding, requests for technology,
additional staff, people that we need, musicians, and we need someone to teach this class, bring a
dance company in, faculty to go out and do things, students to go out and do things. I think we
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had exceptional support and I appreciate that. But it‟s very difficult to build a building for dance;
you have to have a rich benefactor. In Pennsylvania, the way our government works, you‟re not
going to request a dance building and they‟ll say, “Yes, how many square feet do you want? Do
you want one or two floors? Do you want the studio to be on the ground floor?” Or “Where do
you want the parking lot?” It‟s not going to happen that fast.
Now at Utah, where they have the Alice Sheets Marriott Center for Dance, they have a “big
bucks” donor who the building is named after and they have a state of the art dance building with
their own performance space. Modern dance has one level [and] ballet has another level because
they have two different departments. They have a studio that even has warming barres for your
legs so you don‟t chill during your time off stage. They had a dance science center where
students would come in and doctors would evaluate them and the PTs [physical therapists] would
work with them. They had a whole center just for that. It was not made extremely expensively,
because they wanted more dance stuff and not so much bricks and mortar so they settled for
really fancy painted cement blocks, but it‟s a beautiful facility.
So, until one of our donors—one of our friends in dance decides to help us build a building or
one of us hits that lottery, we‟re not gonna have that. Hopefully, in the future we will. I know it‟s
on the drawing boards and I do try and mention it to Dr. Smith every time I see him, about the
dance space. We deserve it, you know? I think we‟ve earned it. We‟ve put our blood, sweat,
tears, and blisters into this place.
TD: I want to take a little step back, rewind a little and talk about the original curriculum for the
dance program. I know that you talked a lot about [how] it was more social dancing. I want to
know about maybe if the classes included—like now we have kinesiology. And some scientific
stuff involved, too?
LS: Oh, yes. The folk, square, ballroom thing that I mentioned was only connected when we
were part of physical education. When we wrote the dance major program, we had levels of
ballet, modern, and jazz. We had choreography, we had teaching methodology [and] we had
dance kinesiology—what we called dance science. [The] wellness for dance [class] developed
out of that. We had practical experiences where we would want to send the students out to do
teaching or they had to perform in the Dance Theater. Yeah, it was a dance major curriculum, it
was not—now we had dance fundamentals, which was a taste of the folk, square and ballroom,
but that was not the focus. The focus was a Bachelor of Arts in dance; the students could major
in dance. They would be able to teach on a beginning level—ballet, modern, jazz—choreograph
and perform. We tried to emphasize each one equally.
TD: Can you tell me a little bit about your campus activities: committees you might have been
involved with? I know we discussed earlier you were involved with women‟s gymnastics.
LS: Yes, when I first came to Slippery Rock, I coached gymnastics for six years and it was a
wonderful experience. It was very hard work, very draining because the season went from two
weeks after school started until April if you made any kind of final competition. We were a nonscholarship school so I worked with walk-ons. People who came to Slippery Rock, mostly for
physical education and who were gymnasts in high school or in their own private programs and
so the teams that we put out were really good—good gymnasts. But we didn‟t award them
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scholarships, and we had to compete against Penn State and West Virginia and Kent, where
students actually had scholarships; but we held our own. We won one state championship,
beating out Clarion who had full scholarships on their team. We came in sixth—[that] was the
best that we ever did at the Eastern Regional Gymnastics Championship competition. But then
you were in competition with the University of Massachusetts, Penn State, as I mentioned, all the
Big East schools that had excellent teams. In my six years of coaching, we were never below
tenth in the Eastern [region], but mostly sixth, seventh, somewhere in that area. So I was always
very proud of my team and when I retired from coaching, I didn‟t leave a team where everybody
had graduated. I left a team with outstanding students who came in—I had nine freshmen who
were with me for two years and then the following coach had something to work with—to take
them beyond. So we were building in gymnastics.
Also on campus I was involved with a lot of committees: personnel committees, curriculum
committee; I was involved in gerontology. [Pause] I was involved in elementary [education]
because I taught the elementary dd. majors creative dance and would take them to the elementary
schools so they could actually teach real children. Let‟s see . . . .
TD: Any involvement with the union?
LS: No, I did not get involved with the union; I didn‟t have time. They always needed
commitments from people who could go to Harrisburg. My trips to Harrisburg, and there were
many of them, were in the nineties when the state dance people were trying to get dance
certification for teachers. This still has not happened but we were hoping by the turn of the
century, in the year 2000, that we would be able to have people become certified to teach dance
in the public schools of Pennsylvania.
This had been something that kept happening. They‟d try it again and they would fail; they‟d try
it again. Well, my group thought we had it. Theater and dance got together and we presented our
proposals. We went to all the meetings in the different areas of the state with the people from the
state. We went and talked to them „til we were blue in the face and that‟s when I really gave up
on Harrisburg because they were not going to add teacher certification in dance to the program.
They said, “Physical educators are certified to teach dance.” And we said, “That‟s what it says
on paper, but they don‟t know anything about dance.” Most of them took one [class]; Slippery
Rock at least took three classes back then and that‟s why dance didn‟t do anything in the public
schools because they were not certified teachers teaching it.
I was very, very disappointed when this thing fell through. It really turned me on the whole
political end of Harrisburg, because we were going to enter another century and children were
still not going to be dancing in school and I know the values of that. I could give you a whole
dissertation on the value of dance for children. One example, and I‟ll only give one, is the kids
go into middle school and one of the first things they have is a dance, but they don‟t know how
to dance, so they don‟t go. It‟s not a good experience for them and I‟ve seen what happens when
they have dance training and its part of their education. They go to a dance and they know how
to act and they know how to move and they know manners and they have a wonderful
experience with it, and we missed it. We just have missed it. And that‟s only one area of dance:
on a social level. It doesn‟t even begin to scratch the surface on the artistic and expressive level
that that could be.
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TD: It‟s frustrating too because it is written into the Pennsylvania state curriculum.
LS: Well, they think they have it covered and they don‟t care that it‟s not.
TD: It‟s not.
LS: They just don‟t care. If a school has money, then you can have a dance teacher teach dance.
Mt. Lebanon has one; there are two schools in Philadelphia. There‟s a couple more in the
Pittsburgh area, but that‟s not all students, that‟s an elite group.
TD: What other accomplishments did you have while you were at the university?
LS: I think my biggest accomplishment is the dance major program and the dance department
that were not here when I started and are here and flourishing as a result of all the work that I did
and all the hours I put into cleaning up after people, solving this problem, and helping that
person. It just, to me, was the most rewarding thing and what I feel is my biggest
accomplishment.
I also developed the dance science section of the dance major. That was my area as far as
teaching the kinesiology because I studied with Sally Fitt, who wrote the dance kinesiology book
and she was at the University of Utah, so that was more my area. I studied with Elizabeth
Larkam and learned Pilates and set up the whole Pilates/wellness program for the dance majors. I
connected with the physical therapy department where their students would evaluate or assess
our dancers and try to predict what kinds of injuries they might have because of imbalances in
their bodies. Then, if we had people who were hurt, they would go over to PT and they would be
our first line to try to help them out. When I was teaching dance kines [kinesiology] we also got
to go to the cadaver lab and look at the muscles and bones and how everything connected
because of the rapport we had with physical therapy.
When I took another sabbatical later on in the nineties, I did three programs, one of which is still
flourishing. One was beginning a creative dance school through the dance department here at the
university and we now still have a portion of that teaching children‟s dance and our dance majors
are working in that program. The second one was dance with older adults where I went to senior
centers in Mercer County and taught dance to older adults. I had studied with Elizabeth Lerman,
from the Washington D.C. area, who was an expert in that area. The children‟s dance I had
studied with Virginia Tanner, who was at the University of Utah and is—she‟s passed away—
but she is renowned. Her children‟s dance theater is still in existence at the university because
her students have perpetuated it. So it was Virginia Tanner, and I designed my own program
based on her work and Liz Lerman‟s work with older adults; I did that work. Because I didn‟t
have students wanting to do that, when I went back to work I could not do all those programs and
go out to all those places and teach. So that one kind of fell by the wayside; I didn‟t have a
prodigy to push that to.
The third was dance and the developmentally disabled, and [with] that program we went to the
houses around here for the developmentally disabled—I can‟t even think of the names right now.
There‟s one in Harrisville; there‟s two or three in the area. Their students who were able to walk
came to McKay and we did our classes there and one of the dance majors went with me, Leslie
Russell. Leslie and I would go out to the houses and we would teach creative dance to the people
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[who] were wheelchair-bound, and the ones [who] were able to move would come to McKay and
we would teach them classes. So we tried to start dance for the developmentally disabled which
again, didn‟t flourish because we didn‟t have time and resources to spend on doing that, but all
three programs were very well-received in the communities [where] they existed. I do wish that
the developmentally disabled one—that I‟d worked a little harder on that because of the work
that Dr. Arnhold has done here at Slippery Rock with the equestrian program and Special
Olympics and the wonderful swimming program that they have done. They need dance in that
program too, and I feel like maybe we dropped the ball on that and didn‟t make it happen as
much as we could have. So those were three things that I had hoped we would get going.
TD: Now I know another big accomplishment for you, the dance department actually offers a
scholarship known as the Lucy Isacco Sack Scholarship. Could you tell us a little about what that
scholarship represents?
LS: Well when we started our department I said, “We have to start working toward a dance
scholarship so that we can help students.” And we decided—this was when Della was here—we
decided that we would have a faculty and guest concert where we would charge like a dollar.
And those students and people who came to that would be contributing to a dance scholarship
fund. So we started out . . . I think the first concert we had we made forty-two dollars, which
wasn‟t going to get us a scholarship. But over time, each semester or each year, we would do that
scholarship concert and earmark the funds for that and eventually we had enough money that we
could start the fund through the Foundation. So, we had a little nest egg toward that and then the
Dance Department hosted the American College Dance Festival here at Slippery Rock for our
region, the Eastern region or the Mid-Atlantic region. Nora was the person who ran that festival
and she was very wise in getting a lot of things donated so that the funds that people paid when
they came here enabled us to make a big profit. That profit was turned into the fund and really
boosted the amount of money that we had in there.
When I retired, in honor of me, they named the scholarship fund the Lucy Isacco Sack Dance
Scholarship. So students are able to receive a stipend for their semester and their year and when
things come up, like they want to go to the American Dance Festival or they want to go to
ACDFA [American College Dance Festival Association] or something in New York or a
program of some kind, they are able to tap that and it goes to help students to further whatever
they need in dance. So it is a great honor, a big honor for me because financially I would not
have a scholarship. I retired as an assistant professor and had two children and all the expense of
home ownership and being the primary bread winner, so there was no way I would have had a
scholarship. But the dance department chose to honor me with that, for which I will be eternally
grateful.
TD: Can you tell me a little bit about your most memorable teaching moments? I know you‟ve
done a lot of teaching as part of different programs off campus and on campus. Can you just tell
me a little bit about some of the ones that really stick out in your mind?
LS: I thought about this question because it‟s very difficult to come up with one or two when
you‟ve taught that long. Every student that you have in class that gets an “Aha!” moment is a
reward for you and there have been so many of them. I think I can share a couple of things.

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In the early days when you‟re teaching physical education majors to do the polka and the lindy
or something like the waltz and they‟re struggling, and you don‟t think they really like it but you
never know when it‟s sinking in. And they go home on vacation and they come back and they‟re
all excited: “Mrs. Sack, I was able to do the polka with my mother at a wedding and she was so
excited and she said, „your whole college degree is worth it just because you can dance.‟”
[Laughs] you know something like that just lifts you because it‟s beyond what you do every day
in the classroom and you see how it helps a student. I‟ve seen students struggle and try to master
material and they get down on themselves, but then over time they become wonderful success
stories. The gymnasts and the dancers that have gone on to really make it in their field, when you
think about them in class and working so hard on things and then you see where they‟ve become
excellent: that‟s rewarding. [Pause] I had a couple of other ideas but mostly it‟s about those
individual one on one things where they‟re like, “Aha!” You know, they finally get it.
TD: Who were leaders—presidents, deans, union members when you first came to campus?
People that were movers and shakers?
LS: Well, I think in my early years as a student, we had a lot of turmoil at Slippery Rock. The
president changed while I was a student. He left under a lot of protest. He‟s the one who actually
gave me my degree. I mentioned to you before we started this about how I wasn‟t a gymnast but
the year that I wanted to join the gymnastics team, the funds were pulled from women‟s sports. It
was called WRA, Women‟s Recreation [Association]. They took all the money and so we
protested and marched around Old Main with signs and everything.
As I was a faculty member, Dr. Watrel was president during the time I was coaching. He was
very supportive of me and of what the girls were doing. Dr. Bob Raymond was the athletic
director during that time and he supported me 110% with things. It was a difficult time in
women‟s sports because . . . [laughs] you were invisible. Later we had the AIAW [Association
for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women] which later became the NCAA [National Collegiate
Athletic Association] but when I started we didn‟t have any organization and then we became the
AIAW.
The women gymnasts were close to the male gymnasts because we all practiced together and
they would come to me and say, “Mrs. Sack, how come they have this and we don‟t?” And I
said, “I don‟t know; I didn‟t know they had this.” So I would go to the athletic director and say
“Look, the girls are saying the guys have this and we don‟t. Why don‟t we?” He said, “You
want that?” [I said], “Yes!” So we would have it. Like training meals and different kinds of
things with equipment. I was able to communicate with these people [and] it was new to them
too. You know, here are women asking for equal time.
Dr. Griffiths had to battle to get to practice in the Field House. They practiced in East Gym and
then they came to the Field House which was like going to an away game for basketball and it
was twice as big as their space and they‟re like [mock panting]; they don‟t have endurance
because they can‟t practice there. Those kinds of battles went on in the seventies in women‟s
sports but Dr. Watrel really helped in the gymnastics program and Dr. Raymond was also very
supportive in the sports for me.

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Sack, Lucy 11

Let‟s see. I‟d have to mention Dr. Griffiths again: Ann Griffiths. She was chairperson of
[Physical Education]. She was the dean under which all the dance development occurred and she
just was phenomenal. You know, she didn‟t know that much about dance, but it didn‟t hold us
back. She really listened and tried to learn and understand why we needed what we did, and once
she understood it then—if it made sense—we were able to get what we needed. I think she was
just phenomenal.
TD: Any other people you‟d like to mention who were significant during your time here?
LS: I think that Dr. Aebersold—I can‟t leave him out as far as supporting the dance program.
[Pause] I wasn‟t always happy with his support of me, but he was very, very supportive of the
dance program and that‟s part of the reason why we were successful in developing that program.
I don‟t think . . . I don‟t think there‟s anyone else I want to mention.
TD: So you‟ve been here in different capacities over the years—were there any major events or
activities while you were here like academic, cultural, major building projects? There have been
a lot of things built from the time you‟ve been here. Weather events, major blizzards, anything
really interesting like that that sticks out in your mind?
LS: It‟s hard for me having been retired almost ten years now to go back through. I know there
were lots of things. We were the first team to not be delivered to a sporting event by Snyder‟s
bus service because of a snow storm. We were on our way to East Stroudsburg and we spent nine
hours on Interstate 80 on the bus. We had times when we were out of water or we had ice storms
and people could hardly walk to get to our concerts. There have been many things.
We had a dilemma in the department with telephone service. Just to get a telephone to McKay I
had to withhold the dance schedule from the master schedule because I felt that it wasn‟t safe for
us, for so many people to be up there and not have access to a phone for first aid or for if
something worse would happen. We won that battle: we got our phone. You know, there was
always an obstacle of some kind. I think we had some divine intervention. We had a flood—[a]
rainstorm and for some reason a pipe was clogged and the whole floor of McKay gymnasium
was flooded two times in one week, and so we got a new dance floor after much hard work,
phone calls, paperwork, and so forth but that‟s the result of a flood. So, you know, there‟s so
many stories, I don‟t know where to start.
TD: I don‟t know if I can ask you this. What, if anything, do you miss about SRU? You‟ve told
me you‟re still here quite a bit, so . . . ?
LS: Well when I retired, my husband thought that I would be here all the time. He didn‟t realize
that I was ready to retire. I had thought about it for quite a while and I had taken the program as
far as I felt that I could with my skills, my connections. We had a totally new president and then
the dean was retiring. It was going to be like starting all over again and so when I decided to
retire, it was time for me to retire. They say you know. Then we were able to bring in Jennifer
Keller in my slot who has been a remarkable faculty member. And Nora has done a wonderful
job as the administrator of the program, having different challenges than I did: starting it out,
maintaining it, and following the guidelines of new administrators, new philosophies, new things
with money. It was just a good time for me to retire.
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Sack, Lucy 12

I miss seeing the faculty. I try to come to as many concerts as I can. I just had dinner with Nola
[Nolen] the other night, and Nora and I try to go to lunch at least once a semester just to keep
tabs of what‟s going on. I had Ursula [Payne] as a student, so I love watching the progress that
she‟s made as a professional. She‟s just unbelievable and I really enjoy watching her work. The
new people have been just such an enhancement to the program and they always welcome me
and make me feel like I‟m really special. So, I miss seeing them.
I do try to get here as much as I can. I should do more but, you know, you retire and you get into
all these activities and things that you do and you wonder how you ever had time to work. It‟s
kind of amazing. I do come back and teach for the Learning in Retirement Institute. I teach
ballroom dance in the fall semester and I just finished up. I had twelve students at the last class
and we just had a wonderful time. I just like it; it‟s my connection but I love retirement and I
don‟t miss the stress. You see this white hair? I was a brunette when I started teaching here and
now my hair is as white as snow. So I think its part of the stress of the whole picture. The
rewards are wonderful and I wouldn‟t trade it, but it was also stressful.
TD: Is there anything else you‟d like to share with us before we wrap up?
LS: Let me just look over a couple notes that I had here. [Pause] I think that trying to have
Slippery Rock known in the area as a dance school, a place where a student can become a dance
major and go on and pursue a career in dance and be successful is one of the important things to
me. So I‟m still always—when I meet a dancer or someone who‟s involved in dance—pushing
the program and asking them to consider it and go down and check it out. It seems sometimes
you‟re not known in your own backyard but when you go away from here people say, “Oh, I‟ve
heard about that dance program at Slippery Rock.” If you wear your Slippery Rock shirt
anywhere, people talk to you, so it‟s almost like wearing Steelers [apparel].
On the professional level, I worked in the Pennsylvania State Association for Health, Physical
Education, Recreation, and Dance; served as the dance person for a term. It involved three years
of a term: learning, doing, and helping the next person. I also did that in the eastern district and I
have presented workshops and presentations on a national level as well.
[I was] involved in the National Association of Schools of Dance, where the administrators at
dance programs get together and share what they‟ve done, what their problems are, and listen to
other people [and] how their problems are solved, so that [they] can glean some information.
That‟s always a wonderful experience for dance administrators, because you go there and you
hear what other people have to put up with and you go home and you think you don‟t have it
quite so bad, but you get ideas on how to make it better. I‟m just very grateful for the professors
that I had at the University of Utah because they really helped Slippery Rock get a dance major
through me. It was—I had to have that experience or this wouldn‟t have happened, I don‟t think,
in my opinion.
TD: Okay, well I‟d like to thank you for being here with us today. I really enjoyed this interview.
I learned a lot of interesting things.
LS: It has been my pleasure. Thank you.

Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania