including me. We have Jennifer Shuey, our development director, Carol Baney, our operations director, and it’s just the three of us. We have a couple people like Doris Mack, our performing arts director, she’s a paid contractor. During the festival, we have a ton of paid contractors for sound and light, as well as people that clean bathrooms. They aren’t employees; they just work those five days a year. Doris works throughout the year; she listens to every single musical submission we get. Mimi: Well, you know, I had my time as president of the festival board and my goal was always to have one festival in the bank. God forbid something happens, you’re covered. Do we have one festival in the bank yet? Rick: Actually we just completed an exercise where we tried to figure out if something happened and we weren’t able to have either the festival or First Night: could we keep the staff paid with health insurance and so forth? We almost have enough in the
CVIM’s Volunteer Representative of the Year Each year Centre County Council for Human Services agencies nominate volunteers to be honored at the annual Rose Cologne dinner. CVIM’s 2017 representative was Arian Zarkower. Arian started volunteering in March of 2003, one month after CVIM opened its doors to the uninsured. As a member of the Medication Assistance Program (MAP), Arian helped to develop a unique process to obtain free medications for CVIM patients. He has seen the program change from manually filling out applications to having it all computerized.
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bank to do that. And that doesn’t include any appeal for help we would make to the community. Also, we just started a legacy society at the Centre Foundation. It’s called the Celebration Circle and we have maybe seven members right now. We don’t want any of the gifts to mature too soon. Mimi: You’ve lived here all your life, except when you went to college. Tell me about your background in this community. Rick: My parents moved here in 1948 and neither of them were Penn Staters. They met during World War II in France. My mother was a widow. Her first husband had died in a B-17 crash. She had been married for about a month before he shipped out. After he died, she enlisted. She worked as a dietician at a hospital in Nancy. She met my father while she was in France. He was a dashing fighter pilot. Even to this day I have people come up to me and say, “Oh, my mother or my grandmother thought your father was just the cat’s pajamas.” My father went to the University of California in Berkley for a while. Mimi: Your father was a character. Rick: Yes, he dropped out of college. He was a character, immensely larger than life. Mimi: You knew he was in the room. Rick: He was quite something. My siblings and I have all heard, “Oooh, your father’s so handsome.” My grandfather said that State College is a place on the move. My grandfather, my mother’s father, was a business associate of O.W. Houts. If you bought something at O.W. Houts and financed it, my grandfather held the paper. So, my father started working there in the lumber yard. I have three siblings and only one of them, my sister, is a Penn Stater. Mimi: And where are they all? Rick: My brother, the attorney, is in Penns Valley. My sister, a project manager for a software company, lives in Bellefonte, and we have another brother who lives in Texas. My mother used to say she had three only children and I think that pretty much hit it right on the nose. We’re all very different. We all think we are the smartest and the funniest.