As a Blue Band alum, Lew Lazarow describes his time at Penn State as “athlete-adjacent.”
“I joined the Blue Band my very first semester [in 1989] and, obviously, that’s a pretty good introduction to the Penn State way of life and football and what it means to be here,” says Lazarow, who played the mellophone with the band.
After more than two decades as an educator in New Jersey, Lazarow marvels at the thought that he’s now in charge of the place that honors the university’s athletic heritage, the Penn State All-Sports Museum.
“My life has been dedicated as an educator. Almost all of that has been in the classroom,” he says. “But a museum is just another form of classroom and it’s a different form of education. … We do tours all the time for so many people, and the number of people who will contact me afterward and say, ‘This has been the moment of a life. We were so thrilled to be able to go through; we learned so much on the tour and we really appreciate what you and the docents have put together’; that’s a very meaningful experience for me.”
Lazarow and his wife, Sharon, met at Penn State and returned to Happy Valley in 2016. He took a part-time job at the museum while teaching in the English Department at the university. He retired from teaching after four years there and eventually took a full-time position as programming and education coordinator at the museum in March 2022. Director Ken Hickman left his position that October, and Lazarow has been in charge ever since, first on an interim basis, and, since October 2023, as director.
One of the ways in which Lazarow and curator Kelly Zalewski are trying to put their stamp on the museum is through “pop-up exhibits—making the lobby active and lively, a consistently changing place so that there’s always something new and interesting.”
This summer, the museum introduced a three-dimensional Beaver Stadium model built of 7,647 Lego bricks put together by Lego artist Garrett Gourley, a 2015 Penn State grad. The lobby also features a Lego mosaic of the Nittany Lion logo, built with 9,476 bricks with the public’s help at July’s Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts.
I Am a Penn Stater: Nittany Lions in World War II is the museum’s featured special exhibit and commemorates the eightiethanniversary of the war. Opened in June 2022, the exhibit will remain on display until June 1, 2025.
At this point, Lazarow only hints at what comes next for that space.
“We love what it is that we’ve done with World War II,” he says. “But varying the structure of those exhibits is really important, giving people different experiences. So, we’re leaning a little bit away from the intensity and the depth of this one to give us something a little bit different, but it’s something that my curator and I have wanted to do for a really long time. We’re really excited to bring that to everybody next summer.”
Here’s more from our conversation:
What is the museum’s biggest attraction?
Lazarow: The first and biggest attraction absolutely is just this stadium itself [the museum is tucked in the southwest corner of the stadium]. As long as conditions are right and we’ve got staffing, we’ll run people up and just give them a view of the field. And then what they usually discover on top of that is just how incredible the museum itself is. The thing that I think they don’t expect is such a well-maintained exhibition of such an incredible length of history.
Are there artifacts in here that are particularly meaningful to you?
Lazarow: As a Blue Band alum, we’re celebrating our 125th anniversary this year since our founding, officially in 1899. So having a few Blue Band artifacts in here. One of my goals is to see that aspect of the museum expand: those sorts of athletics-adjacent aspects—cheer, dance, the athletic bands. They’re as significant a part of the athletic experience here as the teams are, and it’s all part of that same culture. … We’re a huge university with a massive population, and there’s something here for everyone. And I want the museum to offer that as well.
Are there any artifacts that you don’t have that you’d really love to have?
Lazarow: There are so many things that we know are out there, that are a part of families’ personal collections, and we want people to know that we’re here. We get a lot of calls about things that people have where they say, “My kids don’t want this, but maybe this is something that the museum would benefit from.” I had a conversation with someone who has an expansive ticket stub collection, Penn State game ticket stubs, and we’re going to take a look at his collection and see what it is that potentially could now come and be a part of what we have. Paper is a very fragile thing, and so to preserve paper items that could potentially go back 100 years, that’s thrilling.
From a more recent standpoint, I’m not going to sugarcoat this at all: I would very, very much love to have our most recent [January 2023] Rose Bowl trophy here in the museum. I’ve thought about that a lot.
The beautiful thing about the NCAA and the bowl games is that they have absolutely no problem making additional copies of what it is that is given on the field that day. The football team has the Rose Bowl trophy that was given to them on the field at the Rose Bowl, and they should keep it; it was well deserved. It’s important to them and they should have it.
If you visit the football gallery downstairs [at the museum], there are three trophies in a row: the 1970 Orange Bowl trophy, that sort of capped off that big two-year, undefeated run; the Fiesta Bowl trophy from January 1987 that capped off the [undefeated, national championship] 1986 season; and the 1993 Citrus Bowl. So that’s three massive, sort of seismic events in the history of college football, and in the history of Penn State football. The rise to national prominence, the national championship that effectively changed the way the game was played, and then our joining the Big Ten. Our last Rose Bowl win, I see as being equally seismic in the history of Penn State football. I think that it belongs in that row as part of the timeline of the history of our program and the way that we’ve played in relationship to the way that the rest of the country has seen and experienced college football.
What’s the obstacle to getting a copy of that trophy?
Lazarow: $64,000.
The Rose Bowl trophy is made out of sixteen pounds of sterling silver by Tiffany and Company. They are more than happy to make an additional copy for you at a price tag of $64,000, which isn’t in my budget at the moment. But it’s something that I aspire to, and would very much like to see us be able to add that to our collection.
What might people not know about some of the work you do here?
Lazarow: I agreed wholeheartedly when I came on board with the previous director’s mindset that it would be really easy for us to just put trophies and win-loss records and stats on display. But that’s ultimately not what this place is about. In large part, it’s about the individuals, about their careers, about what it is that they were able to accomplish, the personal striving, their efforts to become the very best that they could be. But it’s also about the university itself and the changes that the university has gone through over the course of its history in developing and maintaining and expanding athletic programs for the benefit of its students, both here and in the future. And it’s about the interplay between the university and its athletic program, and the rest of the world, and all the things that have happened in terms of that evolution.
Most of the time, when I’m walking through the gallery with people and I’m giving tours, a lot of the things that I’m stopping to point out are the awards that people don’t know about. Everybody knows about the [football] Heisman Trophy; nobody knows about the Honda Cup or the Broderick awards [for female athletes]. Lots of people like to talk—and rightfully so—about Wally Triplett and the Cotton Bowl team in 1947. But nobody talks about Barney Ewell and the track team of the late 1930s and 1940s. There are stories of amazing accomplishment and amazing diversity of people that folks don’t know who have accomplished absolutely extraordinary things. And I think that’s what everybody who visits has an opportunity to uncover. … It’s our honor to put them on display.
What is your coolest moment in your time at the museum?
Lazarow: Probably the most touching one involved one of the veterans in the World War II exhibit. Almost all of them, of course, have passed. There are a few family members, a few spouses that are still left, and I got a phone call from one of them. She had contributed some stuff to us that had belonged to her husband [First Lieutenant David Ozarow], who was a captain of the fencing team when he was here and was part of a bomber crew during World War II. She said, “We found a couple more things going through the house and we thought you’d like to have them.” And I’m like, “Of course, we’d love to have them.” So, she sent them to me and I gave her a call to let her know that they had arrived. And she said, “I’m so glad that you have these things, and that you’re going to keep them and protect them and preserve them for the future. Because I just don’t want my David to be forgotten.”
Nothing touched me more than the idea that it was our responsibility to preserve the memories of our athletes and everything that they had accomplished, whether they had competed or whether they had gone to war. That’s my burden, that’s my responsibility. And it’s one I’m proud of. I promised her I would not forget her David. T&G
Mark Brackenbury is a former editor of Town&Gown.
