Two Professors Look Back on 50 Good Years at Penn State

At a recent ceremony honoring long-time employees of the College of Agricultural Sciences, two professors received special recognition for 50 years of service. In fact, noted Dean Robert Steele, Lou Moore and Henry Gerhold trail only legendary football coach Joe Paterno in university seniority.

“But I have an advantage over Joe,” quipped Gerhold, a professor of forest genetics. “I was a student here in the late 1940s, before Joe got here.” Moore, a professor of agricultural economics, was a student at the university too, earning both a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in agricultural economics.

Obviously, Gerhold and Moore have seen a lot of changes over the past five decades, as Penn State grew from a sleepy little agricultural college to a cosmopolitan university with an enrollment of 42,000 at the University Park campus. “The students seem so much younger now than they used to,” says Moore with a chuckle. “When I first came to Penn State, there were just 9,000 of them.”

When Gerhold started at Penn State as a student, the structure of DNA had not yet been discovered. “I was at Yale working on my doctoral degree when I first became aware of it,” says Gerhold, a native of Mahwah, N.J. “That was just after Crick and Watson discovered DNA at Cambridge, and a thorough understanding of the cellular material that determines heredity in all living things was still decades away.”

In 1956, when Gerhold began his research in the then-College of Agriculture trying to develop a better Christmas tree, terms such as “genetic modification,” “genomics,” and “gene sequencing” were unheard of. Today, partly because of his work, Pennsylvania is a leader in Christmas-tree production.

Moore, a native of Bedford County, began working for the university in 1955 as its first area marketing agent. Based in Erie County, he traveled to 10 Pennsylvania counties consulting with farmers and other agricultural producers. In 1958, Penn State invited him back to University Park to become an extension economist and livestock, meat, and grain specialist—a role he still plays.