For more than sixty years, the Memorial Student Center-MSC-has served as the "living room" of the Texas A&M University campus. The MSC was conceived as a memorial to Aggies who lost their lives in the two world wars. More than just a monument to the fallen comrades, however, the MSC and programs initiated by its first director helped the university expand its focus to embrace an even more inclusive future. Author Amy Bacon surveys the development of two functions that quickly became vital to the mission of the MSC: a leadership laboratory for students and its centerpiece location as a place of extracurricular cultural and intellectual enrichment. She demonstrates how the MSC and the traditions that have developed around it blend with the national student union movement in a unique way that enhances the institutional heritage and aspirations of Texas A&M. This attractively illustrated book draws heavily on recorded oral histories, archives, and extensive interviews with key administrative leaders and students. Building Leaders, Living Traditions narrates the story of an institution that has transformed and enriched the lives of thousands of Aggie students and is poised to continue its vital mission. Since publication in 2009, the MSC renovation and expansion have been completed successfully, ensuring the "c" will continue to be central to students and former students alike. While an undergraduate at Texas A&M, Amy L. Bacon '91 served as the vice president of development for the Memorial Student Center. She holds a master's degree in public history from the University of Houston.
A disciple of Classical sculpture in a time of pervasive abstract modernism, Lawrence M. Ludtke (1929–2007) of Houston imbued his creations with a sense of movement and realism through his attention to detail, anatomy, and proportion. As a skilled athlete who played professional baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers organization, Ludtke brought to his art a fascination with musculature and motion that empowered him to capture the living essence of his subjects. As author Amy L. Bacon shows in this sensitive biography, Ludtke’s gentle humanity and sensitivity shines through his work; his sculpture truly projects character, purpose, and personality. Ludtke, a Fellow in the National Sculpture Society (US) and a Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of British Sculptors, became well-known for his portrait and figurative art. His works grace the halls and grounds of the United States Air Force Academy, Johns Hopkins Medical School, Rice University, Texas A&M University, CIA headquarters, the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, the Pentagon, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, and the National Battlefield Park at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He has also created significant liturgical art, most notably a life-size Pietá for St. Mary’s Seminary in Houston and a Christ and Child for Travis Park Methodist Church in San Antonio. Based on personal interviews with the artist as well as his family, friends, colleagues, and patrons such as H. Ross Perot, Life in Bronze: Lawrence M. Ludtke, Sculptor places Ludtke’s art within the context of the American figurative art tradition. The author explains how Ludtke was influenced by Italian-born Pompeo Coppini, whose monumental art has especially marked Texas and whose clay Ludtke inherited and used as his own favored modeling medium. Bacon meticulously details how Ludtke’s research into the lives and careers of his subjects was married to his attention to technique and talent. His own life story figures crucially in the creation of those character studies his sculptures so beautifully represent.
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