Jefferson College | portfoliolongo

The other day I was updating an old post, click here to see it, about a Fall 2017 visit to my Southwestern-Pennsylvania roots. The primary reason for the visit was the marriage of my grand-niece, Amanda and her groom, Ryan. Annyth and I were living in Merced, CA at the time. She couldn’t accompany me because she was attending a conference in Montreal, Canada. So I made the trip alone and stayed with my sister, Micki in Washington, PA. In addition to attending the wedding gatherings, I made several stops along Memory Lane. [Note: I discovered that Memory Lane has recently been widened and renamed, it’s new name, Memory Boulevard.] These stops included excursions to my hometown, Canonsburg, PA, a visit with Dave and Brenda, a tour of Sarris Candies, a stop at Rusty Gold Brewing, a Steelers-Bengals game at Heinz Field, and a pilgrimage to my alma mater, Washington & Jefferson College, in Washington, PA.

While I was on W&J’s campus on that cloudless afternoon in October, I sat down on the grass in front of Old Main, as I had done hundreds of times from 1974 to 1978, and contemplated the Washington Trust Building.

I recalled a time when I was sitting in the same spot with a friend and classmate also from Canonsburg, an art major named Sandra. We were both looking at and talking about the Washington Trust Building. So, I was a Spanish major, and at the time I was up to my ears in and in the middle of reading Don Quijote de La Mancha. I must have said something to the effect that, if Don Quijote was sitting next to us looking at the top part of the building, he just might have seen a threatening human-like figure the way he mistook the windmills of La Mancha for monstrous, evil giants.
That experience evidently stuck with Sandy, because in her senior art exhibit a year or so later she included the following piece, a 3D découpage/collage, entitled Longo’s Don Quijote:

Longo’s Don Quijote by Sandra McPeake

Sandy generously gave me that piece, but sadly it was irreparably damaged while in storage, thusly locking in the enchantment, not to mention the permanent threat to Washington, PA and the rest of civilization.

A few days after that 2017 trip I reached for my faithful iPad Pro and my trusty Apple-Pencil lance to do battle once and for all with this hallucination and break its spell over the whole world by conjuring up the following iPad painting (and the time-lapse, progress video below it) so that order could finally be restored.

Washington Trust Building done in Procreate (click on image to enlarge)

Time-lapse progress video

A Celeste Van Kirk photo from the Observer Reporter showing the view from the Washington Trust Building looking back towards W&J’s campus, ie, the view from Longo’s Don Quijote!

Amanda and Ryan’s wedding and the amazing Italian cookie tables.

Sarris Candies production line.

John McMillan’s Log School, a frontier latin school established in the 1780s, once stood about a mile south of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. In 1895 it was moved to its current location near the corner of Central Ave. and College St., in front of the former Canon McMillan Middle School, which is now being used in another creative, community manner. The Middle School used to be the Canon-McMillan Junior High School, when I was a student in the late 1960s/early 1970s, and when I did my student teaching at the 9th-grade level in Spanish in 1978. Before the Junior High School it was Canonsburg High School, before that it was Jefferson College, and before that, Canonsburg Academy. In 1865 Jefferson College merged with Washington College in Washington, PA to form Washington & Jefferson College, and because of the ties to Canonsburg Academy and Jefferson College, W&J can rightfully claim to have been established in 1781.

See a related post featuring digital paintings of Old Main on W&J’s campus and downtown Washington, PA, as seen from campus. Click here.

I indicated that I had done my student teaching at Canon-McMillan Junior High School, but what I didn’t mention was that, when I was in the 9th grade taking my first Spanish class, my teacher was Mr. James Podboy, a native of Canonsburg and a W&J graduate. I eventually attended W&J, studied Spanish language and literature, and my one and only Spanish professor was Dr. Antonio Moreno, who had been Jim Podboy’s Spanish professor as well. So, right there in the shadow of John McMillan’s log cabin on College St. in Canonsburg, PA, where Jefferson College once stood, Professor Moreno and Mr. James Podboy ushered me into the teaching profession as a W&J graduate in a pretty darn hometown sort of way.