Inside Rockefeller Center, David Garten looks outside his office window at the bustling city streets of Manhattan. Despite working in one of the most iconic areas of New York City, Garten reminisces of the beauty seen in the night sky above Ferrum College. “At night you see more stars than you ever could possibly believe,” recalls Garten.
Born and raised in Orlando, FL with strong family roots in West Virginia, Garten ’98, was recruited by Coach Dave Davis to play football at the College. He describes his first visit to campus as arriving in an oasis within a beautiful landscape of mountains. It was different than anything he had seen in Florida, but he immediately felt at home with the coaches and his teammates.
Garten credits the College for instilling in him a certain amount of resiliency and grit. Having played football the entire four years he attended, Garten says, “We practiced on a field covered with rocks everywhere, and we did that every single day, all through the fall.” He adds that, “You grow really close to one another. You’re doing it day-in and day-out, in the mud on the rocky field.”
The resiliency and discipline he learned on the football field spilled over to his other pursuits as well. After graduating from Ferrum College with a B.S. in Social Work, Garten worked in the juvenile justice and specialized foster care system before attending graduate school at Columbia University. At Columbia, he earned dual master’s degrees in social policy and public administration and quickly found himself working on Capitol Hill for former U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and former U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton of New York.
Garten’s time in D.C. and New York politics prepared him for his current gig: New York real estate. He is currently employed by RXR, a real estate and infrastructure development company in New York City, as the Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs.
Garten draws a straight line from his time at Ferrum to his professional success, stating, “It has been instrumental in helping me navigate from the worlds of bareknuckle D.C. and New York politics to [the world of] New York real estate.” At RXR, David works with a dynamic team advancing one of the largest and greenest office buildings in New York City history, a new terminal at JFK International Airport, the redevelopment of a city’s downtown, and much more. “I’ve been really fortunate to work with some amazing and dedicated people throughout my career. And it has been incredibly rewarding to work alongside so many individuals on the RXR team who embody what Ferrum is all about.”
Now with his own family, Garten looks forward to visiting the College with his wife, Melanie, and their son, Rohan. From nights spent beneath starry skies, to his time on the football field, to hanging out with friends on the ground floor of Bassett Hall, Garten wants them to see what makes Ferrum so special.
“You are not only getting a unique college experience, but you also get an education that is as applicable to the classroom as it is to life,” he adds. “You’re in close proximity at a small school [and must] figure out how to get along with others who might be different than you. That’s what life is about, and that experience is something that is unique to Ferrum.”
Article written and submitted by freelance writer Amy Shelor Dye with contributions by David Garten ’98.
“Real dear to me,” is the way Gary Ingram describes how he feels about Ferrum College. Ingram graduated with an associate degree in Chemistry from Ferrum College in 1977 when it was still a junior college. A Franklin County and a Ferrum community native, Ingram says that the College was a big influence in his life before he ever became a student. Growing up, he spent many hours on the Ferrum campus with friends whose parents worked at the College and has fond memories of playing basketball in the gym with those friends. The Ferrum College influence extended even to his extracurricular activities as his Boy Scout leader was a math and physics professor at the College.
After becoming a student at Ferrum, Ingram says that he enjoyed his math classes and even received a mathematics award during his time at the College. He also played tennis under legendary tennis coach Bud Skeens.
“Ferrum College is helpful,” Ingram says, “Like a family.” He refers to the College’s motto of “Not Self, But Others” stating that, “If you get that one principle, you will go far in life.” Ingram continues to give back to the College and urges other alumni to do the same: “Ferrum College is so important to the community. It offers students a diverse range of academics and gives so many students the opportunity to attend college that might not be able to attend otherwise.” One other attraction, he adds, is that most of the professors live and serve in the communities around Ferrum College.
Since graduating, Ingram has enjoyed a successful career in the glass and mirror industry. He has been part-owner in Finch Industries for 20 years. The company is a leading supplier in North America of decorative glass and mirror products that are used in the furniture, medicine cabinet, manufactured housing, RV, and decorative wall industries. He also helped build the Rocky Mount Bowling Center located about 12 miles north of the Ferrum College campus. He sold the business to its current owners after running it for a few years. Ingram currently lives in North Carolina near the Greensboro area with his wife of 33 years, Georgeanne. He’s also the proud dad of daughters Laura, Meg and Marci, and granddaughters Emma, Natalie, and Abigail.
Although a lot has changed since his days running around campus as a kid, he still finds time to visit. His last time on campus? The Folklife Festival in 2019. With each visit, Ingram reflects on how much Ferrum has meant to him and how much he owes to his hometown college.
Article written and submitted by freelance writer Amy Shelor Dye.
Hello, my name is Isaiah Clark. I am from Concord, North Carolina. I will be completing a major in Recreation Leadership (Outdoor Emphasis), and a minor in Ecotourism.
I am also a member of the football and track & field teams. In the small amount of free time I have, I enjoy being outdoors, hiking, biking, and fishing.
I enjoy spending most of my time designing graphics for the athletics program and plan on adding a Graphic Design Minor.
President David Johns
(September 29, 2021)
I spent many of my after school evenings at the Greentown Branch Library. I really don’t remember how it started or why I gravitated there; there was no formal program, no academic intervention, no outreach to poor kids in the neighborhood; but, for some reason, the library is where I wanted to hang out.
Greentown is a few miles from the Pro Football Hall of Fame and Interstate 77, and close enough to the Akron-Canton Airport that we could smell smoke from the wreckage when New Yankee catcher, Thurman Munson, crashed his Cessna Citation there in August 1979.
You could see the library from my school playground. It was tiny, only a few hundred square feet, a single reading room with shelving along the walls and a few freestanding cases stuffed with newspapers, books, and magazines. And, most importantly, I could walk there in less than ten minutes.
Of course, I understand why my parents allowed me to spend countless hours there each week — one less fidgety kid running through the house! But I am not sure why Jean Shelly, the fiercely disciplined, frighteningly stern librarian, put up with me. But she did. In fact, she was kind to me, even maternal, keeping a table always ready for me to spread out all the materials I was exploring.
She pointed me to things that interested me, and then to things that became interesting to me: Al Unser, the Indianapolis 500, magic tricks and biographies of Harry Houdini, stories about the Buddha, world maps, castles, articles about Japan. And mysteries, lots of mysteries like the Hardy Boys, Sherlock Holmes, and especially Ellery Queen, whose ‘Mystery Magazine’ was the first ever subscription I had in my own name.
Miss Shelly was cool, like Morticia Addams is cool; she may have eaten the young of other families in town for all I knew, but she opened the world to me in that diminutive biblioteca, and I loved her for it.
The heavy black rotary phone on her desk sounded the same no matter who dialed the library’s number—except for one. Each evening near closing time, my mother would call—I always knew it was her—and Miss Shelly would tell me it was time for me to go home.
I always carried a treasure back home with me, a book or two that swept me up and drew me in, something that opened my imagination to worlds close at hand and far away. My sisters knew I was back in the house by the familiar sound of a stack of books sliding from my arms, hitting the kitchen table, and fanning out like a deck of cards.
I visited that little place recently, a few days after my father died. Like a lot of things from childhood that we look at with older eyes, it was smaller than I remembered, no bigger than a modest starter home. I haven’t thought about that library for years, so I am not sure why I stopped by then. Maybe I thought the bricks still carried something from those days—a droplet of mystery and adventure, a glimpse of Miss Shelly’s kind and unsmiling face, the ring of a telephone summoning me home.
But all was silent.
No longer a library, it is now a museum, weather-beaten and stuffed inside and out with other types of wonders and curiosities: lightning rods, mailboxes, and hitching posts.
I took a photo in front of the door that opened to me each evening. In my hand I held a book that I could never have read then, but that I wouldn’t be reading today had that once-upon-a-time library not embraced a towheaded boy from Greentown, Ohio with mismatched socks, and a heart hungry for the world.
This column by President David Johns appeared in The Franklin News-Post. President Johns may be reached at president@ferrum.edu.
As a Criminal Justice major and Spanish minor, I intend to use the skills I learned at Ferrum College to change the perception of how we see and interact with those around us. I earned a B.S. in Criminal Justice with a criminology emphasis and intend to study and practice law. In Fall 2022, I will be a first-year student at Liberty University School of Law.
I am from Hurt, Va., and a first-generation college student.
Writing poems and short stories is a passion of mine.
In May 2022, I traveled to Rome for my study abroad experience, where I developed a passion for Renaissance art.
President David Johns
(September 10, 2021) Anyone who was awake twenty years ago has a Sept. 11 story. Some people hurriedly gathered loved ones close, not knowing what to fear, but fearing it nevertheless. Others spent the day staring at a silent sky, or watching looping video images of the same two planes colliding time and time again into the same two buildings.
For my part, I had just finished reading a Time magazine article I thought was ironic. I walked down the hall to share a laugh with a coworker, ready to add some humor to the least interesting day of the week.
But he was transfixed, listening to a small radio sitting on his desk. Farther down the hall, a similar scene. Within minutes, several of us walked across the street to Clyde’s house, the nearest television we could find. There we sat for the rest of the day wondering when a plane would dive into our town.
The senses we have had since birth–taste, touch, smell, sight, sound–are how we interact with the world and how we know the lights are still on within us. But when fear is acute, these senses either shut down to protect us, or they wake up to protect us.
Mine woke up.
And while in New York City that day smelled like burnt steel, smoke, and cremation, in Richmond, Indiana, it smelled like fresh bread, laundry detergent, and the dusty sofa in Clyde Johnson’s family room.
It really is hard to know how to remember some days, or certain events, or particular people. We know this to be true, because we struggle mightily these days with monuments and memorials, and this reminds us that remembering is not as easy nor as safe as it may seem.
I am conflicted with how to remember this day. Without a doubt we must remember the victims whose lives were crushed between floors of the Towers, incinerated–ashes to ashes–and those who chose to soar rather than meet a fiery end. We must remember the spectacle of twisted steel and the ashen faces of first responders, a new breed of Super Hero that was born out of the rubble of that day.
However, these things–destruction, body count, crowds running in fear–these are images of victory for those whose goal was terror.
Twenty years removed from that day and I believe more strongly than ever that Sept. 11 is not the day we should remember. Sept. 12 is. And the 13th, and Sept. 14, 15, 16, and beyond.
Frankly, I have trouble separating what actually happened on that day from what has been kneaded into my memory through two decades of elaboration. Documentaries, conspiracy theories, cell phone videos, political pontification, and newsreels. What I can say with certainty is that September 11th exposed human cruelty and hatred, but Sept. 12 displayed human resolve and solidarity. One day was a testament to nature ‘red in tooth and claw,’ the other a testament to the ‘better angels’ of this nature.
Of course, I am misremembering and painting with a broad brush of idealism. In the days following the 11th, we heard calls for scorched earth revenge that were as ugly as any terrorist’s invective against the United States, and irrational fear caused us to look at each other with suspicion when we boarded a plane together.
But being lumped together as one by the terrorists actually made us act together as one–mostly, and for a time. It seemed to matter less who was who or what group we represented. We were Americans, dammit, and we would live or die that way!
It did not last long, but it happened–a glimpse long enough to convince some of us that it was real, and if real, then something that could happen again. And, maybe the next time, we would not need to be in the crosshairs of violence to bring it back.
I don’t know. Many days that feels like a utopian fantasy. We are as polarized as we have been for quite some time, and simply being fellow citizens does not seem to be quite enough for us to accept each other as fellow Americans.
Our lives look too much like Sept. 11–filled as they often are with fear, and anger, with twisted steel, and revenge. Twenty Septembers later, and my hope for humanity does not come from remembering that day, but from remembering the days that follow it.
This column by President David Johns appeared in Roanoke Times and The Franklin News-Post. President Johns may be reached at president@ferrum.edu.
Hello, my name is Jess Bollinger and I am from Bedford, Virginia. I am double majoring in History and Political Science and have three minors: Psychology, Sociology and International Studies, with an emphasis in human rights.
On campus, I am a member of the Women’s Basketball Team, an Ambassador for the Admissions Office, and I work for the school’s groundskeeping crew. Next summer prior to my senior year, I plan on studying abroad in both Poland and Croatia to further my knowledge of the world, learn from a different perspective of the events of WWII, and to gain some Polish language skills.
I am still rather undecided on what I want to do after college, but for now, I would like to use my education to help better the world. I hope to go into the United Nations and work in the Humanitarian Aid department. I also plan on joining the Peace Corp once I graduate for a two-year term at the least.
In my free time I enjoy traveling, working out, learning new languages and cultures, advocating, exploring nature, watching Harry Potter, hanging out with friends, family, and of course the pets, and as weird as it sounds to some, I enjoy learning.
My name is Kyler Bowden. I am a junior who transferred to Ferrum from Louisburg College at the start of my sophomore year. I’m majoring in Health & Human Performance with an emphasis in Exercise Science.
I live in Durham, N.C., and I play on the college basketball team.
Hi, I am Emily Arrington and I am from Franklin County, Virginia. I am majoring in Agricultural Sciences (Animal Science) and hope to become a large animal veterinarian.
I enjoy photography, horseback riding, and going off-roading.
Hi, my name is Haley Woodward, and I am a freshman at Ferrum College. I am studying Pre- Professional Health Sciences with a Pre-Med emphasis. I hope to one day go into Pediatrics.
I am also a member of the Ferrum Women’s Soccer Team.
