Campus & Community
Letters (Summer 2025)
Streetcars, mastodons, and remembering Jerry West
Country roads ...
My daughter, Lara Taffer (B.A.’13) gets her magazine at my address, and the latest edition caught my eye with the story on Jerry West. I’m a West Virginia born and raised, WVU Mountaineer-loving grad living in northern Virginia for the past 21 years. I read the issue cover to cover waiting to find the article, not realizing until I had finished that the article I was looking for was online. This edition was filled with some great stories. I particularly liked the story by James Irwin on the history and demise of the electric streetcars in Richmond. But ... it didn’t surpass the article about Jerry West. What a great story!
— David S. Taffer, Leesburg, Virginia
A cozy weekend read
It’s March 2, and I just finished devouring the latest VCU Magazine (Winter 2025), in front of the fire on a lazy Sunday morning. While I typically enjoy browsing these publications, this time around, most, if not all, of the articles spoke to me, and I spent two hours reading and enjoying a quiet morning. Congratulations on the accolades from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. Well deserved and keep up the great work.
—Greg Florence, Ph.D. (B.S.’87, M.S.’93, Ph.D.’05), Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina
‘Just plain interesting’
I am not an alumnus of VCU, but my wife, Anne McNulty, M.D. (H.S.’84), was MCV housestaff. As a writer and editor, I see (and sometimes write for) many alumni magazines, both from schools we and our son attended and from other sources, and I have to say VCU Magazine is really good. As I say, I’m not a grad, so I guess I should have little or no interest in the magazine. But it is so filled with interesting stories, profiles, features, etc., that it draws me in.
Too many alumni magazines, in my opinion, are filled with too-lengthy pieces about what a great school this is, how wonderful we are and so forth. (Or to boost the ego of some professor who thinks the wide world should be interested in their specialty.) I guess that’s part of an alumni publication’s nature. But the VCU Winter ’25 issue has stories that are just plain interesting — the history of Richmond’s streetcars, the question about mastodons, the story about desegregation, Mount Everest and more. I picked it up just to thumb through, and it hooked me!
— Henry McNulty, Cheshire, Connecticut
