Mack Park

Dr. Warren Mack with wood engraving on paper. Circa 1950s. Used with permission from

the Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Penn State University Libraries.

Warren Bryan Mack (1896-1952)

Originally named Warren Mack Park for Dr. Warren Bryan Mack, the land for the park was donated to the city by his wife, Dr. Pauline Beery Mack in 1971. Also gifted to the city was a separate parcel for a school site on which Robert E. Lee Elementary (now Alice Moore Alexander Elementary) would be built. The park, school site and the surrounding area were part of a planned development of residential and retail space named Mack Place after Dr. Pauline Mack.

Dr. Warren Mack was a professor at Penn State, on the faculty beginning in 1923 and eventually became head of the Department of Horticulture in 1937.  In June of 1952 he announced his retirement from Penn State to move to his new home in Denton where his wife had just begun her new career as Dean of the College of Household Arts and Sciences and Director of the Research Institute at Texas State College for Women (now Texas Woman's University). However, just a few weeks later he succumbed to a heart attack in Philadelphia.

Aside from being an accomplished scientist and serving an integral role in the Victory Garden program during WWII, he was also an acclaimed artist gaining international recognition for wood engraving. He was named associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1944 and many of his engravings can be found in museums and archival institutions across the country, including the Smithsonian Art Museum and Fogg Museum at Harvard.

Dr. Pauline Beery Mack. Circa 1940s. Used with permission from

the Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Penn State University

Libraries.

Pauline Beery Mack (1891-1974)

Dr. Pauline Beery Mack was a renowned scientist, inducted into the Executive and Professional Hall of Fame in 1967. Her biographies exist in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in Science, American Men and Women of Science, Royal Blue Book of London and the Two Thousand Women of Achievement. Awarded the Medal of Distinguished Daughters of Pennsylvania and the Distinguished Texas Professor citation of the Piper Foundation, Dr. Mack was also asked to submit biographical materials for Who's Who in the World for being the first to devise a method and design equipment for the quantitative measure of bone density using X-Rays and received the Garvan Medal of the American Chemistry Society for her work in bone densitometry and calcium chemistry of metabolism.

Her efforts in studying the effects of prolonged weightlessness for NASA, utilizing bed rest experiments and research in bone demineralization, garnered her the Silver Snoopy Award on behalf of astronaut Jim Lovell who expressed "...my personal appreciation for the care and effort you have demonstrated in performance of your duties on the Apollo program, and especially for your contribution to the research of physiological effects upon astronauts in space." She was the first woman to receive the award.

Once asked why someone with her credentials would come to a "little girl's finishing school" she answered "...this isn't any little finishing school. It's a university for women who want training for careers." The planned development of Mack Place was the culmination of Dr. Mack's dream to surround her home, which had been situated in an agricultural zone, with an active residential area. The Mack House still stands across from Mack Park at 2225 E. McKinney.