Wharton makes KC Chiefs’ roster

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Former Missouri S&T defensive lineman Tershawn Wharton, who earned All-America honors while a Miner, made the 2020 opening day roster for the National Football League’s Kansas City Chiefs. Wharton, who signed with the Chiefs as an undrafted free agent shortly after the NFL Draft concluded in April 2020, was a part of the team’s 53-man…

Football, a history

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The first game in Miner football history was played on Nov. 20, 1893, and the first Miner touchdown wasn’t scored until the next season by G.W. Smith, but the real story of the Miner football team wouldn’t take place until two decades later.  In 1914, the MSM team beat Mizzou 9-0, spawning wild celebrations in…

Major league research

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Three S&T faculty helped strike down claims that “juiced” baseballs were the cause of a spike in Major League home run hits in 1987. Dr. Lee Bain and Dr. V.A. Samaranayake in mathematics and statistics, along with Dr. Terry Lenhoff in mechanical engineering, were hired as independent testers. Bain and Lenhoff brought to the project…

Tom Benton’s ‘Missouri,’ from mural to movie

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It was “over a few root beer floats” one night that James Bogan and Frank Fillo decided to make a documentary of Thomas Hart Benton’s “A Social History of the State of Missouri,” the mural housed in the Missouri State Capitol. Bogan, a Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor emeritus of art at Missouri S&T, and Fillo,…

All aboard! Ozzy comes to S&T

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Rocker and reality TV star Ozzy Osbourne visited S&T’s Experimental Mine in 2018 for an episode of Ozzy and Jack’s World Detour. Dr. Catherine Johnson and Dr. Paul Worsey assisted Ozzy and his children, Jack and Kelly, with setting off explosions in and around the mine for the A&E Network show.

Earthquake stops baseball, starts inspections

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Kamila Crane, who earned a bachelor’s degree (1985) and master’s degree (1986) in civil engineering, was prepared to start rebuilding the Bay Area of California almost immediately after the Loma Linda earthquake of Oct. 17, 1989 — the same earthquake that interrupted the first game of that year’s baseball World Series.  Crane worked in the…

Miner athletics’ biggest fan

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Keith Bailey, a 1964 mechanical engineering graduate, transformed a company and then transformed S&T athletics. He joined Williams Co. in 1973 and became chair of the board in 1994, when the company’s assets were $5 billion. Upon his retirement in 2002, the company’s assets totaled $38 billion. Bailey played varsity football and basketball for the…

Communications entrepreneur and social engineer

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Kwesi Sipho Umoja, EE’67, says that Dr. Martin Luther King’s death had a profound effect on his perception of tomorrow. Umoja, one of only 19 African-Americans on the S&T campus when he was in school, would go on to start the first black-owned and operated national radio network, National Black Network, in 1971.  “While I…

Movie magic

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The technology used to create Davy Jones from “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” and characters from other films was developed with the assistance of Steve Sullivan, a 1989 electrical engineering graduate. In addition to “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, Sullivan contributed to the making of the “Star Wars” prequels and the “Iron Man”…

Float like a butterfly

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Few have shared the ring with Muhammad Ali or been praised by the New York Times as “one of America’s top industrialists,” but Harry Kessler accomplished both. As a teenager, Kessler heard “fabulous stories of mining adventures in far-flung corners of the work world” from his sister’s boyfriend who was an MSM student. The St.…