Lewis F. Gould, Jr., PHR '62, Trustee

It’s my very clear impression that Temple University is North Philadelphia. Without Temple University, North Philadelphia… I’m not sure what would be there.

I was born in Maine, and when I was ten years old my parents moved to central Pennsylvania to a little town called Middletown, better known as the home of three-mile-island. When I was in high school there, I started to work in a neighborhood pharmacy, and the man who ran the pharmacy, a man named Bill Bancas, very wonderful guy, said “You want to go to pharmacy school?” He sent me to what was then Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science where he had graduated, and he had arranged for me and my parents to have an interview there, which we did. We had driven from central Pennsylvania, it wasn’t time yet to go home, and so I said to my father, “Let’s go up to Temple University.” And in very few minutes, the dean came out, Joseph Sprouts - very nice man, and he spent some time with my mother and my father and me. And he then introduced us to Fred Gable, who was the assistant dean, and Fred took us all around the school, spent a lot of time with us.

Walking into a place where no one even knew who we were or that we were coming at all, and the dean and the assistant dean being so welcoming and so supportive, so that’s why I ended up at Temple.

There wasn’t much campus life. The only… the main, I should say, social activities revolved around fraternities. So, I joined a fraternity, Kappa Psi. We had a fraternity house up near the Pharmacy School; there’s still one there.

I think the thing that’s changed the most is now there is so much activity on the campus, I mean it’s just… booming. And everything about it is… students come from all over the country. Temple is no longer a Philadelphia or a Pennsylvania institution of higher education. It is a world-renown educational powerhouse. I think it’s the 28th largest university in the country now, 27th or 28th, with students from all over the world and all walks of life; it’s just a dynamic, dynamic place.