Sept. 10 Ceremony Welcomes Returning Pitt Honorees for ODK Walkway Rededication

On this walk Omicron Delta Kappa honors those persons who, through intelligent leadership, personal integrity and intellectual honesty, have served their University well.

This inscription at the beginning of a walkway between Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning and the Heinz Chapel welcomes visitors to follow the Omicron Delta Kappa (ODK) walkway and peruse the engraved-in-stone names of those University of Pittsburgh alumni who, during their time at Pitt, earned the honor of ODK Senior of the Year.

Through the decades, some stones had cracked, some had settled, and some of the names had faded, prompting the University of Pittsburgh to restore the walkway. Led by Pitt’s Office of Facilities Management and the Cost Company, which cleaned and restored the Cathedral of Learning several years ago, the walkway restoration was completed last fall.

Pitt's ODK honorees, along with several Pitt administrators, stand on the rededicated ODK walkway between Heinz Chapel and the Cathedral of Learning.

A dedication and ribbon-cutting ceremony for the newly restored ODK walkway was held Sept. 10, with 27 of Pitt’s 70 living ODK Seniors of the Year present. The walkway commemorates student leadership and celebrates ODK, a prestigious national honorary leadership society. It is the only walkway of its kind in the nation.

“While scholarship has always been a strong requirement for ODK membership, character and achievement in university-life leadership are the primary membership prerequisites,” said Pitt Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg at the dedication ceremony. “Pitt’s ODK walk captures the promise of student leadership, which sits at the very heart of the noble work that is done on all five of our campuses each and every day. Our ODK awardees, whose names are memorialized in stone, are linked to Pitt in perpetuity.”

ODK was the first college honor society of national scope to recognize and honor meritorious leadership and service in extracurricular activities and to encourage the development of campus citizenship.

Pitt established the Gamma Circle in 1916 as the third ODK chapter in the nation. The Gamma Circle sponsors Pitt’s Senior of the Year Award, given to students who possess and exhibit outstanding leadership qualities in service to the University. The first ODK Senior of the Year was L.I. Klinestivera, in 1922.

Among Pitt’s 70 ODK awardees is University Trustee Michael A. Bryson, the 1968 ODK winner, who spoke at the dedication. Bryson has served as a Pitt trustee since 2002. A 2008 Pitt Legacy Laureate, Bryson graduated from the University summa cum laude with a BS degree in mathematics and physics. He also was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received the M.M. Culver Award in Mathematics. He is a past director of Pitt’s Alumni Association.

Carol Simko Christobek (ENGR ’77), an ODK awardee, receives her ribbon-cutting scissors for the ceremony. The ODK honor had been given exclusively to male seniors at Pitt for 52 years—becoming known as the “Man of the Year” award—until Christobek won it and received the certificate in 1977. But, alas, the finer text of the award certificate was left unchanged and refers to her “as the senior man of the class of 1977.” Christobek said she still chuckles about the wording, adding that some things never change: When she attended last month’s event with her husband, Mark Christobek (ENGR ’77), some participants incorrectly assumed that he, not she, was the ODK alumnus.

Among the 26 ODK honorees attending the dedication were a 15-term Republican representative for the 9th Congressional District of Pennsylvania; a regional administrator for the U.S. General Services Administration Mid-Atlantic Region, appointed by President Barack Obama; a director of Business Process Excellence at Ashland, Inc.; a Pitt Rhodes Scholar who is now an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University; a national account executive from Kellogg Company in Pittsburgh; and a president and CEO of Terradime, LLC, a real estate and research enterprise. (A listing of all the attendees accompanies this article.)

Founded in 1914 at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., ODK is an honorary society that recognizes students who maintain a high standard of leadership in collegiate activities. The founders—15 student and faculty leaders—established the organization with the idea that “leadership of exceptional quality and versatility in college should be recognized, that representatives in all phases of college life should cooperate in worthwhile endeavors, and that outstanding students, faculty, and administrators should meet on a basis of mutual interest, understanding, and helpfulness.”

ODK Attendees at Rededication Ceremony

Franklin Blackstone

—Class of 1949

Ludwig Lippert

—Class of 1953

The Honorable Bud Shuster

—Class of 1954

Robert Muzik

—Class of 1958

Carl Templin

—Class of 1961

Michael Bryson

—Class of 1968

David Ehrenwerth

—Class of 1969

David Guydan

—Class of 1970

David Blandino

—Class of 1974

Carol Simko Christobek

—Class of 1977

Joseph Heim

—Class of 1980

Guy Molinari

—Class of 1983

Patrick McElhinny

—Class of 1985

Sharon Metzker

—Class of 1988

Monica Perz-Waddington

—Class of 1989

Nathan Urban

—Class of 1991

Christine Bienkowski Dockey

—Class of 1994

Julie Crowell Varghese

—Class of 1996

Kelly Coffield

—Class of 1999

George Mongell

—Class of 2000

Michael Unangst

—Class of 2001

Andy Hutelmyer

—Class of 2003

Elizabeth Blasi

—Class of 2005

Tyler Gourley

—Class of 2005

Joseph Pasqualichio

—Class of 2007

Andrea Youngo

—Class of 2007

Max Greenwald

—Class of 2010