Editor's note: This story originally appeared in AlumnInsider, the Penn State Alumni Association's monthly member e-newsletter.UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The man wearing sneakers, khaki pants and a polo shirt bounces through the doorway and toward the front door. Immediately, his energy and enthusiasm belie his age. He’s displaying the same amount of youthful zest as a college student heading into spring break, except for one thing: He’s 94 years old.
He’s extending his greetings within the confines of his apartment at an assisted living community in State College, and he gives the impression he’s ready to go on a jog, or play pick-up basketball, or engage in any number of other activities that people half his age sometimes can’t muster the energy to participate in.
The man’s name is Nick Landiak. He has quite an impressive background, and he’s eager to share it. Landiak accrued two careers, similar in nature but vastly different in execution; he once was a senior engineering officer for the world’s fastest ocean liner before coming to Penn State and helping to rebuild the University’s internal utility systems in the 1970s and ’80s before retiring in 1986.
He’s been married 68 years to his wife, Marie, and was strongly motivated to come to Penn State since two of his three children were nearing college age. They both graduated from Penn State, and have two grandchildren.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, that all comes later. At the beginning, all Landiak wanted to do was help animals.
Landiak grew up on a farm in New Jersey, saw a veterinarian work on animals and surmised that’d be a pretty cool job. So he attended college for two years before World War II broke out, first going to Louisiana State University and then transferring to Kansas State for the veterinarian program, one of the best in the country at the time, he said. Then the war started, and his plans changed forever.
Landiak graduated from the Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York, and sailed both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans throughout the rest of the war. When the fighting ended, he figured it was time for a change.
“I thought, ‘Geez, you don't want to sail when you're married,’ so I started looking around for a job,” Landiak said, “but I couldn't find anything.”
Everything on land involved traveling, so he figured if he was going to travel, he may as well stay on a ship. He was assigned to the SS United States in the early 1950s, acting as first assistant and chief executive engineer. The vessel set world records for speed, beating ships from the other side of the world. The SS United States overtook the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, behemoths in the sailing world, in the time it took to cross the Atlantic each way; there were two records, going from east-to-west and west-to-east, to account for travel patterns.Landiak was still a young man, in his late 40s, when the SS United States was decommissioned in 1969. So what to do for someone who had already traveled the globe, set world records and could sit back and collect retirement benefits? Not stand still, that’s for sure.
Landiak had plenty of options, but because two of his three children were younger and would attend college in the near future, he wanted to jettison a traveling type of lifestyle and work at a university, which led him to Penn State.