What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? I have been thinking about several great Americans who died this week, including Neil Armstrong, the first human being to walk on the moon in July 1969. Here’s a contemporary news account of that day. NASA posted an Armstrong photo gallery here.

Like everyone who ever watched Sesame Street, I was sad to hear that Jerry Nelson, who voiced Count von Count and other Muppet characters, died on Thursday.

A giant of the Iowa journalism world passed away suddenly on August 23. Barbara Mack was a longtime professor at Iowa State University’s Greenlee Journalism school, planning to retire after this semester. She previously worked as a reporter and as general counsel for the Des Moines Register. Mack’s former students and colleagues are posting memories and tributes here. I posted a few of them after the jump.

Dick Doak, longtime editor at the Des Moines Register, remembered,

I met Barbara Mack when she was a young reporter at the Register, fresh out of Iowa State, where I believe she had graduated in three years. She was brilliant enough to do that. She was a breath of fresh air in the stodgy old newsroom, a free spirit who was famous for mischievously greeting the top editor with, “Hello, God.”

She managed to study law while working at the Register and became the fiercest First Amendment lawyer I’ve known. As general counsel at the Register, she argued some of the biggest First Amendment cases before the state Supreme Court. That alone would have been enough to make her a legend in Iowa journalism, but of course she went on to become a legendary teacher as well. Among the hundreds of students who were touched by her is my daughter, Danielle Christensen, to whom Barbara remained a friend and mentor many years after graduation, as she did with many students. Barbara and my wife, Mary Lou, shared a love of horses, giving my family yet another connection with her. I wonder if she knew how much light and joy she brought into the lives of everyone around her through at least two generations.

Amy Gilligan shared a priceless story:

I had Barbara for JLMC 201 when she first began teaching at Iowa State in the mid 1980s. It was a three-hour class, 8-11 am, and she would often toss me her car keys and send me out to get donuts for the class. I was the designee because I was only one who could drive a stick. It was, at the time, the nicest car I’d ever driven.

I worked at the Daily and was a journalism major, but there was a definite “in crowd” in the journalism department, and I wasn’t part of it. I was beginning to doubt that I was on the right path, until Barbara convinced me that I was. She was right. I’ve been in the business for 24 years, and it is my calling. She kept me in journalism when I was 20 years old and adrift.

The story we always revisited whenever we saw each other is this: My senior year I helped her test the powers of observation of a journalism 101 class. In the middle of a lecture, I burst in the door, screamed a rehearsed speech at her, and threw a pie smack in her face. Then I turned and ran out. As the stunned class stared at her, she calmly wiped the banana cream pie from her face and said to the students, “Take out a piece of paper.” Then she quizzed them on what they had seen and heard. The descriptions of me and what I had said varied widely — a great lesson for reporters and a brilliant exercise.

Barbara Mack believed in me when I needed it most. I am thankful that I did tell her what she meant to me in recent years. But I am terribly saddened by this loss.

I was touched by this recent ISU graduate’s story:

I just wanted to let you know how much Barbara means to me. Without her I would still be in school getting a different degree. She took the time out of her busy summer schedule in 2010 and taught me grammar for a month, in order to pass the dreaded English Usage Test. As I am typing this I am thinking about her correcting this message right now. 🙂 I owe her my life, because of her I know that dependence on anybody isn’t an option. If I want something I go after it. Without her I wouldn’t have gotten a journalism degree or be currently working right now because of it. She will truly be missed by many.

Katelynn McCollough wrote in the Iowa State Daily,

For many students at Iowa State, Barbara will always be fondly remembered as B-Mack. A professor who would pull your hair if you excessively used “like” and “umm,” who would take your cellphone until the next class period if she caught you using it in class, and who demanded respect. […]

“I’ve heard it said that some people are born teachers, and I don’t know if that’s anything you can prove scientifically, but anecdotally you could look at Barbara Mack and say: This is a born teacher. She just instinctively knew how to get students to perform at their very best. She expected the best, and she got the best out of her students,” [Greenlee School Associate Director Jane] Peterson said.

Barbara was currently on phased retirement, and this was to be her last semester teaching at Iowa State.

A year ago, when I sat in that interview and asked Barbara about her retirement she left me with this:

“You think about all the people you’ve met, all the people you’ve worked with. … It’s humbling to think of the experience I have had here. All of those things have happened because of Iowa State University. I want students to come away from a class believing there is always more to learn and there is always a way to improve their understanding. Nothing is as frustrating to me as a day in which I learn nothing.”

SEPTEMBER UPDATE: Friends, colleagues, and former students gathered at Iowa State on September 7 for Barbara Mack’s memorial service.

“They’ve all been using that word ‘iconic’ and I guess there’s such a legacy of talents in generations of communicators and reporters and media professionals that have come out of Greenlee,” said John Arends, a 1977 graduate of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “Barbara is such a distinctive personality that if you put all of them in a room you still put those people in the chair and you put Barbara up at the front teaching.”

Mack is remembered for her larger than life personality in addition to her legacy as a teacher. The loss of Mack is felt deeply throughout the community of journalists and mass media communicators who knew her well.

“She was the things people have said: So bigger than life, so renaissance, so compassionate. Just all these combinations of wonderful traits that you just don’t run across in one person and you did in Barbara,” said Mark Hamilton, publisher of the Iowa Falls Times-Citizen. “I can see everybody, all my friends and people I don’t know, feel that same way. It’s really quite inspiring.”

Mack had a distinctive blunt personality. Throughout the memorial there were bursts of knowing laughter when discussing the types of profane things Mack would say even when in polite company. […]

When asked what future generations of students would be missing out with the death of Mack, Jessie Opoien, a reporter at Oshkosh Northwestern and a former editor-in-chief of the Iowa State Daily, started with “good grammar.”

“Confidence, not cockiness, but just a strong sense of self-worth and balance. It’s so hard to balance work, personal lives and school; these are things that everyone is struggling with, but she’s so phenomenal at doing to a superhuman strength to where I don’t know how she did it,” Opoien said. “She taught me and so many other people that it is important to take time and relax and to spend time with people that you love, but it’s important to do what’s best for yourself and your career.”