John Vastyan, the BlogFather
John and his brother Pete spent several years on the salt flats of Galveston island chasing snakes, lizards and scorpions. The family moved to Hershey, PA when John was in 5th grade; all the Yankee kids lined up to beat on the Southern boys with no hair and thick-as-butter accents. The boys learned to fight and they lost the southern drawl in short order.
A decade later, John went to HACC for two years; then, into the undisciplined madness of America’s #1 party school, Penn State’s main campus. Of course, for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Scholastic morass led to four years of service in the US Army as a journalist and photographer.
Assignments took him to Germany (where he bought his first motorcycle) and to the Combat Development Experimentation Command and the 7th Infantry Division in California. There, he spent months at Ft. Hunter Liggett, a little-known, secretive outpost surrounded by miles of hot sand, desiccated mountains and scrub brush. The post was a proving grounds for all variety of covert and emerging weaponry – the sort of place Popular Science journalists would give their left nut to break into.
Before it even had a name, the new M1 Abrams battle tank was tested at Liggett. Many refinements of MI technology dated back to the field exercises in those remote sand dunes, no doubt improving operations many years later when the tank was deployed with fierce effectiveness in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. There, in the baked desert terrain, Vastyan was the first journalist to fire a prototype TOW (tube-launched, optically-sighted, wire-guided) missile, hitting its mark on Vietnam-era tank half a mile away.
Pumping Away
Back in Hershey, John joined PSU’s med center in a PR role that became a three-year adrenalin high. The very first, fully-fueled editorial machine was an air-driven ventricular assist device, built in Hershey as a temporary help for critically-ill heart patients. But things didn’t get real exciting until the FDA approved the Penn State Heart – a totally-implantable, pneumatic pump-driven artificial heart – as a clinical bridge to transplant for dying patients. In the field of medical PR, there was no better place to be worldwide.
That pump led to others: the heavily-pumped world of hydronics has been home since 1987. He still finds inspiration in writing, photography and motorcycling.
We’re putting a ride together now – care to join us?