See front pages: How the CDT covered AI, immigration, housing in years gone by
The one constant thing in Centre County is change.
Since the Centre Daily Times began reporting the news in 1898, the county’s population has more than tripled, agricultural land has been turned to apartments and interstates have been cut through the mountains. But while the area may look different, the people of the past grappled with many of the same issues we do today.
So we took a look at the black and white pages from decades past to see what, if anything, has really changed.
We hope you enjoy.
Housing affordability
Jan. 21, 2007: Workers can’t afford a home in the Centre region
The buzzword of late has been “affordability,” locally and nationally. The State College area’s inaffordability, however, has been an issue for decades.
A 2007 CDT article analyzed the sky-high prices in the Centre region less than a year before the housing bubble popped, resulting in the Great Recession. Local home prices far outpaced wages at the time.
Then-Harris Township manager Amy Farkas, for example, told the newspaper she was unable to find a home in the municipality she was tasked with running, saying, “There’s no welcome mat for me.” It would end up taking Farkas a year to find a house, she told the CDT recently.
County commissioners at the time attributed rising land costs to farmland preservation efforts. Without enough land to develop into housing, what remained became more expensive.
One novel solution proposed in 2007? Use some Rockview state prison land for affordable housing. State Rep. Scott Conklin introduced a very similar proposal in Harrisburg last year after the prison’s closure was announced.
Penn State, the juggernaut
Sept. 5, 1959: Governor sets aside millions for massive Penn State expansion
If it ever feels like Penn State is just too big, imagine what people in the late 1950s thought as the university plotted what it now calls “fundamental changes.”
The Times, as it was then called for short, reported Sept. 5 of that year that Gov. David L. Lawrence had budgeted $68 million — almost $750 million in today’s money — for capital projects at Penn State over the next few years. The university, it wrote, was “expanding every day in one way or another.”
The article detailing the projects took up about a quarter of the front-page text. Lawrence wanted a building to house computers, which at that time were as large as refrigerators. He wanted a $2 million ($22 million today) addition to the library. He wanted a physical education building. The list went on for 16 paragraphs.
Tech and artificial intelligence
June 28, 1998: State College kids land AI, programming jobs
There was a time when there weren’t enough computer programmers and tech optimism was in.
That was the summer of 1998 — “the age of the information superhighway” — and two State College Area High School “whiz kids” had just landed plum tech jobs.
One, Daniel Burrows, was hired by a Penn State professor to write the program underlying a computer board game. The other, Joshua Bao, told the newspaper he would be “working with artificial intelligence stuff” for the Mars Rover Program. (The article is the second-ever mention of “artificial intelligence” in the CDT, which today produces some content with it.)
The CDT dove deeply into Burrows’ and Bao’s fascination with computers. The former, the newspaper wrote, considered his teddy bear and computer his “favorite pals” as a youngster. Bao got a Macintosh when he was 8.
The duo went on to elite schools, with Bao eventually working at Google, according to his LinkedIn. They were reportedly grateful for the myriad tech jobs.
The newspaper quoted a Silicon Valley insider saying there was a shortage of computer programmers in the country, and “it’s only getting worse.” Today, some are seeking work at the likes of Chipotle because their tech jobs have been supplanted by AI.
Immigration
Feb. 23, 1924: County’s congressman supports immigration crackdown
Faced with rapidly changing demographics in the nation, Congress in 1924 had to answer the following question: Should the federal government restrict immigration from non-Western countries?
The answer of Centre County’s Republican congressman, described as a “middle-of-the-roader” by what was then known as the State College Times, was yes.
Rep. William I. Swoope, a lawyer from Clearfield, reasoned the Johnson–Reed Act was a compromise between “letting down the bars completely or prohibiting all immigration.” The Times wrote he would “vigorously” support the bill.
The Johson–Reed Act, which passed both chambers of Congress by lopsided margins, capped immigration from foreign countries to 2% of already naturalized citizens from a given nation. The law banned Asian immigrants entirely and heavily favored Western European immigrants, whose numbers in the U.S. were far greater.
The U.S. State Department said on its website “the most basic purpose” of the act was “to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.”
This story was originally published February 11, 2026 at 6:01 AM.
