Baaron Pittenger Selected Assistant to Athletic Head

Baaron Pittenger, director of Sports Information at Harvard since 1959, will become associate director of Athletics effective July 1. He will serve as assistant to the recently named director of Athletics, Dean Robert B. Watson.

While Dean Watson is away on leave next Fall, Pittenger will coordinate the $2 million Harvard athletic program with the present director of Athletics, Adolph Samborski, who is staying on until Dean Watson returns to take office on Feb. 1. 1971.

No successor to Pittenger has been named, and probably will not be for some time. Pittenger himself will head the search for the new director of Sports Information, and has until July 1 to recommend a replacement.

Happy

Contacted yesterday afternoon, Pittenger emphasized that he is happy with his present position, but that he is eager to move on to a different job that presents new challenges.

Pittenger came to Harvard from Brown, where he had been Director of Sports Information for four years. A former newspaperman on the Williamsport, Pa., Gazette and Bulletin, and the Hartford Times. Pittenger has long been active with Little League baseball and the YMCA.

Aspired to Journalism

Journalism, though, has always been his main interest. "When I was 12, everyone else wanted to be a fireman or a policeman, but I wanted to be a newspaperman," he reminisced yesterday.

At Harvard. Pittenger serves on the Athletic Facilities Planning Committee and an ad hoe committee to study the R?dcliffe merger proposal as it effects services and athletics.

In intercollegiate sports, he has served as secretary and later as chairman of the NCAA's Committee on Public Relations. He has been cited for excellence by the College Sports Information Directors of America, and his Harvard football press books have been lauded by the Football Writers of America.