Indiana University of Pennsylvania Athletics

A lifetime of service--that has been Gene DeMatt's, as since graduating from Indiana State Teachers College in 1942 he has devoted nearly 60 years to education, society and his country.
True, the qualifying reasons DeMatt is being inducted today come from his four seasons lettering in basketball for coach George Miller and being named three years to AP/Associated Press all-state rosters, first-team as a senior, representing the best of the 14 teams that now comprise the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference.
That status resulted from the two-year team captain becoming its leading scorer as both a sophomore and junior as well as a consistent 80 percent foul shooter while starting every game for three years. In his senior season, the Indians posted a 14-4 record and were declared state teachers college Western champs.
Soon after departing ISTC he enlisted in the U. S. Army and completed Officer Candidate School to become a second lieutenant. DeMatt earned five World War II battle stars by seeing action in Normandy (D Day), Northern France, Ardennes, Rhineland and Central Europe campaigns.
Serving as commander of a quartermaster service company, he guarded and provided security for work details for 300 German prisoners of war. Immediately after the war, he operated a labor pool for displaced persons from Russia, Spain, Germany and Italy. Later devoting many years to the Army Reserves, he retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1980.
Professionally, he built a 21-year career dealing with juvenile offenders, becoming superintendent of the Luzerne County School for Boys, the Youth Development Center for Girls at Cresson, the Glen Mills School for Boys near Philadelphia and the Sisters of Good Shepherd School for Girls in that city's Germantown section.
In each of these posts, DeMatt was applauded for numerous program improvements that ranged from reducing the number of escapees at his first assignment from 350 to fewer than 50 in one year, expanding vocational programs, fostering community relations, organizing intramural sport activities, building and renovating facilities, as well as in other regards.
Through all of these demanding roles, as well as intermittent business endeavors, DeMatt served his community and church in many ways. While at Cresson, for example, he was a member of the board of directors for the Talus Rock Girl Scout Council that serves five counties, including Indiana, and he has been an advisory board member for IUP's criminology department.
Married to the former Theresa Fanelli since 1950, he has two daughters, Anne Rooney, a Bloomsburg grad, and Jean, a graduate of Saint Joseph's Hospital School of Radiology, and one granddaughter, four-year-old Mary Clare.