The large pin on Elsie Hillman's yellow suit showed a smiling young man in horn-rimmed glasses incongruously holding a 6-foot-long spoon.

	Tony Tye, Post-Gazette Former Gov. and U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, second from left, talks with U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter at the dedication of the Dick Thornburgh Room in the Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh. To the right of Mr. Thornburgh are Pitt Chancellor Mark Nordenberg and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Click photo for larger image.

Depicted was a neophyte congressional candidate, posing with a trademark campaign prop as he pledged to "stir things up in Washington."

It would take former Gov. and U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh a few years to make good on his promise. He lost that 1966 congressional race. But he did go on to shake things up in Washington, Harrisburg, the United Nations and other venues in his public career, celebrated yesterday in the University of Pittsburgh's Hillman Library.

Figures including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Sen. Arlen Specter and Pitt Chancellor Mark Nordenberg joined the Republican grande dame in dedicating the Dick Thornburgh Room, a center for the study of the voluminous collection of papers and memorabilia that the former governor donated to the university where he attended law school.

The room will also be the focal point for the Dick Thornburgh Forum on Law and Public Policy, planned as a sponsor of seminars and speeches on a variety of civic and political issues.

The teak-paneled room on the library's first floor looks out on Schenley Plaza. On its other side, it faces the library's K. Leroy Irvis Room, which commemorates the late speaker of the state House who was a Harrisburg contemporary of Mr. Thornburgh.

While recounting Mr. Thornburgh's career as prosecutor, governor, U.S. attorney general and U.N. official, Justice Alito hailed him as "one of the finest lawyer statesmen that our generations have seen."

Before the lunchtime ceremony, the justice and the former attorney general had spent an hour in a nearby classroom answering questions from Pitt law students.

Mr. Specter, who lost the GOP primary for governor to Mr. Thornburgh in 1978, called him, "an outstanding attorney general," and stirred laughter, adding, "as each day goes by we see how really outstanding he was" -- an oblique reference to the controversy surrounding the current attorney general, Alberto Gonzales.

Part of the new Thornburgh complex is the Judge Jay C. Waldman seminar room, named for the late U.S. District Court judge who was Mr. Thornburgh's right-hand man from his days as U.S. attorney through his years in Harrisburg and Washington. Mr. Thornburgh remarked that it was appropriate that the Waldman and Thornburgh rooms were adjoining, just as their offices had been throughout much of his public career.

The former governor said he hoped the documents and papers archived and digitized would give scholars and students insights into "the raw material of life in politics," suggesting answers to questions of "how do human beings react to solving problems, how do they react under stress?"

Few situations exemplify such stress better than the Three Mile Island nuclear accident that greeted Mr. Thornburgh just months after his inauguration. The tense days that followed are represented in just some of the memos, newspaper clippings and documents the collection comprises.

More prosaic memories, along with Mr. Thornburgh's notorious pack rat habits, are evident in other items, ranging from baseball scorecards to his law school notes and final exams.