The 40th anniversary of Pell Grants, the student loan program championed by the late Rhode Island U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell, will be celebrated at a daylong event in New York City later this summer.

“Pell Grants: Celebrating 40 Years of Educational Access” will be held Sept. 7 at the Marriott Marquis in New York. It’s hosted by the Washington-based Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators and the College Board.

Members of the late senator’s family including Clay Pell, a U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant and White House Fellow, will be joined by Martha Kanter, an education undersecretary in the Obama administration, and other policymakers, educators, administrators and Pell Grant recipients to commemorate the program.

There will also be a screening of the new 90-minute documentary “Pell Grants: A Passion for Education,” which looks at the behind-the-scenes battle in Congress to pass the program. The film was partly funded by a $7,500 grant from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities. Watch the movie’s trailer here.

• Related: Photo: Clinton, Jack Reed and Claiborne Pell on Air Force One (June 21)

U.S. Sens. Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse took to the Senate floor this afternoon to mark the 40th anniversary of President Nixon signing Pell Grants into law. Named (later) for U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell, the college financing program provided more than $100 million to nearly 30,000 Rhode Islanders in 2009-10.

Over the last 75 years, just three men – all Democrats – have held Rhode Island’s Class II Senate seat: T.F. Green, from 1937 to 1961; Pell, from 1961 to 1997; and now Reed, who was a congressman when he won Pell’s Senate seat upon the elder statesman’s retirement.

All this is really just my excuse to post this great old photograph of Reed and Pell conferring with President Clinton on Air Force One in the 1990s, which Reed’s office dug up at my request:

Fun fact: If Jack Reed retires at the same age as T.F. Green, he’ll be in the Senate until 2043.

Rhode Island’s late U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell got a brief mention on Tuesday night’s edition of “Hardball with Chris Matthews” on MSNBC. During a discussion of a new Washington Post report about the growing wealth of federal lawmakers, Matthews related this anecdote:

There was a muddy day up in Rhode Island one time, and Claiborne Pell – the elite Claiborne Pell – borrowed some galoshes from a young guy. And he brought it to back to him and he said, “Where’d you get these from?” And he said, “I got it from Thom McAn.” And [Pell] said, “Would you thank Thom for me?” He had no recognition of the human experience.

For my fellow Millennials who are scratching their heads at the story, Thom McAn was apparently a chain store owned by the Melville Corporation, the forerunner of CVS Caremark, that sold shoes.

You can watch the “Hardball” clip here. (MSNBC.com’s embed code isn’t working.) Thanks to reader JA for the tip. The Thom McAn story is also told in G. Wayne Miller’s new biography of Pell, “An Uncommon Man.”

Yesterday I put up a post (with an admittedly snarky headline) highlighting a Chronicle of Higher Education study and related New York Times story that showed just 11% of Brown University students got federal Pell Grants, which primarily go to those with lower incomes, in the 2008-09 school year.

Brown’s vice president of public affairs and university relations, Marisa Quinn, reached out this morning to tell me there’s more to the story – and that Brown has evidently made great strides in boosting the economic diversity of its class over the last two school years, despite the economy.

Bottom line: the number of students getting Pell Grants has jumped 37% since the year examined by the Chronicle, from 719 in 2008-09 to 984 this year. That would be about 16% of current undergraduate enrollment, a five-point increase in two years.

Quinn also pointed to major increases in financial aid outside the Pell program – another number that stuck out to me was the share of students without any loans, which has surged 6% to an astounding 61% in three years. “The study referenced does not reflect these important gains,” she said.

As a side note, Quinn has a personal connection with Pell Grants – she was a legislative aide to Sen. Claiborne Pell himself earlier in her career. With Marisa’s permission, I’ve posted the full text of her response to the Chronicle study after the jump.

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an artist's rendering of the Wickford Junction station

To mark today’s groundbreaking on the new Wickford Junction train station in North Kingstown, I have a new story up on the main site looking at the first expansion of commuter rail service in Rhode Island since 1988:

Commuters will be able to pay $18 for a round-trip train ride from North Kingstown to Boston and back when MBTA service is extended to South County a little more than a year from now. …

With the addition of Wickford and the opening of the near-finished intermodal facility at T.F. Green Airport in Warwick, Rhode Island is getting its first extension of commuter rail service since Providence-Boston service restarted 22 years ago.

You can read the rest of the article here. (Please do!) In the meantime, here are a few other interesting anecdotes about how the project got off the ground.

When I talked with Sen. Jack Reed yesterday – who has been working on getting a new Wickford station since the early 1990s – he reminisced about his long-serving predecessor, Claiborne Pell, and how Pell’s vision helped lay the groundwork for expanded rail in the state.

“He wrote a book called ‘Megalopolis Unbound’ – only Claiborne could come up with a title like that,” Reed said, chuckling. (The book came out in 1966, at the end of Pell’s first term – ironically, just a few years before the old Wickford Junction station closed.)

“He talked prophetically about the need for fast, environmentally friendly train service in the Northeast Corridor,” Reed said. “He was someone that had a great sort of vision for the potential for intercity transit, train travel in particular.” Former Sens. John and Lincoln Chafee also backed the idea, he said.

Still, it’s one thing to have the vision, and another thing to corral (in the case of Wickford Junction) $43 million in federal funding for a $52 million project, including $32.6 million in earmarks secured by Reed himself. While federal authorization for the station was granted way back in 1998, it took 12 years for the groundbreaking to finally happen.

When it comes to federal funding, it helps that Reed has a seat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, the powerful panel that controls spending. He is making his way up the ranks there, 11th in seniority this year and likely 10th come January, depending on the outcome of the midterm elections.

Reed said the argument he made over the last decade for the Wickford project was that it made sense economically and environmentally. “But still, there are a lot of projects out there that make a lot of sense,” he said. “You have to advocate aggressively.”

Also helpful is Reed’s relationship with Peter Rogoff, whom President Obama appointed last year to head the Federal Transit Administration, the agency that works with local transit systems.

Rogoff, who was scheduled to join Reed and other officials at the groundbreaking Wednesday, spent 22 years as an appropriations committee staffer, more than half of those as the Democrats’ point man on transportation funding. So he and Reed know each other well – which can’t hurt the Ocean State as officials mull the expansion of train service to other communities like Westerly, Cranston and Pawtucket.

(Image credit: Wickford Junction & Associates)