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THE MUSIC OF HIS WORDS I first met Brian Doyle when I was editor of this magazine. Brian was working at Boston College at the time and a mutual friend had encouraged him to talk to me about writing for PORTLAND. So Brian showed up in my mail in May 1987 when he sent me “The Albino Church”, a story about an albino shaman who lived in the backwoods of the northern Cascades. It was an amazing story, but I sent it back and explained that the magazine didn’t publish fiction. I added that we would like to see more of his work. In Autumn 1989, we published his essay about the inner game of basketball, and none of us ever looked back. A few years later I took on another assignment at the University and had to hire my replacement as editor. Brian came out from Boston, and we had several long conversations about the challenging work we were doing to alter the narrative about the University. We had hired Joe Erceg, the great Portland designer, to help us enrich the ‘look’ of the school and to link it more closely with the deep and rich traditions of Catholic higher education. But we also needed someone who could give us a new vocabulary, a fresh and exciting way to talk about ourselves and those traditions. As Brian got ready to return to Boston, we stood on the steps of Waldschmidt Hall and said our goodbyes. “The University needs a poet,” I said. “Come to Portland and be our poet.” Brian was our poet for 25 years. He sang of the University and its people with language that soared and swept and carried everyone with it. The music of his words touched almost every written thing that came from the University, from certificates for employees on the anniversary of their employment, to citations for recipients of honorary degrees, to letters carrying greetings from the University
president to dignitaries and political leaders, to the pages of his beloved magazine. His short essays in the front of every issue are literary gems. People around the world read and loved both him and his University. Always his words were electric and exhilarating and, as Brian might say, deft and poignant. His language and metaphors made readers laugh or weep or made their hearts leap with joy. He never met a word he didn’t like. Or a story he didn’t want to tell. He was a word magician, but he was many other things, too: a public relations phenomenon; an internationally acclaimed author; a friend to bishops, scholars and luminaries; a chronicler of the unnoticed and inconspicuous; a deeply loyal friend and colleague. Yet it was the beauty of his stories about the University, its faith, and its people, that changed us all. It’s odd that someone who could write with such absolute clarity and assurance could be unsure of his power and impact. In 2009, he wrote to me about that uncertainty. “Funny, just yesterday I was thinking what I did here will be forgotten right quick when I am gone, but that seems normal and natural to me – a few will remember, there will be a thin thread of legacy – books in the library, some framed magazine covers, a scholarship specifically designed for lefthanded Samoan ballet students who dream of running their own Laundromat some day, some grinning at particularly Doyle-esque stories or misadventures – but I guess the real accomplishment will be that I helped shove the place forward a little, which means a lot of kids opened up in interesting ways that maybe they wouldn’t have otherwise, which ripples the world somehow. That’s good work. Plus I had fun, which is important, and I got to work with such people as Bob Boehmer and Don Dinsmore and Becky Houck and Dave Doe, no small gift.” This past November 17 Brian sent me an email to tell me he had been diagnosed with brain cancer and that he would no longer be able to edit PORTLAND Magazine. He asked me to write this note for his final issue in his stead. I wrote back and reminded him of that day decades ago when we talked about him being the University’s poet. He was still unsure of his legacy. “I was just thinking of you telling me the University needed a poet. I tried, John. Lord knows I tried.” Brian Doyle more than tried. He did. He may no longer fill these pages, but the music of his words has changed us forever. - John Soisson edited this magazine from 1983 to 1991.
F E A T U R E S 12 / Miss Loudermilk’s Piano, by Michael Connolly A formal, formidable woman, a grand piano, and a wonderful story. 14 / Paul Slawson Revelations, by Catherine O’Connell Cahill For Paul Slawson ’93, revelation came to him in a cockpit one lovely summer day in the middle of Iowa.
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16 / Six Ladies of The Bluff, photographs by Steve Hambuchen They bless this campus every day, and we can never thank them enough: a photoessay. 22 / Great Fish of the Northwest, illustrations by Joseph R. Tomelerri Celebrating the wondrous Oregon creatures in the holy waters of our state. page 14
26 / What Do We Love Too Much to Lose?, by Kathleen Dean Moore Faced with inarguable terrible sinful extinction, what do we do? Hard truths and a gentle nudge from one of the world’s great nature writers. 29 / Text Me Out to the Ball Game, by Todd Schwartz Lots of telecom giants buy sports teams, but Consumer Cellular co-founder John Marick ’87 and his wife Tami ’87 aren’t your typical baseball team owners.
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32 / The Sacred and the Ordinary, by Fr. Tom Hosinski, C.S.C. On synagogues, mosques, churches, temples, squirrels, chemotherapy, Matza bread, the Big Bang, Alfred North Whitehead, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Amen.
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3 / Victor Rodriguez Valdovinos: The first in his family to attend college 4 / What it means to be a Pilot soccer player, an essay by Ellie Boon ’17 5 / The complicated life of the saxophone 6 / A biology professor’s fascination with “humanness” 7 / Kasey Keller ’91: Athletics 2016 Hall of Fame 8 / A gift of nature by Mike and Joan Concannon 10 / Athletic highlights including runner Lauren LaRocco ’18 11 / Brevia and Brian Doyle’s latest accolades 36 / University news and notes 48 / Less Travelled Roads
page 29 THE UNIVERSITY OF PORTLAND MAGAZINE
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Cover: Photographer and UP life sciences graduate Kelly DuFort ’00 captures the beauty of nature in its smallest details.
Spring 2017: Vol. 36, No. 1 President: Rev. Mark L. Poorman, C.S.C. Founding Editor: John Soisson Editor: Brian Doyle Dedicated and Demonstrative Designers: Joseph Erceg ’55 and Matt Erceg Mooing Assistant Editors: Marc Covert ’93 and Amy Shelly ’95 Fitfully Contributing Editors: Louis Masson, Terry Favero, Anna Lageson-Kerns, Rachel Barry-Arquit Portland is published quarterly by the University of Portland. Copyright ©2017 by the University of Portland. All rights reserved. Editorial offices are located in Waldschmidt Hall, 5000 N. Willamette Blvd., Portland, Oregon 97203-5798. Telephone (503) 943-8132, fax (503) 943-7178, e-mail address: mcovert@up.edu, Web site: https://sites.up.edu/portlandmagazine. Third-class postage paid at Portland, OR 97203. Canada Post International Publications Mail Product — Sales Agreement No. 40037899. Canadian Mail Distribution Information — Express Messenger International: PO Box 25058, London, Ontario, Canada N6C 6A8. Printed in the USA. Opinions expressed in Portland are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University administration. Postmaster: Send address changes to Portland, The University of Portland Magazine, 5000 N. Willamette Boulevard, Portland, OR 97203-5798.
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Commencement ceremonies will be held on Sunday, May 7, and Sr. Charlene Herinckx, S.S.M.O., will receive the University’s highest honor, the Christus Magister Medal; Dr. Celia Hammond of University of Notre Dame Australia will receive an honorary doctorate and deliver the Commencement address; Rev. George Bernard, C.S.C., will receive an honorary doctorate; as will retired Air Force Lt. General Dana Atkins ’77, sheriff’s deputy and pastor Rafer Owens, and Portland Magazine editor Brian Doyle. Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Doerr was presented with an honorary doctorate at his February 27 Schoenfeldt Distinguished Writers talk. ¶ Lenten Visio Divina took place on April 12, 12:35 p.m., in the warm holy embrace of the Chapel of Christ the Teacher. Viso Divina returns for the Advent Season.
The University
So popular is our annual State of UP address in Portland, we now send the ebullient University president Rev. Mark L. Poorman, C.S.C., on the road to spread the good word about campus plans and achievements. This year he visited Los Angeles on February 8 and the Bay Area on March 21, thanks to our Bay Area Chapter and
Arts & Letters
One of the most amazing concerts we have ever seen, thanks to the Garaventa Center: “Hard Times Come Again No More: Social Justice in Art Song,” a concert by UP’s Nicole Hanig and Catherine Jacobs, in collaboration with the Dundon-Berchtold Institute, on April 6. ¶ Performing and fine arts presents “Jesus Christ Superstar,” by Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice, April 19-23, in venerable Mago Hunt Center Theater. Ticketholders for the April 22 performance can come early for wine and cheese and campus experts panel before the show, starting at 6:15 p.m., compliments of the Garaventa Center, where they know their wine and cheese and experts. ¶ Concerts a-plenty this spring include Chamber Ensemble on April 11, 6 p.m.; annual UP Jazz Festival, April 12-13; Wind Symphony with Jesuit High School Band, April 22, 3 p.m.; Wom-
en’s Chorale “Girls’ Night Out” on April 26, 7:30 p.m.; and the May 12 Best in the West Choir Festival in Buckley Center Auditorium. All free, all open to the public, all in Buckley Center Auditorium (except the Jazz Fest), all exceptional.
Student Life
Founders’ Day was Tuesday, April 11, with student presentations taking the place of regularly scheduled classes, not to mention undergraduate research, panel discussions, recitals, and more. Founders’ Day was first celebrated at the University in 1902, when cofounder Most Rev. Alexander Christie visited the school he had established on The Bluff the summer before, an annual practice he kept up with great relish for the remainder of his life. ¶ Students Alec Kauffman (civil engineering, computer science, entrepreneurship and innovation management), Jean Paul Mugisha (electrical engineering), Jeremy Revlock (business), and Elizabeth Rowe (mechanical engineering) have completed training to join the University Innovation Fellows, a global program that helps student leaders increase campus engagement with innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity, and design thinking. Fine young fellows indeed.
The Faculty
Retiring from The Bluff at the end of this school year: James Male, engineering, who started in 1997 as the Edwin and Sharon Sweo Chair in Engineering;
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Wayne Lu, engineering, who joined the faculty in 1988; and the beaming gentle Zia Yamayee, he of engineering as well, and a former dean at that, who has graced our campus since 1996. Nursing prof Carol Craig will retire after 9 years on The Bluff, and theology professor Matt Baasten will retire after 36 years. ¶ Political science professor Gary Malecha will serve as interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2018. This will allow time to replace outgoing CAS dean Michael Andrews, who has resigned from his position to become director of the John Felice Rome Center, a campus of Loyola University Chicago located in Rome, Italy.
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On April 3, 1806, Captain William Clark, his slave York, and a party of scouts from the Corps of Discovery investigated the lower Willamette River near the present site of the University. Did they stand on The Bluff or not? Historical records don’t say, but for the best view of the future site of Portland and the surrounding Cascades peaks, how could they not have? ¶ On May 30, 1948, while the University community was gathered for spring commencement exercises, the flooding Columbia River broke through the dikes around Vanport, completely destroying the former Kaiser Shipyards company town. Over 18,000 were left homeless, some of them graduating UP seniors and their families.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY: MILAN ERCEG
The Season
Fedele Bauccio ’64 ’66 MBA. ¶ The University is still one of the top producers of Fulbright awards in the nation among master’s level institutions, says the Chronicle of Higher Education. UP tied for third place nationally in student Fulbright awards for the academic year 2016-2017. Congrats to 2016 Fulbrighters Kristen Jakstis ’16 (Germany), Erin Nishijima ’16 (South Korea), Jonathan Squires ’13 (South Korea), Katherine Lord ’16 (Malaysia), Taylor Zehren ’16 (Argentina), and Josefina Duran-Martinez ’16 (Mexico).
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Franciso Rodriguez Garcia and Maria N. Valdovinos have four children, and even though they themselves have only seventh grade educations, they believe in education as their childrens’ path to success and prosperity in life. And they were committed to see their eldest son, Victor, become the first in the family to attend college. With their modest income, Victor’s parents were looking at a daunting financial picture. Enter Russell Seidelman in financial aid, who helped him fill out every financial aid application he could find; Matt Daily of the Shepard Academic Center, who helps first generation students; and a host of others Victor calls his “guardian angels.” Now in his freshman year in the School of Nursing, Victor Rodriguez Valdovinos hopes to someday become a cardiologist. Is Victor’s family’s situation unique? Nope. Is the need to help other families enter the fold at the University of Portland great and growing? Yes, it is. Can you help? Certainly. Contact Chris Shine in our development office, shine@up.edu. Spring 2017 3
PHOTOGRAPH BY: STEVE HAMBUCHEN
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decide the only time that fits into everyone’s schedule is six in the morning, then six it is, because that is what’s best for the team. That is dedication. That is heart. That is something special. By Ellie Boon ’17 The UP soccer program is surrounded by a community that is also I will never forget the first Portland knowledgeable and passionate about Pilots soccer game I went to. My par- soccer. This community is what makes ents were aware of the women’s soccer all of the aches and pains and sprains program at UP, and their world-class and early mornings and road trips and reputation. What they didn’t know sacrifices worth it. I found this out was that taking me to that game would early in my career on The Bluff. change the course of my life. It was my second game wearing the I was only twelve, this was a few Portland jersey and we were in Eugene years after the death of the great Clive playing Oregon. The team was still Charles. Ten minutes after the opening whistle, I fell in love. Merlo’s stands were packed with fans, the Villa Drum Squad was in full force and loud as ever, and amazingly, not a drop of rain fell that night. Best of all, I watched a team of talented, strong, incredible young women play a style of soccer I had never seen before. The player who stood out to me was Elli Reed. She shared my first name, had blonde hair just like me, and had the most amazing pair of cleats I had ever seen. She played on my side of the field for the first half and worked harder than anyone on either team. That was more than enough reason for any twelve-year-old to choose her as a role model. I looked up at my mom and said, “I want to play here.” There is something special at the University Portland. Inspiring young girls is just a small piece of it. The girls who play for this program are not simply athletes. They are soccer players, and there is a huge difference. Watch us play against University of Oregon or Pacific and it becomes clear. Those girls on the Merlo pitch trying to get a rhythm as every team aren’t only big, strong, and fast; they does early in the season, and the game carry another level of skills. They’re went to overtime. Less than three able to read the game, juke out a minutes in I got a cross from Ariel defender, and perfectly place a ball Viera on the top of the box. Resisting in the back of the net. They value every cell in my body that was tellpossession and the fundamentals of ing me to panic, I placed the ball in defending. And why? Because the the corner of the goal and found myself University of Portland is a soccer celebrating with twenty-two teamschool. The only school in the nation mates. It was one of the coolest moI am aware of that plans their orien- ments of my career, but it was what tation week to include a Friday game happened the next day that showed me at Merlo. A school that has led the exactly how incredible the Portland nation in attendance for ten consecu- community is. tive years. The following day was the first of These players are dedicated to the the fall semester. As a freshman, I success of the team. I haven’t heard wasn’t sure what to expect. As my first of one other school where players arrive class was wrapping up, our professor, on campus six weeks early to start Dr. Bob Butler (“Coach Bob” to everyrunning together before preseason. one) asked if he could take a picture These runs start at seven in the morn- of us with nametags so he could learn ing, six days a week, but if the girls our names. As I stepped up, Coach Portland 4
Bob said, “Nice goal against Oregon yesterday. We’re all excited to have you here and can’t wait to see what the team accomplishes this year.” I hadn’t even held up my name tag yet. After one of our games during my sophomore season, a little girl walked up to me at the railing with her grandfather. She was really nervous and asked if she could get a picture with me. Her name was also Elli. I had a sense of déjà vu as I thought back to my first awestruck game watching Elli Reed. This new Elli quickly stole my heart, and she visited me at the railing after almost every game. Ellie loved to tell me how her last soccer game went and told me that she wanted to play for the Pilots one day, too. I have no doubt that if she works hard enough, she will. When she does put on that jersey, I am sure she will inspire yet another generation of Portland girls and continue the cycle. Every program has building years, and it is clear that Portland is in the middle of theirs. Even though I played for Portland through some difficult years, I never felt that I made the wrong decision. I also have no doubt that the program will be able to get back to winning West Coast Conference titles and national championships. How can I be so confident? I know how hard the current team is working. They are putting in countless unnoticed hours to get back to the top. I know that attendance over the years has wavered, but the core of our UP community support has not. There are still fans who support us through everything, because they also know that there is something special at Portland. And last, because of little girls like Elli, who are inspired to continue playing soccer because of the girls currently out there on Merlo Field. So as I say goodbye to my career at Portland, I am honored and proud to have been part of a program that changed my life. It gave me lifelong support, tools, and memories that will continue with me long after my soccer career is done. In the meantime, I look forward to the day when the Portland Pilots Women’s Soccer team wins their third National Championship—and I do mean when. Ellie Boon played on the Olympic Development Team, under-18 National Team, received three straight WCC all-league recognitions, helped the Pilots post nine shutouts in 2013, and, needless to say, played her heart out and inspired more Pilot fans than she will ever know.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ELLIE BOON
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Woe to the much-maligned saxophone, brainchild of Adolphe Sax, who dreamed of combining the best qualities of brass and woodwinds with his first instruments in 1846. While the saxophone gained popular acceptance in the United States and most of Europe by the 1870s, in Russia the famous composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (who also served as Inspector of Naval Bands) opined that “Climactic conditions unfavorable to the saxophone— that is, the cold and dampness while playing the saxophone outdoors—affect its harmoniousness and good tone.” He recommended its removal from military bands, and this proved to be a first step towards eradicating the instrument from the country. In fact, it would take nearly a century for the instrument to find legitimacy in the U.S.S.R. In the 1920s, Soviet officials came to see the saxophone as a bourgeois and decadent instrument, and an attempted saxophone purge in 1929 only narrowly failed. Josef Stalin himself, “Koba the Dread,” called it a “dangerous capitalist instrument.” In 1949, every saxophonist in Moscow was sum-
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moned to a meeting, all told to bring their identification cards (a veritable performer’s license) and their instruments. Their saxophones were confiscated and destroyed upon arrival, and their identification cards were changed to reflect a new musical career. Ivan the saxophonist became Ivan the bassoonist, even if he had never so much as held the instrument before. The musicians had a choice—they could either learn to play these new instruments within a month, or find a new career, or worse. Some were not even given the option, and were sent to prison camps in Siberia and other remote locations. Ironically, it became a badge of honor for the supervisors of these camps to have a strong jazz band, and saxophonists were given better and more food than other prisoners, lived in upgraded quarters, and were allowed to rehearse and perform outside the camps, instead of working in horrendous conditions and possibly dying in labor groups. Many musicians who had been sent to the Gulag for playing a “perverse” instrument found themselves attaining a level of respect they had never experienced before. Such was the distrust and paranoia about saxophonists that the Communist youth organization, the Komsomol, was organized to sneak into dance
halls, concerts, and restaurants to find and report musicians to the authorities. It would take until the 1960s and the end of Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw for the saxophone to again be included in military bands, and it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that the saxophone was again taught in the conservatories of the Soviet Union. Today, the saxophone enjoys great popularity in Russia, as young musicians are drawn to jazz and other popular styles it continues to represent. It may seem mildly amusing or even quaint to hear about the travails of saxophone players in Soviet Russia, but to get a better idea of what a society stands to lose from wanton censorship, listen to any recording of Alexander Glazunov’s Concerto, probably the most famous saxophone concerto in the repertoire. For one of the brightest lights in the Soviet and post-Soviet jazz scene, check out recordings by Georgy Garanian. And if you want something newer, take a listen to Igor Butman’s jazz CD, “The Magic Land,” or Sergey Kolesov’s classical CD, “Ritorno.” You’ll thank me as well as all those perverse musicians shivering in the Siberian cold. Patrick Murphy is director of bands and assistant professor of music at the University of Portland.
ILLUSTRATION: LAZUR URH
SAXOPHONE PROBLEMS
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FROM HUMAN ANATOMY TO HUMANNESS By Jacquie Van Hoomissen ’97 I am fascinated with life. Not the chronological marching of time that defines the beginning and end, but how we, as humans, exist and coexist within the totality of everything else, the intriguing, complex, and sometimes mystifying stuff that just is. You could say I am fascinated by our humanness, by our existence in comparison to all else. What does it mean to be uniquely human? I want to know how we define “humanness” and share that experience with students. Is it possible to complete the definition of what it means to be human by learning all there is to know about how we are put together? If we look deep enough beneath our skin will the answer be there, bounding around our cells and illuminating the inner darkness? I teach Human Anatomy because it is a place to develop our definition of humanness, a discipline in which we puzzle-piece our structures together to understand what it means to be us. Humanness is both something to know structurally but also something that transcends structure. Anatomy helps form a map of how we are put together, but the map falls drastically short when we try to understand ourselves and what make us uniquely human. For that we have to dig deeper and go beyond the standard anatomical classification in an anatomical reference book. Within this text of tight typographical structures, of indentations and font changes, there must be a place for difference, for nuances of design, for uniqueness that is impossible to categorize. In essence, there must be room for humanness. Through the exploration of a human cadaver, students write their own definitions of humanness by engaging in what it means to be us—to ask questions, to ponder options, to explore our own existence. This experience is profoundly challenging. Students experience discomfort, frustration, accomplishment, baby steps forward, backwards steps, long and short lists of terms, gross things—like cadaver
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fingernails with nail polish. But they also discover the camaraderie gained through a shared, transformational adventure and a deepening sense of purpose. Anatomy lab provides the catalyst. The experience pushes students to see themselves differently and to understand that is it impossible to really know every structure of the body, because our knowledge is incomplete. In other words, we are still unsure of what it fully means to be human. I was once that student, the one asking the questions they now ask of me. I was the panicked student trying to figure out how I could possibly learn every structure on the cadaver, making endless notecards for reference, drawing pathways of blood flow in my free time, staying up late into the night in the cadaver laboratory, finding classmates who were willing to study with me so I could teach them, because I knew by doing this I would learn the material even better. I’m sure at some point I shed more than one tear. I persevered until one day the terms were easier to say, the structures no longer seemed randomly organized, organ systems started to come together, and finally the human body began to make some sense to me. All the words, the vast array of complex terms derived from languages I didn’t speak, added up to a human body, but the body I was looking at on the dissection table wasn’t just a teaching tool, it wasn’t an “it,” he or she was a person… a beautiful, intricate, amazing person who was a mirror to my own design. How remarkable to be human. How fascinating to see how we are stitched together and in what ways each structure supports another, summing to something greater than we can fully comprehend. How extraordinary to be human and possess the capacity to persevere in the pursuit of knowledge about our own existence. Such self-awareness is unique in the animal kingdom. I can’t directly lead my students to the same insights I had, but I can give them opportunities to write their own definitions within our classroom community. Throughout their study of anatomy, students add to their vision and conceptions of their bodies while simultaneously learning more about themselves and their place in the world. These learning opportunities come in fits and starts when their initial conceptions confront reality. As we progress through the semester, students change. Their definition of humanness expands with each new Portland 6
insight. At first they start to recognize reality: cadavers look nothing like the perfect, multi-colored models and charts in the anatomy lab. Then they start to identify inconsistencies: not all anatomical structures are identically created in different people. Finally, they question what we know: if we understand so much about the anatomy of the brain, why can’t we detail where consciousness comes from? Their questions go deeper than wanting to know which blood vessel carries oxygenated blood to the toes. They start asking who came before our species, what might be the next evolutionary adaptations, why do some populations suffer from preventable diseases, why do specific anatomical structures take on such social and cultural relevance, why is their sister so ill, is cancer going to take their dad away from them? They ask spontaneously, in the quiet moments in lab, while we sit together at a small table covered in lower pelvic floor models or hominid skull replicas. I answer them the best I can, but always initially with a simple question: “What do you think?” Then I just listen as they pour out their inner thoughts about all things human. What students don’t realize quite yet is that through the act of posing and pondering anatomical questions they write their own definition of humanness. At some point in the semester our Human Anatomy class becomes a new one I call “Humanness Studies.” I hope my students recognize this transition. I want them to see how each of us is knitted together by an unfathomable number of structures we share with one another and with other species, and to understand how truly amazing that is. I want them to know that we’re not just memorizing structures; we are really learning about being human. We are learning about ourselves, and this knowledge cannot be categorized, named, or pointed out on any anatomical chart or model. At the heart of it, I want them to see that humanness is unique and with this distinctiveness comes our capacity to persevere and change the world around us. Yet it all starts with understanding how the hip bone is connected to the thigh bone. UP Biology professor Jacquie Van Hoomissen studies the beneficial effects of physical activity on brain function, mental health, and well-being. Her piece is excerpted from Awaken the Stars: Reflections on what we REALLY teach, coedited with Shannon Mayer.
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We can’t say we’re surprised that the great Kasey Keller (men’s soccer, 19881991) was just inducted into the University of Portland Athletics Hall of Fame, but we sure are happy to see him in the pantheon of Pilot greats. Here are some things you may or may not know about Mr. Keller: He retired from pro soccer in 2011, ending a career which spanned 23 years, four World Cups, and four countries; he was named U.S. Soccer’s Athlete of the Year an unprecedented three times (1997, 1999 and 2005); he has the second most caps and wins of any men’s goalkeeper in U.S. soccer history with 102 and 53, and still leads the U.S. National Team in shutouts (47) and World Cup qualifying appearances (31); he competed in four World Cups (1990, 1998, 2002, and 2006); he is still UP’s all-time leader in career shutouts (43.0); the Pilots reached the post season all four years with Keller between the pipes; and he was inducted into the WCC’s Hall of Honor in 2012. We don’t call him the Great Kasey Keller for nothing, you know.
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THE GIFT by Chuck Luce First of all, this is not the forest primeval. Unlike the sodden valleys west of here—in Olympic National Park, where the moss hangs like God’s own scrim across 1,000-year-old redcedars— this is more of a plantation. No roadless tracts the size of New England states. No impossibly green understory of oxalis and ferns. No nurse logs with angel wing mushrooms thick as scales. No deep shaded silence. No, this forest will never be a World Heritage Site. And yet. And yet… Two years ago former UP regent Mike Concannon and his wife Joan gave the University 47 acres of timberland in Washington state, on the west side of Hood Canal between the little towns of Brinnon and Eldon. Turning off twisty Highway 101, you can get most of the way there on a good gravel road. Beyond the yellow steel gate, though, the best way to progress is by ATV or on foot. The land is pitched—steeply in places. As the road climbs, Mount Rainier shows itself sometimes, levitating out there on the southwest horizon like a nearby planet or a second moon. Underfoot, the soil is gravelly, and in the low spots are signs of seasonal streams. The property is well stocked with Douglas-fir—roughly 300 trees per acre—planted the last time the hillside was harvested, about 20 years ago. Scattered among these young 25-foot-high trees are fallen logs and mature living Doug-firs sticking up like colossal fuzzy cattails. These artifacts were left not because they were undesirable commercially but as life rafts in a clear-cut sea, providing for the continuity of soil microbes and fungi, and as habitat for insects and woodgrowing plants. They help the forest reestablish more quickly and with vigor. “Remarkably tall, unusually straight, having the pyramid form…one of the most striking and truly graceful objects in Nature.” So wrote Scottish botanist David Douglas of a giant evergreen he cataloged during his first visit to the Pacific Northwest in 1825. That tree became the bane of botanists who tried to classify it, the platypus of the evergreen world, not really a pine, not a spruce, and not a fir (which is why the common name is often hyphenated). Finally in 1867 the botanists gave up and assigned a new genus—Pseudotsuga, meaning “false hemlock.”
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David Douglas got it right with his first impression. The tree that takes his name is indeed remarkable, and not just for its multiple-personality disorder. The wood is easy to work with. It is generally clear (few large knots), straight-grained, stiff and strong, yet lighter in weight than hardwoods like oak or maple. The Skokomish, the first people to inhabit this forest, made dozens of implements from it: spear handles, harpoon shafts, salmon weirs, caskets, fish hooks. The resin was a good seam sealer for canoes and a soothing salve for wounds and rashes. European settlers, too, found the tree exceptionally useful. Only the coast redwood grows taller, so sawyers got a lot of lumber out of a single log. When, in the 19th century, balloonframe construction supplanted postand-beam techniques, long, sturdy Douglas-fir boards were the preferred material. It is said that most of San Francisco was built from trees cut on the Olympic Peninsula and sawn at sprawling mill complexes like Pope & Talbot and Simpson. As the gold rush drew ever more settlers and western cities boomed, the abundant Doug-fir provided ships’ spars, railroad ties, mine timbers, fencing, flooring, and massive support beams for warehouses. Its attractive core wood, which can be yellowish-brown or golden-orange in color depending on the age of the tree and growing conditions, made it a favorite for furniture and cabinet-
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making. It took stain well, didn’t shrink much or warp when dried, held nails, and accepted glue readily. These days, as a species for managed forests, the tree has many more virtues. It is shade-intolerant, so it’s great for replanting after clear-cutting. It thrives under a huge variety of soil and climatic conditions but is especially vigorous in the rainy Northwest. It is a fast grower, reaching marketable size in 40 years or so. Deer and elk don’t fancy its seedlings, so plantation trees survive at a greater rate, and when deployed in close stands the trees are self-pruning. The thick, cork-like bark of mature trees helps it survive ground fires. It is widely used in home construction, in plywood manufacturing, and in papermaking. That it grows straight and tall makes it ideal for utility poles and pilings. Nearly half the Christmas trees grown in the U.S. are Douglas-fir. It is an affordable and attractive ornamental tree for yards and parks. And, get this, the buds can be an ingredient in a kind of brandy. (Supposedly it smells distinctly of pine needles and tastes that way, too, but sip sparingly: 95 proof!) A tree so recognizable and pleasing to the senses was sure to inspire art, literature, and humor beyond the hundreds of forestry- and botany-journal articles that have been written about it over the years. Tree: A Life Story is a wonderfully detailed book, long on science but approachably so, about
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a single Douglas-fir in five chapters: “Birth,” “Taking Root,” “Growth,” “Maturity,” and “Death.” A few years ago a German artist asked firefighters to pump 5,000 gallons of water onto a gallery floor, then arranged cylindrical sections sliced from a 150-yearold Doug-fir (the tree had been cut down because it was diseased) so that visitors could walk across them like stepping stones. The trees depicted in Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, with their upward-arching boughs, are most assuredly Doug-firs. And then there’s the Allstate Insurance commercial you’ve seen; the one where the actor we’ve come to know as “Mayhem” stands bruised and BandAided in a Christmas tree lot and says: “I’m the world’s greatest Douglas-fir. I’m the perfect shape. The perfect color. My scent? Like making love to a lumberjack.” (Mr. Mayhem then is tied with twine to the roof of the family station wagon. But while driving home the meager twine breaks, and he falls
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into the path of a following car.) The University has no immediate plans for Mike Concannon’s gift. The Douglas-firs will continue their reach skyward for a while. As they mature, natural thinning will take place, and the resulting light that filters through will transform the understory. Fireweed and other fast-growing opportunists already established there will yield to small shrubs such as salmonberry and rhododendron. Then shadetolerant western hemlock and vine maple will appear. More animals will return: the frenetic Douglas squirrels; Clark’s nutcrackers, clownish beggars that they are; and the sooty grouse, with an astonishing, deep, whooping call you’d never believe could come out of a bird. Barring fire, severe wind, or other interruptions that reset the process of succession, the ecosystem will evolve and diversify. As it matures, the forest will do more intensely what forests do: hold water, keep the hillsides stable, and breathe—the lungs Spring 2017 9
of the planet. In another 30 years the Douglas-fir will be ready for harvesting. A second stand of prime timber, given by the Concannons along with the first, will have matured as well in Josephine County, near Grants Pass, Oregon. Money from the sale of the timber could become money for UP students who commence class after class into the world, their arrival everywhere helping to make it better. And so the trees, a gift of the Creation, become a gift that facilitates good among people. The forest would be replanted and the cycle begun anew, perpetuating the gift of the Douglas-fir and its many uses to humans and preserving the habitat that sustains the plants and the animals and us, too. As Mike Concannon said, “With the forest, the University can repeat history over and over for generations. The good Lord keeps giving.” Chuck Luce is editor of University of Puget Sound’s Arches Magazine.
O N S P O R T S Athletes in the Classroom Recruiting and supporting student-athletes is a top goal of the UP athletics program, and while the 2016-17 school year saw fall sports highlighted by West Coast Conference championships, NCAA appearances, and three WCC Coach of the Year honorees, our studentathletes got the job done in the classroom. In fall we had 104 (38.8 percent) student-athletes earning Dean’s List recognition. Of our 268 student-athletes, 189 (70.5 percent) earned a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or higher after the fall semester. Overall, student-athletes earned a semester GPA of 3.284, and 16 student-athletes earned a perfect 4.0 GPA in fall. Sixteen Pilots made WCC All-Academic Honorable Mention, and the women’s cross country team posted a remarkable 3.72 team GPA. Facility Notes The University finished construction of the Portland Academic Resource Center—fondly referred to as PARC—in November. Located on the north mezzanine of the Chiles Center, the new space houses academic and student-athlete development staff, hosts study space, and provides tutoring access and integrated learning assistance programs for the University’s student-athletes. ¶ The Beauchamp Recreation and Wellness Center earned a 2016 Facility of Merit Award from Athletic Business earlier this year. The building was one of ten nationally to earn recognition
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from the organization. Men’s Soccer Head coach Nick CarlinVoigt lead the team to the WCC title, brought the Pilots back to the NCAA Tournament, and was named the league’s coach of the year in his first season last fall. Carlin-Voigt showed his recruiting chops with a top 20 recruiting class last year, and his incoming 2017 recruiting class is already receiving high praise. Top Drawer Soccer says Portland’s class could reach top-10 status nationally. Women’s Soccer The women’s soccer program brought in six heralded recruits this winter, including three players from the Portland metropolitan area. The incoming class also features a player with National Team Camp experience, and a transfer from Colorado. ¶ Pilot Hall of Famer Shannon MacMillan will be inducted into the WCC Hall of Honor in early March. Shannon Mac helped put Portland soccer on the map by leading the Pilots to four NCAA Playoff appearances, was the National Player of the Year in 1995, and helped lead the USA Women’s National Team to the 1996 Olympic Gold Medal and the World Cup title in 1999. Track & Cross Country Following a fall cross country season where both teams qualified for the NCAA Championships, the Pilots turned to the indoor track season and have gotten off to a fast start. Three-time All-American Lauren LaRocco broke the school record in the 3,000-meter run at the UW Invite (9:16.66), while Taryn
PHOTOGRAPH BY: ADAM GUGGENHEIM
Here’s Joe Etzel himself, kicking back on a rare dry day in the beautiful new seats of Joe Etzel Field. Do we have plans to improve not only the seats in his namesake baseball stadium but much, much more? Oh yes. Do we need your help? Yes again. Call Colin McGinty at 503.943.8005 or mcginty@up.edu.
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Rawlings broke the school record in the mile at the same event (4:45.72). After earning national rankings last spring in track, the Pilots are in good position to have at least one representative at NCAA Track & Field Championships for the 26th straight season. Volleyball The Pilots began their third year of beach volleyball this January, on the heels of a record-breaking fall indoor season for the program. Brent Crouch earned WCC Coach of the Year honors in just his third year on the bench. Coach Crouch is also bringing in a highly decorated freshman class for next year. Elizabeth Reich (Colorado Springs, Colo.) earned High School AllAmerica accolades and will be joined by Kassidy Naone, Kellie Hughes, Emily DeMots, and McKenzie Schwan. Men’s Basketball It was a heartbreaking way to finish a remarkable collegiate career for senior point guard Alec Wintering, who suffered a seasonending knee injury on January 12, but he will still go down as one of Portland’s all-time greats. He littered the UP record book and was just five assists shy of the all-time record at the time of his injury. ¶ First-year head coach Terry Porter has a bright future with four players already signed; one service rates this as the No. 17 class in the nation and top mid-major recruiting class nationally. Porter will also have his two sons, Franklin and Malcolm, coming off of redshirts and available to play next season. Women’s Basketball The team continued its annual tradition of hosting a Mother-Daughter Clinic in December, and added a Father-Daughter Clinic to the schedule in February this year. ¶ Cheryl Sorenson’s young roster swept Pepperdine during conference play and will have to overcome the loss of senior point guard Kaylie Van Loo, one of the team’s top scorers and one of the WCC leaders in assists. Men’s Tennis All-WCC junior Michail Pervolarakis opened the spring dual season nationally ranked and leads a team that was picked to finish third by WCC head coaches. The Pilots do not have a senior in the regular lineup, as head coach Aaron Gross has built a team that has high hopes for the program’s first WCC title in program history. Women’s Tennis Freshman Jelena Lukic arrived on campus in January and wasted little time in recording an impressive singles win at Washington. Lukic and fellow freshmen Emily Soares and Anna Oberg are new to the lineup.
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First in Oregon For the seventh consecutive year, the University of Portland is the top Oregon school in Kiplinger’s Personal Finance annual ranking of best values in its private universities category for 2017. The University of Portland was ranked 58th nationwide among all private universities. We’ve been the top ranked private Oregon university and have ranked in the top 100 since Kiplinger’s began releasing its rankings of “Best Value Colleges.” Third Nationally The University of Portland continues to be one of the top producers of Fulbright awards in the nation among master’s level institutions, according to a study released by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The University tied for third place nationally in student Fulbright awards for the academic year 2016-2017, with six students who have received the prestigious grant to study, conduct research; and/or teach English abroad. Best Nature Writer The John Burroughs Association has selected Portland Magazine editor and novelist Brian Doyle as the winner of the 2017 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing for his book, Martin Marten, published by Macmillan Publishers in 2015. The Burroughs Medal is considered to be tantamount to an Oscar in the field of nature writing, you know, and BD gratefully accepted the award, with his usual wit and aplomb. Faculty Feats Shannon Mayer, physics, and Jacqueline Van Hoomissen, biology, are co-editors of Awaken the Stars, a volume of essays on what UP faculty really teach in their classrooms, beyond the standard course content. The collection is comprised of reflective writings from 25 faculty from a broad range of disciplines and is dedicated to Brian Doyle, whose single request for an essay for Portland Magazine inspired Mayer and Van Hoomissen to curate their collection. Get it through ACTA Publishers (www.actapublications.com) and at the University of Portland bookstore. ¶ Kelly Fox, nursing, is the 2017 recipient of the Valley Catholic Distinguished Alumni Award. She’ll complete her doctorate in nursing practice from Yale University in 2017. ¶ Susan Stillwell, nursing, has been selected to join the Nursing Board at the American Health Council. She will be sharing her knowledge and expertise in evidence-based practice, nursing, nursing education, curriculum and program development, and
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nursing education research. ¶ Tisha Morrell, education, has been elected as president of the Association for Science Teacher Education, a non-profit professional organization with more than 800 members around the globe. Vaunted Visitors Among recent guests: nationally acclaimed expert on inclusion, diversity, race, and African American literature Neal Lester, giving the Bauccio Lecture Series keynote, “Beyond ‘Political Correctness’: Success and Everyday Leadership;” the hilarious and heartfelt writer Hob Osterland, who had UP nursing students in stitches and tears; Martin Daum, president and CEO of Daimler Trucks North America; Linda Biehl, whose daughter Amy was killed by an angry mob in South Africa, on “Reconciliation and Restorative Justice;” and Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Doerr, who filled Buckley Auditorium in about five seconds flat for one of our best Schoenfeldt Distinguished Writers Series events yet. Student Feats Three of Sr. Angela Hoffman’s chemistry students, Kevin Truong, Alexys Bermudez, and Mackenzie Brandon, won first prize in the Chemistry category for posters at the Sigma Xi Student Research Symposium in November 2016. ¶ Engineering students Alex Chabert, Jacob Johnston, Thomas Manfredonia, and Savon Sengsavanh (supervised by
engineering prof Jordan Farina) received a $2,000 award from the Oregon Space Grant Consortium to assist them with their senior capstone project. The team is working to design, manufacture, and test a small-scale jet engine over the course of the year. Wow. ¶ Finance major Michael Williamson ’18 was awarded runner-up in his category for his business venture, Sentri Performance, at the finals of the University Start-Up World Cup, held last October in Copenhagen, Denmark. Michael’s company, Sentri, produces a line of waterproof, windproof hoodie-style sweatshirts for outdoor pursuits like snowboarding as well as day-to-day use, and you never wore a more warm and comfy thing in your life. Gifts & Grants In just 24 hours on Tuesday, November 29, the University raised $56,506 through 258 gifts—the largest number of gifts in one day in UP’s history. Giving Tuesday was inspired by $15,000 in matching funds by the Aplet Family and the Demorest Family Foundation. We had 76 parents, 71 alumni, 61 students, and 16 faculty and staff participate, and the money raised goes toward student scholarships and the Immediate Assistance Fund for Students—a fund specifically designed to meet emergency financial needs for students facing unexpected hardships. Whoa.
Retiring from The Bluff after 36 very, very good years: the beloved and widely respected Matthew Baasten, theology professor extraordinaire, known for his roles as scholar, mentor, administrator, cheerleader, department chair, dean, committee member, and goodwill ambassador—as well as his frank and colorful expressions when faced with unnecessary and intractable adherence to dogma. Also retiring this spring: engineering professors Jim Male (20 years), Wayne Lu (29 years), and Zia Yamayee (21 years); and nursing professor Carol Craig (9 years). Thank you, one and all, for your long and tireless service.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: BOB KERNS
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Miss Loudermilk’s Piano “I want to leave my grand piano to you in my will.” by Michael Connolly
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hen Miss Reta Loudermilk said that to me years ago I was taken completely by surprise. Leave her beloved grand piano to me? What possible answer could I give, other than, “Thank you very much, what a generous gift!” Reta had been my high school chemistry teacher, you see. She was Miss Loudermilk to her charges. She wore sensible clothes like my grandmother, her contemporary. Her short hair was pulled back with two combs. Her classroom was a model of organization and decorum. Her reputation preceded her—wave after wave of students knew that in Miss Loudermilk’s classes, appropriate behavior was expected and not negotiable. That didn’t stop us from singing Lovely Rita Meter Maid to each other under our breath in class, a deliciously foolish thing to do. Reta was born in Washington State in 1908. Her father had been the head of an Indian agency near Colfax, south of Spokane. From that experience she developed a lifelong fascination with Native American people and culture. In her youth she became a very good pianist—something I could tell later from the sheet music she owned. In the 1940s Reta moved to my hometown of Shelton, Washington, to teach high school chemistry. The principal asked if she would also teach aviation. Never one to fear a challenge, Miss Loudermilk agreed and taught the course based entirely on book learning. The following summer she took flight lessons and earned her pilot’s license. That was her way to help the war effort. By the time I was her student in 1969, Shelton High School had a beautiful new chemistry lab and adjacent darkroom—Miss Loudermilk had agreed to learn photography so she could teach that subject as well. While Miss Loudermilk taught me chemistry, what I took away from her class
was academic discipline and the deep satisfaction of earning high grades through hard work. At the end of the next year she decided to retire. Her parents had recently passed away, and she felt drained of energy and enthusiasm. That wasn’t the way Miss Loudermilk wanted to teach. I was assigned with finding an appropriate retirement gift in conspiracy with her friend, Miss Newman. One day she took Reta antique shopping and tipped me off to a beautiful, hand-painted Limoges vase that Reta really liked. I drove the 25 miles to Olympia to buy it and got it filled with flowers to present to her at a school assembly. After my little speech I gave her the vase and flowers. Miss Loudermilk leaned over to me, smiling, and said, “You are a sneak!” I was thrilled to have pulled it off. In retirement, Reta moved to Centralia to live in a house her father had built himself. It was probably ten years later that I decided I should visit her. We had a pleasant, rather formal conversation, which would be our pattern for the rest of her life. She told me of the enjoyment she got from computer classes at the local community college; I told her about graduate studies and my new job teaching music at the University of Portland. I wasn’t a chemist, but she was proud of me. And she insisted that I call her Reta, something I have trouble with to this day. In the early 1990s I stopped by to see her again. We talked about many things, including my career and music. I urged her to play the piano for me, but she demurred. Only then did I look at her hands, which were knobby with arthritis. The idea of having to give up playing her beautiful piano and the pleasure it brought her was heartbreaking to me. The piano is a Chickering grand, about seven feet long, built in 1924. Reta was meticulous in all things, so Portland 12
the piano came with provenance, including complete tuning and service records and information about the previous owners. It was originally purchased in Portland from the G. F. Johnson Piano Company, who put their label under the keyboard cover. I don’t know if they were the original owners, but in the 1930s it was owned by Susie Michael Friedman and her husband, Maurice. Together they created and performed a show called the Cavalcade of Jewish Music. She played the piano and narrated, and he sang, performing their traveling show around the United States. In 1937, the piano ended up in a rooming house in Seattle near the University of Washington. From 1942 to 1945, the Friedmans were USO performers. They lived in a New York hotel from 1940 to 1957, after which they moved back to Seattle. Reta came across the piano in that rooming house. Ever a dutiful teacher, she took classes at the University of Washington every other summer. She lived in the rooming house and enjoyed bringing sheet music with her so she could play the piano. In 1968 she said to the woman who ran the house, “Someday I’d like to have a piano like this.” The woman responded, “It’s yours for $150.” So the piano went to Shelton, and Reta had the instrument of her dreams at age 60. After Reta told me of her plan to give the piano to me as a bequest, I told a lawyer friend, who thought it was wonderful but counseled me not to count on it. People change their minds, you know. At that point I truly let it go. If the piano came to me, it was a gift. If not, I still had the worn old upright that had served me well enough as a composer and singer. She surprised me again a few years later by telling me it was now the right time for me to receive the piano. She was moving from her father’s house to
settled in my home near the University of Portland, I learned that Reta was a sneak, too. The sister of one of my close high school friends went to visit her. During their conversation, Reta laid out the whole scheme. The recital was a planned demonstration of my worthiness to receive the piano as a gift. She wanted to make sure her neighbors knew that I was a real musician and that she was in her right mind in giving me the piano. To this day, I smile when I think of that. She was a sneak, too—we were two of a kind, but her act of generosity to me was so much more than mine for her. How can I be anything but grateful? I visited Reta at the nursing home, but as the years went on she became less sure of who I was. She died there in 2002, at age 93. After the funeral I stopped to visit Miss Newman and asked if she knew what had happened to the vase we conspired to give Reta Spring 2017 13
31 years earlier. She didn’t know, but after I left she made a few calls and learned the vase had ended up in an antique store. All of 102 years old, she got in her 1960s Dodge, drove to the store, and bought the vase for me. She asked me to come visit and surprised me with it. She was a sneak! So the vase now sits on the grand piano, a happy reminder of both Miss Loudermilk and Miss Newman, two teacher friends who somehow saw the teacher in me. I suppose the only way to repay their kindness is to make a plan for the future—perhaps twenty years from now I should find a young musician who could use a beautiful 1924 Chickering grand piano with a hand painted antique vase and a wonderful story. Michael Connolly has been a professor of music at the University of Portland since 1988.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: MICHAEL CONNOLLY
a nursing home, so would I be willing to take the piano early? Again, all I could do was agree gratefully. She had a special request: before the piano was moved, she would like me to present a recital in her living room for her and her neighbors. She left the choice of performance repertoire to me. And so it happened that in May that year we gathered: Reta, her neighbors, my parents, and me. For an hour I played on a freshly tuned instrument and sang a Mozart sonata, pieces from Reta’s sheet music collection, including Old Man River and Just the Way You Look Tonight (with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on the cover), and songs I had composed. At the end of the hour, Reta asked for an encore, and I complied. Then, she clasped her hands in her lap, sighed, and said, “The piano is paid for,” a gesture which touches me to this day. A few months after the piano was
Paul Slawson Revelations For Paul Slawson ’93, revelation came to him in a cockpit one lovely summer day in the middle of Iowa. by Catherine O’Connell-Cahill
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t was in Mason City, at a small airfield in the middle of the state. Young Paul Slawson, a few months into his first captaincy, was cooling his heels as passengers boarded the commuter flight up to Minneapolis. Popping open the cockpit window of his Jetstream 19-seater, he looked over into the terminal, where family members were saying their farewells to loved ones. “One of those things you pick up in the industry is every spring and fall, you see the changing of the children,” says Slawson now. “Divorced parents are sending their kids off to the other parent, so you get all these unaccompanied minors on airplanes. I’m sitting there watching, and there’s this guy hugging his 14-year-old daughter, saying goodbye to her. This time something clicked in me. “I realized, this guy is giving me his daughter. His whole entire world. He’s putting her on my plane, and I’m going to fly her at 300 miles an hour up to 12,000 feet, and drop her off in Minneapolis. He didn’t know what my background was. He didn’t know me from anybody. It was all a matter of trust. “I was 25 years old and that hit me pretty hard. I thought, if I’m going to do this, I have to do it the best I can. I’m entrusted with people’s lives: their daughters, their mothers, fathers, sons. As the captain, if I chose to run a sloppy operation, that’s the way it was going to run for all those people and their families. It clicked: if I’m going to do this, I’m going to have to put 100 percent of my training and skill and effort and soul into it. Ever since then, that’s the way I operate.” Paul Slawson started dreaming about flying as a kid growing up in the Los Angeles area. At age 5 or 6, he spent every recess during summer school watching planes land on the adjacent Burbank Airport runway. His doctor father traveled a lot, and Slawson would ride with his mom out to LAX to pick him up. The memories still linger: the car cruising through the night; the intoxicating roar of engines overhead, laced with the smell of jet fuel; unknown exotic destinations calling to him. “To this day,” he says, “whenever I’m at the airport at night,
it all comes back to me.” He chose to attend the University of Portland because of its ROTC program, which could launch him into the Air Force. But as the first Iraq War wound down and Air Force pilot training slots dwindled to single digits nationwide, he left ROTC, graduating from UP in 1993 with a degree in philosophy. By then Slawson had set his sights on becoming a commercial pilot. Flying for a living takes you to places you never dreamed you’d visit, and a few you might wish you never had. Take Slawson’s post-college years, when his new job at a regional airline dropped him at a base in Hibbing,
Minnesota, piloting commuter flights around the Midwest. One hundred and fifty miles north of Duluth in the middle of the Iron Range, Hibbing exported iron ore and most of its teenagers, who usually departed right after high school. Few young people remained to acquaint the 24-year-old Californian with the ways of the frozen north. To boot, Slawson endured one of the coldest winters in Minnesota history, with temperatures reaching -40 degrees for a week straight. Airplanes start to have mechanical issues at -20, and at minus 40 the problems can get, well, severe. It was, he says with restraint, “Quite a learning experience trying to run an airline in that environment.” After five years of bad pay and lousy working conditions, hop-scotching to bases across the Midwest and subletting floor space in a pilots’ crash pad flat in Rockford, Illinois (a town he declared he would never, ever revisit), Slawson landed a job with American Airlines. Portland 14
“It was like going to the Promised Land,” he says now. “Like I’d become an astronaut or something.” But a couple of years later came 9/11, tearing the bottom out of the passenger airline industry. A year later American furloughed him. Slawson ended up flying freight for three years out of Newark for Kalitta Air, “one of the bigger airlines you’ve never heard of.” The airline flew high-priority freight for the U.S. Department of Defense to the Middle East during the second Iraq War, as well as cargo for the U.S. Post Office and South Korea’s Asiana Airlines. Slawson could be gone for 17 days at a stretch, often literally circling the globe. “A typical run might go like this: Leave Newark, land in Europe for gas and to change crews, fly to the Middle East and drop off a load, then go empty across Iran, India, and China, and end up in Hong Kong. Pick up Asiana cargo in Hong Kong, stop in Russia for gas, then fly to Anchorage and from there down to LAX, San Francisco, or O’Hare. Then take the plane back to Newark and the whole cycle would repeat. “It was an eye-opener. From watching how that company worked, I learned more about how to make money with airplanes than I did in all my passenger years. It was a printing press for money. The downside was that the time zone changes were just brutal. All the stuff they teach you about trying to maintain your circadian rhythm went out the window. You would fly nine hours across all these time zones, then rest for 12 hours and get up and do it all over again. After a few days of that, your body has no idea what’s going on. A lot of pilots wouldn’t even last three months.” In 2007, as the passenger airline business bounced back, American Airlines called. Slawson, 46, is now a first officer, flying 737s on international flights out of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, mostly to the Caribbean and Latin America. He lives with his wife and two children not far from Rockford, Illinois, site of his infamous pilot crash pad. The family owns an 1861 farmhouse on ten acres of land, a 1953 Ford tractor, and two goats, known formally as Tax Deduction #1
that could possibly be a thunderstorm or even close to it,” says Slawson. “Bad things can happen if you fly into one. But for the most part, the bad things that will happen are to people who don’t have seat belts on. I tell people, ‘You’re going to break before the airplane will.’ We endeavor to avoid any kind of turbulence, because even though we have the seat belt sign on, people are always getting up. If somebody is unrestrained and you get into some bad turbulence, it can easily hurt somebody. So we try to avoid it. The technology has gotten a lot better: the Doppler radar can look at the motion of the particles in storms and see turbulence, so that gives us an additional tool. “People don’t realize that if you pull one negative G on the airplane, that’s equivalent to dropping you on your head. Think about it: if you’re in your seat there are three feet of space above your head. If you were on the ground and someone dropped you three feet on your head, obviously you would get a head or spinal injury, or it could injure or kill you. That’s why you need to have your seat belt on.” Rule Number Three: Open your window shade and take a look around. “On the transcontinental flights you can see the Grand Canyon, fresh snow on the Rockies, magnificent thunderstorms out on the plains,” says Slawson. “You can spend hours just looking out, and we pilots have the best windows of all, big ones that don’t distort your vision. You learn to appreciate nature, looking around. “Alaska is spectacular. That was my favorite place to fly. We would come up from the south, from Chicago or San Francisco, and we’d have to cross the mountains to get into Anchorage. We would always drop down low to see the glaciers. We’d spend the last 20 minutes of the flight saying, ‘Look
at that! Look at that!’ It never got old. “When I was flying freight, I began to appreciate the size of the world. The one that always got me was the flight from Anchorage to Inchon, Korea. Once you leave Anchorage there’s nothing. You cross the Brooks Range and then you go out to Barrow, and at Barrow you hit the Bering Sea. We’d go right across the Bering Sea and into Russian airspace, down the Kamchatka Peninsula. You see thousands of miles of wilderness as you’re going south. Look to your right and there’s nothing until the North Pole—nothing but trees and these spectacular mountains and lakes. We’d fly right along the coast with 300-foot high cliffs, and could see the waves breaking. Just hours and hours of this. Then you land in Korea, and you’re in an entirely different world. That wonder has never left me.” “I can’t say this job has been perfect,” says Slawson. “I’ve hit a lot of potholes along the way, and have experienced my share of stress and worry. But I’m a very lucky man. I was able to figure out what I wanted to do at an early age, then actually do it. It’s been a good fit. If you talk to enough pilots, you’ll see that we’re all cut from same cloth. We’re very regimented, and rule-oriented. Everything has to line up just so. That’s the way we’ve always done it and the way we’ll continue to do it. You can’t ever start cutting corners, or think that you’ve got it all figured out, that you’re bulletproof. It’s all part of earning the faith of that man in Iowa who trusted me with the life of his daughter. He and countless others have blessed my professional life in ways they will never know.” Catherine O’Connell-Cahill hails from Chicago and was formerly Senior Editor of U.S. Catholic Magazine.
PHOTOS COURTESY PAUL SLAWSON
and Tax Deduction #2, and informally as Cocoa and Fudge. As first officer, Slawson is one of the people at the cockpit door when you walk onto his flight. Relaxed flyers might not realize it, but pilots themselves often take on the job of calming anxious passengers. Here let us attend to the first of Paul Slawson’s three unofficial rules for flying. Rule Number One: Try not to worry, we’ve got your back. “What do I tell nervous flyers?” says Slawson. “‘It’s going to be OK. We’re up here at the pointy part of the plane—we don’t want problems any more than you do. Statistically you’re in more danger driving home from the airport than you are in an airplane. We’ll try to keep it a nice smooth flight. There might be some bumps, but they’re nothing to worry about.’ I also tell them, ‘The airplane has flown a lot more than you’ll ever fly in your life, and it’s still here in one piece, so the odds of you getting off this plane are pretty good.’ We’re just trying to put a face with the flight, to show them we’re human. “The worst injury I’ve seen on a flight was someone hitting their head on the overhead bin while boarding the airplane—they needed a Bandaid, that’s it. I’ve spilled some drinks in the cabin, but nobody’s gotten hurt. I want to retire that way, too. Nobody wants excitement. That’s the best day at work—the boring day. “Once you’ve been in the industry for a while, you start to realize how much thought and effort and experience and money has been spent to make flying safe. I’ve never seen anything like it. The Federal Aviation Administration may get bad press, but for a government agency they do a fantastic job. In the last ten years the pilots and the airlines and the FAA have all begun working together in new ways, trying to figure out how to make airplanes and flying better and safer. Try reading a National Transportation Safety Board report—they rip everything apart: what the captain had for breakfast, who last worked on the airplane, all the maintenance records. It’s really impressive. Look at a graph of deaths in commercial airline wrecks per year, especially in the U.S. The curve just goes down. And the safety statistics for U.S. airlines compared to some companies in Indonesia or China—we’re light years ahead.” Rule Number Two, which does not contradict Rule Number One even though it may appear to: Keep your seat belt on. “We try very hard to avoid anything
Spring 2017 15
Six Ladies of the Bluff T
hey bless this campus every day, and we can never thank them enough for it, these six ladies of The Bluff, laboring by day and night as custodians and housekeepers and protectors and gentle smiling deputy mothers to countless students who ache for that warm, assuring smile only a woman of great dignity and grace can bestow. That they came here from points around the world makes our community richer and better still—many of them escaped brutality and oppression too terrible to endure, a difficult thing to comprehend in a place where safety and respect and welcoming, open arms are seen as core principles, even taken for granted. Thank you thank you thank you.
Emina Haurdic Custodian in Shiley Hall
Yodit Derese Housekeeper in Lund Family Hall
Anabel Lawson Housekeeper in Fields & Schoenfeldt
Deborah Mayom Custodian in the Chiles Center
Keltuma Salih Custodian in Waldschmidt Hall
Angeles Vega Housekeeper in Lund Family Hall Son: Alex Moreno-Vega is a senior at UP studying Organizational Communication and Spanish. Daughter: Itzel Guadalupe Moreno-Vega is a sophomore studying Psychology, Spanish and Social Work. She is currently studying abroad in Granada, Spain.
GREAT FISH OF THE NORTHWEST
W
hen Lewis and Clark entered the Columbia River on the final leg of their journey to The West, they encountered millions of fellow travelers who would not live to return from their voyage. Rather, the seething, miraculous schools of salmon that left the Corps of Discovery dumbstruck would reach the places of their birth and die there, or die trying, providing the basis of nearly all life in one of the richest environments on the planet. Other resident fish like the Columbia River sturgeon were part of the vast web as well. The great fish of the Northwest are with us still, though diminished and often taken for granted, so we celebrate the wondrous Oregon creatures in the holy waters of our state here. Joseph R. Tomelleri has been illustrating fishes since 1985. His work has appeared in more than 1,000 publications, including Trout and Salmon of North America, The Outdoor Life, and Eddie Bauer. His recent projects include research on fishes of the Salish Sea and Puget Sound, Fishes of Texas, and Fishes of Kansas. Chinook (Tyee, King) Salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), male spawning colors
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1. Chinook (Tyee, King) Salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) 2. Steelhead (Sea-run Rainbow Trout) (Oncorhynchus mykiss) 3. Coho (Silver) Salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) 4. White Sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) 5. Pink (Humpback) Salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) 6. Sockeye (Red, Blueback) Salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) 7. Chum (Dog, Keta) Salmon (Oncorhynchus keta)
What Do We Love Too Much to Lose? A call to life, in the face of inarguable terrible sinful extinction.
“L
et’s begin with the hard, hard truths. Since 1970, forty percent of all beings with the breath of life, animals and plants, have been erased from the face of the Earth. Four out of every ten beings, with the notable exception of human beings, whose numbers have doubled in that same period of time. The number of other vertebrate animals has been cut almost in half: the beasts of the Earth, the birds of the air, the fishes of the seas, amphibians, reptiles. Only a quarter of the world’s frogs still sing at the edge of the swamps. Do you remember 1970? If you remember, then you were alive when there were almost twice as many plants and animals, forests and fields, as there are now. And if you don’t remember 1970, you have spent your whole life in a world that is half of what it should be – an impoverished, simplified, drained, and bulldozed world. I will die in a world that is half as abundantly beautiful as the one I was born into. My children will tear out half the pages in their field guides and throw them away. They won’t need them anymore. My grandchildren’s picture books about hippopotami, penguins, and wise old owls will be fantasies. Human consciousness evolved perhaps 100,000 years ago. We are, Mary Evelyn Tucker says, “beings in whom the universe shivers in wonder at itself.” We celebrate the extraordinary chance that we find ourselves in the Cenozoic Era, when evolution has achieved its greatest fullness of flowering, what theologian Thomas Berry has called the most “lyric period in Earth history.”
We celebrate our good fortune, to live in the time of thrush-song and thirty thousand species of orchids, the time of microscopic sea angels with tiny wings and whales that teach each other to sing. The planet is still crammed with lives of urgent striving, crawling over each other, burrowing into every crack. The fate of these lives is not a matter of indifference or of economic expediency. These lives are the irreplaceable consequence of planetary creativity over four billion years. Those lives are a complete repudiation of the idea that human beings are the only wondrous beings on Earth, that we are in charge, that we are the point of the whole thing. Each being is worthy. Each fractal layer is necessary, all the lives the theme, all the lives the variations. All the years, we humans have been lifted by the assurance that birds would go and birds would return, that storms would come in season and storms would blow back to sea again, that fish would scatter eggs before they died. The music of the world was a repeating promise, a promise that harmony would be restored again and again in chords so complicated and beautiful that we could love them, even if we could not fully understand the genius of their pattern. In Oregon, the first rufous hummingbirds returned in late February last year, when the blueberries bloomed at the coast. Violet-green swallows returned to their ponds to meet the mayflies. It was a great day in the swamps when American bitterns and yellow-headed blackbirds swooped in, grumping and hollering. The humans and the birds slept and woke by this, lived and died by this faith in inevitable, unPortland 26
folding harmony, the expectation and the arrival, the call and the response, the question and the answer, the world’s promise of absolution and return. The weather comes now and goes, and who can make sense of it? Five times in planetary history, Life has faced catastrophic extinction. Awful forces of exploding rocks, boiling seas, poisonous clouds – or icy glaciation and shrinking seas – or storms of comets – ended forever the possibilities in the strange and wonderful bodies. Five massive extinctions, when evolutionary development started over with what was left… And now, we are told, we live in the time of the Sixth Great Extinction, bringing the Cenozoic Era to a close. Extinction. Extinguish. Cause to cease burning. All those sparking lives. Is it possible? Is it possible that we are living through an extinction event of terrible power? 39 percent of terrestrial wildlife gone, 39 percent of marine wildlife gone, 76 percent of freshwater wildlife gone – in our lifetimes. The greatest extinctions are in the developing countries, with losses of 58 percent, where the wealthy countries are outsourcing their environmental destruction. What is the cause? Deforestation, a dramatic loss of habitat; overharvesting of the oceans; poisoning of land and air; agricultural expansion; and climate change. And what causes that? A way of life, a constantly growing, all-consuming culture driven by extractive industries that have few moral or legal constraints. Oh for heaven’s sake, people say; change happens. Evolution is a game with winners and losers. If it weren’t
ILLUSTRATION BY: MILAN ERCEG
By Kathleen Dean Moore
for the dinosaur extinctions, there wouldn’t be human beings. Hoorah for the Fifth Extinction! Maybe so. But there is a distinction between change and destruction, and that is the difference between death and murder. For all their horror, the early extinctions were natural Earth processes, “acts of God.” This current great wave of dying is the direct result of human decisions, knowing and intentional, or wantonly reckless. That changes a calamity into a cosmic crime, a failure of our responsibilities toward the lives that are now in our hands. Extinctions one through five call us to awe; number six calls us to rage – rage against the dying. It’s madness, the trades we make. Unless something stops us, we will keep on converting living creatures into dead commodities. We trade deep mossy forests for uselessly large homes. We trade wide-winged albatross for plastic six-pack- rings. We trade a meadow miraculous with butterflies for an industrial park to manufacture My Little Ponies. Dear God, the madness! We trade a singing marsh for another Kmart parking lot. It’s madness, this consumption, this eating up. What are we thinking? For corn to burn in our cars, we are happy to give up monarch butterflies. For one more fitness center, we blithely give up the spring chorus of frogs. For oil terminals, we give away the salmon. It’s a frenzied, mad auction of what is of ancient value for what is cheap and desperately sad. A mad rush to the end of the world. We are like people who live in the penthouse of a hundred-story building, Daniel Quinn writes. Every day, we send workers down to remove blocks from the foundation, so we can make our penthouse bigger, fancier. This might work for a hundred days. But for hundreds of years? At some point, we will have created so many channels of emptiness that the entire structure will collapse. Ever since I read this analogy, I have been haunted by a nightmare imagining of my grandchildren’s future children, Theo’s babies. Zoey’s babies. With their arms spread, they are falling from a high penthouse, crying out like broken sparrows. An Amur leopard or gut-shot black rhinoceros, struggling to its knees. The Hawksbill turtle. The chimpanzee. A mountain gorilla, shot from the jungle trees, falling through an explosion of red parrots and a rain of green
leaves. Yangtze sturgeon. Chinese sturgeon. Persian sturgeon. Atlantic sturgeon, settling into the mud. Snake River sockeye, caught by its shining gill-plates in a ghost net, dying in a falling rain of fishscales. Snow leopard. Marine iguana. Staghorn coral dying in the warming sea. Condors and kit foxes, chased from the cliffs by fracking pumps loud as diesel trucks. Blackfooted ferrets, startled from their burrows by the rhythmic thud of seismic oil explorations. The blue whale, the narwhal, hazed by underwater seismic oil explorations, air-guns exploding every ten seconds. The pain of impact on the ears, every ten seconds. The Industrial Growth Economy has offered us a terrible bribe, says Lewis Mumford. These are the terms: We can have everything we want. Bouquets of Ecuadorian roses, elegant meals of seared tuna and pineapple. Huge houses and room-sized cars, every comfort and pleasure sailing on through the sun-lit days, kitchens shining with the most amazing slice-and-dice machines, music on demand, movies on demand, everything we want on demand, guaranteed free two-day delivery of anything in the world, all this glory… On the condition that we never ask where it came from, or at what cost, what cost in animal and human suffering, what cost to the your children and their children. The children. What do we love too much to lose? What does it matter? Why is it important that there be this planet with these odd little creatures? It could all end tomorrow. So what? Why should we care? We wouldn’t know. Would anything of value be lost? You know the answer is yes. It matters that a hundred years from now, salmon are returning to the streams, children are kneeling to watch glow worms in the grass, red-legged frogs are burbling underwater. We are struggling to talk about something of deep sacredness, as Mary Catherine Bateson says. Every extinction, every suffering, every destruction, is a diminishment of creativity, and so it is a profanity. So what do we have to do? Three things, and we have to do them all. Number One: We will stop the madness. We have to stop making it worse. We have to leave the Earth’s ancient Portland 28
carbon in the ground. We have to stop bulldozing forests into burn piles. We have to stop paving meadows, for God’s sake. We’ve got to stop buying stuff and eating ourselves sick. We’ve got to hold our leaders to account. If they sell out to the culture of destruction, we will throw them out. If they stand courageously against it, we will stand with them. All around the world, people are drawing the line. We are saying, Not another mountaintop. Not another rainforest. Not another estuary. Not another prairie. Not another mighty river can be traded away for cash. These are not industry’s to take or sell. They belong to the future of the everlasting Earth. Number Two: We protect, restore, grow, preserve, we hold on to what we’ve still got. It’s got to be everybody, each asking, what ark can I build, what habitat can I save or create, that will carry living things? “It comes to me that every good act might be an Ark, no matter how small,” the Portland author David Oates wrote to me, “every good act might be a widening arc of consequence, incalculable. There will be flotillas of Arks, uncountable. Tiny handmade ones, and massive ones; science-arks like battleships, and garden-arks like rowboats, all set into the forward-river of time, to sail if possible through the narrow part of the hourglass of our era…and start the world anew.” Number Three: Imagine new ways, protect ancient ways, to live beautifully on the planet. Invent ways of respect and restraint. Imagine. Invent. Imagine! I believe that everything awaits redemption at every moment. Redemption: when the pieces, which are scattered, are brought together again. We yearn to be called back into a right relationship. We yearn for that. Imagine! Kathleen Dean Moore, the University’s Schoenfeldt Series Visiting Writer in 2012, is the author of many books, including Piano Tide: A Novel, Pardons, How It Is, Riverwalking, Holdfast, Moral Ground, and most recently Great Tide Rising. This essay is drawn from “A Call to Life: Variations on a Theme of Extinction,” a word/music collaboration with the pianist Rachelle McCabe, which was performed for the third time on April 7, 2017, at Oregon State University. For more information see Kathleen’s site, www.riverwalking.com.
Text Me Out to the Ball Game Lots of telecom titans buy sports teams, but when Consumer Cellular co-founder John Marick ’87 and his wife Tami Marick ’87 bought the West Coast League Bend Elks baseball club, there wasn’t a private jet in sight. By Todd Schwartz
“I
t’s Two-Dollar-Tuesday at the 52-year-old Vince Genna Stadium in Bend, Oregon, so you’re looking at triple the average Elks’ game attendance of 1,126. Two-dollar hot dogs and beers always fill the park’s 3,500 seats, not to mention the red plastic trays juggled by hungry and thirsty fans. You get there early, and after the smiling, pink-haired high-school girl shows you where to park, you walk in past the guys playing banjos in Hawaiian shirts. The kid who takes your ticket—Preferred Seating, Row G, eight bucks—says “Your seat is behind home plate, but there are freshly cooked dogs on the barbeque deck along the third-base line. That’s where I’d start.” And why not? The couple you wait with in the beer line have driven half-an-hour down from Redmond for the game. “We always come on Two-Dollar Tuesdays,” they say, “and we love baseball anywhere it’s played.” In this case it’s the West Coast League, “a summer wood-bat league for college-eligible student-athletes,” as their website explains. Eleven Northwest teams make up the league, ranging from the Bellingham Bells and the Yakima Valley Pippins to the Walla Walla Sweets and the Wenatchee Applesox. All of the kids playing in the league will make memories. Once in a blue moon, one will also make a fortune. The Redmond couple tells you with pride about Jacoby Ellsbury, the kid
from Madras High School who played for the Bend Elks and is now the center fielder for the New York Yankees. With the Elks, Ellsbury received a room and home-cooked meals with a local host family, and maybe some expenses for road games. As a Yankee, his sevenyear contract totals $153,000,000. Nice work if you can get it. It’s one of those long, lovely August evenings, and the sun hangs in the western sky like a lazy pop fly. The Cascade Mountains of central Oregon spread out past the left field fence, going slowly red in the summer light. A foul ball will aim at Broken Top, the Three Sisters are fair. Get some healthy wood on a homer to deep left center and it bounces off the Grocery Outlet. You sit on the busy barbeque deck, trying to keep a little too much mustard, relish and onion in the bun, and watch the players chalking out the base lines and the batter’s box. This evening’s game matches the Elks against the North Sound Emeralds, based in Edmonds, Washington. An Elk and an Em chat as they water the infield to keep the dust down. This is not something Jacoby Ellsbury does pre-game at Yankee Stadium. You see the Elks’ young bat kid, Olivia, humming the ball back and forth with a player in front of the Elks’ dugout. It looks like she throws nearly as hard as he does. The kid’s got an arm. When the players take the field for warm-ups, she taps gloves with every player she can reach. Country Spring 2017 29
music twangs over the loudspeakers. Families with children of all ages fill the stands. You reach your seat just as the anthem singer, an assistant at the local bank currently starring in Bend Community Theater’s take on “Le Mis,” grabs the microphone. The teams take the field. The home plate umpire, a man of considerable heft, dwarfs his overworked chest protector. Truly wild is the pitch that will get past both catcher and the dark blue wall of the ump. The first hit is a single up the middle for the Ems. You look up as an enthusiastic young woman, who will seem to be everywhere in the ballpark during the coming game, stops by to welcome you. Today is her 23rd birthday. This is Kelsie Marick, head of marketing and sales for the Bend Elks. Her parents own the team—they bought it pretty much because of her— and she has boundless energy. During the break between the top and bottom of the first inning, you can’t help but smile when the stadium announcer’s voice rings in your ears: “Let’s go Elks! And please return your food trays to the barbecue deck—we just ran out.” When John Marick and Tami Olsen met in class at the University of Portland, they were both business and marketing majors. They graduated in 1987 and were married in the summer of 1988. Sitting with them in the large conference room at Consumer
being corralled by a young boy. This excites the crowd as much as the game itself. The Elks were down 3-2 at the end of the fifth, but now in the bottom of the sixth the game is tied 4-4. There’s been some good baseball played, not to mention topflight entertainment between innings, including water-balloon batting for the kids, a sack race from first to home, a Chicken Dance competition and, of course, the team’s mascot Vinnie the Elk—who, according to the roster on the team website, stands 6’5” and weighs 200, bats and throws switch, and lists his hometown as Deschutes National Forest. When the inning ends, you stand up as a cloud of electric-blue cotton candy floats by in the nervously outstretched arms of a little girl. You’re on the clock here, because, as the stadium announcer has made abundantly clear: “Beer sales stop after the seventh-inning stretch.” Looming threat notwithstanding, the crowd seems joyous to be taken out to the ball game. Well-tended Sunriver types mix happily with ranchers from Terrebonne, teachers from Tumalo, and sisters from Sisters, while easygoing Bend locals cheer with diehard Elks fans—whom you can identify because they’ve dropped the 20 bucks for an official Bend Elks hat. You inevitably run into Kelsie Marick again, making her rounds of the ballpark. As you wait for a final beverage and she prepares to organize the next bit of between-innings theater, the Elks’ co-owner tells you how she’s always loved baseball, and after earning a degree in sports management and marketing at Gonzaga, working in internships with the Portland Timbers soccer team and the Bend Elks, she needed a job. And she knew the Elks were up for sale. “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to buy a baseball team?,” she asked her parents. “The first season we owned the team,” Kelsie says, “we won the league championship. I guess we thought that would always happen.” It didn’t, and this season the team is an also-ran behind the league-leading Victoria (B.C.) Harbourcats. But that hasn’t stopped the younger Marick and her Elks from setting attendance records. The full-season ticket sales for the Elks might be a slow night in the big leagues, but here—here, you and a couple thousand new friends are going to see some serious still-on-theway-up love of the game from these college players. There may be few with the skills for the Show, but they all have the heart. You work your way back to your seat as another foul zinger thrills the Spring 2017 31
crowd and the plus-sized ump chucks a fresh (although, in this league, maybe not new) baseball to the pitcher. The count is 2 and 1. In 2015, the average value of a major league baseball team was $1.2 billion. Jacoby Ellsbury’s Yankees top the list at $3.2 billion. When the Maricks bought the Bend Elks—which, by the way, came with a clubhouse which they rent out for weddings and events, just so you know—they paid less than that. Here in the Consumer Cellular conference room, they won’t name a figure, but’s it’s safe to assume it was more than a Tesla and less than Bend’s bigger houses. “It’s not a great investment,” John Marick says with a smile. “But it’s great to be part of the Bend community. We do it as a family, and we love to spend time in central Oregon. And the small-town feel of the games is lots of fun.” “Our approach,” Tami Marick adds, “is to treat people right in both of our businesses, and to give back where we can.” Their larger business does that at a high level: in 2015, for example, Consumer Cellular donated over $2 million to cancer research, collected some 35,000 pounds of food for local food banks, donated $45,000 in school supplies and holiday gifts to those in need, and contributed 2,000 volunteer hours. In fact, the size and scope of Consumer Cellular often surprises the Maricks as much as anyone else. “We’re so busy day-to-day,” Tami says. “When we stop to take stock it’s amazing to see what, together with our great employees, we have built. It’s a wonderful surprise that it’s gone so well.” That Marick work ethic is clearly in evidence throughout the Bend Elks game, as Kelsie zooms around the park like the baseball in a 5-4-3 triple play, making sure everything goes smoothly. The sun sinks between North Sister and the Grocery Outlet, and you groan in the warm light as the Emeralds go ahead 5-4 in the top of the ninth on an error by the Elks. The home team makes it interesting in the bottom of the ninth, the crowd is on its feet—but the Elks can’t quite get a run across the plate. Ems win, 5-4. Even so, the fans file out happy, secure in the knowledge that there will always be baseball on languid summer nights in cheerful small towns, always be Two-Dollar-Tuesdays to be savored, and always, of course, good affordable cell service to bring us all together, win or lose.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY: DAN CARTER
Cellular’s new 82,000-square-foot headquarters, it’s hard to believe this youthful-looking couple graduated three decades ago. After graduation, John went to work at McCaw Cellular, the now-extinct early telecom Tyrannosaurus that evolved into AT&T’s wireless subsidiary. By 1993 he’d earned a master’s degree in management, and he was getting restless. Along with fellow McCaw employee Greg Pryor, Marick saw that the rapidly growing cellular service providers were largely ignoring the over-age-50 market. In 1995, Marick and Pryor decided to launch a company that would offer older users simple, inexpensive, no-contract cell phone plans. They called it Consumer Cellular. “We were too naïve to really know what we were doing,” John says today. “I think nine banks turned us down before we finally got a Small Business Association loan.” “Fortunately,” Tami adds, “I had a good job, so we could gamble a bit.” Little by little, the gamble—and a lot of long hours—paid off, and after 10 years Consumer Cellular had about 30 employees (including Tami, who took over the company’s billing department), 130,000 customers, and $30 million in annual revenues. They made their name by offering Model-T-basic flip-phones and using cellular network capacity purchased from the big guys. Partnerships with AARP, Sears, Target, and others followed. Today Consumer Cellular’s nearly 1,800 employees serve 2.2 million customers and, according to the Maricks, the company is on track to reach $1 billion in revenue by 2018. While Consumer Cellular is still primarily focused on older users, most of their plans now involve more sophisticated smartphones. “The core of what we do has always revolved around providing better service for our customers,” John says, “and we put a lot of effort into that.” Consumer Cellular, as the framed posters on the walls point out, received the highest customer service ranking from Consumer Reports in 2010, ’11, ’12, ’13, ’14, and ’16. “Most of our management team is still composed of friends and family,” Tami says. “John’s sister is our chief financial officer (UP alum Jill Leonetti ’89).” And in 2014, family is what possessed this low-key power couple to buy a little baseball team in scenic central Oregon. You watch as a towering foul ball drops into the stands behind the first-base line, banging off metal seats before
ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF ERIC STOTIK AND THE RUSSO LEE GALLERY UNTITLED LR247 (WHITE BIRD) 2015, ACRYLIC ON EMBROIDERED SILK, 9.25” X 6”
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will tell you a story that even I find hard to believe. One evening when I was five years old, my mother asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said that I wanted to be a priest. My mother responded, “Tommy, that’s wonderful, but why do you want to be a priest?” “Because I want to hold God in my hands,” I said, startling both my mom and myself. I was thinking of the consecrated host, which in my childhood could be held only by a priest. The sacred in the ordinary. It would be many years before I came to understand that we all hold God in our hands, and that the Sacred dwells in the ordinary at every instant. We usually make a strong distinction between the sacred and the ordinary. We create sacred places: churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. We create sacred times: Ramadan, Passover, the Day of Atonement, Lent, Holy Week, Easter. We create sacred rituals: Mass, the Veneration of the Cross, the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Shalako rituals among the A’shiwi people (commonly known as the Zuni Indians of New Mexico), the various nine-day healing ceremonies conducted by Navajo hatali or “singers.” Yet the older I get, the more I am convinced that we humans make this distinction between the sacred and the ordinary only because we take our ordinary daily lives for granted and we have to create these sacred places, times, and rituals to remind ourselves that our lives have to do with the sacred, to remind ourselves of how sacred ordinary life really is. I learned the sacredness of the ordinary gradually. Although I had always felt the presence of the divine in the beauty of nature and in the love of my mother and some family and friends, I learned the sacredness of life and the ordinary world most strongly when I went through chemotherapy for cancer and again when I cared for my ordination classmate, Father Jeff Sobosan, as he died. During my chemotherapy, simply watching the birds and squirrels in my garden, enjoying the beauty of flowers, and walking outside filled me with a deep sense of how beautiful and sacred life and the world are. The concern of my community and friends, even the gentle touch of my cats’ paws, communicated to me the presence and love of God. And in the suffering and death of my ordination classmate, I sensed very deeply the presence of God and the sacredness even of the dying process and grieving. The theology I had been studying all of my adult life il-
luminated and validated these feelings. This idea of the sacredness of the ordinary can be traced back to Jesus himself, I believe. “To what should I compare the kingdom of God?,” He says. “It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” This parable would have shocked Jesus’ Jewish listeners for several reasons, including that Jesus compared the kingdom of God to the action of a woman, a challenge to a very patriarchal culture. But the shock I am interested in this evening is this: leavened bread was the ordinary everyday bread, not the sacred bread. Matza, the sacred bread, was (and is) unleavened. In fact, because of how women in Jesus’ time obtained the yeast to make leavened bread, it was the Jewish regulation that during the sacred times—specifically the observance of Passover—all yeast or leaven had to be removed from the house. How did women obtain yeast? They couldn’t run down to the local Safeway or Fred Meyer’s to buy a packet of yeast. They got yeast by taking a piece of leavened bread, putting it in a bowl, covering it with a damp cloth, and placing it in a dark corner of the kitchen. The yeast would then grow on the bread and they could harvest it as they needed it. This process seemed, well, unclean...not fit for sacred times and observances. Yet Jesus compares the kingdom of God—the Sacred, a euphemism really for the very presence and action of God—to yeast in this ordinary, everyday bread. The Christian tradition subsequent to Jesus teaches us of the sacredness of the ordinary in many different ways. There is, for example, the implication of the divine attribute of omnipresence: God is everywhere. Metaphysically this attribute is trying to say that one cannot confine the infinite God to any finite location. But surely to say that God is everywhere also implies that the ordinary world is God’s dwelling place. And by association at least, this ought to teach us that the ordinary world and our ordinary, daily lives are sacred because God dwells in them. There is also the much-neglected doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The Christian tradition teaches us that the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Triune God, is poured out on the world, so that the Spirit is working within every person, active within the ordinary world, unseen, felt only in extraordinary moments of religious awareness. The work of the Spirit is traditionally called “sanctification,” the making Portland 32
The Sacred andthe Ordinary “It is only through the agency of the creatures of the universe that the possibilities of God’s eternal vision of beauty can come to be.” By Father Tom Hosinski, C.S.C.
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us, actually—that can give rise to ‘virtual particles’ which suddenly pop into existence from the vacuum and disappear back into it without violating the law of conservation of energy. None of the quantum fluctuation theories of the origin of the universe proposed to this point work, but it is possible that eventually one might. Yet none of the theories even attempts to explain why or how there is a quantum vacuum; they simply presume it. Alexander Vilenkin, a cosmologist who developed one of these theories, has called his theory a naturalistic “creation out of nothing,” but this is disingenuous, because the quantum vacuum is not nothing; it is an energy field of unimaginable power. My point
in his mid-sixties and ended his teaching career at Harvard University. In one of his books, Religion in the Making, Whitehead wrote a sentence that has haunted me since I first read it in 1972. He wrote: “The world lives by its incarnation of God in itself.” I don’t think you could have a more striking expression of the idea that the ordinary created world exists by participating in and including the sacred. And if something becomes sacred by its association with the divine, then surely we must understand and feel the sacredness of the ordinary. Whitehead conceives of God and the world in a dynamic relationship in which they interact in each moment and give something of value to each
is that none of the current cosmological theories can explain the energy that is our universe. Give physicists and cosmologists the energy, either in the form of the singularity or the quantum vacuum, and they can explain everything. But they cannot explain the energy itself; they must simply assume it. The arguments seeking to prove God’s existence are actually saying something quite similar. No one can explain God, but give us God and the whole world becomes intelligible; give us God and we can explain everything. What if energy, inexplicable by science, and God, inexplicable by theology, are fundamentally related? Perhaps the energy constituting the universe is a creaturely share in the very life of God. My own reflections on God have been deeply influenced by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, the great English mathematician and philosopher who moved to the United States
other. His vision is very similar in some ways to that of Nicholas of Cusa and, I would argue, it is quite compatible with Christianity’s triune understanding of God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. God, says Whitehead, acts as Creator by endowing us in each moment of our lives with all the possibilities open to us in that moment, and with freedom, our share in the divine life. God creates us not by determining what we must be or do or say, or what events must occur, but rather by providing all that we need to create ourselves in each moment and leaving us free to complete our own creation. God seeks to attract us toward the best possibility as God has valuated it. But each of us, and every other agent in the universe, is free to actualize any of the possibilities open to that moment. God is present in every single agent in the universe, empowering it and seeking to attract it and the universe as a whole toward actualizing the best possibilities. But
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ILLUSTRATION BY: WONDERLANE (HTTPS://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/WONDERLANE/3925793748/IN/ALBUM-72157622264218683/)
holy of all of us and the world itself. The sacred, the divine in the ordinary, confers sacredness on the ordinary. Moreover, many of the great theologians of the Christian tradition (Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa (“God is the enfolding of all things in that all things are in [God]; and [God] is the unfolding of all things in that [God] is in all things”), Friedrich Schleiermacher) have understood the doctrine of creation to imply that the creatures of the world and the world itself exist by participating in the divine being or the divine life. This is a profoundly important idea: to exist is to participate in the divine life. If we reflect on this and grasp what this means, we cannot help but see the sacredness of what we take to be ordinary. Interestingly, the notion that the universe exists by participating in God’s own life can also arise from comparing contemporary cosmological theories of the origin of the universe with the classical arguments for the existence of God. Contemporary scientific cosmology has two main ways of thinking about the origin of the universe. In the standard model, the universe begins in a “big bang” from a cosmic singularity. The singularity is an implication of Einstein’s general theory of relativity and results mathematically when an equation requires division by zero. Einstein’s equations show that when enough matter-energy is compressed in a small enough volume, everything goes infinite. Think of the entire massenergy of the universe compressed into a point with a diameter smaller than that of a proton: this is virtually incomprehensible! The singularity is inexplicable by physics, since all the laws of physics break down at that point. Physicists believe that eventually they will be able to explain the history of the universe from 10-43 seconds after the “big bang,” once they can integrate the gravitational force with the strong and weak nuclear forces and the electromagnetic force. But the singularity itself, which contains the entire energy of the universe, is not explainable—it must simply be assumed. Needless to say, the fact that they cannot explain absolutely everything bothers some physicists, since they operate under the ideal of complete explanation. And so there have been several attempts to develop theories of the origin of the universe as a fluctuation in the quantum vacuum. The quantum vacuum is a well-established fact; it is an energy field—all around
all agents in the universe enjoy freedom; they may be influenced by many other things besides God’s aim or will and they may actualize even the possibilities God values least or abhors. The world lives by its incarnation of God in itself, and it is free—but there is no guarantee that freedom will always be used in the best or even a good way. This view of creation goes a long way toward helping us understand the ambiguity of our experience. If the sacred dwells within the ordinary, how can it be that our experience of life is so ambiguous, so filled with suffering, evil, and pain, as well as beauty and joy? Whitehead’s answer is that God creates not by determining outcomes but by empowering the agents of the universe, who in their freedom determine what occurs and are therefore co-creators of the universe. Hence the evils and sufferings in the world are due to how the agents of the universe exercise their freedom. Traditional theology has long recognized that God gives humans free will and does not determine their actions and decisions. Whitehead, recognizing that we are part of nature, argues that freedom to some degree characterizes all agents in the universe. The Anglican scientist and theologian, John Polkinghorne, has called this “free process,” an extension of the “free will” defense of God’s goodness in the face of evil. In a major difference from traditional philosophical theology, Whitehead suggests that God must be affected by what the agents of the universe have made of themselves, what possibilities they have actualized. Among many implications of this view, one of the most important is that God suffers in two distinct ways. First, God suffers with all the suffering persons and creaturely agents in the universe. Whitehead states that God’s reception of each occurs with perfect sympathy: God feels the sufferings of all suffering creatures directly and completely, with a perfection of sympathy infinitely greater than we are capable of. But secondly God also suffers in God’s own right because of the difference between what has in fact occurred and what might have been: the beautiful possibilities of God’s eternal vision, the “Kingdom of God” if you will, are not always actualized. We might have loved and cared for each other, but so very often we do not. The power of the cross of Jesus Christ is that it reveals to us how deeply God suffers with and for us, and because of us. Whitehead’s philosophical
theology honors and expresses this revelation. In Whitehead’s cosmological vision God and the world are related in a dynamic interaction of complementarity. God is the infinite and eternal ground of possibility, order, novelty, and value that is necessary for there to be any actual course of events at all. This aspect of God makes the universe possible, but, we should note, is an eternal vision of merely possible beauty and value. The temporal agents of the universe, finite and passing, incorporate this creative aspect of God in their own becoming. In turn, these temporal agents give to God something God cannot otherwise acquire: actualized beauty and value. It is only through the agency of the creatures of the universe that the possibilities of God’s eternal vision of beauty are gradually actualized. An analogy may help to show the importance of this. When we are hungry, we can imagine all sorts of possible foods and relish the idea of them; but until we obtain some actual food, our hunger is never satisfied. Analogously, God “hungers” for the actualization of the possible beauty and values God envisions and presents to us, but only through the actualization of these possibilities can God’s “hunger” be satisfied. This is what we and all the agents of the universe give to God: actualized beauty and value; or the suffering of failing to actualize those possibilities. Traditional theology tells us that God loves the world, but that the world adds nothing to God. I could never understand this and I do not believe that it is true. The beloved always adds something to the one who loves. This is another way in which Whitehead’s philosophical theology shows the sacredness of the world: only through the actual world does God experience the actuality of God’s “Kingdom.” What happens in the world is of ultimate value not only to us, but also to God. But the world lacks harmony and continually ‘perishes’ into the past. Here God provides what the passing world cannot achieve on its own. God receives into God’s everlasting becoming every person and agent of the universe and unifies, harmonizes, and heals them in the unity and harmony of God’s own everlasting life. This is God saving the world as God takes it into God’s own life. It is God’s love for the world and God’s compassionate healing of it. In response to what has been done in the world, God seeks to lead the world beyond the tragedies and evils of the past toward new healing possibilities and new life. God’s redemptive love Spring 2017 35
flows back into the world: the Spirit of God sanctifies our torn and broken world. Whitehead once said, “The concept of ‘God’ is the way in which we understand this incredible fact—that what cannot be, yet is.” The Sacred is in the ordinary and the ordinary is in the Sacred—an incredible fact. Yet the Christian religious tradition, as I have briefly tried to indicate, has been teaching us this truth from the beginning. The little boy who wanted to hold God in his hands stands before you tonight at the beginning of his old age telling you that we all hold God in our hands at every moment. It is because we take our ordinary daily lives for granted that we so often fail to remember how sacred our ordinary daily lives are, how filled with the divine, how precious to God, how important to God in what we say and do to each other, to our fellow creatures, and to our world. We live and dwell in God and God lives and dwells in us. To feel this is to know in our hearts the true depths of our lives, the true depths of our cosmos, and the ultimate purpose and significance of our existence. I conclude with a short Navajo prayer that seems fitting for a person approaching the last portion of his life. The word in this prayer translated as “beauty” is the Navajo word “hozho,” which is very important in Navajo theology and has the connotations not only of beauty, but also of goodness, well-being, blessedness, and peace; perhaps its strongest connotation is harmony – harmony with the Sacred and harmony with the processes of the universe. The prayer goes this way: With beauty may I walk. With beauty before me, may I walk. With beauty behind me, may I walk. With beauty above me, may I walk. With beauty below me, may I walk. In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk. In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk. It is finished in beauty. It is finished in beauty. Father Tom Hosinski, C.S.C. first arrived on The Bluff in 1978, and subsequently taught just about every theology course we offer. He retired in 2016; this was his Last Lecture, offered through the University’s vibrant Garaventa Center. For the podcast, go to sites. up.edu/garaventa/the-sacredness-ofthe-ordinary.
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Calling All Pilots to Port for R eunion 2017, June 22-25
Relive your favorite UP memories with your Pilot family and make some new memories too! This year’s Reunion will celebrate Shipstad Hall’s 50th Birthday, Hawai’i Club, and all classes with years ending in 2 and 7. Plus, on Friday, June 23, join us for a brand new Reunion event: the President’s Welcome Reception and Alumni Rewards (congratulations to our 2017 award winners, listed below). We’re also introducing a new perk for members of our 50 Year Club: a weekend package that includes entry to all Reunion events at a discounted price. For more information, including a list of the weekend’s highlights, go to up.edu/reunion.
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Celebrate Portland’s vibrant homebrewing community by tasting unique small batch beers brewed by UP alumni and friends at the second annual UP Brewers Fest! All community members and families are welcome to attend. $12 tasting ticket includes entry to the fest plus a tasting glass, 8 tasting tokens, and snacks; $6 food ticket includes entry to the fest and snacks. RSVP at up.edu/alumni. And while we’re on the subject…Are you a homebrewer? We want to feature your beer at the Brewers Fest! Email Anna Horlacher at horlache@up.edu for more information. Homebrewers
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must register to participate about happy hours in both in the fest by Friday, June 16. cities scheduled for this spring. For more information about these and our other 10 regional chapters, go to up.edu/alumni/regionalchapters.
turn to The Bluff in time to cheer them in person.
Introducing “Light from the Bluff”
Alumni Family Day OMSI, May 20
We’re happy to share news of a new means of connection with the University and its faith-based community: our “Light From the Bluff” enewsletter. This monthly newsletter will feature scripture reflections written by alumni, the latest Fractio Verbi podcast episodes from the Garaventa Center, and more. Go to up.edu/alumni to sign up. Interested in writing a reflection to share? Email Katie Mitchell Franz at mitchelk@up.edu.
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Grab the kiddos for a day of fun with fellow Pilots at OMSI. Purchasing a ticket includes Life After UP: discounted entry to the muCaregiving for Aging seum as well as snacks and Parents, April 19 beverages upon arrival. All A panel of healthcare and children must be accompasocial work professionals nied by an 18 or older chapwill explain how to best sup- erone for the entirety of the port aging family members. museum visit. Tickets are This event is presented in $6 for adults and $3 for kids. partnership with the UP Sign up at up.edu/alumni. Alumni Nursing Chapter. $5 for alumni and guests. RSVP at up.edu/alumni.
Supper Under the Stars, August 12
You are cordially invited to a delectable, coastal-inspired Alumni Poker dinner on The Bluff. PreTournament, April 7 The University of Portland pared by our Bon Appétit Back by popular demand, the mission centers on teaching chefs, this multicourse meal Alumni Poker Tournament and learning, faith and for- will feature fresh, local seabenefits the National Alumni mation, service and leader- food paired with regional Board Scholarship. Tickets ship. Through our annual wines. $60 per person or $45 are $50 per person and Alumni Awards, we recognize for GOLDs (Graduates of the include entry to the Texas those individuals who emLast Decade). Reserve your Hold’em tournament, food, body this mission in their life seat at up.edu/alumni. and drinks. The top eight and work, and demonstrate finishers will be awarded a the power of the University prize. Tickets are available to prepare people who reat up.edu/alumni. spond to the needs of the world and its human family. We are pleased to announce that the following alumni have been selected to receive 2017 Alumni Awards: Thorns v. Reign, May 6 • Distinguished Alumni Award: Arnaldo Rodriguez Alumni and their families are invited to join us for the ’68 New UP Chapters in • Rev. Thomas C. Oddo, C.S.C., Thorns v. Reign soccer match New York and Boise Outstanding Service Award: at Providence Park. $45 per We are pleased to announce Tina Casola ’96 person includes entry to the formation of two new our viewing space behind • Contemporary Alumni University of Portland re Award: Stefanie Sertich ’06 the goal line on the Widmer gional chapters for alumni, • Gerhardt Award: Valerie Brothers Deck, plus food and parents, and friends: New drinks prior to kickoff. Re Smith ’17 York City and Boise. Keep We congratulate this year’s serve your spot at up.edu/ an eye out for information alumni. winners and hope you re-
2017 Alumni Awards Winners
UP Brewers Fest, July 29
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She was born Maria Josefina Bautista in Manila, Philippines, in 1937, and went by Josefina B. Gray here in the states. She was one of ten siblings. She went to Centro Escobar University in Manila, a Catholic school. Josefina returned to college for her licensed practical nurse degree in Lawton, Oklahoma, while her kids were in high school. She worked as a nurse in the mother/baby unit of Salem Hospital for over 25 years. An Army wife, she opened up her home during the holidays (any day, really—she was quick to set another place at the table) for soldiers, nurses, and later to her children’s UP classmates whose families were far away. Josie’s meals were renowned and she taught the art of Filipino cooking to anyone who wanted to learn. Many often requested she bring pancit and/or lumpia to gatherings and holidays. She would often serve meals at soup kitchens at Thanksgiving and Christmas. A true servant leader, Josie was a positive role model to many and was devoted to her children, Angie Gray Roarty ’83, Natalie Gray Haar ’84, Mark Gray, and Joseph Gray; grandchildren Houston Gray, Emily Haar, Gabrielle Roarty, Bridget Gray, and Tristan Gray; and family members far and wide, official and unofficial. “To say were are proud to be her children is an understatement,” according to Angie. “Mom suffered a stroke in January and was recovering, joking, and even asking if she could practice walking. She had a second stroke and passed away on Saturday, March 11, in University Place, Washington.” Our prayers and condolences and teary-eyed smiles to you and yours, Angie, and thanks for sharing. Spring 2017 37
PHOTOGRAPH BY: THE FAMILY
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CLASS Fifty Year Club
Norbert J. “Van” Vandehey ’40 passed away on July 6, 2016, at his home in McMinnville, Ore., surrounded by his family. Since he was born on November 26, 1922, he loved to say, “I was born the very day King Tut’s tomb was opened!” Norbert and his younger sister Alberta were raised in McMinnville by Bill Bernards after their parents passed away. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II as a radio technician. Van and Peggy Patrick were married at St. James Catholic Church on December 29, 1947. For the first years of their married life, Van worked as a Vocational Agriculture and Wood Shop teacher at Sheridan High School. The remainder of his career was spent as a 4-H extension agent first in Linn and then in Lane county. Van and Peggy were happily married for 68 years and raised five children who Van was “sinfully proud of,” in his words. Survivors include Peggy; sons, Ted (Annie), Pat (Kris), and Bob (Sally); daughters, Beth Hammericksen and Susan (Bob) Edwards; grandchildren, Deni (Tim), Jamie (Kirsten), Rani (Dustin), Melanie, Melissa (Andrew), Cory (Erica), Keri, Aaron, Scott (Annie), Sean, Ryan (Nora), Sarah (Tim), Jackie (Brant), Kate (Michael), Dan, Bryce (Kellie), Becky (Noe), Derek (Chynna), Mariel, Zach, and Lyla; and great-grandchildren Zoe, John, Leilani, Amelie, Baylee, Riley, Taven, Koda, Brynlee, Carter, McKayla, Casen, Ellie, Ben, Joy, Maddie, Geoffrey, Claire, Liam, Alice, and Diego; and three more great-grands due in the fall. Our prayers and condolences to the family. William “Bill” Danner ’41 passed away at the age of 97 at his home in Milwaukie, Ore., on Christmas Eve, 2016. Those who swear by the rugged quality of Portland’s Danner Boots have Bill to thank for them— he and his brother John took over their father’s struggling bootmaking company in 1945 and slowly but surely transformed Danner Boots into an internationally recognized and respected brand. Known by all as an honorable, gentle, and kind man, Bill Danner had other work to do before taking on the family business: he served three years in the Army Air Corps during World War II, flying an astounding 50 missions over Europe as a B-17 engineer and top gunner. A boot designed by Bill, the Mountain Light hiking boot, took the company to the national level in the late 1960s. He sold Danner boots in 1983
and spent his retirement years traveling the world with his beloved wife of 63 years, Miriam, visiting and volunteering in as many countries as they could. Miriam, passed away in November, 2016. Survivors include William B. Crary, Jr. (Jill), George Crary (Noriko), Peter (Deborah), and Michael; David (Lauren), Nancy Jeu
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We learned recently of the death of Margaret “Peggy” Connor Bergquist ’44, wife of the late Roy Bergquist ’49 and mother to Timothy ’71, Kathleen ’74, Michael, and Brian ’79. Peggy and Roy embraced the University’s mission as wholeheartedly as they did their faith, in words, works, action, and more, and we pray for their family in this difficult time. See more under her class year in “50 Year Club” on this page. (Rodney), and Craig (Stacey); foster sons, Hien Nguyen (Tram) and Khoa Nguyen (Mimi); 19 grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild. His daughter, Molly Whitcomb, predeceased him. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Margaret, “Peggy” Bergquist ’44 passed away on November 10, 2016. Her late husband, Elroy “Roy” Bergquist ’49, was a controller at the University of Portland. Peggy graduated from the University of Port-
break for a few years to raise her family, returned to work, and retired in 1985. During retirement, Peggy was active in a senior hiking group, in the St. Francis Guild at her church, and in the Nursing Alumni Association. She and Roy married in 1947 and had four children. Roy predeceased Peggy in 2014. Survivors include Timothy ’71 (Lesley), Kathleen ’74, (Mike Devenney), Michael (Jennifer), and Brian ’79; four grandchildren, John (Andrea Jensen), Jeff (Beka), Matthew,
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Andrew; and one great-grandchild, Connor. She is also survived by numerous nieces and nephews. In lieu of flowers, please send remembrances to the St. John Catholic Community Foundation Uniforms Fund for students in need, 10955 SE 25th Ave., Milwaukie, OR 97222. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Clarence J. Young, Jr. ’47 passed away on January 4, 2017, in Portland, Ore., at the age of 95. He was drafted into the service while attending the University of Portland and served with the Corps of Engineers in North Africa, India, Burma, and China. He came back to UP and finished with a degree in business administration, then went to work for Farmers Insurance. His love of travel took him to Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia in 1952, and then a two-month trip to Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America in 1956. It was during his 1956 trip that Jim met a beautiful Argentine tourist named Ileana Kaufmann on the summit of Sugar Loaf Mountain overlooking Rio de Janeiro. She accepted his proposal, and they returned to Portland, where they raised four sons and continued to travel, this time together, ultimately visiting over 100 countries between them. Survivors include Ileana, his devoted wife of 60 years; sons, Michael (Halah), Richard (Joy), Kevin, and Brian; his much beloved grandchildren, Kimberly Meyers (Stephen), Stephanie Renfro (Jeff), and Christopher Young (Erin Maraist); and his great-grandchildren, Emily and Alice Meyers, and Ben Renfro. “His life taught us the important lesson that travel, to paraphrase Mark Twain, is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,” according to his family, “and we need it for this reason.” The family requests that donations be made to the Portland Rescue Mission at www.portlandrescuemission.org. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Patrick Joseph Polich ’49 passed away on Saturday, January 14, 2017, from congestive heart failure, at Providence St. Vincent Hospital, with his family at his side. He was 90 years old. Born on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1926, he was raised in Northwest Portland’s Slabtown district. Patrick attended St. Patrick’s Grade School and graduated from Benson High School. He served in the Navy during World War II in the Aleutian Islands, and earned a history
CLASS degree from the University of Portland in 1949, followed by a master’s degree in education from the University of Oregon. Patrick married Patricia Wray on November 8, 1952, at St. Patrick’s Church and they soon welcomed son Joseph and daughter Joanne. He taught and counseled at Sunset High School for 28 years. Survivors include his wife of 64 years, Patricia; son, Joseph (Kay Lynn); daughter, Joanne Corrigan (Kelly); grandchildren, Katie Berglund (Erik), Molly, and Michael Corrigan; great-granddaughter, Gwen Berglund; and his brother, Robert Polich ’48, ’54. Our prayers and condolences to the family. George Blatner ’50 passed away on November 10, 2016, at his home in Northeast Portland. George was born on September 26, 1921, in Sterling, Colo., to Ernest and Anna Blatner. When he was a child, the family moved to Portland, where he attended Immaculate Heart Grade School and Jefferson High School before graduating from the University of Portland with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II and saw action in Europe. In 1952, he married Martha Haspert, and they lived in Lebanon, Ore., where George worked in the sawmills. Later, they moved to Portland, where George was a parole and probation officer/ supervisor. He was a kind man with a great sense of humor and will be greatly missed. Survivors include his children, Elizabeth (Daniel) Reilly, Jean Blatner, John (Loretta) Blatner, Anne Blatner, Michael (Mary Rose) Blatner, and Charles (Maureen) Blatner; 16 grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and brother, Ernest Blatner. He was preceded in death by his wife, his brother Joseph, and sisters, Margaret and Ann. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to St. Vincent de Paul. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Virgil W. Gamache ’40 passed away peacefully at Blossom Valley Assisted Living Facility in Wenatchee, Wash., on January 10, 2014. He was 99 years old. Virgil attended the University of Portland and transferred to Seattle University. He then graduated from San Francisco School of Embalming in June 1939, and served his apprenticeship at Sourwine Funeral Home in Wapato, Wash., but never worked as a mortician. He had to help run the family business after his brother went to war in World War II and served later in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He mar-
ried Gerri Sarrazin on March 2, 1946, at St. Charles Catholic Church and returned home to continue farming. In the mid1940s, Virgil and his brother, Francis, took over operations of Sunshine Ranch, which is now operated by his sons as Virgil Gamache Farms, Inc. In 1983, he was honored to receive the International Order
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N OT E S in-law, Elsie (Amos) Gamache; and multiple nephews, nieces, cousins, and good friends. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Edward John “Ted” Little ’50 passed away on April 9, 2016, at the age of 91. He is survived by his wife of 67 years, Marianne, and their six children: Wendy, Tim,
While looking in our photo archives for something else, we found...this. Captioned “Columbia University 1930s Fred Sullivan.” We’re willing to bet Fred was a fun-loving man who went on to do big things in his life. Any and all stories welcome to mcovert@up.edu. of the Hop Award for his innovative farming and service to the hop industry. Survivors include Gerri; children, Kenneth (Chris), Bernard (Vicki), Steve (Jocelyn), Barbara (Arnie) Bangs, Paul (Trudy), Ray (Cindy), and Arlene (John) Neal; 16 grandchildren; and multiple great-grandchildren. Also surviving are his sister, Theresa (Jerry) Wilton; sister-
Mary Alice, Teresa, Anne, and Edward. He is also survived by seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Ted was a decorated veteran of World War II, serving with the 10th Mountain Division in Italy. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to the 10th Mountain Division Scholarship Fund or the Marin Humane Society. Climb to
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Glory! Our prayers and condolences to the family. John Kuchler ’50 passed away at his home in Medford, Ore., on June 22, 2016. Survivors include his wife, Frances Kuchler; and son, Justin Smith. He was 93 years old. Our prayers and condolences to the family. William Karl Haug ’50, age 90, passed away peacefully on November 21, 2016, in Portland. He was a World War II veteran who served in the American Army in the 45th Infantry, known as The Thunderbirds. Ironically, he was stationed in Bavaria in an area where many of his relatives lived, allowing him to reconnect with many of them. Bill received a Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart. His service was recognized again more recently at a hospice pinning ceremony honoring veterans. Bill attended Kennedy Elementary School and was thrilled to see the building repurposed as a McMenamins hotel and restaurant. His name appears on a plaque in the main lobby commemorating students who served in the war. He graduated from Jefferson High School and then the University of Portland with a BA in business administration in 1950. On June 18, 1955, Bill married Marcia Mae Magnuson at Central Lutheran Church. They purchased a home in Northeast Portland and lived there for almost 60 years. He is survived by his wife of 61 years, Marcia; his three children, Christine Haug-Chin (Gary), William Karl Haug III, and Cynthia Madden (Ken); and his seven grandchildren, Evan, Kelsey, Brent, Cameron, Kyle, W. Karl IV, and Annika. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Robert Gilbertz ’51 died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family, on November 25, 2016. Robert’s father died when he was a teenager, after which his family moved to Portland. He attended Central Catholic High School and the University of Portland. He worked for Southern Pacific Railroad for 45 years. He was a member of the Portland Chancellor Club, where he met and married Joan Twitchell and developed many lifelong friends. The couple shared 59 years of marriage and had five children, seven grandchildren, and one-and-a-half great grandchildren (as of this writing). A devoted Catholic, Robert loved the services and the people at both St. Agatha and Sacred Heart churches. He coached CYO basketball at St. Agatha, where his
CLASS children and grandchildren attended school. He spent many hours each week at the St. Agatha Adoration Chapel, and was a server at the 6:30 a.m. Mass. He was named St. Agatha’s Holy Name Man of the Year in 1976. He also gave 19 gallons of blood to the American Red Cross. Survivors include his wife Joan; all his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren; his brother, John Gilbertz; and many cousins. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Paul Edmund Joseph Lebrun ’51 passed away in the early hours of November 4, 2016, with his family by his side. After finishing his education, Paul found Ruth. They fell in love and were married on February 14, 1955. They were happily married for 33 years and raised their family of five together. Sadly, Ruth left this world in 1988. Paul’s children (Joan, Jenny, Greg, Bob, and Kim), all 20 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren live in Washington State. Paul was a great father and shaped the hearts and minds of his five children. He shared his love and wisdom in all he did and established many traditions. His grandchildren agree his greatest profession was being the best grandfather ever. Paul met a beautiful little Irish woman named Lily in 2000, and it was love at first sight. The two were married just six months later. For the next 15 years, they loved each other and traveled the world together. Paul’s faith guided his actions throughout life. He started most days by attending daily Mass at Holy Rosary in Edmonds. At home, his door was always open, and he hosted many happy hours. He was passionate about golf, but his true love was always his family. Our prayers and condolences. Hank Cwalina ’51 died on August 16, 2016, in Bethel Park, Pa., at the age of 84. He was the beloved husband of 57 years to Adrienne J. Cwalina (Balzer); loving father of Jon, Michael (Beverly), Peter (Debbie) and Paul (Barbara); proud grandfather of Kristan (Greg) VandenHeuvel, Tim, Scott, Dan, Nikki, Kasey, Jenna and Jamie Cwalina; anduncle of Jennifer (Steve) Reynolds and Greg Barnhart. Hank was born in Rochester, N.Y., and moved his family to Bethel Park in 1966. He attended the University of Rochester and graduated from the University of Portland. While in college, Hank played basketball for both schools, and he continued playing basketball when
he joined the Army after graduating. He devoted much of his time and energy to coaching youth football, baseball, and basketball leagues. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Louis E. Gray ’51 passed away in Vancouver, Wash., on June 12, 2015. Louis graduated from Battle Ground
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N OT E S many feet of drifting, blowing snow to get to school each morning are legendary). After three years at the University of Portland, Tony was drafted into the military and chose to enlist in the Marines, eventually becoming a Master Sergeant. Tony also distinguished himself as a semi-pro baseball player in the service. He
It’s not too early to make plans for Reunion 2017, June 22-25, here on the beautiful University of Portland campus. You never know who you’ll run into, or what memories you’ll share with old friends, and the alumni office and its small army of UP student workers really know how to roll out the red carpet. Find out more about what’s in store for Reunion 2017 at up.edu/reunion. High School, class of 1944, and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He married Virginia Schoemaker on August 25, 1946. Louis retired after many years from Kenton Machine Works. Survivors include son, Stanley Gray (Carol); daughters, Juanita Carlson (Steve), Katherine Prew (George), and Skaist (Howard); nine grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Anthony Dooher ’51 died on November 21, 2016, in Salem, Ore. After spending a year boarding at Columbia Prep School (now the University of Portland) Tony attended Central Catholic High School in Portland, graduating in 1947 (his stories of battling
briefly contemplated a career in baseball, but family considerations led to other pursuits, and he was honorably discharged in 1953. Tony met the love of his life, Ann Lee Bailey, while studying at UP, and she at Lewis & Clark College. They were married on May 12, 1951, at Sacred Heart Church in Tillamook, Ore. Tony began teaching in Woodburn, Ore., moved to Tillamook, and taught physical education and history at Tillamook Catholic High School. He moved over to Tillamook High School the following year, teaching history and coaching the football, basketball, and golf teams for the next 10 years. Tony always stressed that academic competency went hand-in-glove with sports. He
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was respected and admired as a mentor and role model for his athletes. Survivors include Ann Lee; children, Stephen (Bunny Way), Tom (Chris Kollaja), Joan (Neal Rothenberger), Sean (Judy Howard) and Joseph (Michelle Blaser); 10 grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Frederick Schlotfeldt, Jr. ’53 died on December 29, 2016. In 1962, Fred married Louisa Barei. They had two children, Jim and Albert, who gave them four grandchildren they deeply loved. Fred worked for Ross Island Sand and Gravel for 43 years and retired as a general manager in 1997. He was very active in Our Lady of Lourdes Parish and served on the board of Central Catholic High School. He was a Fourth Degree Knight and Grand Knight of the Knights of Columbus. Survivors include sons, James ’85 and Albert ’86; brothers, Robert ’61 and Richard ’65; grandchildren, Erika, William, Nicole, and Philip; and sister, Mary Langevin. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to Our Lady of Lourdes or Central Catholic High School. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Elizabeth “Ann” Engelcke ’56 of Eugene died surrounded by family on February 26, 2016. Ann was the first born child of Ennis and Frances Keizer. She received her bachelor of science in nursing from the University of Portland. In 1956, she married Boyd Engelcke. Always a curious learner, she loved traveling, reading, and spending time with friends and family. She was from the pioneer Keizer family, and with that came a respect for nature and a love of Oregon, from the beach to the mountains. She is survived by Boyd; daughters, Carolyn (Barry) Brewis and Paula (Ty) Engelcke Osborne; granddaughters, Alyson and Lindsay Brewis; and brothers, Phil and Russell Keizer. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Mary Magdalen Sonderen Thompson ’56, a member of St. John the Apostle Parish in Milwaukie, Ore., died on December 19, 2016, in Oregon City, Ore. She struggled with complications from surgery and health issues. Mary worked for the University of Portland as secretary to its president, Holy Cross Father Robert Sweeney, C.S.C. She also worked for Farmers Insurance and was a teacher in the Oregon City School District for 30 years. She volunteered as a religious
CLASS education teacher and as a substitute teacher for St. John the Apostle School and Parish. Survivors include her children, Guy, Beth Boswell, Robert, David, and Roger. She is also survived by 12 grandchildren and a great-grandchild. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Gene Anderson ’58 died on October 26, 2016, in Fremont, Calif. Gene grew up on a farm in Molalla, Ore., with his brother and four sisters. He proudly served in the Army during the Korean War in a MASH unit, where he obtained the rank of Sergeant First Class. He began working for Mansfield Tire Company in Denver, Colo., where he met his future wife, Dorothy. Gene and Dorothy married in 1962, finally settling in Fremont, where they have lived for the past 49 years. He was a Farmer’s Insurance agent for 28 years. Survivors include Dorothy and their children, Lynn, Craig, and Scott; daughter-in-law, Tonee; granddaughter, Oriana; and sisters, Helen, Margaret, Marilyn, and Joanie. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Marvin Remy Delplanche ’59 passed away on December 11, 2016. Also known as “Popa,” “Uncle Marv,” or even “That Damn Marv,” he was the eldest of five children and was raised on the family farm just outside Verboort, Ore., where they were parishioners. He later attended the University of Portland, where he enjoyed playing baseball and received his teaching degree. Marv met Patricia “Pat” Bride at a CYO dance, and they married soon after in 1964. Their life together started in Portland, then they moved to Forest Grove, eventually returning to the family farm in Verboort, where they built their dream home and raised strawberries. They had five children: Curtis, Remy ’89, Douglas, René, and Michelle ’01. Farming was a bittersweet struggle, but for over 20 years he was known as the “Berry Baron” as he continually expanded his strawberry empire. He taught for a time at North Catholic High School and coached football as well. He then sold insurance and worked on his berry empire before working in the funeral industry. With retirement came Marv’s dream job: professional poker player. He even had a big win on his last day. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Norvin Lowery ’59, ’60, ’64 died on August 25, 2016. In 1944, he and his family relocated to Portland, where
Norvin graduated from Jefferson High School in 1949, the same year he met his wife-tobe, Rose Williamson. In 1951, Norvin enlisted in the Air Force, serving as an air rescue communications specialist stationed in Japan, Korea, and at Westover Air Force Base. He married Rose while on leave in June 1954 and was
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N OT E S vate practice as a clinical psychologist in Salem, eventually moving his family to Salem in the spring of 1968, where he retired in 1995. Survivors include Rose; children, Linda Lowery, Susan Lowery (Dan Greenberg), Michael (Jane Jolliff), and Jane’s sons Tanner and Hayden Bridgeman; and sister, Charlotte Ulmer. Our
Rev. Joseph P. Browne, C.S.C., professor emeritus, passed away on October 30, 2016, at 87 years of age. The University remembers Fr. Browne for his years of pastoral service and as director of the Clark Library from 1966 to 1970 and again from 1976 until his retirement in 1994. A dignified, deeply intellectual man, Fr. Browne volunteered to take over as pastor and also to celebrate the traditional Latin Mass during his time at nearby St. Birgitta Parish from 1994 to 2004. Our prayers and condolences to his family and the Holy Cross community. honorably discharged as a staff sergeant in January 1955. After completing his Ph.D. in psychology at UP, Norvin interned at Morningside Hospital in Portland, counseled at PSU, and taught psychology at Lewis & Clark College. In 1964, Norvin established a pri-
prayers and condolences to the family. Dr. Melvin Nathan Olson ’60, ’70 passed away on August 25, 2016. As a young man he worked as a baker and served in the Merchant Marines, but his life journey would be more academic and organization-
Spring 2017 41
al. He became a professor at Western Evangelical Seminary in 1960, and in 1965 he joined the faculty of Cascade College as professor of psychology, also serving as vice president of campus affairs. He became president of Cascade in 1968, and in 1970 he earned a doctor of education at the University of Portland. He was a co-founder of Nulabs, an agricultural genetics company, and served as president until 1984, when he purchased Power Logistics Company. He was a voracious reader, leaving behind a library of nearly 1,500 volumes, all of which he read one or more times. Survivors include Mary, his wife of 47 years; daughter, Lori Anne (Barney) Rosen; son, Michael (Jenny) Olson; and grandchildren, Adrianne, Delaney, Liza, Molly, and Brett. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Mary Lou Salvo ’61 passed away on May 16, 2016, at her home in Portland, after a long courageous battle with cancer. Survivors include three nieces, one nephew, and several great-nieces and nephews. She attended Lewellyn Grade School and Cleveland High School, then graduated from the University of Portland with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education. Later she went on to earn her master’s degree. She taught the sixth grade for 20 years in the David Douglas School District, teaching at Cherry Park, Lincoln Park, and Ventura Park elementary schools. After she retired from teaching, she held a real estate license and was a travel agent. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Nancy Johansing Hall, wife of William Hall ’66, passed away on November 30, 2016, surrounded by her family. Survivors include Bill, her husband of 49 years; daughters, Emily May (Tom), Melissa Sahand (Sam), and son, David (Annie); grandchildren, Ellie, Nicolas, Brennan, and Julia; sisters, Diane Litchfield (Jim), Sally Held (Bill), Beth Cote (Bob), Karen Meyer (Steve), and brothers, Peter (Kathy) and Tom (Judy). The third of ten children, Nancy was born in Berkeley, Calif., and raised in Pasadena. She graduated from Mayfield Junior and Senior Schools and Dominican University with a degree in sociology. Bill was Nancy’s high school sweetheart; they raised their family in San Gabriel. With her warm and caring personality, Nancy was the heart of the Hall family. She will be missed by everyone. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
CLASS ’68 A Gentle, Honest, Intelligent Man
Michael P. Fogerty passed away on December 14, 2014. Mike married Mary Boylen on August 3, 1968. They pledged to love, explore, support, and cultivate the best in each other. Mike was gentle, honest, and intelligent. He was the logic and strength behind the establishment of the Friends of Fine Arts at Central Catholic High School, which was instrumental in the building of CC’s Performing Arts facility. In 1968, he began work for Bonneville Power Administration. Survivors include Mary; his sons and their wives, Matt and Shealin, David and Tracy, and Rudy Leal; grandsons, Patrick and Forest Fogarty; his sister, Joan Flanagan and her family; as well as the children of his brother, Dennis Fogarty; and many cousins. Mike, ever the practical engineer and generous person, donated his body to science. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
of linguistics and head of the English as a Second Language (ESL) division at Western Kentucky. I also have two terrific granddaughters and two terrific grandsons. Hi to all the theatre graduates and anyone who may remember me. I recall my time at Portland with great fondness.” Thanks for writing, Richard, one of
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N OT E S 1940. They settled in Vancouver and raised their family there. Delmer preceded her in death in 2002. She taught in the Vancouver School System. Geneva is survived by three sons, Craig (Polly) Wohlgemuth, Loren (Carolyn) Wohlgemuth, and Mark Wohlgemuth; eight grandchildren; and 17 great-grandchildren.
’69 “With
spectacles on nose and pouch on side...”
A note from Richard Poole, who writes: “I have been retired for the last year-and-a-half and am now professor emeritus at Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, Iowa. I am on the Iowa Humanities Speakers Bureau, and I travel across the state giving presentations as “THE GREAT DOCTOR BALTHAZAR T. ARCHIMEDES and his American Medicine Show.” (If I didn’t use caps and bold, the old guy would never forgive me!) I also give lectures on “Tent Repertoire, Circle Stock, Airdomes, and Opera Houses: Gone but not Forgotten.” Currently, I am writing a book on Sioux City amusements, focusing on theatre. In 2014, I co-authored a book, American Traveling Tent Theatre: 19001940 Rural and Small Town Tent Shows Performed in the Midwest Including Scripts of Popular Tent Theatricals, published by Mellen Press. I also co-authored a book on Iowa Opera Houses, Iowa State Press, 1993. I am performing Tubby the Tuba with the Sioux City Symphony for 2,400 fourth graders as part of a children’s concert. Lots of fun. And I will be playing a crazy professor (typecasting, pure and simple) for some Youtube videos sponsored by the Launch Pad, a children’s interactive museum recently opened here in Sioux City. Retirement is great, and we have wonderful children. My son, Gerald, is a project manager for a healthcare system in Minneapolis, and my other son, Alexander, is a professor
drier weather, and at this point, much colder and snowy weather. Wishing all my fellow ’72 grads the best! If you are in Bend, look us up.”
’73 A Life Of Teaching
Phyllis Swenson passed away on June 4, 2009, at her home in Battle Ground, Wash., surrounded by family and friends. When she and her husband Joseph moved to Vancouver, Wash., in 1967, she began teaching at Clark County Christian School. The following year she became the school’s principal and held that position until 1987. Phyllis later accepted the offer to be principal of Mountain View Christian School in Ridgefield, Wash., where she stayed until she retired in 2003. Phyllis was a woman of great faith who dedicated her life to serving others and leading them in a closer walk with Christ. Survivors include two sisters, Joy Hall and Marilyn Benson; five children and their spouses, Steve and Karla Swenson, David and Melody Swenson, Elizabeth and Scott Watkins, Christine and Donald Chaney, and JoEllen and Eric Bjur; 12 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’74 Prayers For Sheila
Behold the exacting, urbane, peripatetic Paul Ouellette, the founding chair of the UP drama department. Ouellette’s first production, “A Christmas Carol,” was staged in cavernous Education Hall auditorium in 1949 on a budget of $50. He lived to see Mago Hunt Center rise from the ashes of Education Hall in 1973 but passed away tragically at age 50 in 1975. We’re willing to bet plenty of students and colleagues remember Dr. O—e-mail mcovert@up.edu to share your memories and impressions. these days you’ll have to tell us all about the Great Fire of 1969, which left the UP drama program homeless for nearly four years.
’70 Sad News
Geneva “Gen” Eleanore (Fanselau) Wohlgemuth died in Vancouver, Wash., on January 15, 2015, of natural causes. In 1934, she moved with her family to Newberg, Ore. She met her husband, Delmer Wohlgemuth, in the Newberg area and they were married in
Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’72 Living Large
in
Bend
Here’s the latest from Dick Dudley: “My wife Toni and I recently retired from our work careers. I left Weyerhaeuser Company after a 41-plus-year career on January 5, 2016. I retired as general sales manager for the liquid packaging board business. We moved from the west side of Washington State to Bend, in Eastern Oregon. We love the change of scenery,
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Sheila Ann (Westby) O’Malley ’74 passed away on December 23, 2016, after a brief battle with cancer. Sheila was the sixth of eight children born to Herbert and Angela Westby in Vancouver, Wash. She met her husband of 37 years, Tim O’Malley ’73, on The Bluff. Throughout her early career in banking, imports, sales, and marketing, Sheila’s true passions—her love of music and desire for peace and justice—continued to flourish. Ultimately they became her life’s work, from leading parish music ministries in Idaho and Oregon, to devoting her most recent years to the Ignatian Volunteer Corps in San Diego as a board member, spiritual reflector, and agency volunteer at Catholic Charities’ Tomorrow Project. Survivors include Tim and their two sons, Dan and Mike, and Mike’s fiancée, Lauren South. She is also survived by five siblings, including Harold “Hal” Westby ’63, ’67, and many nieces and nephews. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’78 A Very Full Life
Helen H. Libonati passed away peacefully on December 6, 2016. She was 87. Helen lived
CLASS a very full life, always surrounded by family and music. She was born and raised in New York and moved to Portland to start a family in the 1950s. She had several jobs, but life always led her back to music and theater. She had two sons, four grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren, along with two step children and three step grandchildren. Helen always did things her way, which is what made her so unique. Our prayers and condolences to the family. We recently received a note from Michelle Eten, who writes: “My father, Bob Lever, received his BA from the University of Portland in 1978. He delayed getting his degree to enter the Army and then marry Diane Lever, his wife of 52 years. He recently passed away on October 19, 2016, at the age of 74. He worked full time in the Air National Guard while supporting a family of four. My brother and I were both under the age of 12 while he went to school at night and on weekends to earn his degree. He was very proud of completing his degree at U of P. Bob was a devout Catholic and contributed greatly to his parish community during his retirement years. He was an avid reader of the University of Portland magazine and always wore his University of Portland graduation ring. We would be honored to have his passing mentioned in the magazine.” Thank you, Michelle. We’re honored to mention him, and we offer our prayers and condolences to you and your family.
’81 Remembering Wayne
Wayne Woolhiser died peacefully, with his family present, at Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup, Wash., on September 19, 2016. He was 58 years old. Born in South America, Wayne also lived in Thailand, Pakistan, Greece, and Egypt prior to moving to Oregon in the late 1960s; his father worked in international construction. His UP degree was in electrical engineering. He worked at Boeing for 29 years, taking part in Pave Pace, AWACS, Advanced Systems Technology Staff, Peace Shield Program, Electronic Countermeasures Program, B-IB, B-2, V-22 Osprey, Commercial Major/Minor Programs, FCS, and the ALCUM/CALCUM program. He was a published author and was most proud of receiving the Employee of the Month award from the Boeing technology staff. Near the end of his career, he was a systems engineer concentrating on
configurations in military and commercial applications in airplanes, bombers, and weaponry. He retired from Boeing in 2008. He had a large family and relatives in Paleo Faliro and Thessaloniki, Greece. Wayne is survived by his wife of 31 years, Karen, and his son, Alex; also his sister, Dianne C. Malloy. He was preceded in
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N OT E S number one gateway to heroin addiction,” said Milton Cohen, president & CEO of Safe Rx. “Anthony’s leadership will enable us to achieve significant growth and fulfill pharmacy sector demand with a high level of customer service.” Dolan’s career includes 18 years at the McKesson Corporation, with additional experi-
working for the Washington Department of Labor and Industries. We are still avid Pilot soccer fans and attend games whenever we are not attending our own children’s soccer and basketball games! We visit campus frequently for alumni events and games—our UP experience is deeply rooted within us, and also in our kids! Sending much love to all of our fellow UP alums!”
’00 We Expect Big Things
We are told Chris Lattner has joined Tesla Motors as vice president of autopilot software. Chris was at Apple for the past 11 years, where he was primarily responsible for creating Swift, a programming language for building apps on Apple platforms. Prior to Apple, Chris was lead author of the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, an open source umbrella project that is widely used in commercial products and academic research today. We heard about Chris through Brian “Casey” Cowart ’99, who writes: “Chris was a year behind me in the computer science program at UP, and back then he was amazing. It would be really cool to see a highlight of him in the alumni publication at some point if it isn’t already being planned. Maybe get him back to campus for a talk about his experiences one of these days?” Thanks Casey, that’s not a bad idea.
’04 Melissa’s Update Michael ’09 and Laryssa Scheepers ’12 welcomed a baby girl, Keyara Lee Scheepers, on September 10, 2016. See more on page 45. Awwwww... death by his parents, Willard and Alexandra Woolhiser. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’82 Prayers For Michele
Michele Pardee passed away on April 4, 2014, in Callaway, Va. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’91 Helping Keep Us Safe
Anthony Dolan has been chosen to lead pharmacy sales and marketing for Safe Rx LLC, a manufacturer and marketer of locking prescription vials (LPVs) used by pharmacies and veterinarians in dispensing controlled substances. “At Safe Rx, we are at the beginning of a high growth path to help pharmacies improve profitability and capture share, while helping protect families and children from the
ence on the payer side and in retail pharmacy.
’94 Twenty Years And Counting
We heard recently from Cathy Rubio Kuffner, who writes: “I would like to share the news that my husband, Mike Kuffner, and I celebrated our 20 year wedding anniversary on August 2, 2016. We met as freshmen at UP and are both part of the 1991-92 Salzburger group. After 20 years of marriage, we have four children: Vanessa (17), Jack (15), Josie (11), and Colette (9). After living in New York City, Missoula, Mont., and then Oak Harbor, Wash., while I served in the U.S. Navy JAG Corps, we made our home just across the river in Vancouver in 2003. Mike works for Grainger as an account manager, and I am an attorney,
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Melissa G. Bowers is a registered mechanical engineer and plumbing project manager for the Chandler, Ariz., offices of DG Koch Associates LLC. Bowers has been heavily involved in the Phoenix Chapter of the American Society of Plumbing Engineers since March 2008 and has held various chapter offices, including that of past president and current historian and ASPE young professionals liaison. Melissa serves as a vice president on the Research Foundation of the American Society of Plumbing Engineers and also serves as a member of the ASPE Society Nominating Committee. Clearly, Melissa is a young professional engineer who is going places—to see an example of her expertise, see her article, “Leading the Plumbing Industry with a Service Heart” in Plumbing Engineer at http://tinyurl.com/ gutj94c.
’06 An Actual Promotion
Lauren Canfield has been promoted to second vice president and associate actuary at Standard Insurance Company
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in Portland. Lauren joined The Standard in 2006 and has held actuarial positions in the commercial mortgage division and the corporate actuarial team. Most recently, as senior director of corporate actuarial, Lauren has had a significant impact on the expansion of interest rate risk management and implementation of associated hedging strategies at The Standard. In her new role, Lauren will provide actuarial consultation and insight to other areas of the business, including financial and capital planning, investments, and other key product lines across the organization. Congratulations, Lauren! Molly Keenan has joined the staff of Congresswoman Suzan DelBene (WA-01) as district manager. “Molly brings invaluable experience and extensive knowledge from her work in Washington state, and, like me, she is committed to working toward bipartisan, commonsense solutions that help our students, workers, families, and seniors,” DelBene said. “She has shown a deep dedication to public service, and I’m delighted she will be part of our team working with us to ensure Washington’s First District remains the best place to live.” DelBene’s district spans four counties: King, Snohomish, Skagit, and Whatcom. Keenan will oversee outreach efforts and casework throughout the district. Since graduating from UP, Molly has worked for Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), and serves as a board member of NARAL Pro-Choice Washington.
’09 Here’s To Megan!
’08 Megan Says “I Do!”
Hey, you really ought to plan on coming back to The Bluff for Reunion 2017, June 22-25. These ladies seem glad they did in 2015. This year, we celebrate Shipstad Hall’s 50th Birthday, Hawai’i Club, and all classes with years ending in 2 and 7. We’ll present the 2017 Alumni Awards on Friday at the President’s Welcome Reception, plus so much more. For more information, including a list of the weekend’s highlights, go to up.edu/reunion.
Megan (Barrus) Gentry writes: “I have to say that I have loved Portland Magazine from day one of being a UP student. I am writing because I would like to submit information regarding my wedding this past fall. I married Jacob Gentry of Fruitland, Idaho, in Cascade, Idaho, on October 1, 2016. The ceremony was presided over by UP’s own Father Jim Gallagher, C.S.C., and many other friends and members of the Class of 2008 were able to be present and celebrate with us. The UP family always comes together! We welcomed Matthew Korte, Matthew Louie, Jamie Halpenny, Amanda Mitchell, Kyle O’Donnell, Laura (Sullivan) Burke, and Sarah (Bortvedt) Andres, with baby Avery Andres. Warm regards to all!” Thanks for the news and kind words, Megan, and congratulations on throwing one heck of a wedding.
Megan Heberle was recognized as the Innovative Educator of the Month in the SavannahChatham County Public School District. Her notice reads in part: “Everything about Megan’s scientific research classes prepares students for life after high school, from an ongoing three-year field study,
to the class. But what really stands out beyond the quality of student work is the wealth of autonomy and intrinsic motivation. Our hats are off to Ms. Heberle for gathering the resources and arming students with all the skills they’ll need to go far in life!” Craig Joseph Casey ’65, husband of Nancy Carlin Casey,
hours to the success of Portland Piano International and other music related events. He loved recording his favorite artists and had a remarkable collection of music scores of which he was quite proud. Craig served in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps, where he is remembered for his contributions to a number of prominent cases. He was exceedingly proud of his four children, Anne Marie, Matthew, Sarabeth, and Andrea; as well as his stepchildren, Margaret, Sally, and Joe. He praised God for his five grandchildren and was the beloved uncle of six nieces and nephews and more than a dozen grand-nephews and nieces. Craig was devoted to his Roman Catholic faith and, in particular, to the Virgin Mary. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’10 Great News On All Fronts
to lengthy peer reviewed research papers and posters presented biannually to the community. Megan started teaching her classes with a vision about what she wanted students to be able to do— namely, be prepared to do college-level research. When you enter her class, it feels like a professional work space. Each student is deeply engaged in researching, preparing presentations, or presenting
died peacefully at home on Sunday, November 20, 2016, at the age of 72. Ordained a deacon in the Catholic Church following a career as an assistant U.S. attorney, Craig served in the diaconate for six years at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Portland. He did additional work for the Church at the Diocesan Tribunal. A man of many talents, Craig was a gifted pianist who loved the works of the Romantics. He gave endless
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We heard recently from Jennifer Lofft, who writes: “I was recently awarded the prestigious Daisy Award for nursing excellence at Stanford Hospital and Clinics in Palo Alto, Calif. The Daisy is an international award that recognizes exceptional nurses for their caring and compassion, honesty, excellence in education or research, advocacy, respect, and teamwork. Nominations are from fellow employees or patients. It was an incredible honor, and I am very thankful for the excellent nursing education I received as a student at UP. On another happy note, we are all set to welcome our second child, Lucas Joseph, due in March 2017!” Thanks, Jennifer, and congratulations on your award and, of course, on the happy news about Lucas Joseph, due in March. Hey, wait a minute, that’s now! Please give as an update when you get a chance.
’11 TJ’s Update
TJ Muktoyuk writes: “After five months on hospice, my dad, Alex Muktoyuk, died on Saturday, January 14, after years of declining health. My mom, Nancy (Bigelow) Muktoyuk, is from the class of 1965. They were married for 47 years. On a personal note, I underwent brain surgery in late December 2016 to repair an unruptured brain aneurysm behind my left eye. The aneurysm was asymptomatic and was found while undergoing imaging for something else. The aneurysm was clipped, and the procedure was successful. It was ready to rupture, so it was good timing! It will be a long
CLASS road to healing, but I’m doing well so far.” Thanks for the update, TJ, and our prayers and condolences to you and your family.
’12 Welcome, Keyara!
Proud grandma Terina Retzlaff sent us the following wonderful news: “Hello! Here is a new baby announcement to put in your next magazine. Michael ’09 and Laryssa Scheepers welcomed a baby girl, Keyara Lee Scheepers, on September 10, 2016. Keyara weighed 6 lbs., 15.5 oz., and was 19.5 inches long. Michael graduated from the University of Portland in 2009 and Laryssa Retzlaff (maiden name) graduated from the University of Portland in 2012. The Scheepers family is living in Washington, where Michael is a police officer and Laryssa is a middle school teacher.”
’15 Aussies Stick Together!
Marisa Barrie (now Marisa Schell) writes: “During my time at UP, I happened to participate in study abroad in Australia with a group of amazing students. Two weeks ago, I got married at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, Wash., and most of that group (Australia Fall Semester
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N OT E S Paige Reynolds, Victoria Wellock, Sophia Romanaggi ’16, and Bryan Chipman ’16. Brenagh Sanford, Monique Martin ’16, Sarah Larabee,Becca Alfaro ’16, Megan Tamblyn ’16, and Tatiana Aguilar were there in spirit, since they couldn’t get time off work to make it. Thank you for having such wonderful programs!”
’13 A Note From Fr. Art
A note from the illustrious Rev. Art Wheeler, C.S.C., who shares: “I just had dinner with Noelle Niedo, who leaves soon for Samoa (her home) and then Fiji. She was a Gearhardt Award winner at UP. Now she’s going to Fiji National University to study medicine and wants to be pediatrician. She has a scholarship from American Samoa, with the understanding that she will practice there after becoming a doctor. Her sister Irene ’12 (now working in Portland as an accountant) and brother Ariel ’16 (now working as an engineer) are also UP grads. Best wishes, Art.” Best wishes to you, Fr. Art, as well as Noelle and Irene and Ariel.
’14 Don’t Walk Harder, Walk Smarter!
Sean O’Rourke ’14, ’16, Peter Chamberlain, and Nick MacKinnon ’15 sit on the board of directors for Auto-Pilot Medical Technologies. Since getting their start at the University of Portland with a lead investment from the Franz Center’s annual 100K Competition, the company settled in Grand Forks, N.D. Their mission is to bring the personalized data revolution to physical therapy, elder care, and other important areas of healthcare. They plan to do so with their Walksmart device and app, which use a simple attachment to a patient’s walker to record data about that person’s walking habits. Caregivers can use the app to make decisions based on distance walked, speed, time of day, and more. To find out more about the company and its mission, go to http://tinyurl.com/hlp7owp.
A cool note from Jim Erzen: “My daughter, Kira Erzen ’18, is in the Army Oregon National Guard. As the distinguished honor graduate at her Officer Candidate School, the Guard decided to use her in some of their recruiting materials. My niece was driving down NE Lombard and 63rd in Portland and noticed this billboard with her picture.” Hey, that’s awesome alright—thanks for sharing! I, 2014) traveled to the wedding. Some came from as close as Seattle, and some came from as far as Hawaii. My mother thought the University would like to know how wonderful its programs are at creating relationships that last a lifetime. I just wanted to thank the University again for giving me the best support group and friends a person could ask for. Our guests included Megan Murray ’16, Abbey Swanson ’16, Claire Moberly ’16, Kim Kadomoto ’16, Erin Puetz ’16,
Faculty, Staff, Friends
Rev. Ronald J. Wasowski, C.S.C., died on Monday, December 5, 2016, at the Holy Cross residence at the University of Portland. He was 70 years old and had just started a phased retirement from his teaching duties. Fr. Wasowski was born in South Bend, Ind., on March 31, 1946, to Leo and Mary (Sotkiewicz) Wasowski. He attended St. Casimir Grade School for eight years and graduated from St. Joseph High School in 1964. In the fall of 1964, he
Spring 2017 45
entered the Congregation of Holy Cross Candidate Program at St. Joseph Hall on the Notre Dame campus. He entered Sacred Heart Novitiate in Jordan, Minn., on August 15, 1965, and made his first vows on August 16, 1966. Returning to Notre Dame and Moreau Seminary, he resumed studies and graduated with a degree in physics in 1970. Three years later, he received his graduate degree in theology from Notre Dame. Due to the serious illness of his mother, Fr. Wasowski was ordained earlier than his classmates on June 2, 1973, in the chapel at Moreau Seminary; his mother died four days later. After ordination, he spent one year at St. Joseph Parish in South Bend and, in 1974, spent a year teaching at Bourgade High School in Phoenix, Ariz., residing at Casa Santa Cruz. In 1975, he returned to Notre Dame to prepare for graduate work in earth sciences, and the following year began working on his doctorate at the University of California in Los Angeles. He taught at Notre Dame from 1983 until 1991, then moved to King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where he was an associate professor of science until 1998. That year he began teaching at the University of Portland as an associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences. He recently earned the nickname “Fr. Drone” after mastering the use of camera drones in documenting large archeological sites from the air. Survivors include his sister, Patricia Spychalski; a niece, Michele Ramachandran; a nephew, Christopher Spychalski; and four grandnieces and nephews. Memorial contributions in support of the mission and ministries of the Congregation of Holy Cross may be made to: United States Province of Priests and Brothers, Office of Development, P.O. Box 767, Notre Dame, IN 46556-0765, or online at: donate.holycrossusa. org. Our prayers and condolences to Fr. Ron’s family, colleagues, and the Holy Cross community. Philip J. Faccenda, Sr., general counsel emeritus and life trustee of the University of Notre Dame, died on January 11, 2017, at the age of 87. Faccenda came to Notre Dame in 1967 at the request of Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., to serve as his special assistant during the early years of national student protest. In 1970, he became general counsel and saw Notre Dame through its reorganization to a largely lay board of trustees, on which
CLASS he served until his death. His tenure also included the transformation of Notre Dame to a co-educational institution in 1972. He was appointed as the first chairman of the Indiana Educational Facilities Authority and served for over 25 years. He also served on the boards of St. Mary’s College and the University of Portland (May 31, 1991-May 31, 2003, Life Regent) and was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1980. Among his many honors were the Sorin Award, the Howard Kenna Award, the Sagamore of the Wabash, the W. Scott Miller Distinguished Business Leader Award, and an Honorary Notre Dame Monogram. His beloved wife, Kathy, predeceased him in 2008. He is survived by his children Maribeth (Duane) Hough, Susan (Thomas) Walsh, Kathy (Tom Lauer) Faccenda, Peggy (Tony) Green, Philip, Jr. (Angie), and Michael (Cynthia). He is also survived by 20 adoring grandchildren: Kayleigh, Ted (Lindsay), John, and Philip Hough; Thomas, Timothy, and Margaret Walsh; Joseph, Katie, Andrew, and Peter Lauer; Madeleine, Anthony, and Elisabeth Green; PJ, Matthew, and Luke Faccenda; and Rosie, Michael, and Kitty Faccenda. Our prayers and condolences to the family. The University community was saddened to learn of the tragic death of former adjunct physics professor Adam Claussen and his wife, Shannon O’Leary, a physics professor at Lewis & Clark College. “This is very sad news for the University of Portland,” according to College of Arts and Sciences dean Michael F. Andrews. “Adam Clausen taught as a visiting assistant professor here during the 20112012 academic year. Shannon Mayer, department chair, notes that Adam was a terrific teacher and a wonderful colleague. We in the College are deeply saddened by this tragic loss. Adam and his wife Shannon will be profoundly missed by everyone in the physics community.” The couple’s four-year-old son survived the automobile accident, which occured on December 26, 2016. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Sr. Janice Boogaard, SSMO, passed away on January 7, 2017, at the Sisters of Saint Mary of Oregon Motherhouse in Beaverton, Ore. Her elementary and secondary school studies took place in Otter Tail County and New York Mills, Minn.; Rochester, New York; Verboort, Ore.; and at St. Mary of the Valley (now Valley Catholic) High School in Bea-
verton. On August 15, 1956, Sister Janice was received as a novice by the Sisters of St. Mary of Oregon and became known as Sister Mary Mark. She made her final profession in 1961. She served as religious education coordinator at St. Boniface Church in Sublimity; master catechist at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in
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N OT E S munity; brothers, Jerry and Ron and their spouses; sisters, Bev Evers, Margie Vandehey, Darlene Moore, and Joyce Hunter and their spouses; as well as many nieces, nephews, great-nieces, great-nephews, and friends. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Congratulations to Sr. Sue Bruno, O.S.F., resident director
Winner of the 2016 Spirit of Holy Cross Award, given annually to lay collaborators of the Congregation of Holy Cross, United States Province of Priests and Brothers: Sr. Sue Bruno, OSF, resident director of Fields Hall. If anyone works more devotedly to fulfill Blessed Basil Moreau’s vision and mission to “make God known, loved, and served” a reality at the Congregation’s education, parish, and mission apostolates, it’s news to us. For more on Sr. Sue’s heroic, holy work, see the note under “Faculty, Staff, Friends” on this page. Camas, Wash.; director of religious education at St. Paul Parish in Silverton; and pastoral associate at St. Francis Catholic Church in Sherwood. She celebrated her 60th Jubilee in July 2016. Survivors include her sisters in the SSMO com-
of Fields Hall, who received a 2016 Spirit of Holy Cross Award, given annually to lay collaborators of the Congregation of Holy Cross, United States Province of Priests and Brothers. Sr. Sue is a member of the Franciscan religious or-
Portland 46
der. She is in her sixth year at UP as Fields Hall director and spent 15 years at the University of Notre Dame working in a variety of capacities, including rector of Pasquerilla West Hall, in campus ministry, as the women’s basketball team chaplain, and as a member of the Moreau Seminary Formation Board. She also served on the selection committee for the Alliance for Catholic Education for 15 years, and was a founding member of the Standing Committee on Gay and Lesbian Student Needs Committee. “Sr. Sue has been a faith-filled and extraordinary collaborator with Holy Cross at the University of Portland and at the University of Notre Dame,” according to Rev. John Donato, C.S.C., vice president for student affairs. “For twenty years, she has given herself entirely to the service and support of her resident students, truly knowing and understanding them and providing a great example of religious life. I am honored to call her my colleague and friend.” The Holy Cross community at the University of Portland formally honored Sr. Sue at a Mass and dinner in January 2017 as part of celebrations of Holy Cross founder Blessed Basil Moreau’s life. Prayers of gratitude to Sr. Sue for her stellar work and selfless dedication to the University’s mission. Nursing professor Susan B. Stillwell, associate dean for graduate education at the University of Portland School of Nursing, has been selected to join the Nursing Board at the American Health Council. She will be sharing her knowledge and expertise in evidence-based practice, nursing and nursing education, curriculum and program development, and nursing education research. Stillwell has been recognized for her professional accomplishments by the American Academy of Nursing, National League for Nursing, and American Association of Colleges of Nursing. Sister Alberta Dieker, O.S.B., celebrated 75 years of monastic profession on February 10, 2017. She celebrated her Jubilee by renewing her monastic profession, surrounded by her Benedictine community and family, at Eucharist on Sunday, February 12, 2017. “Sister Alberta is a walking encyclopedia and an amazing conversationalist,” according to her fellow sisters. “If you want an interesting, informative visit with someone who has seen almost a century of history and loves life, our community would name Sister
CLASS Alberta as the one to see.” Sr. Alberta was raised in Fleming, Colo., and moved with her family to Mt. Angel in 1938 at the age of 18. She enrolled in Mt. Angel Normal School the following year, where she met the Benedictine Sisters. She entered Queen of Angels Monastery in 1939 and made her profession of vows on February 10, 1942. She earned undergraduate and master’s degrees from St. Louis University, and a Ph.D. in European History from the University of Oregon. Sr. Alberta taught history and other subjects for 46 years at Mt. Angel College, Mt. Angel Seminary, and Eastern Oregon College in La Grande. She also served in numerous leadership positions, including president of Mt. Angel College, Prioress of her community for four years (1983-87), president and founding member of the Oregon Catholic Historical Society for nine years, and executive secretary of the American Benedictine Academy for six years. Sr. Alberta received the 2006 Bishop Francis P. Leipzig Award for significantly contributing to the study of Catholic history in the Pacific Northwest. In 2007, she received a papal award, Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, for her contributions to the Archdiocese. A sweet, dedicated, no-nonsense, deeply devout fount of knowledge, our Sr. Alberta is, and we joyfully mutter prayers of gratitude for her long life of service. The School of Education has announced its new director of the Pacific Alliance for Catholic Education (PACE). Steven Wojcikiewicz began his official duties on Wednesday, February 1, directing a number of strategic partnerships with Catholic P-12 schools and dioceses in the Pacific Northwest, Northern California, and Hawaii. Wojcikiewicz brings deep experience as an educator and scholar in teacher education and policy. He spent six years as a member of the teacher education faculty at Western Oregon University, followed by positions as assistant director of educational issues at the American Federation of Teachers in Washington, D.C., and vice president of policy for Deans for Impact in Austin, Texas. Wojcikiewicz will replace former director Dave Devine ’97, who announced his resignation this past winter to pursue new professional and personal opportunities. Under Devine’s leadership, PACE doubled in size, expanded new teaching partnerships in Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii, launched new programs in Catholic school leadership and inclu-
sions services, and established a successful summer leadership institute. The provost’s office has announced the following promotions and grants of tenure, effective July 1, 2017: Alice Gates, social work, has been granted tenure and promoted to associate professor; Anne Santiago, political science, has
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N OT E S Christine Weilhoefer, biology, has been granted tenure and promoted to associate professor. Congratulations to our latest tenured faculty, whose academic dedication and integrity speak for themselves. It takes excellent teaching, consciously creating an atmosphere that draws students to develop and use their powers of inventions
It’s not as if Billy Vandervelden needs a sign to be recognized, but here he is, fresh off his 2016 Ted Deiss/Joyce and Virgil Dodson Outstanding Physical Plant Employee Award win. Billy recently celebrated 35 years of service to the University. His Navy service got him started on a long career of fixing anything that moves, drains, secretes, excretes, compresses, depresses, conducts, or just plain won’t work. He stands out as one of the most loyal, experienced, and dependable members of the physical plant team, but despite that, don’t expect him to share any of his secret fishing holes. been granted tenure and promoted to associate professor; Elinor Sullivan, biology, has been granted tenure and promoted to associate professor; Sarah Weiger, English, has been granted tenure and promoted to associate professor; and
and discovery, evidence of habits of continued scholarship, University and community involvement, and qualities of character and personality to make the grade, according to our Faculty Handbook and Academic Administration Manual.
Spring 2017 47
Deaths
Norbert J. “Van” Vandehey ’40, July 6, 2016, McMinnville, Ore. William “Bill” Danner ’41, December 24, 2016, Milwaukie, Ore. Margaret “Peggy” Connor Bergquist ’44, November 10, 2016. Clarence J. Young, Jr. ’47, January 4, 2017, Portland, Ore. Patrick Joseph Polich ’49, January 14, 2017, Portland, Ore. George Blatner ’50, November 10, 2016, Portland, Ore. Edward John “Ted” Little ’50, April 9, 2016. John Kuchler ’50, June 22, 2016, Medford, Ore. William Karl Haug ’50, November 21, 2016, Portland, Ore. Robert Gilbertz ’51, November 25, 2016. Paul Edmund Joseph Lebrun ’51, November 4, 2016. Hank Cwalina ’51, August 16, 2016, Salem, Ore. Louis E. Gray ’51, June 12, 2015, Vancouver, Wash. Anthony Dooher ’51, November 21, 2016, Salem, Ore. Frederick Schlotfeldt, Jr. ’53, December 29, 2016. Elizabeth “Ann” Engelcke ’56, February 26, 2016. Mary Magdalen Sonderen Thompson ’56, December 19, 2016, Oregon City, Ore. Gene Anderson ’58, October 26, 2016, Fremont, Calif. Marvin Remy Delplanche ’59, December 11, 2016. Norvin Lowery ’59, ’60, ’64, August 25, 2016. Dr. Melvin Nathan Olson ’60, ’70, August 25, 2016. Mary Lou Salvo ’61, May 16, 2016, Portland, Ore. Nancy Johansing Hall, wife of William Hall ’66, November 30, 2016. Michael P. Fogarty ’68, December 14, 2014. Geneva “Gen” Eleanore (Fanselau) Wohlgemuth ’70, January 15, 2015, Vancouver, Wash. Phyllis Swenson ’73, June 4, 2009, Battle Ground, Wash. Sheila Ann (Westby) O’Malley ’74, December 23, 2016. Helen H. Libonati ’78, December 6, 2016. Bob Lever ’78, October 19, 2016. Wayne Woolhiser ’81, September 19, 2016, Puyallup, Wash. Michele Pardee ’82, April 4, 2014, Callaway, Va. Craig Joseph Casey ’09, November 20, 2016. Alex Muktoyuk, husband of Nancy Bigelow Muktoyuk ’65, father of TJ Muktoyuk ’11, January 14, 2017. Rev. Ron Wasowski, C.S.C., December 5, 2016, Portland, Ore. Rev. Joseph P. Browne, C.S.C., October 30, 2016, South Bend, Ind. Philip J. Faccenda, Sr., January 11, 2017. Adam Claussen, December 26, 2016.
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He left us too soon, the congenial, remarkably curious Fr. Ronald J. Wasowski, C.S.C., who passed away unexpectedly in his apartment at Holy Cross Court on December 6, 2016. This spring was to have been his last year of classroom teaching; he was ready to retire. For the past 18 years, Fr. Ron has been a beloved and much admired fixture on campus, as a professor of environmental science, as a pastoral resident in Mehling Hall, as Voice for Life chaplain, and anywhere he felt he might be needed. Kind, affable, approachable, eminently knowledgeable about his academic specialties, he could hold forth on such subjects as rocks, minerals, meteor showers, regular weather, or irregular weather. Fr. Ron had a mind that was never at rest and never closed to the wonders of life. For the last three summers he joyfully scratched away in the dust and heat under the pounding sun in Mallorca, Spain, as part of the University’s archaeological team, the Pollentia Expedition. But he didn’t stop there. He became known as “Fr. Drone” after he taught himself how to operate a drone so he could take photos of the outlines of ancient city walls, foundations, and streets from the air. Fr. Ron was also a man of deep faith, and his commitment to the Holy Cross community was ever apparent in his words and deeds. His enthusiasm, his love of the University, and his dedication to the Holy work and students of the University of Portland will be greatly missed and not soon forgotten. Portland 48
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
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CALLING ALL PILOTS TO PORT! You’re invited back home to The Bluff this June for Alumni Reunion Weekend. Relive your favorite UP memories with your Pilot family and make some new memories too! Don’t miss the President’s Welcome Reception and Alumni Awards hosted by Fr. Mark L. Poorman, C.S.C., on Friday night. On Saturday, join us for the annual All Alumni Welcome Home BBQ on The Bluff. We’ll also celebrate Shipstad Hall’s 50th Birthday, Hawai’i Club, and the Classes of 1967 and 1992. Online registration is now open. Visit up.edu/Reunion to view the full schedule and to register. MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR JUNE 22-25, 2017
Decode the message using the alphabet signal flags.
University of Portland Portland Magazine 5000 N. Willamette Blvd Portland, OR 97203-5798
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PHOTOGRAPH BY: MATT ERCEG
JOSEPH ERCEG
DESIGNER EXTRAORDINAIRE The end of an era has truly come – this is the last issue to be completed under the mighty talents of both Brian Doyle and Joseph Erceg ’55. Joe, the only art director and graphic designer Portland Magazine has had since Autumn 1986, chose to quietly retire upon learning that Brian would no longer be able to serve as its editor. Their partnership was beautiful to behold. It was one where disagreements and barbs and strong personalities and opinions never trumped the mutual admiration and respect that made their bond like that of bellowing loving brothers. Each and every issue has been a testament to their connection. The magazine would not have become what it is today without Joseph Erceg’s sharp eye, keen wit, and desire for perfection. Thank you, dear friend, and we wish you the very best upon your well-deserved retirement.