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MUSKIE ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY

George Wigton talks with his basketball team during a winning 1968 game vs. Bowdoin.

THEOPHIL SYSLO

Professor of French and Francophone Studies Kirk Read modeled this outfit at the 2021 Trashion Show, which he and Assistant Dean of the Faculty Kerry O’Brien designed. The outfit’s signature trash was face coverings — 152 of them. “Nous nous masquons donc nous sommes, ‘We mask, therefore we are,” said Read, the first professor to model an outfit at the student-run annual show.

About Facial

I loved the article on facial hair. (“Slideshow: Eleven great Bates beards and mustaches from yesteryear,” BatesNews, Sept. 24, 2021). Many of us wore beards and mustaches in the ’70s, but none like those shown. Ken Paillé ’78 Chapel Hill, N.C.

Wishcycling

These outfits are brilliant, funny, and meaningful. (“Slideshow: Students’ dazzling Trashion Show outfits,” BatesNews, Nov. 17, 2021). Congratulations to all the designers and models for this light-hearted message about waste.

And to everyone else: Unless you are obsessed with recycling like me, take the advice in the story about recycling only beverage cans/bottles and clean paper/cardboard. They account for most of the marketable volume and value in the residential waste stream, and the other materials can indeed do more harm than good. Marge Davis ’76 Mount Juliet, Tenn.

‘Not Today, Satan’

I couldn’t resist sending you a note of congratulations on yet another outstanding magazine. The photo on the cover of Stella James Sims captured my curiosity right away. The history of the earliest women at Bates was fascinating — I had no idea. Imagine what they had to do to be there.

Then, I started reading about the student projects: Bovine BurpBusters and the methane study, IBU study with the local brewery, the student interviews about the Bates spaces they love, and the Campus Construction Updates.

I even had to look up the “Not Today, Satan” reference. A good motto for all of us. Terry Byrnes P’05 Vero Beach, Fla.

Thomas James Bollin, Class of 1879, and his mutton chops.

MUSKIE ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY

George Wigton

Coach Wigton gave me a chance to make the squash team in the early 1990s (“George Wigton, legendary and influential coach of ‘impeccable integrity and perspective,’ dies at age 93”). While I was never a great player, I felt valued and it was an honor to play for him. What a life! Michael Battle ’95 Sunnyvale, Calif.

Fire and Ice

Thanks for the happy memories of Winter Carnival (BatesNews, Feb. 18, 2022). When I was a freshman in 1962, the cross country team carried the torch from its lighting by the governor, John Reed, in Augusta, keeping it lit the 30 miles back to Lake Andrews with a precise rotation: a driver plus five of us in one car, one runner at a time carrying the lighted torch about one mile.

The upperclassmen allowed me, a freshman, the honor of carrying the torch on the final leg to the official carnival “flame” at Lake Andrews. Waiting for us was the Winter Carnival queen and her court — and lots of students.

Our torch was a metal cup atop a wood handle carried upright (I believe that we used kerosene-soaked rags), and as I dipped the torch to light the flame, the soaked rag fell out of the torch cup onto the ice, but did not go out. Wearing gloves, I picked up the flame and put it back in the official carnival lamp — thus beginning my first Winter Carnival. Peter Heyel ’65 Redding Center, Conn.

Life at Bates

I love these images and stories about life at Bates in a week (BatesNews, Jan. 22, 2022). Visuals, quotes — historical and fascinating. My daughter is a junior at Bates. The stories help to get what it is like to be on campus now. Each story you tell here is radiant, as is your creative way of delivering them. Way to go! Kate Conway P’23 South Salem, N.Y. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously referred to himself as a “self-appointed inspector of snow-storms.”

Years ago, as I grew up in Waterford, Maine, my father would quote Thoreau as we made our rounds as self-appointed snowstorm inspectors, tramping about the field behind our house on Plummer Hill, inserting our solid, varnished yardstick from Longley’s hardware store here and there into the new mantle of snow until we had a good estimate of how much fell on our windswept hill.

The memory returns these days when I arrive at Bates and pull into the Lane Hall parking lot. I choose a spot facing Lake Andrews because I am a selfappointed inspector of ice-out at the Puddle.

Contests to guess when a local lake becomes ice-free are a longtime spring tradition in towns all across Maine and other northern states. Many years ago, when more people made their living directly or indirectly from the land (or water), recognizing changes in the weather and seasons was part and parcel of daily life.

And while Thoreau was no farmer, he found sustenance for his soul by observing and knowing the natural world. And yes, he recorded Walden Pond’s ice-out each year.

I’m no naturalist, but I find succor in Bates being a both familiar and inspectable place. (And it is a place, as the late, beloved Carl Straub always made clear in his public remarks by calling it “this place of memory and hope.”)

My campus inspections might reveal the day of the spectacular annual leaf drop of the ginkgo tree outside Carnegie Science (Nov. 4 last year), the blooming of the magnolia outside Hathorn (not yet, as of this writing on April 4), or the melting of the last snowpile on campus (there are still a couple on the north side of Pettengill Hall).

Consider the iconic children’s book Goodnight Moon, where mindful encounters with familiar things — a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush — propel the story.

Before she wrote Goodnight Moon, author Margaret Wise Brown wrote children’s stories for Bank Street Experimental School (now Bank Street College of Education) in New York City. At a time when most children’s books drew on fables and folktales, school co-founder Lucy Sprague Mitchell believed that children would find the “here and now” of their familiar surroundings much more compelling, once writing that “it is only the blind eye of the adult that finds the familiar uninteresting.”

Which brings us to the Puddle’s ice out in March. On the warm afternoon of March 25, as I pulled away from the Lane Hall lot after work, just a skim of ice remained on the inlet end of the pond, which is shaded by Pettengill Hall.

The next morning, my colleague Phyllis Graber Jensen, a fellow campus inspector and perhaps champion as the longtime college photographer, texted me a photo showing that the last of the ice was gone.

And the campus ducks, seen in growing numbers along the shore in recent weeks, suddenly had the iceless pond at their full disposal — in time to make way for duckling season.

H. Jay Burns, Editor jburns@bates.edu

Comments are selected from Bates social media platforms, online Bates News stories, and email and postal submissions, based on relevance to college issues and topics discussed in Bates Magazine. Comments may be edited for length and clarity. Email: magazine@bates.edu

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