For more than two centuries, artists have seen Monhegan’s wildness as essential to its character. Through an interplay of art, science and natural history, and community, the island remains under the watchful eye of those who love it.
20 Some Vibrant Word
Were it not for Longfellow’s ardent wish to stir the public, Tom Putnam ’84 and other scholars argue, Paul Revere’s midnight ride might have passed into obscurity.
32 The Sport a Joy
Adam Walsh’s journey took him from a California childhood to Notre Dame, where he was captain of the Knute Rockne team featuring the famed Four Horsemen, and then—twice—to Bowdoin.
38 Seriously Funny
Two Bowdoin graduates who work in humor— Chip Leighton ’93 and Kerry Elson ’05—talk to us about the serious business of being funny.
5 Operatic Life: Mo Zhou ’09 has taken her fluency in three languages and her talent for directing to the greatest stages in opera.
7 Dine: Karla Olivares ’17 shares a recipe for tamales from her mom, head chef in Olivares’s new catering company.
8 A Killer Lineup: For some of the most memorable villains and victims in horror movies, work can be a killer.
15 South Side Short: Filmmaker George Ellzey Jr. ’13 was inspired by an experience with his estranged father to make a short film, now airing on AMC.
17 Fowl Language: Professor Emerita Barbara Held and her husband, David Bellows, wrote a love letter to their late parakeet, Gus.
46 New World Order: Professor Allen Springer talks about the challenges of teaching international law amid shifting and changing global politics and norms.
Tommy Mandel ’71 followed a “force like gravity” into an illustrious career in music.
Alethea Fischer Kehas ’96 encourages others, with yoga and her writing, to find deep connections.
Carrington Renfield-Miller ’06 turned a fun hobby into a soaring career as an international pilot.
FREESTYLE GOLD
On February 22, Emma Crum ’26 won her second race of the ski season, making a move in the third and final lap of the 15k mass start skate event to take home gold at the Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Association championship. The women finished third, the second-best all-time finish for the women at regionals in program history, and the team overall placed fifth. Crum, the top-ranked skier in freestyle this season, was also named First Team All-East.
Photo by @flyingpoint/EISA Skiing
Respond
The Fascinating Underground
I was delighted to open the Fall 2024 Bowdoin and see Toby Kiers ’98 featured on the inside cover. I’d accessed the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) website several years ago when seeking information for a proposed information panel on the mycorrhizal within an old-growth forest, one of the few inside a city limit within the USA. The panel didn’t come to fruition, but I’m fascinated by the food and information transfer this network facilitates. I hadn’t been back to SPUN until you inspired me to do so. I found there a 2022 opinion piece, Supporting Urban Greenspace with Microbial Symbiosis, of which Toby is a coauthor. I’m on the board of the Rochester Olmsted Park Alliance; the effects of urban greenspace (and of suburban lawn space) fascinate me. This year I finally got around to reading Susanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, the memoir of another woman and a pioneer researcher into these underground networks (one who also faced the demands of family), a book I commend to anyone interested in following this further.
Andrew Seager ’66
DON’T FORGET THE BEANS
There was one glaring omission from [Fall 2024] “Here: Blueberries and Beyond”: baked beans. The uninitiated should refer to Marjory Standish’s Cooking Down East or R. P. T. Coffin’s Mainstays of Maine. While an archetype for Maine foods, baked beans are not without controversy… Navy beans or Jacob’s Cattle, molasses or brown sugar, onions or salt pork? Whatever the choices, the beans go in to soak on Friday evening and bake
away all day Saturday. There is no need for a baked bean festival. There are still Saturday night church suppers that feature baked beans in the tradition of the community. And those suppers, while increasingly rare, are festival enough.
Mark W. Anderson ’74
GOOD WORKS
I appreciate the deserved attention given to my classmate John Bowman in the
last edition [Fall 2024]. I can’t ignore the irony that John’s long and dedicated service to the good works of USAID were recognized by our community as the incoming administration was planning to eliminate this program devoted to enhancing global common good. We live in perilous times. I am grateful for those among us who, like John, have chosen to spend their careers serving others.
Brett Buckley ’76
MAGAZINE STAFF
Editor
Alison Bennie
Designer and Art Director
Melissa Wells
Managing Editor
Leanne Dech
Senior Editor
Doug Cook
Design Consultant
2Communiqué
Contributors
Jim Caton
John Cross ’76
Cheryl Della Pietra
Lily Isabelle Echeverria ’26
Rebecca Goldfine
Sophaktra Heng
Scott Hood
Micki Manheimer
Janie Porche
Tom Porter
On the Cover: Illustrations by Brian Rea
BOWDOIN MAGAZINE (ISSN: 0895-2604) is published three times a year by Bowdoin College, 4104 College Station, Brunswick, Maine, 04011. Printed by Penmor Lithographers, Lewiston, Maine. Sent free of charge to all Bowdoin alumni, parents of current and recent undergraduates, members of the senior class, faculty and staff, and members of the Association of Bowdoin Friends.
Opinions expressed in this magazine are those of the authors.
Please send address changes, ideas, or letters to the editor to the address above or by email to bowdoineditor@bowdoin.edu. Send class news to classnews@bowdoin.edu or to the address above.
PHOTO: MATTEO BARRENENGOA
OPERATIC LIFE
After my MFA, I sought work on Broadway. As a young Chinese woman, I quickly realized the challenges. With a background in music and fluent in three opera languages, I decided to give opera a try. I emailed every company in North America and soon landed a position with the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. I’ve never looked back.
I joined major opera houses like the Lyric Opera of Chicago and Houston Grand Opera and, with time, began directing my own productions. One of my proudest moments was directing the world premiere of The Diary of John Rabe, the story of the Rape of Nanking. It premiered at China’s National Centre for the Performing Arts and became the first non-Western canon opera invited to Staatsoper Berlin and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.
Unfamiliar with American colleges, my father suggested three criteria: cold weather to build character; near the ocean to broaden the mind; a strong humanities and social sciences focus. When I applied those filters, Bowdoin was a perfect match. I found my home in the English and theater departments. I’m endlessly curious about the stories people carry—the struggles, triumphs, and perspectives that shape our humanity. Opera offers a rich canvas to explore these narratives.
People often tell me they forgot they were watching “opera” in my productions. I credit my Bowdoin education. Every opera I direct is rooted in dramaturgical analysis—no gesture or movement is random. This meticulous attention to detail surprises those outside of theater, but it’s the essence of our craft. (I also thank Professor Davis Robinson for recognizing my talent for directing in my first directing class and encouraging me.)
Dreams don’t just happen. I spent my first three years at Bowdoin waiting for life to start, but when I took control, everything changed.
For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.
PHOTO: AFRA LU
After earning her MFA at Columbia, Mo Zhou ’09 began a journey in opera that included training at Merola Opera Program, Glimmerglass Festival, Wolf Trap Opera, and The Juilliard School.
MO ZHOU ’09
FROM BOWDOIN AND BEYOND
Student Life
A Spot of Super Bowl
The Bowdoin Tea Club hosted its second annual Super Bowl Sunday Teatime to watch the big game their way. As guests trickled into Hubbard Hall, they selected treats from two tables laden with baked goods from Wild Oats, and David Guan ’25 poured the tea. As the game played on a foldout screen, students sat, chatted, ate snacks, and watched the action. Some did homework. All of them sipped the blueberry infusion Guan had brewed.
The Tea Club’s mission is to bring students together to sip teas from around the world and learn more about the cultures they come from. Every Friday night, the club gathers in Massachusetts Hall. The two leaders—Guan and Ari Bersch ’25— met as first-year roommates.
Bersch and Guan said that Super Bowl Sunday Teatimes are a chance to reach a new crowd. They’ve had tastings with the Film Society and Chess Club, as well.
“We’re both applying to graduate schools next year,” Bersch said. “We talked about how the experience of Tea Club—about getting involved in it and how we’ve shaped it over the last three years—is something that we’re both proud of. And it is something that shows our commitment and our values in terms of creating an inclusive space.”
Alumni
Time Won’t Fly
Ruben Martinez ’15 had a lot of time to build an app to see his place in line for Taylor Swift tickets.
RUBEN MARTINEZ ’15 was standing in line in Brooklyn, waiting to buy tickets to see Taylor Swift (a self-described Swiftie, he’d seen her in concert twice before and also had tickets for her canceled Lover Fest tour during the pandemic). He was growing increasingly frustrated by the Ticketmaster software that told him, no matter how much time had passed, the same thing: “2,000+ people ahead of you.”
He was working as a front-end developer for the online dating app OKCupid then— he now leads their iOS team—so he decided to dig into the browser network tools to see what he could find out. “I was able to find periodic outgoing traffic with much more specific details about my place in line, and I decided to build a Chrome extension to intercept that request and display the number onscreen, which took about an hour for me to design and polish,” he says. It turned out many others were just as frustrated as he was, and the story got a lot of attention when he shared it on social media.
As a Bowdoin student, Martinez created an app to see Bowdoin Dining menus and a website to collect student petitions, and he has built a tool that would translate colors into sounds (he’s color-blind). A visual arts minor, Martinez has a photography practice on the side, which he describes as not dissimilar to building software. “I don’t think people think of software development as a creative pursuit,” he says. “But, especially working on the front-end side of things, you really get to think about people, what they want or need, and creative ways of solving those problems.”
As for the concert? Martinez saw the show at the MetLife stadium in May 2023. “Totally worth the wait!” he says.
DID YOU KNOW?
Fat is the secret to getting a soft filling that pulls away from the husk as the tamale cooks. Traditionally, the fat of choice for tamales has been pork lard, but cooks who choose not to use meat products or who don’t have easy access to lard can use vegetable shortening or canola or vegetable oil as a substitute.
Queso Fresco and Jalapeño Tamales
Recipe by Karla Olivares ’17
This recipe comes from Olivares’s mom, Olga, who inspired her daughter’s passion for food. A renowned chef featured on the Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, Olga will be the lead chef in Karla’s new catering company.
20 dried corn husks
1 (10-ounce) package of queso fresco
1 (10-ounce) can pickled sliced jalapeños
2 pounds freshly ground or packaged masa (Masienda yellow corn masa harina preferred)
1 cup lard
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon garlic powder
Soak the corn husks in lukewarm water for thirty to sixty minutes.
Cut the queso fresco into ½-inch sticks.
Drain the jalapeños and set aside.
Put the masa in a large bowl, add the lard, salt, baking powder, and garlic powder and knead for thirty minutes or so, until the mixture is smooth and the lard is fully incorporated. The masa should be the consistency of hummus and easy to spread.
Spread three tablespoons of masa mixture evenly across each corn husk, smoothing from the wider end of the husk.
Add a queso fresco stick and one or two slices of jalapeño on top of the masa on each husk. Fold each husk to wrap it and then fold the tip down.
Place water in a steamer so that it doesn’t touch the tamales. Stack the tamales vertically in a circle over the metal insert. The tamales need to cook standing up. Tightly cover the pot and steam tamales for one to one and a half hours, checking to be sure the water does not completely evaporate and adding more if necessary.
Remove the steamer from the heat and the tamales from the steamer. Let them rest for thirty minutes, then unwrap and enjoy.
Karla Olivares ’17 was an economics major at Bowdoin and is a recent graduate of St. Phillip’s College, where she developed culinary skills and a passion for creating dishes that bring people together.
Did You Know?
A Killer Lineup
Work can be a source of pride, opportunity, and meaning, but for some of cinematic horror’s most memorable villiains and victims, the ravages of work can be the birth of bloodshed.
Illustration by Dominic Bugatto
Edward Little Professor of English and Cinema Studies Aviva Briefel has written and taught extensively about horror films, exploring their meaning, context, appeal, and evolution. Her latest book, Labors of Fear, coauthored with Jason Middleton, looks at ways the genre has represented work and workers as a source of monstrosity, specifically in a capitalist society. In showing how “work shifts from the linchpin of American society and the nuclear family to a destabilizing force that makes men into monsters, families into victims, and social classes into violent combatants,” the book’s collection of essays provides a cast of characters that make up something of a workplace nightmare— colleagues who don’t just try your last nerve, they try to kill you.
Before she was a scholar of Victorian literature and culture and an expert in cinematic horror, Professor Aviva Briefel had a number of unusual jobs herself, including selling toys at FAO Schwarz, working at a vanity press, and temping at an offline dating agency. She discovered her love of horror during an outdoor screening of The Shining at Brown when she was a student.
MAD SCIENTISTS
A classic horror film character and an embodiment of anxieties about a world dominated by science and rationality rather than humanity and emotion, the mad scientist sports wild hair, thick glasses, and a white lab coat while concocting evil or dangerous potions and schemes of power or domination.
Frankenstein (the monster’s creator, bent on power and destruction, often parodied), The Fly, Jekyll and Hyde
DOCTORS
These terrifying characters take trusted roles—doctors, surgeons, therapists, and medical examiners—and turn them on their heads, showing that even the supposed good guys can be suspects when it comes to manipulation, murder, and mayhem and suggesting that learned professionals can be beastly as well as brainy.
The Silence of the Lambs (Hannibal Lecter, forensic psychiatrist/killer), Human Centipede, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, American Mary
CULT LEADERS
Charismatic and monomaniacal, creepy cult leaders in horror films inspire their followers through fear, tribalism, brainwashing, and other means to commit some truly ghastly acts, capitalizing on the power of faith and sometimes underestimating the will of the lured and conscripted to escape.
Midsommar (Dani, quasi-leader and coerced killer), The Invitation, The Wicker Man
TEENAGE VICTIMS
From camp counselors and babysitters to ice cream scoopers, jobs for teenagers in horror films often put them alone, in the dark, and threatened with death, where they are sometimes heroically brave but more often just as they are in their jobs—powerless, lacking adult supervision, unprotected from their own poor decisions.
Halloween (Michael Myers, murderer of babysitters and many others), Friday the 13th, It Follows
MANUAL LABORERS
Angry, oppressed, and othered, these characters are often wearing flannel shirts or coveralls and wielding axes, chainsaws, or other tools of their trade as butchers, slaughterhouse workers, or janitors while they seek revenge not just on individual victims but also an entire system that has failed them.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Bubba Sawyer, aka Leatherface, former slaughterhouse worker), Nightmare on Elm Street
WHITE-COLLAR WORKERS
These characters are portrayed as issue-riddled psychos, with chillingly scary minds and plenty of money but not a single scruple or scintilla of conscience to go with their fancy, blood-dripping knives, powerful positions at work, and cold, monochromatic apartments.
American Psycho (Patrick Bateman, investment banker and serial killer), Hostel
HOTEL/MOTEL WORKERS
Abandoned, derelict, and haunted hotels, inns, and other supposed shelters-in-a-storm are often settings for horror— sometimes the workers who clean and toil are the vulnerable victims, tortured more literally than by the repetitive work they do, and sometimes they are the lurk-in-the-shadows villains themselves.
The Shining (Jack Torrance, alcoholic writer and resort winter caretaker), Psycho, The Innkeepers
VULNERABLE CREATIVE TYPES
Artists, photographers, filmmakers, or writers are stereotypically lost in creative worlds of their own making, and their distraction and desire for distance and solitude to work can lead to their own demise—or to a descent into madness and destruction.
Misery (Annie Wilkes, captor and would-be novelist murderer), Blair Witch Project, Get Out
MOTHERS
An entire gender and the terrifying power of reproduction go to work in horror movies, exploring the dread and trauma of women’s domestic work, the haunted space of home and the labor of keeping children and family members alive, the danger of moms who are ambivalent or absent, and of course the demon seed.
Rosemary’s Baby (Rosemary Woodhouse, paranoid pregnant newlywed who births Satan’s baby), Embryo, The Brood, The Babadook
ZOMBIES/THE UNDEAD
Zombies and the undead represent as many human anxieties about work and ways of being oppressed as there are movies that depict them—fears of slavery, mind control, loss of self, endless repetition, and the collapse of norms and structural protections. They personify death itself, maybe the scariest subject of all.
Night of the Living Dead, The Last of Us, Shawn of the Dead
Faculty
Sew Creative
Bowdoin’s costume shop designer involves students in the imaginative work of “world-building.”
THIS SEMESTER, Lily Prentice ’10 is teaching her first Bowdoin class, Costume Design. It was over-enrolled.
“It feels very meaningful to me, because I get to share what I do already as an artist with the students and help them explore and lift up their own creative processes,” she said. “I’m excited to support how they develop as visual storytellers.”
Caption
After working in New York City for six years, Prentice began a new job at Bowdoin in 2020 as the theater department’s costume shop manager and designer. She was tapped this fall to teach the new course, which helps theater and dance majors fulfill a design requirement. Assignments include script reading, design sketching, and eventually, costume creation in the department’s fabrication shop with scissors, needles, and thread.
Mira Pickus ’25, a student in Prentice’s class who also has a work-study job in the costume shop, said she lives in the Harpswell Road production space, which is filled with sewing machines, racks of outfits, shoes of all sizes, and fabrics and threads in all colors.
“I love creating pieces and doing alterations, and I learned how to do all of that from Lily,” Pickus said. “She’s perfect! I tell Lily the not-important updates of my life and she listens to all of them. And sometimes I say, ‘Can I use this fabric?’”
Alumni
BUZZING IN
Samantha Altschuler ’04, dean at Winston Preparatory School in New York, was a contestant on Jeopardy! on November 26, 2024. Facing off against a writer and an Episcopal priest, she remained in the running but came up short in Final Jeopardy to the priest, who answered correctly this question: Born to immigrant parents, in 1916 he was the first Supreme Court nominee to undergo public Senate confirmation hearings. (It’s Louis Brandeis.) Altschuler correctly buzzed in on clues that included “In On the Origin of Species, he agreed with other naturalists that all pigeons descended from the rock pigeon” and “So devastated was Queen Victoria by the death of this consort, that she wore black mourning wear for forty years.”
Samantha Altschuler ’04
A costume sketch for the theater department’s spring play, Men on Boats
History
Inspired
On September 7, 1825, thirty-seven students graduated from Bowdoin. Among them were two who would become greats of American literature, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the Class of 1825, the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives organized a digital project and accompanying exhibition, Before They Were Famous: The Student Days of the Class of 1825 (open through June 6, 2025), and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art opened Poetic Truths: Hawthorne, Longfellow, and American Visual Culture, 1840–1880, which highlights a wide range of paintings, sculptures, and other works inspired by the words of Hawthorne and Longfellow and is open through July 20, 2025.
PHOTO: BOWDOIN COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART
Josiah Wedgwood & Sons Ltd., Longfellow Jug, transfer-printed earthenware, 1880–1881, Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Gift of Earle G. Shettleworth Jr. in honor of Barry and Karen Mills.
On the Shelf
Pleasure Grounds of Death: The Rural Cemetery in Nineteenth-Century America
JOY M. GIGUERE ’03
(University of Michigan Press, 2024)
Rural cemeteries offer a mirror for the transformations and conflicts taking place throughout the nineteenth century in American society—including matters of burial reform, taste and respectability, and appropriate ways to structure the landscape of the dead in a modern and progressive society. Joy M. Giguere is Associate Professor of History at Penn State York.
Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas
ELENA JACKSON ALBARRÁN ’98 (Brill, 2024)
The Economic History of the Grateful Dead: A Look Inside the Financial Records of America’s Biggest 20th Century Touring Act
DAVID DAVIS ’81 (Independent, 2024)
A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt
TESS CHAKKALAKAL, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and English (St. Martin’s Press, 2025)
King Vidor in Focus: On the Filmmaker’s Artistry and Vision
KEVIN STOEHR ’90 and Cullen Gallagher (McFarland, 2024)
Faculty
CAN THEY DO THAT?
When the nation and the world crave answers to the questions swirling around what an American president can and cannot constitutionally do, journalists at leading news organizations around the globe turn to presidential scholar Andrew Rudalevige, Bowdoin’s Thomas Brackett Reed Professor of Government, whose most recent book, By Executive Order: Bureaucratic Management and the Limits of Presidential Power, has been recognized with awards from the American Political Science Association and the National Academy of Public Administration.
Through outgoing President Joe Biden’s burst of last-minute executive actions, including pardons, and amid the flurry of executive orders signed beginning on President Donald Trump’s first day back in office, Rudalevige has been the media’s go-to person for insight and expertise. He has appeared on BBC, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, NPR’s Morning Edition, and the PBS NewsHour, among others, and has been heavily quoted in The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Boston Globe, Miami Herald, and other news outlets across the country, sharing analysis from his decades of scholarship on the modern presidency, the executive branch, and interbranch relations.
“At a basic level, I hope to give people a sense of what the president can do—not just the current president, but the presidency as an office,” Rudalevige said, adding that the role of the president has shifted and expanded over the course of American history, with a more aggressive use of executive actions in recent years. He sees an important opportunity to share that evolution.
“Academics are quick to complain when journalists get the story ‘wrong,’ so I think we have an obligation to work with those reporting on current events to help them understand the history and context of a given presidential action or even of Constitutional basics,” said Rudalevige.
Performance
Jazzing Things Up
Three musicians from different corners of the College have formed a jazzy new trio.
THE GROUP, which doesn’t have a formal name yet, is made up of communications professional Tom Porter, pop/jazz instructor Scott Martin, and Michele Reid-Vazquez, a professor of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies and Africana Studies. They performed their first concert, a mix of classic jazz and Latin songs, to a full house in Studzinski Hall last November.
It’s not that common for Bowdoin staff and faculty working in disparate fields to collaborate. But Martin, a jazz pianist, said bringing people together is a talent of his. “I’m a bandleader and producer, a champion and mentor. I feel that is my role,” he said.
He first met Reid-Vazquez, a vocalist, at an event for new faculty in the fall of 2023, where they connected over their jazz backgrounds. When she moved to Maine from Pittsburgh, Reid-Vazquez said she vowed to make music a more active part of her life again. Before she devoted her scholarship to interdisciplinary history, Reid-Vasquez was an accomplished musician and musical scholar. Soon after meeting Martin, she began practicing Latin and jazz standards with him.
Then, last spring, Martin heard someone playing on one of Gibson Hall’s practice pianos. When he poked his head in, he met Porter. Porter has a degree in history from University College London and a master’s degree in war studies from King’s College London. While his career is in journalism and communications, he’s played jazz piano semi-professionally since he was fourteen.
Martin suggested he and Porter play together, and “it was obvious from the first eight bars that this was going to be easy,” he said. “We had a common approach to performing, and we sounded good together right away.”
Students
Nature’s Table
Paloma Hsiao-Shelton ’28’s childhood was spent gardening and foraging in western Massachusetts. “Growing up in a rural area, I had a lot of access to the land and to wild foods,” she said. On these forays, she would usually tote a lightweight watercolor set to paint what she saw and found. So when it came time to select a high school project to work on for her senior-year capstone, she said, “It was a pretty instinctual choice: I wanted to investigate the foods I have loved to eat in the wild since I was a kid.”
Over seven months, Hsiao-Shelton interviewed local foragers, herbalists, and artists. She picked and painted as she walked the fields and forests near her home, eventually publishing a book about eating from nature’s bountiful takeout.
The Art of Eating Wild features thirty-two watercolors for sixteen delicacies, including stinging nettle, wild ramp, dandelion, bracken fern, cattail, wild strawberry, milkweed, jewelweed, chokecherry, yellow bullhead lily, autumn olive, oyster mushrooms, and black walnut. It also includes personal stories of Hsiao-Shelton finding and relishing them. Now that she’s at Bowdoin, her mom has suggested she turn her attention to her current home and work on book number two: Eating Wild on College Campuses
From left: Scott Martin, Michele Reid-Vazquez, and Tom Porter
Chokecherry from The Art of Eating Wild
Music, Minds, Machines
As a gifted concert pianist majoring in math and computer science, Brian Liu ’25 is perhaps ideally placed to understand the intersection between artistic expression and the world of technology and science.
“The rigors of mathematical thinking fed into my understanding of practicing music and its structure,” he explained, “while music gave me an emotional grounding and a kind of creative thinking that brought nuance to my problem-solving in math and computer science.”
Liu was the concluding speaker at “Klavierfest: The Sound of Innovation—How AI and Technology Impact Our Music, Minds, and Machines,” which featured world-renowned experts examining the intersection of AI, cutting-edge technology, and the timeless art of music in performances, lectures, and panel discussions.
Also in the spotlight was Assistant Professor of Digital Music
Badie Khaleghian, whose compositional work employs motion sensors and real-time visual elements. “Khaleghian’s work with brain-computer interfaces revealed exciting possibilities for future performances,” said Beckwith Artist-in-Residence George Lopez.
“The symposium successfully illustrated how diverse fields— from computer science to neuroscience, from composition to performance—can converge to advance musical innovation while preserving the essential human elements of musical creation and experience,” added Lopez.
Maya Le ’25
Academics
ILLUSTRATION: ANNA & ELENA BALBUSSO; PHOTO (DANCE): MICHELE STAPLETON
On Stage
LIKE WATER
Dance minor Maya Le ’25 performed a solo in Within our souls, we flow like water (Aiyibobo!) during the annual December Dance Concert. Part of an Afro-modern course taught by Assistant Professor of Dance and Critical Dance Studies Adanna Kai Jones, the dance mirrored the grounding concepts of the class: the energy of water and the rhythms and philosophies of Haitian Yanvalou, a traditional ritual dance that imitates movements of snakes, waves, and other natural elements.
South Side Short
In February, AMC Networks began streaming George Ellzey Jr. ’13’s latest short movie, Cottage Grove, based on his relationship with his father.
MUCH OF George Ellzey’s thirteen-minute film, Cottage Grove (2023), takes place in a grocery store parking lot on a sweltering summer evening in Chicago. The story follows a young man who picks up his estranged father from the hospital after he’s suffered a stroke. While the two wait for a health aide to buy groceries, they sit together, sweating and tense.
The short movie is loosely based on Ellzey’s experience with his estranged father in 2021. After collecting his father from the hospital after he had had a stroke, Ellzey stopped at a Walgreens on Cottage Grove, a street on the South Side. They sat together, listening to jazz, not speaking much, because his father couldn’t.
The brief episode had a volcanic effect on Ellzey. “When this meteor of a story happened, I was so inspired to write,” he said.
Ellzey credits much of his success to the support of Jordan Shields ’98 and Sarah Donovan ’98,
who first connected with Ellzey in 2017 through the Bowdoin-Chicago alumni network. “Since 2017, Jordan has supported my career and has become a good friend,” Ellzey said. Both men are from Chicago. Ellzey grew up on the South Side, and part of his intention with Cottage Grove and his other films is to show both the challenging aspects of living in the neighborhood and its beauty.
While his relationship with his own father has improved, it is still not what Ellzey dreamed it might be. “Making this short has allowed me to heal and release the weight of expectation I have put on my father,” he said.
He hopes that audiences also walk away with a sense of how acceptance can heal. “I want people to see each other,” Ellzey continued. “Oftentimes, we let our perspectives, our pain, our agendas, our values, our convictions fog up or skew our viewpoint of someone else.”
PHOTO: (ELLZEY) JEREMY HALL
Alumni
George Ellzey Jr. ’13 watches the playback on the set of his debut feature, Closed Mouths.
964
Upward Bound programs in the US, serving more than 80,000 students.
By the Numbers
5
62
Schools in Maine—and 834 students—are served each year by Maine’s Upward Bound. The schools are selected based on their rates of poverty and college admittance.
10
14
Schools partner with Bowdoin’s Upward Bound, including eight in Washington County, Maine’s poorest county.
totaling over $12 million, which expanded the program by 50 percent to reach more students in Maine’s most underserved schools. Though the program is supported by annual federal appropriations, Bowdoin provides office space, professional development to staff, and subsidized room and board to students who attend Upward Bound’s hallmark summer program.
6
“TRIO programs were created to serve as a pipeline to help families have a path to the middle class,” Mullen said. She added that Upward Bound specifically is a “targeted and efficient program with a lot of data showing it’s effective at helping people get an education, become successful, and fifteen.
won eight competitive TRIO awards, and become taxpayers.”
16
$5,020
Average annual per student expenditure that provides year-round academic counseling and family support and a summer residential program.
56
3
6
Percent of US students from the bottom quartile of income graduate from college by age twenty-four, compared with around 60 percent for the top quartile.
Fowl Language
A professor emerita and her husband write a love letter to their late parakeet, Gus.
IN A HOUSEHOLD of two strong but different personalities—Barry N. Wish Professor of Psychology and Social Studies Emerita Barbara Held, a self-described “tell-it-like-it-is girl from the Bronx” and prolific writer of opinion pieces taking on everyone from the president to Santa Claus, and retired clinical psychologist David Bellows, who hasn’t yet met a yawl, schooner, or square-rigger that he couldn’t restore or sail from one hemisphere to another—it was actually Gus, a 1.4-ounce, occasionally foul-mouthed parakeet, who ruled the roost.
Through the lens of their collective psychological insights, Bellows and Held have written Gus: A Bird’s Life, in His Own Words, chronicling their avian experiences and the lessons acquired over their five years with him, including learning from their veterinarian that Gus had to be relocated during an office visit after verbally offending a visitor with a crass remark.
Bellows, who initially rejected the parakeet his wife insisted on adopting, came to find stories of Gus helpful in his therapy practice. Tales of the bird’s more forceful behaviors served to help passive patients assert themselves. Others with relationship problems learned from anecdotes of Gus’s expressions how they, too, might express empathy, especially through the example of the therapist himself having been comforted by a “That’s pretty scary, David” amid the couple’s conversation of Bellows’s pain following the death of his father.
Like cognitive and language development, the couple says there is good reason to believe that the social development of nonhuman animals plays an important role in the growth of their relational capacities, adding that it’s the close relationships with humans that motivate them to learn human concepts and language.
“I feel like I am one of Dr. King’s kids. I’m not a member of his family, but I was born in the 1960s. I grew up in a world made possible by him. The education that I have is because of his courage, his commitment, and his sacrifice.”
—JOURNALIST MICHELE NORRIS, SPEAKING AT THE COLLEGE’S ANNUAL MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. COMMEMORATIVE LECTURE
Sustainability
FUN, FAST
Bowdoin added to its growing group of electric vehicles this summer: a Ford-150 Lightning, the first EV for Safety and Security, and their first pickup. Assistant director Adam Talbot worried about the battery, but six months later, he’s pleased—even in a cold snap, the range has been fine. “Besides the utility of having a truck, it’s a fun vehicle to drive; it’s really fast! It has a low center of gravity and does well in the snow,” he said.
Faculty
Gus the parakeet
Academics
Funded Research
Each year, the Fellowships office funds students working on faculty-mentored projects. Here are three of the twenty-five awarded this fall.
LILLY CURTIS ’26
Neuroscience and English major Advisor: A. LeRoy Greason Professor of English Brock Clarke
Curtis, who is premed, flew to Beijing over the winter break to investigate her family history during the Cultural Revolution for an honors project, “Unraveling the Survival Story of My Ancestors,” that weaves together “fiction and nonfiction, oral history, and archival research.” She says, “The understanding of my own identity—and giving a voice to those who also struggle similarly at the crossroads of belonging—develops the qualities of passion and empathy that make physicians better providers.”
AALE AGANS ’25
Biology major
Advisor: Linnean Professor of Biology Jack Bateman
In her project, “Sharpening Molecular Scissors into Knitting Needles,” Agans has established and is refining a new, cost-effective method to edit the genes of the dark-winged fungus gnat, a common agricultural pest and an up-and-coming model for experimental genetics. The research award, Agans says, is helping to “prepare me for entering a career in genetics research, particularly in new or non-model systems.”
CIARA TRAN ’25
Government major Advisor: Professor of Government Laura Henry
Through her project, “International Courts as Venues for Climate Activism,” Tran is exploring climate activists’ attempts to bring claims before international, national, and regional courts to force action on global warming. The award supported Tran’s travel to Strasbourg, France, in January to visit the European Court of Human Rights. Tran, who plans to attend law school, said, “I hope that the understanding I gain of the role of international courts in climate activism is something I can continue to build during my future engagement with the legal and environmental fields.”
DEAR DARLING
Collections On Valentine’s Day, students at Stowe House were treated to a glimpse of the letters between some of Bowdoin’s famous lovebirds, like Oliver Otis Howard and Lizzie Howard, and provided with special paper to write their own fancy love letters. Chef and food writer Christine Burns Rudalevige crafted a period-correct mahogany chocolate cake to eat while they crafted sweet nothings to say.
Although they didn’t read letters between the Stowes, they worked in Harriet’s Writing Room, in the house where Calvin, Bowdoin Class of 1824, and Harriet Beecher Stowe lived.
Harriet and Calvin’s marriage began in some ways with loss when Calvin’s first wife, Eliza, a dear friend to Harriet, died. And tragedies followed: four of their seven children died from illness or accidents, and they had troubles with money even after Harriet’s success. But they had love! In 1847, Harriet wrote: “Where you have failed your faults have been to me those of one beloved—of the man who after all would be the choice of my heart still were I to choose—for were I now free I should again love just as I did and again feel that I could give up all to and for you.”
Research
The Joe Gene
For many of us, coffee is key. We simply have to have it—to start our day, to start our brains, to start. Period. After it kicks in, at what point the caffeine buzz actually ends is quite individual. It depends on several factors, including which variant of the caffeine-processing gene CYP1A2 you possess. Half of us have two copies of the fast variant, so we metabolize caffeine quickly, which means that the “pick-me-up” effects don’t last as long. Others have just one copy, and some don’t have it at all, which means their bodies are slower to break down caffeine and the buzz lasts longer for them. Professor of Neuroscience and Biology
Manuel Díaz-Ríos says the speed of your metabolism isn’t the only factor at play. He says caffeine works by binding to and blocking our brain’s adenosine receptors, which affect a person’s heart rhythm and need for sleep, among other processes.
The number of these receptors is determined by both genetics and how much caffeine you routinely consume. For example, if you consistently drink a lot of coffee, and those channels are consistently blocked, the body compensates by creating more adenosine receptors within your brain cells. More caffeine is then needed to achieve the same effect, thereby increasing your caffeine tolerance. “But some people naturally start out with higher levels of certain neuroreceptors than others,” says Díaz-Ríos. “And if you’re a person who genetically just happens to produce a lot of those receptors, then you are likely to be less sensitive to caffeine than others.”
Vibing with Proffee
How a love of music, a DJing dentist, and a Bowdoin colleague set Keona Ervin spinning.
AS DIRECTOR of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies and a scholar of many aspects of Black women’s history in the US, including around labor, the working class, and social movements, Keona Ervin keeps a lot of plates spinning. Given this, it will either be a complete surprise or make perfect sense to learn that among the many hats she wears is that of DJ—not the person manning the CD player at your middle school dance, but a track-blending, record-scratching, mix-mastering artist who is part performer, curator, and producer.
“Music has always been my thing,” Ervin said. “I noticed how often I wanted to play music for and with others and began to think, ‘Maybe I want to learn to DJ to throw parties for my friends.’”
After moving back to Maine in 2022 to fulfill her current role, after having been at Bowdoin as a postdoctoral fellow in 2009–2010, Ervin bonded with her dentist and learned he was also a professional DJ, one who would become a mentor.
“I love being a student again,” she said, noting another influence, Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Lindsay Rapport, who gave Ervin her first gig playing music for her hip-hop class. “The experience underscored the power of vibing—shaping some pretty incredible encounters between DJs and dancers.” Hooked, Ervin then went on to DJ the dance department’s Community Show and Groove.
“I already incorporate the study of music and performance into my scholarship,” she says. “DJing has served to expand my understanding of my research and writing.” Ervin’s stage name, DJ Proffee, sums it up. “It’s designed to emphasize the connection between the many ways that all of us show up in the world.”
Faculty
Keona Ervin at the Community Show and Groove
Some Vibrant Word
Were it not for Longfellow’s ardent wish to stir the public, Tom Putnam and other scholars argue, Paul Revere’s midnight ride might well have passed into obscurity.
A RECENT exhibit opening in Concord, Massachusetts, introduced me to two twentiethcentury Bowdoin connections to the famed revolutionary Paul Revere.
Both the late Paul Revere Jr. ’53 and his daughter, Avery ’82, the third great-grandson and fourth great-granddaughter respectively, are alumni. Their efforts as past and current president of the Revere Memorial Association have been at the center of bringing a more nuanced story of the legendary patriot to new generations, a task particularly significant in 2025, as the nation prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Revere’s iconic midnight ride.
They are not, though, the College’s only connection to this tale. Revere’s obituary in 1818, for example, made no mention of the role he played in warning the residents of Lexington and Concord that the British Regulars were marching their way in the early morning hours of April 19, 1775. Were it not for Bowdoin’s own Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Revere’s story might only be a footnote in history.
It was the specter of the Civil War that resuscitated Revere’s story and emblazoned it onto our national memory. According to historian Jill Lepore H’15, Longfellow’s commitment to the abolitionist cause inspired him to write his most famous poem, Paul Revere’s Ride Longfellow hoped that recounting the dramatic tale of a Revolutionary War hero would waken his slumbering contemporaries to face the challenges of their time.
Lepore suggests that the story begins in the aftermath of Longfellow’s teaching career at Bowdoin when, in 1837, he accepted a position at Harvard and met Charles Sumner, then a professor at the law school. Longfellow and
Sumner became close friends and lifelong confidantes despite mismatched temperaments. Lepore describes Sumner as a “dogmatic and abrasive” politician. Longfellow, she suggests, was “a famously nice man … gentle and retiring and contented.” Personalities aside, one issue that united them was their opposition to slavery.
In 1842, when Charles Dickens visited Boston, Longfellow took him on a tour of the city’s historic sites, including the North Church from which the famed lanterns were hung. Soon after, Longfellow visited Dickens in London, where he was chastened by the British novelist’s sharp critique of slavery in the United States— the slave trade having been outlawed in Great Britain in 1833.
After Charles Sumner sent him a letter in England suggesting he “write some stirring words that shall move the whole land,” Longfellow wrote his Poems on Slavery about the plight of the enslaved. Many took note, but Longfellow had not yet made his mark.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, the abolitionist cause remained of great interest to him. His account ledgers during this time indicate that he gave generously to Black newspapers, schools, and churches—and to fugitive slaves themselves, using a portion of his wealth to emancipate formerly enslaved men, women, and children.
The day John Brown was hanged, Longfellow wrote in his diary: “The second of December, 1859. This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new Revolution—quite as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon.”
Writes Lepore: “This is Longfellow, an almost maddeningly restrained and genteel man, at his most ardent. Was there a way he could do his part, in his timid manner? John Brown had started ‘a new Revolution.’ Longfellow, writing poems about history, got to thinking about the old one.”
“I long to say some vibrant word, that should have vitality in it, and force,” Longfellow wrote to Sumner, now a United States senator.
On April 5, 1860, Longfellow visited the North End again, later writing in his diary about the North Church, “from this tower were hung the lanterns as a signal that the British troops had left Boston for Concord.”
The next day, April 6, he recorded “‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ began this day.” On April 19, “I wrote a few lines in ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ ; this being the day of that achievement.”
In his biography of Paul Revere, David Hacket Fischer conjectures: “Perhaps on that
The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Grant Wood, 1931
anniversary day he found his opening stanza, which so many American pupils would learn by heart”:
Listen my children, and you shall hear, Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April in Seventy-five Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year.
Longfellow continued working on the poem throughout the fall, penning the last words on October 13, 1860—just weeks before the presidential election in which he voted for Abraham Lincoln. The Atlantic Monthly published Paul Revere’s Ride in its January 1861 issue, which arrived in Boston on December 20, 1860—the very day South Carolina seceded from the Union.
The poem was rightly read by Longfellow’s contemporaries as a call to arms, appealing to Northerners’ conscience and rousing them to war. But Longfellow has been critiqued for the wide license he took in telling this dramatic tale. Revere, for example, was not “on the opposite shore” when the signal lights were hung. He directed them to be cast in case he did not make it across the Charles River to Charlestown where his horse was waiting. In the poem, Revere makes his way to Concord, but in reality, he and fellow rider William Dawes were captured by the British that night between Lexington and Concord. It was their compatriot, Samuel Prescott, who lived in Concord and happened to be in Lexington for a rendezvous with his fiancé, who managed to make it to Concord to alert militia leaders.
Some critics argue that Longfellow was justified in embellishing this exceptionally engaging tale. The more serious critique, however, may be the mistaken impression the poem imparts of Revere as a lone rider.
Historians have since clearly documented that, while the events of April 19, 1775, turned on the contingency of many individual heroic actions, what is even more remarkable is how well this defensive effort had been planned and coordinated. Local militia leaders had meticulously trained companies of Minutemen volunteers to defend themselves, and a complex communications apparatus had been clandestinely
organized involving scores of other “midnight riders” who passed the word from town to town after receiving the news from Dawes and Revere.
But, in the aftermath of the battles, that collective effort was concealed, Hacket Fischer explains, as it did not fit with the Revolutionaries’ claim that the British had led “an unprovoked attack upon an unresisting people.”
To move the hearts and minds of their fellow countrymen—and to sway the opinion of other nations—Revolutionary leaders “actively propagated,” Hacket Fischer says, “the myth of an injured American innocence … as an instrument of their cause.”
To maintain that interpretation, the earliest written accounts of Revere’s ride and his own deposition were suppressed. To Revere’s credit, in his affidavit he refused to testify unequivocally that the British had fired the first shot in the exchange of fire on the Lexington Common. To this day, it remains unclear who shot first.
Revere’s deposition was returned to him and remained unpublished among his private papers until 1891. Through his lifetime, his story remained concealed, which helps explain why his obituary made no mention of the ride for which he became so famous.
Since Longfellow’s time, historians have uncovered the real story, but the myth of Revere singlehandedly rousing his neighbors to action endures. As Hacket Fischer observes, “the scholars never managed to catch up with Longfellow’s galloping hero.”
While many can still recite the famous first stanza, it may be the concluding words of his poem that Longfellow would most wish for us to recall:
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past, Through all our history, to the last, In the hour of darkness and peril and need, The people will waken and listen to hear The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed, And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
What is that message, and why did readers in Longfellow’s era read the poem as a call to oppose slavery? In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. summed it up this way, “We still need some
Paul Revere of conscience to alert every hamlet and every village of America that revolution is still at hand.”
If it is true that “revolution is still at hand,” and if we agree that the ideals of our founding remain unfulfilled, Revere’s story is an interesting prism to consider how revolutionary reform efforts are sparked and how societal change occurs.
One school suggests, in the words of Buckminster Fuller, that “no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about.”
Anthropologist Margaret Mead offered a slightly different view when she observed: “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Paul Revere’s example supports both views.
In the introductory chapter to his Revere biography, David Hacket Fischer includes this old Texas joke: “Paul Revere? Ain’t he the Yankee who had to go for help?” Hacket Fischer then explains that “Revere was much more than a midnight messenger. He was also an organizer of a unique collective effort that led to the outbreak of the American Revolution. … His actions made a difference most of all mobilizing the acts of many others. The old Texas canard…. when shorn of its pejoratives, is closer to the mark than the mythical image of the solitary rider.”
The upcoming 250th anniversaries offer an opportunity to be stirred again by “the night winds of the past.” But let us hope, in our new hour “of darkness and peril and need,” that those winds will also inspire individual and collective actions by a recommitted citizenry to solve the unprecedented challenges of our time.
Every generation needs its emissaries, like Revere on horseback and Longfellow in verse, to waken its slumbering populace to hear, and heed, that call.
Tom Putnam ’84 is the former director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and the Concord Museum.
Artists have been coming to Monhegan Island in the Gulf of Maine for two centuries, drawn by the natural splendor of its high cliffs and long ocean views, and pulled back again and again by its magic. Those who live there year-round feel all that too. They also know that it’s wild and remote, and those qualities are essential to its character. Through an interplay of the power of art, the revelations of ecology and natural history, and the determination of community, it remains under the watchful eye of those who love it.
Moved to Preserve
BY JESSICA SKWIRE ROUTHIER ’94
Opening spread: Jamie Wyeth, Islander, 1975. The introduction of sheep—for meat, milk, and wool—led to deforestation and a barrenness that persisted in the landscape and in artists’ renderings long after the sheep were removed in 1896.
Opposite page, top: Rockwell Kent, Sun, Manana, Monhegan, 1907. When Barry Logan learned that decades after making this painting, Kent reclaimed it to add the white spruce that had sprung up, it struck Logan that the reforestation was part of a larger story, one that included art.
Opposite page, bottom: Edward Hopper, Monhegan Landscape, ca. 1916–1919. The distorted branches called “witches’ brooms” seen in this painting are evidence of attack by dwarf mistletoe, the parasitic plant Logan studies.
SINCE THE MID-1800S, artists have captured Monhegan’s distinctive headlands and its irresistibly picturesque village and harbor, with Manana Island and the broad horizon beyond. These images are lodged in the public consciousness and draw thousands to the island for day trips every summer. But those who live there, as well as those who have made it a sustained object of study, know that these margins where the land meets the salt water are only part of the story. The branches, shoots, and shadows that tangle together in Barbara Petter Putnam’s woodcuts of the island are not the typical artist’s rendering of the year-round fishing village, tourist destination, and artists’ colony ten nautical miles off midcoast Maine that is Monhegan, but their intertwined stories of art and ecology, of wildness and preservation, characterize this unique place.
The vast majority of Monhegan’s one square mile is a protected wilderness called the Wildlands. Much of that wilderness is old-growth forest known as Cathedral Woods for the way the tall conifers overhead suggest the vaults of a church. The Wildlands are the subject not only of Putnam’s prints but also of Bowdoin biology professor Barry Logan’s research on a parasitic plant called dwarf mistletoe. Logan’s project has set off its own shoots and taken a somewhat unexpected form in Art, Ecology, and the Resilience of a Maine Island, a book and a two-venue exhibition organized jointly by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) and the Monhegan Museum of Art & History, which tells the story of the changing ecology of the island through a century and a half of art produced there. The story is not a simple one, but, like the knotted-together plant forms in much of the exhibition’s works, the complexities and interrelationships are the point.
Logan, Bowdoin’s Samuel S. Butcher Professor in the Natural Sciences, explains that his awareness of dwarf mistletoe began in Colorado— where it is also part of the native ecology—but he did not begin to study it in earnest until he came to Bowdoin in 1999. Logan had been tagging and tracking trees infected by dwarf mistletoe in various sites throughout the midcoast only to see the trees he was studying lost to development, when William Livingston
from the forestry program at the University of Maine suggested that he look into the protected Monhegan Wildlands.
Dwarf mistletoe is fascinating, especially for those of us who have little frame of reference for the high drama of plants. As Logan says, people’s “expectations of what plants can do are so low, it’s a gift how easy it is to blow their minds.” The parasite initially attacks trees—on Monhegan, red and white spruce—from within, stealthily feeding from their vascular system like little vampires. Eventually the mistletoe sends out shoots from the host trees’ branches, and after those shoots flower, seeds are ejected like missiles, traveling as much as several yards through the air to land on another host tree and begin the process again. Unchecked infection causes distorted branch growth—tangled masses colloquially called “witches’ brooms,” highly visible in the Edward Hopper painting on the cover of the exhibition catalogue—and ultimately the tree’s death.
A pivotal moment for Logan came when he visited Monhegan to check on trees that a colleague and a student had tagged some years before. While old-growth red spruce seemed able to manage the infection, he found, many white spruce had died long before their time. After several seasons encountering artists on the trails, he had a growing consciousness of Monhegan’s legacy as an art colony. “It was precisely at that moment that I became aware of a painting that Rockwell Kent created, which is called Young Spruces,” Logan recalls, and with it came the flash of realization that the adolescent white spruce Kent painted in 1955 were of the same generation as his tagged trees. With that painting, he realized, he was seeing both the beginning and the end of their lives.
Over the course of nearly two centuries, Logan understood, Monhegan artists had—wittingly or not—documented environmental change. This opened a new avenue of research for him, one that demanded not only a close study of the artwork but also a fuller understanding of the island’s history. In part through the resources of the Monhegan Museum and its director, Jennifer Pye, Logan learned about the island’s evolution from forestland to sheep pasture to tourist playground to its current slow path
to reforestation. Another work by Kent that shows this happening: Kent began Sun, Manana, Monhegan in 1907 and then, after a long time away from the island, reclaimed it from the owner to add, in the foreground, the row of white spruce that had sprung up in his absence.
It was clear that the spruce and the mistletoe were part of a much larger story. This gave Logan an opportunity to practice what he preaches in his popular Science Communication course. Offered as an elective, the class challenges students to explore and implement different modes for communicating science findings, from grant writing, art making, and exhibition development to speaking with the press.
Putnam was a guest lecturer in 2024, leading students through an exercise where they documented a day trip to Monhegan with illustrations made on scratchboard. Previously an artist-in-residence at the Schiller Coastal Studies Center and a lecturer in the art department, Putnam works at the intersections of art and science. “As artists and makers, as scientists, we’re all storytellers,” she says, “but we have very different processes.” Mer Feero ’23, now working on her master’s at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, speaks powerfully about how the course informed her thinking. In science education, she says, “the burden falls on scientists to be able to communicate with the public” in ways that may push the boundaries of their training. “Art museums are not the source of scientific content for many people,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be.”
Communication begins with conversation, of course, and Logan did just that, not only by connecting with Pye but also by reaching out to both Putnam and photographer Accra Shepp— who would later be tapped to create a series of monumental photographs for the Monhegan Wildlands project—during their stints at Bowdoin (Shepp was also an artist-in-residence, in 2014). Both marvel at how welcoming Logan and the College’s science community in general were to them as artists. As the concept of building an exhibition took shape, Logan drew on those conversations to draft a proposal to BCMA codirectors Anne and Frank Goodyear. Within ten days, Logan remembers, Frank had responded favorably but observed, “You need
The cumulative result is a narrative that has artists, curators, historians, scientists, and museumgoers all seeing this familiar landscape in an entirely new way.
a partner”—an idea that would coalesce into the three-person curatorial team of Logan, Frank Goodyear, and Pye. “This was born in my head,” Logan says, “but the moment that it became a bigger thing, it truly became a shared, collaborative effort.”
The book and the exhibition represent a wide ecosystem of voices—students and scientists, artists and lobstermen. Taking a cue from the sciences, Logan, Goodyear, and Pye coauthored all six main chapters of the book, rather than dividing it up according to their areas of expertise. They also recruited nine additional interlocutors to speak from their perspectives in short essays, including Livingston on Monhegan’s forest health, Bowdoin environmental studies professor Matthew Klingle on its history of conservation, and an afterword by Shepp. The cumulative result, both in the art of the exhibition and in the pages of the book, is a narrative of Monhegan’s art, history, and ecology, one that has artists, curators, historians, scientists, and museumgoers all seeing this familiar landscape in an entirely new way.
FRANK GOODYEAR describes a central idea of the show as “an opportunity to reflect on a series of human decisions over the course of the last two hundred years that have dramatically impacted the lands.” One of the first was to introduce sheep as a source of meat, milk, and wool for the year-round community. Having sheep on Monhegan began the deforestation of the wooded island, both from a conscious effort to create pastureland for the sheep and from the fact that the sheep’s grazing kept vegetation in check. In the section of the exhibition Goodyear calls the “firsts wall”—the first bird’s-eye view of Monhegan, the first drawing and painting, the close-to-first photograph—the
bare landscape, with views largely unobstructed by trees, shows their impact. Sheep were eliminated in 1896, less because of the deforestation than because the herd was suffering from neglect, but when modernist painter Robert Henri and his students began visiting Monhegan in 1903, they were still seeing an island altered by their presence. The barren, overgrazed headlands they depicted are an enduring image of Monhegan, and these treeless headland landscapes are among the best-known paintings of the island.
Another human decision evolved alongside Monhegan’s growing popularity as a tourist destination and summer community. The influx of summer people led to a housing boom in the early years of the twentieth century. Seeing the wilderness shrink inspired summer visitor Ted Edison, son of famed inventor Thomas Edison, to purchase land with the express idea of preserving it from development. By the 1950s his goal had expanded to protect not only the Wildlands, including the largely untouched Cathedral Woods, but also the year-round community in Monhegan Village and its distinct way of life. Edison is often credited as the mastermind behind Monhegan Associates, the land trust founded in 1954, but both Logan and longtime Monhegan year-rounder and retired lobsterman Doug Boynton stress that it was a fully communal effort. “It wouldn’t have happened without him,” says Boynton, “but it was formed with deep involvement from the community.”
Just as these conversations about protecting the island’s ecology were taking place, islanders made the decision to introduce deer into their previously mammal-free environment—“to amuse tourists and to give locals game to shoot,” as officials said. Six deer rapidly became many more and, just as they do in any garden, they ate
PHOTOS: (TAM) MONHEGAN MUSEUM OF ART & HISTORY; (MASON) DICKSON AND HUDSON FAMILIES; (CONNAWAY) COLLECTION OF STEPHEN S. FULLER AND SUSAN D. BATESON
Above: Geraldine King Tam, Bittersweet. Artist Tam saw what deer were doing to the Wildlands plant life and raised concerns.
Opposite page, top: Mary Stuart Mason, Sidney’s Garden, 1930s. Before the deer, unfenced flower gardens flourished on Monhegan.
Opposite page, bottom: Jay Hall Connaway, Seas at White Head, Monhegan, ca. 1940. The cliffs at White Head are a popular destination for tourist trail hikers and have been captured by artists for centuries.
Everyone who takes a snapshot on Monhegan is part of the lineage of image-makers there.
what they wanted. This was not only the end of the unfenced flower gardens seen in paintings by Edward Redfield, Constance Cochrane, and Mary Stuart Mason, it also had disastrous effects on the native plants of the Wildlands. Artist Geraldine Tam, who made lush botanical studies of plants on the forest floor, wrote passionately to Edison and the Monhegan Associates in 1969 that the herd’s selective grazing was causing irreversible changes to the Wildlands plant life.
The deer brought another danger. Just as Logan and his colleagues would use Monhegan as a natural laboratory for studying dwarf mistletoe, infectious disease experts found it to be a uniquely well-suited environment for testing mitigation strategies for Lyme disease,
which plagued the island before the deer herd was culled in 1997–1999.
An important takeaway is that the invasive species were the sheep and the deer—and ultimately the ticks—and not the dwarf mistletoe. Hopper’s painting demonstrates that it has been on Monhegan for at least a century and a quarter. What has become clear to today’s researchers is that a series of human decisions on Monhegan allowed the mistletoe to dominate and crowd out competition, leaving new forest growth (specifically the stands of young white spruce) particularly vulnerable to infection. The deep and enduring artistic record of Monhegan—including the work of contemporary artists—shows the shifting ecological
balance over time, communicating not only these complex ideas but also the island’s lasting beauty and resilience.
JUST INSIDE the entrance to the exhibition, a pair of objects goes to the very heart of science communication. Molly Holmberg Brown’s twin maps, one of Monhegan around 1890 and the other 2023, make evident the extent to which the island has successfully reforested itself. This resilience is also an overall message of the project, says Goodyear: the idea that, “if allowed, nature will rebound from even sort of dramatic change.” The maps are a manifestation of how interdisciplinarity and collaboration are woven into the infrastructure of this multilayered project. A trained artist and geographer, Brown is part of a longtime Monhegan family, so she brings deep knowledge of the island to her work. But she also relied on a catalogue of historic images furnished by Goodyear and Pye, on data sourced from Logan’s research, and on fieldwork by Feero, mapping and documenting growth patterns throughout the island, for the final images. Both Feero and Sam Stevenson ’26
spent two months on Monhegan in the summers of 2023 and 2024, respectively—Feero through a paid BCMA internship and Stevenson as a Freedman Summer Research Fellow.
Stevenson says that what stands out for her in this project is “just how many people have collaborated, and how many people care so deeply about it.” She traces that nurturing environment to Bowdoin classrooms, where she has studied with both Logan and Putnam, who encouraged her to further explore intersections between art and science. Along with Feero, Stevenson worked on creating video and soundscapes for the exhibition—a new skill for them both—and Stevenson also created a geolocated walking tour that compares historical views by artists to the same sites today.
Shepp touches on something similar in his photographs. Long engaged with an ongoing series called “Islands of New York,” Shepp came to the Monhegan project with no knowledge about the island. Goodyear explains that this was very much intentional. “We wanted to identify somebody who’d actually never been to Monhegan before and didn’t have all of these
associations, all this nostalgia for this incredible place.” Shepp says that the curators gave him wide-ranging support—including on-site help from Feero and others—but very little direction in terms of what to photograph. Ultimately, he said, “what I was interested in seeing was what they were interested in seeing.”
Take Barry’s Trees, for instance: five different captures montaged in Shepp’s distinctive way that show a site Logan frequently teaches from because it includes key elements of his botanical research. “I really wanted that little inlet where the water comes in and you have the banding in the sky,” he says, but at the same time, “I was aware that there were a certain variety of trees that Barry was interested in.” “Barry’s trees” was the field note he made on the negatives, just to organize them, and like the trees themselves, the words proved lasting—becoming not just the title for the art but also, organically, a kind of place name on the island, not unlike Cathedral Woods. Everyone who takes a snapshot on Monhegan is part of the lineage of image-makers there. But Shepp’s traditional methods and 4x5 camera have a particular resonance with earlier island
Shepp, who came to the project with no prior knowledge of the island, felt himself part of “that historical dialogue, where we see Monhegan changing over the decades.”
photographers. He remembers that Pye called his attention to a specific view of Monhegan from Manana Island, across the harbor, that was retaken every few decades in panoramic photographs, all composites, all taken from the same spot. Getting to Manana, whose dock had blown down in a storm, was not easy, but once there, Shepp says, “I came upon this rock . . . and it was like it all snapped into focus.” He left the terrain of Manana uncropped in the foreground and took a more expansive view of Monhegan to show not just the harbor but the full outline of the island—but his photograph nevertheless “gets to participate in that historical dialogue, where we see Monhegan changing over the decades.”
Shepp’s portraits of islanders and his photograph Trap Day with Margaret reflect how people are part of the island’s ecosystem. Trap Day is October 1, the official start of Monhegan’s lobstering season, which since 1907 islanders have voluntarily limited to preserve stocks and manage marine traffic. Margaret is Margaret Chioffi, a full-time islander who acted as a sort of unofficial guide (“We would never have made it to
PHOTO: COURTESY OF ACCRA SHEPP
Accra Shepp, Monhegan from Manana, 2023. Photographer
what it took for these early artists to get here.” She sees it as the museum’s responsibility to tell Monhegan’s local stories as part of its presentation. There will be more works by painter and conservationist Elena Jahn as well as contributions from Joanne Scott, a former president of Monhegan Associates, and Teco Slagboom, one of its original incorporators. True to the museum’s longstanding policy, however, it will not display the work of living artists, with the exception of Brown’s maps and Shepp’s photographs, specifically commissioned for the exhibition.
Above:
Opposite page:
Manana without Margaret,” says Shepp); she is also Pye’s daughter and a member of Bowdoin’s class of 2028. Looking at the Trap Day photograph, Shepp and Pye share different memories. Shepp recalls how he had planned to take the photograph the day before, when lobstermen were bringing their gear down to the docks to get ready, but held back when he perceived their anxiety about a difficult season ahead. Pye remembers that Margaret would otherwise have been at boarding school, as is the norm for highschool-aged Monhegan kids, but she’d returned home after contracting COVID, and that Trap Day was her first day out of quarantine. That these parallel stories emerge from the same image seems to echo a central idea behind the exhibition project: every image of Monhegan conveys a wealth and variety of history and experience that is expansive and changeable, contingent on whether the viewer is looking for sunsets, dying spruce, or something else entirely. Accordingly, the exhibition staged at the Monhegan Museum in the summer of 2025 will adapt to a different audience, Pye says. “For people who have already made the journey to Monhegan . . . you don’t need to communicate on the same level how wild and remote this is and
The Trap Day stories underscore Boynton’s observation that Monhegan is “an incredibly difficult place to live” year-round. “Even the littlest things are hard,” he says. Pye agrees that being a permanent resident “has to be intentional” and suggests this may partly explain why Monhegan has historically been somewhat more welcoming to people “from away” than other rural Maine communities. As Boynton explains it, “for the people that really get into it, they have to really commit themselves. . . . [You] go through a lot to get a foothold out here.” That effort earns respect.
That said, Boynton would prefer it to be not quite so challenging to put down roots on Monhegan. Today, one of the biggest threats to an ongoing year-round community is the lack of affordable housing. Boynton led the effort to found, in 2002, the Monhegan Island Sustainable Community Association (MISCA), which buys existing homes or buildable lots and sells them to residents at affordable prices, maintaining ownership of the land in perpetuity so they can only be sold to year-round residents. MISCA has worked closely with Monhegan Associates to align their respective goals of preserving wilderness while expanding housing. The two might seem to be in conflict, but Boynton points out that protecting the yearround community has always been a priority and that “the Wildlands wouldn’t be a sustainable situation out there if it didn’t have buy-in from the whole community.” One could not exist without the other.
That the Wildlands are magical was recognized by artists early on, from photographers Samuel Peter Rolt Triscott and Oliver Watts to Henri and his students, including George
Samuel Peter Rolt Triscott, Untitled, ca. 1900. A watercolor specialist and photographer, Triscott settled on Monhegan in the 1890s. This painting of Triscott’s shows sheep at work altering Monhegan’s landscape.
Robert Henri, Cathedral Woods, Monhegan Island, 1918. Artist Barbara Putnam describes the old-growth forest of Cathedral Woods, in the protected Wildlands, as a sort of school.
Bellows. A seldom-seen pastel by Henri and a newly rediscovered and never-before-published oil by Bellows are highlights of the Cathedral Woods section of BCMA’s show. While the harbor and headlands are still popular among artists, the woods have held their own as a subject, seen in works by Frances Kornbluth, Lynne Drexler, and Steve Budington, among others. Shepp rhapsodizes about shooting on Evergreen Trail late on a rainy October day, where the dense canopy created a kind of dark, protected sanctuary. Putnam thinks of it as a kind of museum or school, with scientists and artists alike hauling their equipment along the trails. Feero observes that “there’s something poetic about you all being on the same path, all capturing the same things, but from different perspectives and sometimes for similar goals.”
Boynton says that he thinks Monhegan’s ability to attract great people is one of its “special powers,” an idea he elaborates on in his essay for the book. He is self-effacing about his contribution, calling himself “very peripheral” to the larger project, but it’s clear that he, himself, is one of those great people, along with Edison and Pye and all the artists and lobstermen and others who have been his neighbors. Of the artists, Boynton says, “it wasn’t like they were a separate community; they were just your friends.” The relative absence on Monhegan of the kinds of bright dividing lines that might be drawn in other places has perhaps helped to foster the marvelous tangle of disciplines we see in the Monhegan Wildlands research project, exhibitions, and book, with artists, scientists, historians, and islanders working in tandem to observe, record, and communicate.
“When you’re on an island, your resources are limited,” Boynton explains, “and if you screw it up, you don’t get a second chance; you can’t move down the road.”
Jessica Skwire Routhier ’94 is the managing editor of Panorama, the journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and is a regular contributor to Antiques and The Arts Weekly. She is also a freelance copy editor, specializing in art history, for several museums and academic presses. An art history major and studio art minor at Bowdoin, she earned her MA in art history from Tufts University.
THE SPORT A JOY
BY JIM LEFEBVRE
His life’s journey took him from a California childhood delivering groceries in a horse-drawn buggy to a starry playing career at Notre Dame, where he was captain of the most famous football team in the nation, and then to stints at Harvard, Yale, the NFL, and—in moves at two different times, both of them improbable—to Bowdoin. Adam Walsh, center of the Knute Rockne squad that included the famed Four Horsemen, brought “standards of fair play, hard work, and gentlemanliness to generations of Bowdoin athletes,” his 1984 honorary degree citation said, and “made the sport a joy.”
AADAM WALSH’S LIFE was one of achievement from coast to coast. As a coach, a teacher, a public servant, he touched lives and strived to inspire and lift all those in his sphere. In the all-too-frequently rough-and-tumble worlds of athletics and politics, he found a way to compete with honor and respect, leading others to do the same.
In his twenty seasons as Bowdoin’s head football coach (1935–1942 and 1947–1958), Walsh led the Polar Bears to eleven outright or shared Maine intercollegiate championships. He became a fixture in the state and eventually served in the Maine legislature and as a federal marshal, gaining a legion of friends and followers. From humble beginnings, he made the most of what life presented him.
Adam Walsh III was born on December 4, 1901, at the crossroad town of Churchville, Iowa, about fifteen miles south of Des Moines. His father, Adam Jr., was a first-generation American whose parents emigrated from Ireland during the potato famine of the late 1840s. In Churchville, Adam Walsh Jr. operated a general store.
In 1906, the family followed a familiar American theme and struck out for southern California. Adam Jr. and his wife, Stella, built a home in the village of Hollywood, in an area with few other houses. The Walsh children played in a large, fenced yard where they would occasionally see deer and mountain lions wandering down from the nearby hills.
Adam’s father began working as a clerk in a grocery store, and before long, he had become co-owner of Walsh & Mackie Groceries on Prospect Avenue, just east of Vine Street. The area was becoming famous for the budding motion picture business. Young Adam Walsh spent his high school Saturdays driving a horse and buggy to deliver groceries to the “movie stars”—Will Rogers, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin. In summers, it became a full-time job, paying seventy-five cents a week.
So bright a student was Adam that he finished grammar school when he was only eleven. Rather than enter high school so young, he spent some time back in Iowa with relatives.
In between delivering groceries and attending to his studies, young Adam had developed an interest in sports. He started out playing
PHOTOS: (OPENING SPREAD AND TOP) BETTMANN; (BOTTOM) NOTRE DAME ARCHIVES; (OPPOSITE PAGE) GEORGE J. MITCHELL DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES
Opening spread: Adam Walsh as a player at Notre Dame.
Top: Walsh carrying ice in his hometown of Hollywood, California. Bottom: Walsh at the center of the Notre Dame championship team line-up. Opposite page: Walsh in 1949, with Jim Sibson ’50 and Dave Burke ’50.
football as a 132-pound “runt” but developed into one of the stars at Hollywood High, leading his team to a regional championship.
Upon leaving high school, he worked to earn money for college, driving a ten-ton truck, working ten and a half hours a day, seven days a week, for fifteen dollars. For a time, he worked as a cowboy, rounding up cattle on a nearby ranch. Later, he joined the crew of famed automobile racer Barney Oldfield, who was developing and testing designs for new race cars that would better protect drivers while achieving high speeds.
As Adam passed his nineteenth birthday in December 1920, he began to think more seriously about going to college. Several of his classmates at Hollywood High had gone on to Leland Stanford at Palo Alto near San Francisco, and Adam saw himself there as well. But his mother had other thoughts. She desperately wanted her son to attend a Catholic college—but not just any Catholic college: Notre Dame.
Walsh reported to Coach Knute Rockne on September 8, 1921, and joined the other firstyears on the freshman team. Practicing against the varsity took its toll, and in late September, Walsh suffered a broken arm and dislocated collarbone. Coupled with his homesickness and self-doubt, Adam was terribly discouraged. In these times, it was Coach Rockne’s knack for seeing into the heart of his players that provided the needed remedy. Rockne saw something of himself in Adam Walsh—a determined, self-reliant sort who was not afraid of work.
Rockne helped Walsh find a job the second semester of his freshman year working at the Northern Indiana Gas and Electric Co. garage. For someone who started at Notre Dame with thirty dollars in his pocket and, as he said later, “for months had only pennies,” the sum of $125 a month felt like a king’s ransom.
After the 1923 football season, Walsh had ascended to starting center for the Irish, and life was sailing along smoothly. Then, in January 1924, he came down with a debilitating case of strep throat. He was so sick that the sisters at the Notre Dame infirmary could do little for him. He lost thirty-three pounds in nine days.
Rockne saw a young man teetering on the edge of exhaustion. He advised Walsh to take the spring semester to go home and get well.
For the first time since arriving on campus as a hesitant freshman, Walsh headed back to Hollywood, where he regained his health.
In June, he set off for summer school with his brother Charles, known as Chile, in tow. Driving a Ford Model T from their home in Hollywood some 2,400 miles to the Notre Dame campus— across the deserts of California and Arizona, up through the Rockies, past Denver and out onto the plains, to the great crossroads of Chicago— the Walsh brothers traversed one series of rutted dirt and gravel roads after another. By their estimation, they had encountered barely 100 miles of paved highway on the entire route. After numerous dings, flat tires, and other maladies, their car came to rest in an off-campus garage.
Healthy again, Adam was set for a senior year as captain, a season in which he would again play through injuries with tenacity and toughness, leading a team whose skilled backfield became the legendary Four Horsemen. Quarterback Harry Stuhldreher, halfbacks Don Miller and Jim Crowley, and fullback Elmer Layden had played together since their sophomore year in 1922 and formed a nearly unstoppable unit whose versatility, quickness, deception, and precision marked them as memorable.
After an epic victory over archrival Army at the Polo Grounds in New York City, sportswriting icon Grantland Rice wrote: “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore, they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.”
Many would know “the four horsemen” from the Book of Revelations, but Rice’s description was also a timely cultural reference to a 1921 feature film starring Rudolph Valentino. Back in South Bend, a hastily arranged publicity photograph of the foursome on horseback was taken; over the subsequent weeks it would be reprinted in newspapers all over the country. The Irish took down one formidable foe after another: Princeton, Georgia Tech, Wisconsin—and Nebraska, which had given Notre Dame its only loss in both 1922 and 1923.
While the four backs did most of the rushing, passing, and scoring, Walsh and his teammates provided the down-and-dirty blocking and
tackling that propelled the Irish to victory after victory against the nation’s best. In that Army game, Walsh, playing with two badly injured hands, made one great stop after another.
On one road trip, there was a knock at Walsh’s door. “Is this where we can find the Four Horsemen?” came the inquiry. “Nah,” Adam replied. “We’re just the Seven Mules.” It was a nickname that, like the Horsemen, would stick for decades.
Notre Dame’s magical season culminated on New Year’s Day, 1925, at the Rose Bowl, just a short ride from Adam’s Hollywood home. Facing Stanford University and their legendary coach Pop Warner, the Irish triumphed, 27-10, to claim their first national championship. Walsh, whose toughness and leadership were heralded far and wide, joined two of his Horsemen, Harry Stuhldreher and Elmer Layden, as a head coach immediately after Notre Dame, taking the reins at the University of Santa Clara (today’s Santa Clara University) in the fall of 1925. Against schedules that included Stanford, Cal, and USC, Walsh led the Broncos to winning records three of his four seasons there.
He then trekked cross-country, to serve first as line coach at Yale from 1929 to 1933 and then to Yale’s archrival Harvard for one season as the Crimson’s line coach.
It was considered a coup for out-of-the-way Bowdoin College to hire a man of Walsh’s fame and background, but that’s what happened in early 1935. It didn’t take long for Walsh to have an impact at Bowdoin. In his first season, 1935, he led the Polar Bears to a 5-1-1 record and their first Maine Intercollegiate title since 1921. Victories over Colby and Bates led to a battle with Maine before a capacity crowd of more than 7,000 at Alumni Field in Orono. Maine had rallied from a 13-0 deficit to tie the game and was driving for what seemed to be a winning touchdown. But the Black Bears would “miss victory by a bare six inches as Bowdoin rose to magnificent defensive heights with the ball inches away from the last white line and less than a minute left to play,” the Bangor Daily News reported.
“That Bowdoin had the cohesion and courage to stem the Bruins in that hectic last period speaks volumes as to what Adam Walsh has done to the Polar Bears this season.”
“HE WAS TRULY LARGER THAN LIFE. EVERYBODY LOVED HIM. HE HAD THAT MYSTIQUE OF HAVING PLAYED AT NOTRE DAME. THERE WAS JUST AN AURA ABOUT HIM.” —ROD COLLETTE ’56
Walsh had made an impression on the Bowdoin community. Student paper The Growler editorialized: “A coach’s job, as we see it, goes beyond a technical knowledge of football. He must have certain elements of personality that win the affectionate respect of the team and of the bystanders who see him doing his job. Walsh possesses this personality for he has impressed both the team and the undergraduate body in general. They are singing the praises of Walsh, not only for the way he teaches a team football but for his treatment of his men and his personal popularity.”
Noted a longtime observer: “Adam Walsh is tops. The fellows like him, respect him, and would do anything for him. The team has great spirit. Walsh has done a good job; he’s a king up in Brunswick.”
So began a stretch of eight seasons in which Bowdoin won the state title outright four times and tied with Colby another three years. After the Polar Bears won the crown in 1942, football at the school was shut down due to World War II. Walsh, then in his forties, served as Brunswick’s civilian defense director during the war, but he needed to return to coaching.
He spent some time coaching at Notre Dame and was Harvard’s line coach again in 1944. The following year, Adam’s brother Chile was serving as general manager of the Cleveland Rams in the NFL and needed a head coach. He called his older brother, and Adam took the job. With future Hall of Famer Bob Waterfield at quarterback, the Rams went 9-1 in the regular season and defeated the Washington Redskins, 15-14, in the 1945 NFL Championship game in near zero-degree conditions at Cleveland Stadium.
The NFL became the first coast-to-coast league in pro sports the next season when the
Rams moved to Los Angeles, drawing 95,000 fans for a preseason rematch with Washington. Walsh guided the team to a 6-4-1 season before stepping down and heading back to Bowdoin.
In his second stint as head coach, Walsh led the Polar Bears to another four Maine titles. When he retired following the 1958 season, he closed the books with sixty-three career victories, the most ever by a Bowdoin football coach. And he made an impression on his players that would last a lifetime.
“He was truly larger than life,” recalls Rod Collette ’56, who played halfback on some of the later teams. “Everybody loved him. He had that mystique of having played at Notre Dame. There was just an aura about him.”
“He was a defensive genius,” Collette said. “He devised ways to neutralize the other team, especially in line play.”
At practice, Walsh would dress in a tattered sweatshirt and padless football pants…and was prepared for action. He would step into the drills to show exactly what he wanted done.
“He was always in incredible shape, not an ounce of fat,” Collette recalled. “And he loved showing off. He had tremendous strength. With that raspy voice, he’d command a lineman to sit on his chest, then he would do neck raises, to show what kind of strength he still had.”
Like Rockne, Coach Walsh could give an inspirational halftime speech. And he was careful with his words. “He would praise players in front of the team but would never discipline anyone openly. That was done privately,” said Collette.
Ted Gibbons, who played tackle for Walsh in 1955–1957, recalled that practices rarely included scrimmaging. “He wouldn’t work us very hard, and as a result, we had very few injuries. And today, that means that most of
us still around aren’t crippled. I’m thankful to him for that.”
After football, politics became Walsh’s primary pursuit. He served two terms in the Maine House of Representatives as a Democrat, associated with then-governor Edmund Muskie and leading a fight for the resurgence of the party in state politics. Walsh was elected minority leader of the House and served on important committees, including taxation.
He served as chairman of delegates to the state Democratic conventions in 1956 and 1958 and a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1956. In 1958, he ran for a seat in Congress but came up short.
Walsh thought of politics as he did football: “In the final analysis, those elected to office are servants of the people and not the masters of them. Politics is not a dirty business unless you wish to make it so. Here we bring the real essence of sportsmanship—and that is to respect the other fellow’s point of view, keeping in mind that good competition brings for the best from all of us.”
Walsh was later appointed the US marshal for Maine under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and served in that position until his eventual retirement.
In 1968, his induction into the College Football Hall of Fame, college football’s highest honor, recognized his outstanding contributions to the game. He was also honored with induction into Helms Athletic Hall of Fame, the Maine Sports Hall of Fame, the all-time Southern California high school team, the all-time Notre Dame team, and the all-time Rose Bowl team.
When Walsh died in January 1985, at the age of eighty-three, on a flight from Boston to Providence, Rhode Island, he left behind family, friends, and admirers—and a record and legacy of greatness in Bowdoin football.
Jim Lefebvre is an award-winning journalist, author, speaker, and sports historian who wrote Loyal Sons: The Story of The Four Horsemen and Notre Dame Football’s 1924 Champions Jim is also the founder and executive director of the Knute Rockne Memorial Society (rocknesociety.org) and writes the Irish Echoes historical column for Blue & Gold Illustrated
Opposite page: Coach Walsh at Bowdoin in 1947.
Top: Walsh using a charging sled during a Bowdoin practice.
Bottom: The famed Four Horsemen from Walsh’s championship team at Notre Dame.
We know that laughter is good for us. It reduces stress hormones in our bodies, decreases inflammation, helps us manage pain. Even if we don’t agree that it is the best medicine, it’s clear that it’s at least really good medicine. When we say, “I needed a laugh,” we mean it. Laughter also has social value: it promotes unity, gets at truths, allows us to broach tough subjects. Research has even shown that people who make us laugh are more influential and easier to forgive. Why then is being funny considered so, well, unserious? We talk to two Bowdoin graduates in the humor business—Chip Leighton ’93, social media comic and author of What Time Is Noon?
Hilarious Texts, Ridiculous Feedback, and Not-So-Subtle Advice from Teenagers, and Kerry Elson ’05, an early education teacher and humor writer for The New Yorker and other media—to see what they had to say about the serious business of being funny.
BOWDOIN: You both seem to draw from your own experience in your comedy. What is that about? Is some part of it acting, putting on a character?
KERRY ELSON: I’m writing, a lot of times, about myself. Most of the time, about something that I feel a little bit embarrassed about, and writing about the thing I’m embarrassed about helps kind of pierce the embarrassing feeling.
I tend to do more self-deprecating humor. If it is about my daily life or my own work, it’s a way to, honestly, just kind of cope with and help myself process thoughts and feelings I have. It makes me feel better to laugh at them. And in terms of performing or acting a little bit, sometimes I kind of exaggerate my own voice, and that ends up being like a character. Like, I had something I just wrote that was inspired by me going to my very first professional basketball game. As a person who had gone to a lot of theater, I was trying to make sense of the game by connecting it to my experience of theater. And I was realizing that it was kind of dorky of me to be, like, “Wait, I get it, that’s the orchestra seats, those are the balcony.”
So, I wrote this kind of exaggerated version of a very theatrical person who was just being ridiculous. So I guess, acting a little bit, performing, is a way to make it funnier. For it to be funny, you have to exaggerate it. If I just did it about me, it wouldn’t be enough.
CHIP LEIGHTON: I definitely draw on my own experience. The stuff that I do on social media, it took me a little while to figure out what works in that medium—I tell people I started posting on TikTok in early 2021, and after six months, I had, like, seventeen followers. I was thinking about deleting my account, actually. What I was trying to do was kind of weird funny—it’s tough to even describe, but it wasn’t about my life. And then, I posted something about marriage that kind of reflected my experience, and it went viral. It was something about having teenagers, and it went viral. So, I learned, eventually, that it’s the relatability that works in that medium, and that’s what leads people to share and follow you and that sort of thing. So, because it’s relatability, it’s going to be about my life or about things that happen in my life.
And, yeah, there’s definitely a performance aspect. Not for everything. I do lists of things I’ve apologized to my wife for, and they’re deadpan— so that’s definitely a performance, because I’m recording myself, and it’s not the way I normally talk in real life.
BOWDOIN: I know that domestic life has been fodder for satire and humor for a very long time— people like James Thurber and Erma Bombeck and others. What do you think it is, besides the relatability, that makes it so funny to tell a story about your mom or your kid or your spouse? Why is it so inherently attractive to other humans?
LEIGHTON: I think it’s just that it’s such a big part of life, right? Like, the stuff I do about raising kids and being married, that’s a huge part of life, so you’re going to have a lot of experiences, and some of them are going to be funny, some of them are going to be frustrating. There’s just a lot to draw from. And what I’ve found with a lot of content is just how universal some of these little things are—for instance, maybe it drives you crazy how your husband, like, the sounds he makes when he eats cereal or whatever.
And you might think, “That’s just him,” or “That’s just our relationship.” But then, in a TikTok environment, you have a thousand people jumping in, “Oh, my gosh, that’s the same exact conversation I had with my husband.” There’s something special about people having a shared experience.
ELSON: I think that’s true. I feel like because it is so core to our lives and our experiences—our relationships with our family members and the special people in our lives—that it just taps into something very deep and emotional. It sometimes says something that’s unspoken.
I’ve written a couple of little pieces about my mom—thank you, Mom, for being okay with this! I wrote something about how she would always ask me, when I went home, if I wanted any old things that she had been saving for me. And I got a lot of feedback about that—not that many, but six emails from people I’d never met! And that does not happen to me.
I think there was something about that where it made people think about their mom and
the deep connection that they had with their mom. They were, like, “Oh, my god, my mom does that, too,” but it was like somebody kind of named it, in a way. It was just, it was a point of delight. For some people, they said it made them nostalgic for their mom and it hit on something kind of central. I like reading that kind of stuff, too. I think it hits on something very deep and personal for all of us.
BOWDOIN: Is there a kind of freedom with comedy in general, that comedy provides people a way to talk about things that are hard?
LEIGHTON: Yeah. Some of what I do, it’s intentionally meant to sound ridiculous, right? So, I apologized to my wife because I was standing in front of the kitchen drawer she wanted to open and how that drives her crazy. But it’s kind of ridiculous to apologize for that, right? So some of what I do, it’s not clear who the subject or the object of the joke is, right?
You talked about this a little bit, Kerry, but blowing up an everyday moment to an exaggerated extreme, I think that takes the power away from it a little bit, takes the tension out of it, and makes it easier to laugh at. I went to this wedding, once, where the officiant said to the bride and groom, “Don’t let the little things become the big things.” I think that summarizes some of what I do. If you can laugh at the little things, like whatever happens in the kitchen, it takes away their power and they don’t become these big things that fester, that bother you.
I’m just a big fan of the power of laughter to reduce stress and defuse things.
BOWDOIN: Kerry, what about you, do you think comedy provides a sense of freedom to say things that maybe are harder to say?
ELSON: Yeah, maybe so. I admire people who can do really hard-hitting political satire, and that’s not something I feel like I’m very good at. And I think that when they say things, it provides a bit of relief—and maybe, potentially, with the relief, you get renewed spirit to keep working toward what you want.
I’m thinking about how Hannah Gadsby, in a special she had a long time ago, said something
From “I Can’t Wait to Move Into My New Apartment/Rodent Burrow,” by Kerry Elson, originally published by Women in Comedy Festival Daily in 2018
about how she almost didn’t want the audience to be feeling a release of tension. Because she wanted the anger to be pushing us to do better. And so, thinking a little bit about that, you want comedy to provide people with release, but not so much that they sit and don’t do things they maybe could to work for change.
BOWDOIN: What makes you laugh?
ELSON: What makes me laugh? I like really silly, theatrical, goofy comedians. I love Abbott Elementary, which I can relate to because it’s a teaching show. My friends make me laugh. My partner makes me laugh. I love just little moments of wordplay and delight.
LEIGHTON: All kinds of things, I would say. I don’t have, I wouldn’t say, a sophisticated sense of humor. I mean, one of my favorite shows, for many years, was America’s Funniest Home Videos—you know, physical comedy and just silly things that happen in real life. With TikTok or Instagram, I love seeing random people with an interesting take or a funny story to tell. What’s so great about comedy today is there are so many voices that have a way to reach people that didn’t exist before.
I love that. I mean, there are pluses and minuses to social media, I get it, but there are some amazing pluses in terms of more creative people reaching more other people than was ever possible.
BOWDOIN: Do you ever get tired of it? Do you ever feel, like, “I just don’t have it in me, right now, to be funny”?
LEIGHTON: I’ll go through phases where I might work on the social media stuff for two or three days, and then not do anything for two or three days. I don’t follow the social media experts’ advice—I’ve always tried to go for quality over quantity, so I post much less often than most large accounts do. I just wrote a book, and I would sort of dive into the book for two or three weeks, and then get totally away from it for a while.
I need to do that, from a creative process, and sometimes you just don’t want to be talking into a camera. Most of the time, actually.
ELSON: I spend most of my time not really working on comedic things. I do it in spurts. During school break, I’ll tell myself, “Okay, you should work on something,” or maybe on the weekend. But, to be honest, sometimes I am too tired to work on anything. A lot of times I don’t feel like it. And sometimes I don’t feel funny, but I push through it anyway, because I know that it brings me so much happiness to just do it. Sometimes I’m writing and I’m, like, “I don’t know, this doesn’t feel very funny.”
But sometimes I will write something that makes me giggle, and I really look forward to that. So I kind of just keep going anyway. It usually takes me a few drafts, and I’ve learned to be, like, “It’s okay it’s not funny right now. [Laughter] Maybe it’ll get funny later. Relax, just trust.”
BOWDOIN: One of the things I saw in both of your work is playing with the absurd—the title of your book, Chip (What Time Is Noon? ), and, Kerry, a lot of your stuff. What makes something absurd?
LEIGHTON: On that title, I have heard from at least ten parents that their kid asked some version of that question. I’m not trying to make fun of teenagers. I’m just trying to make light of the absurd, because, is it that your parents didn’t explain that to you? Or is it because you’re a dumb kid? Or whatever.
I think it’s neither, it’s just one of those things that’s so basic that you would never think, as a parent, “Oh, I should talk to my kid about what noon means.” And for the kid, if no one’s ever said that to you, I guess you might not know it. Stuff that’s absurd is just kind of funny, right?
I don’t know exactly why, but there’s so many text messages like that, that are just, you know, “Did Grandma have kids?” [Laughter] I don’t know, what do you think, Kerry?
ELSON: I feel it’s just a fun place to go, like, “We’re going off the deep end.” It’s so fun to just go off the deep end with somebody, you know? And you have to take it there to make it extra funny. In humor writing they say, “You gotta keep pushing. You gotta make it strange.”
I think that’s the most fun part, when it gets to that point, for a lot of humor and comedy.
BOWDOIN: Are your first-graders funny?
ELSON: There are things that they do that are funny, and, unfortunately, I forget to write them down. But the thing is, I tend to take them really seriously and I take teaching so seriously that, when I’m with them, I really try to just listen to them and take what they’re saying for real. But sometimes, later, I’ll be, like, “That was pretty silly.” But, I tend not to laugh at them too much, because they’re just trying the best that they can to be in the world. So, I kind of try to be with them, if I can, in their humanity.
BOWDOIN: Chip, are your kids self-conscious around you now? Are they, like, “Oh, my god, I don’t want to say anything around Dad, because he’s going to make it into a routine”?
LEIGHTON: Not really, I don’t think. I mean, I get feedback—because I’m always taking notes on my phone—like, “Not everything is content, you know.” The main feedback now, because the teenager stuff started with their funny text messages, but now it’s a compilation of other people’s, is, “You gotta make it much clearer those are not all from us. All my friends think I write all those messages.”
So, it’s kind of funny, but, no, they’ve been both good sports. Generally, they’re just not that impressed with me.
BOWDOIN: Does anything feel out-of-bounds to you? Are there jokes that you just wouldn’t make? And is that just for you, or do you think comedy should stay away from certain things?
ELSON: Well, my writing buddies and comedy people I talk to, we always talk about how we don’t want to ever punch down and make fun of anybody who’s in a vulnerable or oppressed position. So, we are always editing and looking at each other’s work with that in mind.
I don’t think comedians should punch down. I don’t think we have to, and I think that we can do better. The elimination of the punch-down is just going to make the comedy stronger.
I also personally am not comfortable putting profanity in my work, simply because I don’t want anyone to be worried about me teaching
children and saying anything inappropriate. My teaching life and school life don’t really cross over, but I never want anyone to look at work I put out and be concerned about me being with children. So I always want to make sure that it looks benign and pretty gentle.
LEIGHTON: That all makes sense. In my own work, I stay away from politics completely. You don’t have to; obviously, some people are very effective at political comedy. I also keep my work PG-13, because, similar to you, Kerry, with profanity, I’ve been conscious, from day one, that my kids see what I do—and their teachers, their friends— and I wouldn’t want to be sharing stuff that was age-inappropriate or whatever. So, those are the big things for me. And the other thing is, I’m trying not to make fun of anybody in what I do.
With the teenager stuff, I call it “celebrating teen humor.” It’s not making fun of kids because they don’t know something; it’s just highlighting the humor in the situation and the fact that something we never thought about talking about leads to some funny questions. Some people think it might be an indictment of a parent or a kid or a spouse, but it’s never meant in that way. And sometimes it’s tough, especially with the satire and the deadpan stuff, it’s not always clear to everybody that it’s meant in a satirical way. On social media, most people get it, because they’re in that environment. One of my big series is things I’ve apologized to my wife for, and I’ve had some articles written about that. There was one in the Daily Mail in the UK, and because it was being explained out of context, the comment section of the article was crazy. It was, like, “Oh, you gotta get divorced, your wife’s terrible.” And I’m thinking, “Okay, you’re missing a bit of the spirit of this!” So I think the context definitely helps, and the intent. Sometimes it’s tough to make your intent clear.
BOWDOIN: So, if you’re at Reunion and somebody says, “Well, is it fun?” what would you say?
LEIGHTON: I had my reunion a couple of years ago, and it was funny because I started this whole thing after the prior reunion, and so people said, “Oh, I see you online all the time.” And somebody I went to Bowdoin with, his wife was a fan
From What Time Is Noon? Hilarious Texts, Ridiculous Feedback, and Not-So-Subtle Advice from
Teenagers, by Chip Leighton
and was, like, “Oh, I can’t believe I’m meeting you.” I’m thinking, “I’m as boring as I ever was in real life, don’t worry.” [Laughs] But, yeah, I mean, what’s not fun about connecting? I have people who connect with me that say, “Oh, thank you. I share this stuff with my mom group or my spouse or kids, and it helps bring something bright to my day.” I mean, all I’m trying to do is give people a little positive. I’m not curing cancer, here, just give’em a little laugh at the end of the day or whatever, and that feels good, right?
ELSON: It’s been a very important part of my life. It’s been so good. And I do like having pieces in publication, and it’s been really rewarding, and I feel proud, but also, it’s been really fun to make friends. It’s been so nice to meet people and make these connections and just have these relationships with people that I’ve met through this humor writing community. I’m so glad that I have this for myself, because I really do like writing and being creative, and I think I need that in my life. Just to have that as something I can just do any time I want is really special.
BOWDOIN: Is there anything either of you would want to ask the other?
ELSON: Well, I was thinking of a question for Chip. You touched on it a little bit, but just, if you want to share more about what it was like to start making work about your family.
LEIGHTON: I never show my kids in posts; that’s one line I draw, and I have to be careful about. My wife’s been in a few posts, and people love seeing that. But they all have a good sense of humor. If one of my kids said, “Hey, I want you to stop doing this,” then I would.
ELSON: I have another question. You’re presenting your work via TikTok and Instagram. And I will tell you, sometimes I just wish I didn’t like my phone so much! I’m just wondering what it’s like to always have notifications on and always be online, because your work is online. I feel like if I had all those comments, I might go bazonkers, and it would be too much for me. I wonder how you navigate that and help yourself turn it off, if necessary.
LEIGHTON: That’s a great question, because actually, I don’t like being on my phone a lot, and I usually don’t like being on social media that much. So even though this whole thing started with me just using TikTok and enjoying it, these days I don’t scroll through it for fun very often. Because it does take so much time just to reply to comments and create the material. I do wish I could do some of that effectively on a computer, but it’s just the way those platforms work, it’s most efficient to do everything on the phone. So, yeah, that is one thing I don’t like: it does require time on the phone, and I’m still trying to navigate through that. I guess the way I address it is to not spend time doing other things on the phone, but I’m not saying that I’m successful with that. It’s tricky, because a lot of my content comes from the comments and from direct messages people send me. I don’t want to miss a gem of a text message that some parent sends [laughs]. But it is a bit of a quandary.
I have a question for you, Kerry. I’ve written a book, but it’s not like War and Peace, right? It’s a collection of text messages and there are some stories from my family and stuff, so, the writing thing is still a bit new. Do you enjoy the writing process?
ELSON: Most of the time I kind of do. I think it’s been a big step for me, over the course of learning more about this writing, to tolerate it being bad. I think I used to, when I was younger, get more frustrated and have writer’s block, and I would be, like, “Oh, my god, this is so bad,” and I couldn’t tolerate it. And then I took a class, and the instructor showed how he went through the process from brainstorm through rough draft through the final draft. And he showed how he tweaked it over time, and it was really powerful for me. I got to see, “Oh, wait, his rough draft wasn’t actually that funny.” And so, just learning to tolerate it, literally, being, like, “This is bad and it’s okay.” Learning to tolerate the uncertainty of not being successful has been really helpful.
LEIGHTON: Do you feel like you can reliably tell if it’s funny? Or do you need other people’s perspective on it?
ELSON: If I write a line that makes me giggle, that is usually a good sign. Because if it makes
me giggle, then I feel like it has a chance that somebody else is going to laugh at it. I think at the very beginning when I first started to do this, I wasn’t always sure, and I would really need to send it to somebody else. And I still do need to do that, but I think I’ve learned more about how to come up with the premise, in the initial brainstorming, to know whether something has hit the humor mark. Where it’s, like, “I feel like this has potential.”
Then I abandon ideas, too. So I think just over practice, over time. But I still definitely need to send it to people. I do really value feedback from peers.
And in humor writing, there’s a lot of trading of pieces and feedback and stuff, and I really am so grateful for people to read. And I like doing it for other people, too.
LEIGHTON: That’s helpful to hear, the giggle test makes sense. I once heard a creator say, “When I look back at my video draft, if it doesn’t make me laugh, I just delete it and move on.” And I’ve found that’s true. I can’t always tell, but, if it makes me laugh when I look at it repeatedly, I think, “Okay, that’s probably funny.” But sometimes these things work, sometimes they don’t.
ELSON: Sometimes you look at it so much and you’re tweaking it so much that you do stop laughing. And then in that case, you kind of do have to send it to someone else.
LEIGHTON: Yeah, that’s true.
ELSON: I don’t know if that ever happens with one of your videos.
LEIGHTON: Oh, definitely. There are text messages in the book that, the first time I heard them, I was dying laughing, and maybe the first five times, I was laughing. I’ve read them 150 times now. But you have to put yourself in the shoes of someone hearing it for the first time. You have to make sure you don’t lose that moment of discovery.
Alison Bennie is editor of Bowdoin Magazine
Brian Rea is an illustrator, artist, author, and educator based in Stockholm, Sweden.
Amid tectonic shifts in this country’s relationships with nations around the globe, the foundation in international law provided to students by Allen Springer, Bowdoin’s William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Constitutional and International Law and Government, may be experiencing some shock.
New World Order
Much of US foreign policy has, as its foundation, the norms established at the end of World War II. How can students absorb the importance of and reasons for these norms today?
Do they have that foundation as history?
The challenge was evident even when I started teaching back in 1976. I agree that it is tremendously important for students to understand the historical context in which contemporary foreign policy is set. In my US foreign policy course, we begin with a series of historical quotations going back to John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” speech to get a feel for the way US leaders have articulated their views of the US’s place in the world and the best way to protect its interests. I use detailed case studies to take them back to important foreign policy challenges, from the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, the Iran hostage crisis, and IranContra to the invasion of Iraq and the Obama-era debate over the use of military force against Syria. Each case is used to analyze problems of decision-making that have contemporary value, but also contributes to develop a deeper, if admittedly somewhat fragmented, sense of the history of US foreign policy.
How do you teach rules and norms of international relations when there don’t seem to be any?
I’m teaching international law in much the same way as I always have. Students from the fall of 1977 would recognize the basic approach, even if the color and content of the casebook has changed. And I would challenge the idea that rules and norms no longer exist. There are so many areas of international relations that remain essential to everyday life, and pure self-interest should help sustain them. While global media
naturally focus on situations where international law is dramatically flouted, what receives little coverage is the extent to which it is routinely followed. It is true that the US is now raising challenges to important existing norms, but I am not convinced this will have lasting impact.
How do you characterize international relations in 2025? Is it all about the country with the biggest stick?
It can’t be. The biggest stick is nuclear, one that almost everyone now realizes must never be used. We are definitely seeing significant challenges to the existence of the liberal, rulesbased global order the US helped construct after WWII through the development of institutions like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund. This is an order that I believe, for all its limitations, has served the US very well. What will replace it remains unclear, especially if the US walks away from the leadership role it has played until now.
Is there a way to preserve the traditional norms of give-and-take agreements, and what happens if we don’t?
I have always felt that international agreements succeed and can be sustained over time only if they are carefully designed and address directly the interests of the signatories. In that respect, I’ve always been a realist and very much respect the work of seasoned diplomats who struggle to negotiate and reach agreement on very difficult issues like those we face today. It is crucial that international agreements include reasonable enforcement mechanisms to make violations transparent and costly. Nowhere is this more evident than in the current negotiations to end
Russia’s war in Ukraine. If we are serious about constructing a durable peace, there will have to be robust security guarantees built into the agreement to ensure that Russian aggression against Ukraine does not begin again, and perhaps spread to other parts of Europe, once Russia’s depleted armed forces are rebuilt. Given Russia’s role in starting the conflict and the tremendous damage it has inflicted on the people and territory of Ukraine, it is understandable that many feel that some form of reparation should be included in any peace agreement. While I share that sentiment, I am afraid that this will likely prove to be non-negotiable, especially in the current political climate.
What are your thoughts as you conclude your long career at Bowdoin?
We are moving into a world so different from the one that existed when I came to Bowdoin, when my biggest technological challenge was mastering Grace Lott’s mimeo machine. Computers were something only Myron Curtis understood, cell phones were not widely available, and I had heard nothing of what would become the internet. Looking back, I have had a wonderful opportunity to work with some amazing students and hopefully play some small role in helping them become the critically informed citizens upon which we will all depend.
Allen Springer, who will retire next year after fifty years at Bowdoin, has taught courses in international law and organization, international environmental policy, international humanitarian law, and US foreign policy.
For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.
Whispering Pines
A Sky Filled with Stars
Fifteen years after graduation, two of Bowdoin’s most famous alumni formed an enduring friendship.
THE YEAR 2025 is filled with landmark anniversaries for the Class of 1825, a class that featured many luminaries, perhaps none more famous than the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. The July 14, 1875, issue of The Bowdoin Orient reported that eleven of the surviving thirteen members of the class were present at the class’s fiftieth reunion to be inspired by Longfellow’s poem “Morituri Salutamus” and its message that “Something remains for us to do or dare; Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear.” Hawthorne had died in 1864 and was one of the classmates against whose name “the fatal asterisk of death [had been] set.”
The centennial of 1825’s graduation in 1925 was marked by a two-week institute of modern literature that brought Carl Sandburg, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Dos Passos, and others to campus. At Commencement, honorary degrees were awarded to Longfellow’s daughter Alice and to Hawthorne’s daughter Rose.
This year, the bicentennial of 1825’s graduation is being marked by several lectures and two different exhibits [see page 11]. This year also marks the sixtieth anniversary of the dedication of the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library at the College. That celebration included an exhibit of materials linked to the most famous members of the Class of 1825 and the publication of a facsimile letter and transcription about “Evangeline,” Longfellow’s epic 1847 poem.
At Bowdoin, Hawthorne and Longfellow moved in different social circles. Longfellow was a member of the Peucinian Society, while Hawthorne belonged to the rival literary society, the Athenæans. The writers connected/reconnected fifteen years later as prominent literary figures, and their mutual respect is evident in published reviews of each other’s work and in exchanges of their respective published works.
In 1840, Longfellow dined with Hawthorne and the Reverend Horace Conolly. Conolly had been trying to get Hawthorne to write about the expulsion of Acadians from Canada in the 1750s, but the author had declared that it “…was not in his vein.” After hearing the story, Longfellow expressed interest in it. After “Evangeline” became Longfellow’s most popular poem, he wrote to Hawthorne in 1847, attributing its success to his classmate’s willingness “…to forego the pleasure of writing a prose tale, which many people would have taken for poetry, that I might write a poem which many people take for prose.”
The friendship that developed between these literary giants invites reflection on what often happens with alumni who “discover” or “rediscover” each other years after graduation. Paths of alumni may intersect anywhere, at any time— within the context of reunions, travel, business, or what seem to be chance encounters. Many alumni have friends from college with whom they have maintained contact over the years, and these are relationships to be treasured. In other instances, friendships may blossom decades after leaving Bowdoin, as passing acquaintances become close friends, and the wisdom and experiences in their life journeys may inspire, broaden perspectives, and renew an appreciation of lifelong learning. Not only do these new friendships help counter the relentless subtraction of classmates over time, they also offer a “curriculum” for understanding the breadth and depth of human experience: suggestions for books to read, performances to watch on screen or live, and music genres and artists to explore; questioning the historical and empirical basis for assumptions; and sharing in the joys, sorrows, and challenges of life.
At Reunion 2025, the Class of 1975 will have the opportunity to forge new friendships and catch up on the ways in which personal lives have intersected with a half-century of historical and social change. They will no doubt embrace Longfellow’s words from 150 years ago:
“For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”
John R. Cross ’76 is secretary of development and college relations.
A NATURAL FORCE
I was drawn to music as if by natural force. I was playing with The Kennebec Fruit Company (a Bowdoin blues band), leveraging years of piano lessons, when Professor Beckwith gave me the keys to the chapel and the grand pipe organ, a great gift and vote of confidence. It felt like play: intriguing, spurring me on, keeping me focused and involved. I switched from sciences to philosophy, learned a lot from Professors Pols and Geoghegan, took my junior year in New York at NYU, fell in with a great band of younger contemporaries, got into the NYU course in songwriting Paul Simon had decided to offer. One thing led to another in that zig-zag way. I made the substance-addled though fortunate decision to return to Bowdoin, just in case my dreams of music turned out to be fantasy. I moved to upstate New York and lived out the hippie dream in a low-rent, run-down house, writing music, doing gigs, growing facial hair. I auditioned for a job at Sarah Lawrence, and I suited the professor’s tastes. Through him, I music-directed an off-Broadway show and composed and performed in my own rock opera in the East Village in 1974. By then, I’d also been “discovered” in a different band. I was asked to fill in for the Broadway revival of Hair, and a casting agent there got me more work. I toured with Bryan Adams, Dire Straits, Todd Rundgren, and John Waite and did studio sessions for Cyndi Lauper, Pretenders, Tina Turner, and many others. Got my job at Sarah Lawrence back in 2000 after all that played out.
I’m inspired by selfless giving, coffee, and women. I have two wonderful daughters and am the grandfather of three girls. I still write and record, with a page on SoundCloud and on your favorite streaming service. I play solo piano every Monday night at The University Club.
For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.
PHOTO: KARSTEN MORAN ’05
Piano lessons, access to the Bowdoin chapel and its pipe organ, and “a force like gravity” led to an illustrious career in music for Tommy Mandel ’71.
TOMMY MANDEL ’71
ALUMNI NEWS AND UPDATES
Bill Williams ’69 at the mic, hosting The Kingfisher Project on WJFF 90.5 FM, a monthly radio show dedicated to issues surrounding addiction and the drug epidemic.
1962
From the CPCS 40th Anniversary celebration program. Arnie Rosenfeld was one of two honorees recognized by the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS) at their fortieth anniversary celebration in November. The CPCS provides legal representation in Massachusetts for those unable to afford an attorney in all matters in which the law requires the appointment of counsel, addressing systemic inequities and inspiring new possibilities in public defense. Rosenfeld has been a member of the Massachusetts bar since 1967. He began working at the Massachusetts Defenders Committee as its deputy chief counsel in 1974. While there, he handled criminal cases in both the district and superior courts, as well as appellate cases in the appeals court and the supreme judicial court. In 1984, he was selected as the first chief counsel of the CPCS and served in that position until 1990, when he was appointed to be the chief bar counsel of the Office of the Bar Counsel of the Supreme Judicial Court. He went into private practice in 1999, and in 2006 was appointed by the Supreme Judicial Court to the CPCS committee, a position he held until 2020. He has been teaching professional responsibility at local law schools since 1989 and is currently an adjunct professor at Northeastern University School of Law.
1963 From George A. Smith: “Perseverance paid off and G. A. Smith published his second book on Amazon, Kidbits: The Science and Art of Teaching. In a combo of memoir and textbook, Smith reflects on his experience to help
teachers and other interested parties solve classroom mysteries, be they academic problems or some puzzling student behavior.”
1966
Doug Hotchkiss:
“Members of the Class of 1966 were aboard the schooner Bowdoin for a short sail into Castine Bay on the evening of September 25, right before Homecoming Weekend. Unfortunately, there was not much wind that evening, so the captain cut our sail short. The Bowdoin is now used as a training vessel for Maine Maritime cadets and is docked at the academy when not at sea. She recently returned from a summer expedition up the coast of Quebec, Labrador, and Greenland. In the fall shoulder season, she is available for afternoon sails into Penobscot Bay. Our hosts were Captain Peacock and Chief Mate David. Also aboard were Doris and Paul Feyling, Aleka and Ed Leydon, Lynn and Doug Bates, Scot Wilson ’75, and the academy’s women’s basketball team. Our thanks to all the people up at Maine Maritime for making this possible. I hope we can do this again next year over Bowdoin Homecoming.”
1968
Bill Miles: “In September, my wife, Helene’s, organization at Dartmouth, The Rassias Center for World Languages and Culture, was employed by The Immigrants Resource Center in Southern Maine (IRC) based in Lewiston/ Auburn, to run two five-day English as a second language immersion programs primarily for refugees from Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The center is run by Fatuma Hussein, a Somalian who holds a 2017 honorary degree
Chief mate of the schooner Bowdoin with voyagers Aleka Leydon, Lynn Bates, Ed Leydon ’66, Doug Hotchkiss ’66, Doris and Paul Feyling ’66, Bowdoin captain Alexander Peacock, Doug Bates ’66, and Scot Wilson ’75 gathered for a sail into Castine Bay in September.
Adele Brown ’27, Ella Henry ’25, Nico Brown ’24, Luke Weitzenberg ’22, Mark Brown ’92, and Peter Webster ’62 pause for a break during a Thanksgiving trip to Mexico, which included a tour of the Mayan Ruins at Ek’ Balam.
Remember
The following is a list of deaths reported to us since the previous issue. Full obituaries appear online at: obituaries.bowdoin.edu
David Thorndike ’46
April 25, 2024
Robert J. Leach ’48
September 7, 2024
Andrew B. Crummy ’51
October 14, 2024
Wilhelm Haas ’53
October 18, 2024
Richard A. Doherty ’54
December 31, 2023
Owen M. Zuckert ’54
August 16, 2024
John R. MacKay II ’56
August 28, 2024
Alan W. Messer ’56
September 18, 2024
J. Leonard Bachelder ’57
November 3, 2024
William S. Howard Jr. ’57
September 13, 2024
David G. Messer ’57
July 8, 2024
Kenneth E. Holbrook ’58
December 11, 2024
John L. Lasker Jr. ’58
September 4, 2024
Francis C. Marsano ’58
November 30, 2024
Raymond E. Beal ’59
September 16, 2024
Peter H. Dragonas ’59
November 11, 2024
Robert D. Blair ’60
October 19, 2024
Carl A. Olsson ’60
October 3, 2024
David A. Russell ’60
November 2, 2024
John R. Strachan ’60
October 30, 2024
Peter M. Day ’63
October 22, 2024
L. Joseph Hickey ’63
October 31, 2024
J. Stephen Codner ’64
September 14, 2024
William E. Hinkley ’65
November 13, 2024
Edwin D. Bell ’66
September 4, 2024
Dana T. Gallup ’68
May 12, 2024
David D. Daniels III ’76
October 10, 2024
Tom C. Aceto ’77
October 21, 2024
Honore J. Fallon ’77
September 1, 2024
Marie E. Bengtsson ’81
October 12, 2024
Linda A. Johnson ’82
October 7, 2024
Yvonne Swann Simon ’82
December 4, 2023
Elizabeth L. Dreier ’89 November 11, 2024
Joelle Collins ’93
November 29, 2024
Ashley E. Rogers ’01 December 25, 2024
Tucker W. Hodgkins ’05 December 29, 2024
GRADUATE
Daniel L. Driscoll G’63 August 30, 2024
Phillip H. Waller G’69 September 2, 2024
FACULTY/STAFF
Denis J. Corish October 26, 2024
Blythe Bickel Edwards November 1, 2024
Mortimer F. LaPointe November 24, 2024
Joel Peskay October 2, 2024
Sydnae Steinhart November 24, 2024
Barbara L. Whitepine November 18, 2024
Bowdoin obituaries appear on a dedicated online site, rather than printed in these pages. Updated regularly, the improved obituary format allows additional features that we can’t offer in print, specifically the ability for classmates, families, and friends to post photos and remembrances.
More Than Money
Most people create their wealth through real estate or private business—surprisingly, less than 10 percent of wealth in the United States is held in cash. These interests are also likely to have a low-cost tax basis, making them great for charitable gift planning.
Bowdoin has recently evaluated and agreed to accept a proposed gift of a non-cash asset: an estate gift of shares in a commercial building in a major US city. If you have real estate, privately held business interests, personal property, or other non-cash assets you would like to consider as part of your giving, we can help you get creative! For more information about the benefits and important factors to consider, visit bowdo.in/non-cash-gift
Director of Gift Planning
Stephanie Ward Ball ’94 can help you become a member of the Bowdoin Pines Society and create your legacy at Bowdoin.
from—guess where?—Bowdoin College! Bowdoin’s McKeen Center provided lodging for staff (me included), two meals, use of classrooms pro bono, with additional funding from the United Way of Mid Coast Maine. Bowdoin’s food, lodging, and maintenance staffs all provided amazing help. And two student volunteers were a great help. Anything we needed was made available. Actually working and teaching at Bowdoin gave me such a different feel for the school—it works, and works well.”
1969
From Bill Williams: “Since November of 2019, Bill Williams has been the radio host of The Kingfisher Project, a monthly radio show dedicated to issues surrounding addiction and the drug epidemic. The Kingfisher Project is broadcast on WJFF 90.5 FM, an NPR station serving the Catskills and eastern Pennsylvania. Guests have included people in recovery, recovery advocates, national and local government officials, authors, addiction doctors, law enforcement officers, and lobbyists. The show was a 2023 nominee for the New York State Broadcasters Award for Best Show. The Kingfisher Project can be found locally at 6:00 p.m. eastern time on the first Tuesday of each month. For those beyond the broadcast signal area, the show is available via livestream at wjffradio.org. More recently the show has also become a podcast. The podcast, an extended version of the radio show, can be found at wjffradio.org/thekingfisherproject, where both the most recent show and archived broadcasts of earlier shows are available. You can also find the podcast on YouTube under The Kingfisher Project–WJFF Radio.”
1973
Michael Mahan: “Hey, folks! My most recent CD, Cold Comfort, is finally done and now on Spotify as well as most of the other music sharing platforms—check it out. Fourteen new originals, some a bit country, some more folk, a bit of good old rock ’n’ roll, some even with strings! There’s gotta be something you like! Celebrate the new year with some new sounds!”
1976
From the publisher. Margy Burns Knight’s latest book, Who Needs a Statue (Tilbury House, 2024), written with Eve Laplante, looks at statues across the country and examines how and why we choose to commemorate individuals from our history, and who those figures are. The book focuses on deserving but less prominent figures—women, people of color, Native Americans— to shine a light on unfamiliar groundbreakers, pathfinders, and activists memorialized throughout the United States.
1981
David Davis: “I retired after thirtyfive years in film industry investment banking and private equity, so I wrote an interesting independently distributed book on The Economic History of the Grateful Dead, which covers the years 1965 to 1995. It’s a really fun historic piece on the money side of rock ’n’ roll. While at Bowdoin, I took time from my studies to see twenty or thirty Grateful Dead shows.”
From Dan Spears: “Dan Spears, whose company, BMI, hosts a songwriter festival down in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, annually, invited recent Bowdoin grads Peyton Semjen ’24 and Colter Adams ’24 to perform at the three-day event.
Peyton and Colter are founders of the independent band Night Hawk, whose music is inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper. The band is currently on tour throughout the US.”
1982
From an Ohio State Bar Foundation press release, November 7, 2024. Jeffrey Hopkins received the Ritter Award, the highest honor awarded by the Ohio State Bar Foundation (OSBF), at the 2024 All Rise Annual Awards Celebration in Columbus, Ohio. The OSBF awards honor individuals and organizations that exemplify a commitment to service, justice, and the advancement of the legal profession. The Ritter Award is given for a lifetime of service recognizing the accomplishments of the honoree in attaining and promoting the highest level of professionalism, integrity, and ethics in the practice of law. Hopkins is a distinguished United States district judge for the Southern District of Ohio, a position he has held since December 2022. Before his current appointment, he served as a US bankruptcy judge for the Southern District of Ohio for twenty-six years, where his leadership as chief judge from 2014 to 2021 was highly regarded. His tenure on the bench was marked by numerous contributions to the development of bankruptcy law, and he was known for his fair and thoughtful judgments. His public service career includes significant roles in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio, where he served as chief of the civil division and assistant US attorney. In addition to his judicial responsibilities, Hopkins has been a strong advocate for legal education. He has served as an adjunct professor at the
University of Cincinnati College of Law, where he taught courses on ethics, professionalism, and bankruptcy law. He is also an active contributor to the legal community, delivering lectures, publishing opinions, and serving as an editorial board member for Bloomberg Law
1983 Cathy
Houle:
“This spring, I moved from Georgia to Buffalo, New York, and have started a new job working with families to prevent children from entering foster care. I am also enjoying being closer to my granddaughters and being a part of their daily lives.”
1984
From a United Soccer Coaches online press release, January 3, 2025. Michael Andreasen was named a national coach of the year by United Soccer Coaches, the world’s largest soccer coaches’ organization serving members at every level of the game. The 2024 National Staff and Coach of the Year recipients were selected for senior and junior college, high school, and youth/club soccer as voted on by the coaches in their respective divisions and levels. Andreasen was honored for his work at Greely High School, a public high school for grades nine through twelve in Cumberland, Maine, at the annual awards ceremony in Chicago. Prior to receiving the national honor, Andreasen was also named the soccer coach of the year for both Maine and New England.
1987
From Charles “Rudd” Mackenzie:
“Lara (Spence School, Connecticut College ’03) and I were married on Saturday, October 19, at 4:00 p.m. at Saint Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan, followed by a reception
Jack Lawler ’69 and Lynn Gelzheiser ’75 connected on a Smithsonian tour in San Sebastián, Spain. Lynn said, “Still learning (and drinking)!”
Peyton Semjen ’24, Dan Spears ’81, and Colter Adams ’24 at the Island Hopper Songwriter Fest in Fort Myers Beach, Florida. Spears invited the members of their group, Night Hawk, to perform at the event.
Dave Gleason ’70, Peter Frailey ’71, Steve Oakes ’71, Bob Knowles ’70, Bob Foley ’72, Dave LaFauci ’71, Steve Buchbinder ’70, Chic Godfrey ’72, Tom Marjerison ’70, Bill Spencer ’71, Phil Steer ’71, and Phil’s black-and-white dog, Bodie, gathered at Phil’s house in August for a Chi Psi cookout.
in College Hall at the University Club. The Right Reverend Dean Wolfe, who is both rector of the parish as well as Episcopal Bishop of Kansas, officiated. Lara’s father, Richard Mizrack, Esq., a graduate of the University of Chicago and Columbia and Harvard Law Schools, gave away the bride. The Lester Lanin Orchestra performed. The couple spent their honeymoon on Grand Cayman at the Ritz Carlton. They reside in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan and Little Compton, Rhode Island. Lara is a realtor with Brown Harris Stevens; Rudd is principal attorney of Mackenzie Law Offices, and the couple own Roosevelt Research & Reporting, Inc.”
From a bowdoin.edu/news story, October 28, 2024. John McQuillan Jr. has serious concerns about the current rapid rate of scientific progress. “Science and technology are advancing at a fever pitch, but if it’s not advancing in the service to humankind, then that’s a problem,” McQuillan told The Boston Globe. To this end, McQuillan, founder and CEO of waste management company Triumvirate Environmental, has invested $10 million in a new Boston area institute to explore “the interplay between scientific issues and social ones,” writes the Globe The McQuillan Institute for Science, Technology, and the Human Future has its roots at Harvard University, where McQuillan studied after majoring in biochemistry and government at Bowdoin. The institute’s scientific director and cofounder is Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at Harvard Kennedy School and one of McQuillan’s former teachers. McQuillan told the paper they want to promote scholarship and
research that could help state and federal policymakers on a range of issues, from AI to stem cell research. “We need to be able to develop policy to regulate these new discoveries.... There’s technology everywhere we go, and it’s coming our way faster than a democracy can manage it.”
1989
Kate Farrington:
“My public art installation, Future Monument to the Trees of the Public Garden, a project of Un-Monument sponsored by the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, launched to the public on November 9, 10, and 11 in the Boston Public Garden. The project is an augmented reality (AR)-enhanced walking tour of ‘odes to trees’ that engages with the philosophical practice of place-as-medium and shared authorship of the city. www.futuremonumenttotrees.org.”
1991
Lance Conrad:
“Year sixteen as head of school at Chapel HillChauncy Hall in Waltham, Massachusetts. My oldest, Jake, is a first-year at Bowdoin and loving his experience thus far. I see him on occasion as I visit campus in my volunteer work as chair of the Bowdoin Alumni Fund Directors. It’s great to share time, talent, and treasure with the Office of Annual Giving, as well as my continued long-standing participation in BRAVO and relatively recent involvement with CXD’s Sophomore Bootcamp. It feels meaningful to help future, current, and former Polar Bears in these various capacities. Join me!” From a Sherin and Lodgen press release, January 3, 2025. Sara Jane Shanahan, managing partner with
Nina Olaka ’94 backfilling a fence at Strawberry Fields in Irvine, California.
Emily Woods ’95, Emily LeVan ’95, Garrett Broadrup ’96, Brad Johnson ’96, Dave Payne ’96, Aaron Pratt ’96, Jeremy Lake ’96, and, as Garrett said, “a bunch of Massholes that did not attend Bowdoin” (not pictured) gathered for Garrett’s surprise birthday party in Brookline, Massachusetts, for a great night with great friends.
Kate Farrington ’89 leading a tour of her public art project Future Monument to the Trees of the Public Garden, which draws upon place-as-medium as part of Boston’s multiyear “Un-monument” program.
PHOTO: (KATE FARRINGTON ’89) ANNIELLY CAMARGO
the law firm Sherin and Lodgen LLP in Boston, Massachusetts, was named a 2024 “Go to Lawyer: Business Litigation” by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. She was selected for her reputation as a top trial lawyer, influential leadership, and long-game approach to helping clients navigate challenges in Boston’s ever-evolving business environment. Her practice focuses on complex business litigation and insurance coverage disputes. She represents a diverse range of clients, including investment managers, property owners, national retailers, insurers, insureds, and shareholders of closely held corporations. Outside the office, Shanahan is an active contributor to the legal and charitable communities. She has held various leadership positions with the Boston Bar Association, including council member and cochair of the Administration of Justice Section, and served on the Women’s Bar Association’s Women’s Leadership Initiative. Shanahan is also a regular speaker and contributor to programs for Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education, Inc. (MCLE) and teaches in the Trial Advocacy Workshop during winter term at Harvard Law School.
1994
Nina Olaka: “After facing and triumphing over my (and most people’s) worst fear, nine months of homelessness resulting from a divorce and failed business of fourteen years, I have joined the Orange County, California, Construction Laborers Union Local 652 (LiUNA). To join this Union, I passed a rigorous three-day physical agility test where I was the oldest person and only woman in my cohort. As a result of my recent transformation journey, I have also changed my name from
Ebitari Isoun Larsen to Nina Nahla Olaka. Follow me on Facebook at facebook.com/ABCsBuddha.”
1995 Reunion
From a WETA online news announcement, October 31, 2024. Richard Bland has been named executive vice president and chief development officer of WETA, the flagship public media station in the national capital area, effective November 4, 2024. Bland has been WETA’s vice president for foundation and government development since January 2021 and has a strong record of successful fundraising and organizational management. He will lead initiatives in revenue generation by overseeing fundraising, communications, and branding areas, as well as serving as one of four executive vice presidents managing the station’s operations. In his new role, Bland will lead the development and execution of a comprehensive, sustainable revenue strategy for WETA, which serves the national capital area with public television, radio, and digital programming and is the second-largest producer of content for PBS stations nationwide. He will oversee four vice presidents and approximately sixty staff members across major and planned giving, membership marketing and development services, corporate marketing, foundations and government development, licensing, production fundraising, creative design, and communications departments.
From Renata Merino: “Renata Merino, former varsity swimming and tennis student-athlete, has had a transformative ten years of life and career reinvention. As a mother of two teenagers and coming off of a divorce, Renata has come out of the gate in full force with a
INNER TRUTH
Author and yoga instructor Alethea Fischer Kehas ’96 wants to encourage people to experience what she did: a deeper connection to the light that weaves through all life.
AFTER REALIZING a doctoral program in microbiology and biochemistry was not bringing joy, I struggled. During this time, I discovered yoga. As a young mother, I developed irritable bowel syndrome—I sought out specialists and medication, but nothing alleviated it. Writing a memoir, A Girl Named Truth, unlocked my childhood traumas and led to a deep healing. Suddenly, my condition disappeared.
SINCE PUBLISHING MY MEMOIR and becoming a blogger, there isn’t much about my life that is secret. That wasn’t always the case. I used to hold my stories close. None of my friends knew, for instance, that I lived in hiding with the Hare Krishnas when I was two. Seeing my struggles mirrored in other children led to my middle-grade series, Warriors of Light.
BOWDOIN TAUGHT ME TO EMBRACE CHALLENGES. Once we turned twenty-one, my friends and I would sometimes visit The Barking Spider, drinking frozen mudslides and dancing without a care. I have fond memories of plant physiology class field trips through the Brunswick woods to identify local flora. A friend introduced me to foraging for wild mushrooms. My family will tell you it’s an obsession. During peak season you can find me in a hunt for golden chanterelles and shaggy mounds of bear’s head tooth.
For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.
PHOTO: DAVID KEHAS ’96
Alethea Fischer Kehas ’96
Catching Up
A BEAUTIFUL VIEW
International pilot Carrington Renfield-Miller ’06 turned a fun hobby into a soaring new career.
I’VE LOVED FLYING SINCE I WAS A KID. I would always ask for the window seat—now I get that view but better. I love the challenge of learning different types of aircraft, from small single engine piston planes to large wide-body jets. I also enjoy the preparation and concentration required to fly in and out of difficult airports like Aspen, Colorado, and Quito, Ecuador—high elevation, surrounded by mountains.
I WAS A CONSULTANT BEFORE I BECAME A PILOT. At my last consulting role, my office happened to be next door to an airport. I started taking lessons in a Cessna 172, thinking it could be a fun hobby. My first aviation job was as a flight instructor at the school where I learned to fly. Once I had the hours, I joined SkyWest Airlines, flying shorter feeder routes. I had a great time doing that, but my goal was international routes. A friend from flight school convinced me to join Atlas Air—I now fly the Boeing 777 for Atlas, hauling cargo all over the world. MY WIFE INSPIRED ME TO BECOME A PILOT. After our first kid, I found I had less time for things I used to love. My wife asked me what I loved but had never done, and my answer was flying. Little did she know what she was setting in motion. Being a pilot has made me a better father. I might be away half the month, but when I’m home I’m able to completely disconnect and focus on my family.
For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.
bestselling book, Empress, showcasing her ‘come-up’ story; delivered a groundbreaking 2022 TEDx talk on ‘Breaking Generational Patterns’; became a model and brand ambassador at age fifty; and was a guest speaker on NBC on ‘The 5 Methods of Goal Achievement’ about how to break into one of the toughest, most competitive male-dominated industries: venture capital. Renata has shown all of us that you can achieve anything in life at any age, any time, and any place with any level of resources. Renata knows how to make ‘it’ happen. To contact Renata, partner or invest with her, contact renata@renatamerino.com or to find out more about Renata visit www.renatamerino.com. If you are a female founder or female small business owner and want to be part of Blazin’ Babes, one of Renata’s companies, visit www.blazinbabes.com.”
1998
Elena Jackson Albarrán:
“I wanted to let the Bowdoin community know about the publication of my latest book, Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas (Brill, 2024). In it, I explore the symbolic and real implications of the heightened visibility of children in the public sphere during the ‘Good Neighbor Policy’ years of the 1930s and 1940s, and the consolidation of narratives that infantilized Latin America in hemispheric relations. I started my journey at Bowdoin with a selfdesigned major in what would become Latin American studies. Influential faculty members were Allen Wells, Janice Jaffe, Susan Wegner, and Enrique Yepes. I’ve followed their footsteps into academia and now get to teach that cherished material at Miami University.”
2000 Reunion
Lindsay Harris: “My book [Photography, Architecture, and the Modern Italian Landscape: Primitivism and Progress] is finally in press! Information about it can be found on the Taylor and Francis/Routledge website. The seeds for the book were sown at Bowdoin, in my art history classes with Professor Clifton Olds, photography classes with Professor John McKee, and Italian classes with Professor Arielle Saiber. Without their excellence in teaching, and their dedication as mentors, none of it would ever have happened.”
2003
Joy Giguere: “I am pleased to announce that my second book, Pleasure Grounds of Death: The Rural Cemetery in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Michigan Press), was released in July 2024.”
2006
From Kate Sandak: “Nine friends from the Class of 2006 gathered in Harpswell, Maine, for a mini-Reunion in October. A highlight of the weekend was eating Sunday brunch in Thorne, where they were dismayed to discover that students don’t use trays anymore. Attendees included Kristina Sisk Bush, Kendall Brown Reed, Elizabeth Droggitis, Becky Sargent McLean, Molly Dorkey, Sarah Riley, Kate Cary Sandak, Tash Kawatra, and Ellen Grenley McKernan.”
2008 From a Robinson+Cole press release, January 13, 2025. Raymond Carta has been promoted to counsel at Robinson+Cole LLC in the firm’s Stamford, Connecticut, office in the managed care and ERISA litigation group. He litigates
Carrington Renfield-Miller ’06
Catching Up
disputes related to group welfare benefits, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), health insurance, disability insurance, and life insurance coverage. Carta has extensive experience handling a range of complex and sophisticated civil litigation matters. His experience includes trying both jury and bench trials as first and second chairs as well as successfully arguing substantive motions in multiple jurisdictions.
2009
From a Temple University online news story, January 8, 2025. Shemeica Binns has been named head team physician for athletics at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Binns is a boardcertified physician who has specialized in sports medicine and family medicine. She was previously head team physician at Drexel University and Chestnut Hill College and also served a yearlong sports medicine fellowship at Rutgers University’s Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. During the fellowship, Binns provided care for athletes at Rutgers, Princeton, and Middlesex College, and was the team physician for Rutgers’s football team. In addition to her clinical work, Binns served as an assistant professor at Drexel and Temple. She is a member of numerous societies and organizations, including the American College of Sports Medicine Association and the American Medical Women’s Association.
2010 Reunion
From Maxine Janes Symes: “Maxine Janes and Edward Symes IV (Kenyon College ’04) were married on September 23, 2023, at Trinity Church in Upperville, Virginia, and then danced the night
away at the bride’s family home in Middleburg, Virginia. They are grateful for all the support and love from the Bowdoin community and their families and currently reside in Washington, DC.”
2011
From a bowdoin.edu/news story, December 10, 2024. Tired of polarization and “oversimplified thinking” when it comes to discussing current affairs, Eric Thompson decided to start his own news service and make it truly nonpartisan. The economics and government major, who has been working mainly in media and management consulting since graduating, decided earlier this year to launch Framechange, a weekly newsletter that analyzes key issues from different perspectives. Thompson describes Framechange as “a nonpartisan newsletter that summarizes viewpoints from multiple sides of current issues. Each weekly email explores a hot topic issue by synopsizing prevalent arguments from across the spectrum, along with supporting data and links for readers to continue forming their own opinion. Our mission is to reduce polarization by helping readers understand diverse perspectives, evolve their thinking, and practice empathy for viewpoints they disagree with.” The goal is to help reduce polarization and promote a new normal for media consumption, centered around quality information and viewpoint diversity.
2012
From a Sidley Austin LLP online press release, December 11, 2024. Justin Nowell has been promoted to partner at Sidley Austin LLP in the New York office as part of the largest
Snider Glasgow ’16 and Sam Glasgow (Bates ’16)
class of partners and counsel in the firm’s nearly 160-year history. Nowell counsels public and private companies and boards of directors across industries. He advises on a wide range of corporate matters including corporate governance, shareholder activism and preparedness, takeover defense, environmental, social, and governance (ESG), mergers and acquisitions, financing transactions, and related legal matters impacting business and key stakeholders.
2015 Reunion
From an NC State University online news story, November 26, 2024. Siena Mitman, a second-year ruminant health management resident at NC State University College of Veterinary Medicine, was profiled by the school for her clinical work and research in goats, cows, and even primates. After graduating with her bachelor’s in 2015, she delayed applying to veterinary school to explore animal advocacy opportunities and spent a couple months volunteering at the Lilongwe Wildlife Centre in Malawi working in wildlife conservation and rehabilitation. She also worked at the Wisconsin Humane Society as an animal care technician and adoption counselor, then enrolled at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. After her first year there, she spent three months with a team of researchers in Peru working with primates recovered from trafficking situations. She then connected with the National Institute of Health’s Fogarty Global Health Fellowship and took a year off from veterinary school to study at small-scale farms in the region surrounding Quito, Ecuador, where she fell in love with working with livestock and farming
communities. After graduating with her DVM, she pursued more specialized clinical training with the breadth of livestock species and headed to NC State College of Veterinary Medicine to begin a ruminant medicine internship. Though she started with an interest in public health, specifically within animal care and advocacy, she realized she could make the most difference in that realm by working with livestock, by focusing on the balance between individual and population medicine in livestock health. Her international clinical care and research experiences involving various species have given her a global perspective in all senses of the phrase as she pursues a career at the intersection of livestock, wildlife, and human health. Inside and outside the clinic, Mitman also researches key issues in livestock health, including evaluating colostrum feeding regimens for newborn calves and studying bladder-stone treatment methods for blocked goats. After completing her NC State residency, she says, she pictures herself pursuing a PhD in veterinary public health and epidemiology, potentially at NC State, and working in academia in the long term. Last fall, Mitman was named an inaugural fellow of the College of Veterinary Medicine’s Veterinary Academic Leaders program, which prepares residents for careers in teaching and research.
From Ujal Santchurn: “Ujal Santchurn and Maddie Hearn (Middlebury ’18) wed in the island country of Mauritius, with a number of Polar Bears making the long trip over multiple oceans to join them in the celebration. It was a mini-reunion over the four-day wedding with classmates and alumni reconnecting!”
Emily
welcomed Harrison “Harry” Stanley Glasgow on September 23, 2024. Emily said he couldn’t wait to meet his new friend and fellow Polar Bear Class of 2046, Cyrus “Cy” Bernard Albert, son of Zach Albert ’16 and his wife, Laura (NYU ’16), born November 21.
Artillery scout observer Lance Corporal Daniel Terburgh, infantry squad leader Corporal Jackson Lake, First Lieutenant Francisco Navarro ’19, and infantry platoon sergeant Staff Sergeant Connor O’Brien studied the curriculum from Professor Jean Yarbrough’s course American Political Thought during their deployment. Navarro, who led the instruction, said that the materials were “instrumental in emboldening our civic education.” Course participants not pictured: joint terminal attack controller Sergeant Bruce Layne and mortarman Lance Corporal Gavin Davis.
Kristina Sisk Bush, Kendall Brown Reed, Elizabeth Droggitis, Becky Sargent McLean, Molly Dorkey, Sarah Riley, Kate Cary Sandak, Tash Kawatra, and Ellen Grenley McKernan—all members of the Class of 2006—at a mini-reunion in Harpswell in December.
2017
From a Knowles Teacher Initiative, November 21, 2024. Leah Alpher was chosen by the Knowles Teacher Initiative as part of the 2024 cohort of teaching fellows, a group of exceptional educators committed to advancing math and science education across the nation. The five-year program is designed to meet the needs of early-career biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics teachers with access to resources including personalized coaching and mentoring and financial support for professional development, classroom materials, and stipends. Alpher began her second year of teaching at Haldane High School in Philipstown, New York, in the 2024–2025 school year. She earned her MAT in chemistry from State University New York-New Paltz in 2023 and is currently working toward an MSEd in teaching English to speakers of other languages.
2019
From Francisco Navarro:
“Between April and December 2024, Company B, Battalion Landing Team 1/8 was forward deployed on the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard the USS Oak Hill. The deployment’s area of operations focused primarily in the eastern Mediterranean. Throughout the deployment, five Marines from Company B studied Professor Jean Yarbrough’s American Political Thought (APT) curriculum. First Lieutenant Francisco Navarro led the instruction and labeled the course ‘American Exceptionalism,’ since it focused on restoring the significance of living in a large and federal constitutional republic. Marines read and discussed over 180,000 words of primary text driven from the APT syllabus.
Highlights included reading the Mayflower Compact, Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, US Constitution, The Anti-Federalist Papers, The Federalist Papers, selections from John Locke’s Second Treatise, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. In the final class, Marines used primary text to write an essay and deliver an oration refuting the New York Times’ apocryphal 1619 Project, which describes the United States as a ‘slavocracy,’ and the prevalent belief that all nations, irrespective of their roots and governmental framework, are equal in freedom and exceptionalism. Over their left breast pocket, covering the heart, all Marines proudly display ‘US Marines’ on their uniform. While Marines learn plenty of the Marines component of the statement, across the force there is a gap in understanding about the US. Professor Yarbrough’s curriculum was instrumental in emboldening our civic education.
The Marines who completed the course were artillery scout observer Lance Corporal Daniel Terburgh (Midland, Michigan), infantry squad leader Corporal Jackson Lake (Newton, Massachusetts), infantry platoon sergeant Staff Sergeant Connor O’Brien (Brooklyn, New York), joint terminal attack controller Sergeant Bruce Layne (Cleveland, Oklahoma), and mortarman Lance Corporal Gavin Davis (Jackson, Alabama).”
2023
From a UCLA College of Physical Sciences online news story, November 15, 2024. Thando Khumalo, a chemistry PhD student,
is only the second UCLA student in nearly twenty years to receive the prestigious Department of Energy (DOE) Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. She recently served as a Fulbright research grantee in Italy at the University of Padua, completing her project titled “An Investigation of Selenium-based Compounds that Inhibit SARSCoV-2.” At UCLA, she will focus on quantum algorithm development.
“We don’t have large quantum computers yet, so I’m interested in leveraging high performance computers (HPCs) to simulate quantum computers,” Khumalo said. “In these simulations, I want to learn how quantum algorithms can best be used to understand the chemistry of complex molecules, like those used for carbon capture and pharmaceuticals.” Khumalo volunteers for Black Girls Code, a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering young girls of color by teaching them coding, technology, and digital skills to inspire them to pursue careers in STEM fields. Established in 1991, the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) provides outstanding benefits and opportunities to students pursuing doctoral degrees in fields that use high-performance computing to solve complex science and engineering problems.
2024
From a bowdoin.edu/news story, November 1, 2024. Eduardo Mendoza is enjoying impressive success on his directorial debut. Lucky Night, an eleven-minute short film, chronicles a first-generation American college student called Rey who loses a winning lottery ticket worth $215 million and spends all night searching for it in a town that
looks a lot like Brunswick, Maine. During his search, Rey fantasizes about what he would do with such a huge amount of money. The film recently premiered at the Minority Film Festival in Jersey City, where Mendoza picked up the award for best director. Lucky Night has also been chosen as part of the official selection at the recent OC Film Fiesta in Santa Ana, California, and in mid-November was screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival, where it also features on the official selection list. Mendoza has been making films for about two years now, either as editor or assistant director, but this was his first time “in charge” behind the camera. He says he’s both “excited and shocked” by the momentum Lucky Night has generated, clearly a testament to the movie’s success in exploring deeper themes regarding the American immigrant experience. As Rey thinks about what he would do with the prize money (if he finds the ticket!), he decides he would share it with family members, some of whom are still back in his parents’ home country, which is not specified. This sense of indebtedness to one’s community is an idea that resonates strongly with Mendoza, who was born and raised in southern California to Mexican immigrant parents. “I really owe everything to the sacrifice my parents made.” Mendoza says the genesis of the film can be traced back to 2023, when he took a trip to visit family in Mexico. “I remember looking at my young cousins, aged two and four, and thinking how different their lives will probably be from mine, and how much less opportunity they’re likely to get due to their circumstance of birth. Because my parents crossed the border before I was born, I effectively won the lottery.”
1. Casey Stewart ’14 and Wiley Spears ’14 were married on November 4, 2023, in New Gloucester, Maine. Pictured: Dusty Biron ’15, Filipe Camarotti ’14, Zach Morrison ’14, Professor Allen Wells, Sasha Ballen ’96, Dee Spagnuolo ’96, Coby Horowitz ’14, Mikey Jarrell ’14, Dan Spears ’81, Peggy Williams Spears ’81, Winston Antoine ’16, Kristen Hilbert ’16, Rodrigo Bijou ’14, Salem Hernández ’14, Peter Larcom ’81, Mary Kate Barnes ’81, David Barnes ’81, Brien Henderson ’82, Caroline Blake ’14, Diana Lee ’14, Dylan Hammer ’14, Alex Powers ’14, Matt Glatt ’14, Wiley and Casey, Matt Leiwant ’14, Sunita Chepuri ’14, Monica Das ’14, Madelena Rizzo ’14, Sarah Frankl ’16, Tracey Faber ’16, Jay Eastman ’84, John Hickling ’81, and Emily Carr ’14.
2. Wes Fleuchaus ’11 and Hannah Howe (Union ’12) were married on September 20, 2024, in Sun Valley, Idaho. Pictured: Brett Gorman ’11, Katherine Harmon ’14, Max Goldberg Liu ’11, Isabelle Albi Ransohoff ’13, Schuyler Ransohoff ’11, Hannah and Wes, Christian Ebersol ’11, Mark Oppenheim ’11, Turner Kufe ’11, and Zak Kubetz ’11.
3. Cecile Roche ’20 and Logan Jackonis ’17 were married on December 23, 2023, at a castle in the Scottish highlands. Pictured: Marion Zaniello ’95, Dylan Johnson ’17, Becca Vanneman ’19, Phoebe Nichols ’20, Logan and Cecile, Ruilin Yang ’20, Eleanor Paasche ’20, Caroline Kranefuss ’20, Carlos Holguin ’19, Jeannie Davis ’20, Sasa Jovanovic ’20, Hailey Wozniak ’20, Marc Berson ’18, Lauren Weller ’20, and Emma Bertke ’20. In attendance but not pictured: Nicholas Daniels ’12.
4. Viola Rothschild ’14 and Jay Query ’14 were married on July 20, 2024, at the Rothschild family farm on Tory Hill in Phillips, Maine. Pictured: Marc Daudon ’77, Sarah Buchanan Rose ’95, Graham Rose ’95, Alastair Rose ’28, Emily Powers ’14, Skyler Lewis ’16, Margot Roux Lewis ’14, Luisa LaSalle ’14, Jay and Viola, Tory Edelman ’13, Sophia Cornew ’14, David Dietz ’14, Emily Carr ’14, and Filipe Camarotti ’14.
5. Annie Wilcosky ’17 and Joe Schuman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology ’16) were married on September 28, 2024, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Pictured: Sandy Morrell-Rooney (exchange student ’72–’73), Libby Wilcosky Lee ’10, Eric Lee ’08, Joe and Annie, Maddie Bustamante ’17, Lisa MacKenzie ’17, Eli Bass ’16, Eduardo Jaramillo ’17, and Lucy Morrell ’13. In attendance but not pictured: Brian Francoeur ’16.
6. Hannah Hodess ’17 and Paul Delancy ’17 were married on July 6, 2024, at Aragosta on Deer Isle, Maine. Pictured: Frank Whittier ’82, Sophie Meyers ’17, Steff Chavez ’17, Cameron Ogden-Fung Adé ’17, Katie Foley ’17, Thomas Freeman ’17, Kelsey Scarlett ’17, Natalie Kylie-Bergen ’17, Helen Gandler ’17, Kenny Shapiro ’17, Ellis Palmieri ’17, Tessa Westfall ’18, Jono Gruber ’17, Hannah and Paul, Brendan Civale ’17, Brett Hodess ’82, Jack Weiss ’17, William Schweller ’17, Justin Ramos ’17, Brooke Goddard ’17, Sophie Binenfeld Gilmore ’17, Rebecca Fisher ’17, Kelsey Gallagher ’17, Annie Glenn ’17, Jesse Weiss ’17, Marisa O’Toole ’17, and William Goodenough ’16. Celebrate
7. Charles Mackenzie ’87 and Lara Mizrack (Spence School, Connecticut College ’03) were married on October 19, 2024, at Saint Bartholomew’s Church in New York City, New York. Pictured: Lara and Charles in College Hall at the University Club.
8. Cynthia Weidner ’89 and Tony Wilczynski were married on October 19, 2024, at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Pictured: Kathleen McKelvey Burke ’89, Rick Heisler ’88 and spouse Carmie, Annie Sappenfield Pacious ’89, Cynthia, Sarah Kelsik Bay ’89, Karen Andrew ’90, Michelle Dice ’89, and Janice Murad (Northeastern University ’86).
9. Lee Barker ’16 and Carrington Wentz (Randolph-Macon College ’16) were married on July 20, 2024, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Pictured: David Brown ’79, Matt Rubinoff ’16, Lee and Carrington, Suzanne Willian P’16, Deborah Jensen Barker ’80, Cindy and Jimmy Bartz P’28, Christopher Blodgett ’06, and Melissa Blodgett.
10. Mimi Paz ’17 and Jack McGuire ’17 were married on July 27, 2024, at the Bowdoin Chapel in Brunswick, Maine. Pictured: Phil Koch ’15, Courtney Koos ’16, Frank Pizzo ’06, Jack and Mimi, Olivia Diserio ’16, Charlotte Williamson Croteau ’15, Michael Croteau ’15, Matthew Lyons ’17, Martinique Ogle ’18, Casey Silvermale ’17, Erin Mullins ’16, Alana Luzzio ’17, Oscar Chavarria ’17, Kaylee Yarrow ’15, Chester Jacobs ’17, Peter Edmunds ’14, Marcus Christiansen ’17, Gregory
Piccirillo ’17, Nathaniel Schwarz ’18, and Hunter Moeller ’17.
11. Caty Hanson ’19 and Austin Stern ’18 were married on July 27, 2024, in York Harbor, Maine. Pictured: Stephen Griffin ’18, Meghan Parsons ’19, Kat Gaburo ’19, Sofi Llanso ’18, Sara Ory ’18, Maggie Bland-Ross ’18, Molly Foley ’19, Austin and Caty, Bryan Porter ’18, Elliot Borden ’18, Izzy Austin-Green ’19, Rebecca Stern ’19, Nolan Roche ’19, Sterling Dixon ’19, Emma Torres ’19, Peter Cohen ’17, Roya Moussapour ’17, Mariah Rawding ’18, Jordon Castonguay ’18, and Carlie Rutan ’19.
12. Ujal Santchurn ’15 and Madeleine Hearn (Middlebury College ’18) were married on August 24, 2024, in the island country of Mauritius. Pictured: Christian Dulmaine ’15, Aaron Rosen ’15, Tom Gawarkiewicz ’15, Andrew Ward ’15, Elizabeth Ward ’84, Jaime Ward ’83, Ujal and Maddie, Avery Loeffler ’15, Trevor McDonald ’15, Molly Rose ’15, Matt Friedland ’15, Cedric Charlier ’17, and Josh Friedman ’15.
13. Maxine Janes ’10 and Edward Symes IV (Kenyon College ’04) were married on September 23, 2023, in Middleburg, Virginia. Pictured: Pack Janes ’09, Meg Janes ’22, Elizabeth Shepherd Bourgeois ’09, BenjaminÉmile Le Hay ’08, Maxine and Edward, Matt Yantakosol ’10, Ingrid Alquist Kjeldgaard ’10, Sophie Janes ’16, and Bill Janes ’76. In attendance but not pictured: Jed Lyons ’74, Barry Mills ’72, Karen Mills H’15, Ellen Shuman ’76, Mary Tydings ’78, Michael Staes ’16, Marne Gallant ’17, David Roux H’24, and Barbara Roux.
As Bowdoin grew and drew students, faculty, and staff, areas around the College developed—and were developed—into neighborhoods, both for proximity to the classrooms and buildings that were the workplaces of those who moved there, and also to be close to the College’s green and open spaces.
No Place Like Home
The Joshua Chamberlain House at the northwest corner of the Bowdoin campus was the home of the hero of Little Roundtop and Bowdoin’s sixth president (1871–1883). It was originally built at 4 Potter St. in the 1820s. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow rented three rooms there when he taught at Bowdoin (1829–1836). Chamberlain purchased the house in 1836 and moved it to 216 Maine St. in 1867. The Pejepscot Historical Society purchased it in 1983 as a historical house museum.
Longfellow Ave., along the south side of the Bowdoin campus, was developed by Joshua Chamberlain starting in 1907. Chamberlain and his heirs created the residential neighborhood that included South St., Longfellow Ave., and the no longer extant Grove St.
College Park, a one-square-block neighborhood bounded by Maine St., Whittier St., Berry St., and Bowdoin St., was the first subdivision south of the campus. Charles L. Douglas (1880–1964), a farmer-turned-lumberman, realtor, and insurance man, developed College Park starting in 1927. The original homes are all Sears plan houses in Colonial and Bungalow styles. College Park has long been popular with Bowdoin faculty, staff, and coaches.
Douglas Park, across Maine St. from College Park, included Boody, Belmont, Columbia, Spring, Douglas, and Curtis Streets and was also developed by Charles L. Douglas.
McKeen St., one of Brunswick’s primary residential arteries, runs a mile and a half from Church St. to Maine St. It is named after Bowdoin’s first president, Joseph McKeen (1757–1827).
McKeen St. is crossed at its halfway point by Baribeau Drive, named for realtor Henry Baribeau, who raised palomino horses and exotic birds at the corner of McKeen Street and Baribeau Drive. The affordable housing complexes Mallard Pond and Pheasant Run are named for the Baribeau property features they replaced. Henry Baribeau Jr. ’52 took over the Baribeau Agency from his father.
McKeen Street Landing was known locally as McKeen Woods until the 1960s, when it was developed as off-base housing for Brunswick Naval Air Station. McKeen St. Landing contains 188 three-bedroom residences and forty-three four-bedroom homes. All were once a uniform gray with maroon trim. When the naval base was decommissioned in 2010, the McKeen Street Landing homes were among some 700 units of military housing purchased by businessman George Schott.
Bowdoin Park consists of eighty-five homes on Peary and McMillan Drives off Baribeau Drive. It was developed as an affordable housing subdivision by the Portland-based Minat Corp. starting in 1957. Bowdoin Park garrisons, capes, and ranches sold for between $15,000 and $20,000 when new.
Meadowbrook was begun by Allen Morrell ’22 in the 1950s. Over the years, the leafy subdivision became one of Brunswick’s largest and most desirable residential neighborhoods. His sons, Robert Morrell ’47 and Richard Morrell ’50, continued the development, and Robert’s son William completed the project in 2012 with the creation of Alder St. The project includes a College to Commons Trail that runs from the Bowdoin playing fields to the Brunswick Town Commons. The Morrell family founded Brunswick Coal & Lumber Co. (now Downeast Energy), which supplied most of the building materials for the Meadowbrook neighborhood.
Parkview Estates, which connects with Meadowbrook, was developed by Brunswick auto dealer Frank Goodwin ’60.
For more information, see a street-by-street, house-by-house history series researched and written by Richard F. Snow ’61 at the Curtis Memorial Library. Following a distinguished career as a teacher and coach at Topsham’s Mt. Ararat High School, Dick Snow devoted himself to local history, creating an index to the Brunswick Record, an index to every grave in town, and more than fifty street histories.
