Bowdoin Magazine, Vol. 95, No. 1, Fall 2023

FALL 2023 VOL. 95 NO. 1

AT THE THRESHOLD Opening the door on a new world with AI

Contents FALL 2023 VOL. 95 NO. 1

“At sea, you spin around.

It makes me feel that I am a small part of this beautiful thing. I feel so lucky to be part of it.”

—LILLIAN FRANK ’25

20 Valuing the Arts

Writer, producer, and musician James Gadon ’07 remembers a moment at Bowdoin that set him on a path toward music.

22 The Very Spot

Two Bowdoin students who traced northerly routes that explorer Donald MacMillan, Bowdoin Class of 1898, took at different times more than a century ago, share stories and photos from Greenland and Labrador, sometimes from the very spot where MacMillan documented his own.

32 Revolutionary Tech

In a discussion with Bowdoin alumni from three different decades, we talk about the imperative to learn and engage with the revolutionary technology of artificial intelligence.

Forward 2

Installing a President: More than a thousand

alumni, students, faculty, staff, and others watched as President Safa R. Zaki received the symbols of office and listened as she gave her inaugural address.

5

The Reinventor: Christopher Fung ’12 intended to be

a doctor, worked for a bit in venture capital, and ultimately ended up with a career as an actor.

7

Dine: Heather Wish Staller ’05 shares a recipe for peanut butter and jelly breakfast cookies.

8

Hidden Hawthorne: Little-known facts about one of America’s most famous authors and one of the College’s best-known graduates.

18 Telling Their Stories: Peter Chandler ’83 honors American soldiers buried overseas.

Q&A 38 Driving Change: In an interview by Ken Anderson ’68, Dan Holin ’87 talks about his mission to connect financially struggling people with affordable cars.

Connect 41 Susan Finigan Coons ’73 on claiming her place.

44 Hank Hubbard ’69 has a lifelong mission to advance opportunity.

47 Todd Herrmann ’85 connects students with careers.

In Every Issue 4

Respond

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A FELLOWSHIP OF SCHOLARS Dean for Academic Affairs Jen Scanlon led nearly sixty delegates from other colleges and universities, along with two student delegates from each Bowdoin class, in a procession ordered by the date of their institution’s founding to the Exercises of Inauguration for Safa Zaki. Also marching in the procession on a sunny October 14, 2023, were Bowdoin trustees and trustees emeriti, faculty and staff both current and emeriti, and ceremony participants, all attired in regalia reflecting their areas of discipline, earned degrees, and the institutions from which they graduated. Following the inauguration ceremony—which featured greetings from representatives from the town, state, students, faculty, and the academy along with a fanfare and musical interlude composed for the day—everyone joined in a community luncheon that featured lobster rolls, brisket sliders, chili, chowder, and more from Bowdoin’s justly famous dining services.

Photo by Michele Stapleton

Respond Aidan Carey ’24

Love of the Game

I was intrigued as I read the article about the interview with Aidan Carey in the spring/summer 2023 edition of Bowdoin Magazine. I noted multiple parallels in our academic and recreational pursuits, beginning in our high school years. Aidan and I both graduated from Boston College High School, where I cocaptained hockey and golf teams in my senior year. I graduated from Bowdoin and soon thereafter enrolled in law school in Boston. After obtaining my law degree, I relocated to Minnesota, dubbed the “State of Hockey” by Minnesotans. In Minnesota I began a thirty-plus-year career as a high school and youth hockey official, like Aidan, giving back to the game I loved so much as a player during my youth in Massachusetts. After a nearly forty-year “day job” as a municipal and county prosecutor in three Minnesota counties, I have retired and relocated to the Pacific Northwest. I wish Aidan Carey well in his part-time officiating and his desire to become a software engineer. Go U Bears (and B.C. High Eagles)!

Michael Hutchinson ’75 BEAUTIFUL ART Many thanks for the Bowdoin Magazine. I thought the last two issues in particular were outstanding— especially the art and photography! I have a question regarding Harriet Lee-Merrion’s artwork in your “Circling the Stories” article in the spring/summer issue. I looked her up online and saw many of her works, but none of the Aegean type that you featured. Can you tell me where to find them?

Jeanie Rubio, Harpswell, Maine Ed. We commissioned the work from Harriet Lee-Merrion specifically to go with the piece, but she has many prints available to purchase at her online shop, harrietleemerrion.com, including a series inspired by Plato’s Symposium.

GREAT WORK Congratulations to all who contributed to the spring/summer 2023 issue! I liked the composition of the cover, the profile on Safa and how she thinks, and all of the other articles I found very interesting.

This issue, to me, seemed way above most prior issues, so keep up the great work!

MAGAZINE STAFF Editor Alison Bennie Designer and Art Director Melissa Wells Managing Editor Leanne Dech Senior Editor Doug Cook Design Consultant 2Communiqué Editorial Consultant Laura J. Cole Contributors Jim Caton John Cross Cheryl Della Pietra Rebecca Goldfine Scott Hood Janie Porche Tom Porter

On the Cover: Illustration by Celyn Brazier 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.

Jack Daggett ’51

Opinions expressed in this magazine are those of the authors.

SEND US YOUR NEWS!

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.

If there isn’t a class news entry for a class year, it’s because we didn’t receive any submissions for that year. We want to hear from you, and so do your classmates! Email classnews@bowdoin.edu or fill out a class news form on our website, bowdoin.edu/magazine.

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PHOTO: HEATHER PERRY

Forward FROM BOWDOIN AND BEYOND

CHRISTOPHER FUNG ’12

THE REINVENTOR

Christopher Fung has landed roles in independent short and feature films, including Tribeca Film Festival Best Narrative Feature nominee Ghostbox Cowboy and LA Cinefest semifinalist A Little Payback. When he’s not acting, he calls himself a “homebody”—except if he’s traveling (he’s been to twenty countries) or working out (he has run two marathons: a 26-mile marathon in Seoul, Korea, and a 52-mile ultramarathon in Turkey).

PHOTO: CYNTHIA SMALLEY

I found performance art late in life. After majoring in neuroscience at Bowdoin, I did disaster relief in Haiti and research in Zambia before realizing I didn’t want to be a doctor.

Then I went to work for a venture capital fund in Shanghai, working my way up from an intern to a program manager and realized I wasn’t happy in that career, so I quit and took a hiatus.

You could call it an existential crisis. On a whim, I moved back to the US and beelined to Los Angeles to work as an extra on large film sets. I realized how complex and incredibly interesting film production is, so I moved to New York for about a year, did loads of student films at NYU Tisch, did some screenwriting, and finally confirmed that I had found my life’s passion. Acting is inherently an ethnographic, anthropological endeavor. It is generative, explorative, and deeply emotionally fulfilling— to act is to reveal to yourself and to others the infinity of human expression and identity. That’s why I love it. It’s also ridiculously hard work.

Though I didn’t pursue medicine or study acting until I was in my twenties, my education in neuroscience and anthropology has given me a competitive edge. I’m booking gigs, which I think largely has to do with what I did study and how and why I studied it. A profound interest in human behavior has been the common thread through all of it.

I chose Bowdoin knowing I wanted a smaller liberal arts institution where I could get a world-class education, but I wish I had taken full advantage of my experience. My advice to students is to discard your inhibitions and learn and socialize as freely as your gut tells you to. Be free, be earnest, and work hard—it’s preparation for you to do exactly the same in life after you graduate.

For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

Forward David D. Pearce. Town Landing, Falmouth, Maine. Watercolor on paper.

Passions

HELLO, QUILTING Professor of Biology and Neuroscience and cricket researcher Hadley Horch says she really needed some comfort. It was the height of the pandemic, she had just turned fifty, and she decided she felt like making a quilt.

Horch didn’t really know how to quilt, and she had only done a little sewing in high school home economics and in 4-H as a kid. But, as a scientist, she was used to designing ways to figure things out, and she was very used to learning.

So, she got out her daughter’s old Hello Kitty sewing machine, opened up YouTube, picked up a book (she says the Quilt as You Go series is great), and got to work creating.

Three years later, Horch has made fourteen quilts and even managed to push a queen-sized one through the small throat space (the distance between the needle and the right-hand side of the machine) of the Hello Kitty machine before she upgraded. She quilts in all kinds of styles, including traditional, but says her favorite is free-motion, full of curlicues and squiggles and not so much “quilt math.” For a friend in medical treatment, she made a quilt featuring a series of alpha brain waves, the ones your brain makes when you are calm and relaxed. For her dad, she depicted a favorite memory of the two of them lying under the stars while they camped during a meteor shower. Two former students who married and were expecting were gifted a quilt that appears just to feature baby polar bears but hides in the borders and stitching all kinds of science: crickets, beakers, cells, and colorful snippets of DNA. “I’ve always been driven by curiosity,” says Horch. “I like the experimentation of it all, just jumping in.”

Alumni Life

At Home Abroad

Cribstone quilt by the Cribstone Bridge in Harpswell, Maine.

Some thirty paintings by artist and retired diplomat David Pearce ’72 featured in a recent exhibition at the Thos. Moser gallery in Freeport. The works were created both at home in Maine and during various overseas postings, says Pearce, a thirty-five-year veteran of the US Foreign Service. The show included an original watercolor of Massachusetts Hall, on display for the first time.

“Bowdoin’s impact on my life has been profound,” adds Pearce, who majored in classics. “I gained a portal to wider worlds.” After spending a semester in Rome, Pearce realized how much he loved living abroad. “It made you more alive to everyday things, because you have to actively think about it when you’re operating in another language and culture. That experience set me on a course to journalism and then to the Foreign Service.”

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PHOTOS: (PAINTING) DAVID D. PEARCE; (QUILT) HADLEY HORCH

Dine

PB&J Breakfast Cookies Recipe by Heather Wish Staller ’05 Staller, who describes herself as “the mom of two opinionated little boys,” believes that even very young children can help in the kitchen and learn to cook and enjoy healthy food. In this recipe, adapted from her book Kid Kitchen, she offers suggestions for substitutes to help every family: you can swap applesauce for the bananas, almond or another nut butter for the peanut butter (or even tahini), and a gluten-free blend for the flour.

2 very ripe bananas ⅓ cup smooth peanut butter ¼ cup maple syrup or honey 1 large egg 2 teaspoons vanilla extract ½ teaspoon cinnamon ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon baking powder ¾ cup whole wheat flour or 1 cup all-purpose flour 1 cup rolled oats 2 tablespoons jam or jelly

DID YOU KNOW? It’s not uncommon for schools to be nut-free because of a growing awareness and rate of peanut allergies, but some people avoid PB&J for another reason: arachibutyrophobia, the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth.

Preheat the oven to 350° F. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.

In a large bowl, mash the bananas with a sturdy whisk or a fork.

Once the bananas are well mashed, add the peanut butter, maple syrup or honey, egg, and vanilla. Whisk until well combined.

Add the cinnamon, salt, and baking powder, and whisk again to combine. Add the flour and oats, and use a rubber spatula or large spoon to stir until the flour is just mixed in.

Using a large cookie scoop or a ¼ cup measuring cup, make ten mounds of the sticky dough on the baking sheet. Spoon about ½ teaspoon of the jam onto the center of each cookie and press the top down slightly with the back of a spoon.

Transfer the baking sheet to the oven. Bake for 14 minutes. If the edges of the cookies are light golden brown, remove from the oven.

If they still look pale, set a timer for 2 more minutes. Allow the cookies to cool completely before eating.

Food blogger and author, cooking professional, and mom of two Heather Wish Staller ’05 is the owner of Happy Kids Kitchen in Swampscott, Massachusetts. Find recipes at happykidskitchen.com.

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Forward

Longfellow, who served as a pallbearer at Hawthorne’s funeral, summered regularly in the Massachusetts town of Nahant, and it is there that he wrote “The Bells of Lynn” in Hawthorne’s honor.

Hawthorne lived with his mother and two sisters in Raymond, Maine, from age nine until he returned to Salem for school as a teen. The house, now owned by the Hawthorne Community Association, is on the National Register of Historic Places. A rock in nearby Dingley Brook, said to be one of his favorite fishing spots, is still known as Hawthorne’s Rock.

It is said, but not proven, that Hawthorne changed his family’s name to avoid association with his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne, a judge in the notorious Salem witch trials.

Did You Know?

Hidden Hawthorne Little-known facts about one of America’s most famous authors and one of the College’s best-known graduates.

Illustration by Mark Hoffmann Ask any Bowdoin graduate about Nathaniel Hawthorne, and they’ll almost certainly be able to credit him with The Scarlet Letter and maybe others, tell you that Hawthorne was a classmate of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, know that he was a member of the Class of 1825, and probably also remember that he was good friends with Franklin Pierce, Class of 1824 and so far the only Bowdoin alum to be President of the United States.

What they might not know is that Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on the Fourth of July, or that his sea-captain father died while he was away at sea when Nathaniel was just four years old.

Famously handsome (his friends told of a woman stopping in her tracks to ask, “Is he a man or an angel?”) and just as famously shy, he was a customhouse worker and US consul to Liverpool, England, and he was devoted to his wife, the former Sophia Peabody, whom he called “dove.”

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Franklin Pierce and Hawthorne traveled together to New Hampshire in the spring of 1864.

After a dinner of tea and toast, Hawthorne retired early. When Pierce went to check on him later in the night, he found him dead in his hotel bed, just a few weeks shy of his sixtieth birthday.

His daughter Rose became a Catholic nun, Mother Mary Alphonsa, a founder of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne.

Herman Melville was a great admirer of Hawthorne. He dedicated Moby-Dick to him and described him as “the American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in literature, the largest brain with the largest heart.”

The Hawthorne family lived in Lenox, Massachusetts, for just a year and a half, and Hawthorne reputedly hated it there, but his stamp on the area is permanent: he coined the term “Tanglewood” with his Tanglewood Tales.

Not able to survive on earnings from his writing until 1851, Hawthorne worked at the Custom House in Salem. Fired from that appointment when Zachary Taylor became president in 1849, he wrote The Scarlet Letter, with an introduction called “The Custom-House.”

The original corrected page proofs for The Scarlet Letter were auctioned by Christie’s in June 2023 and sold for $693,000.

Hawthorne’s slim, little-known account of taking care of his son while his wife and daughters were away, Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny, by Papa, was published in 2003 with an introduction by novelist Paul Auster. Auster describes him in the book as “the shyest and most reclusive of men, known for his habit of hiding behind rocks and trees to avoid talking to people he knew.”

Forward On the Shelf Et C’est Ainsi Que Nous Vivrons DOUGLAS KENNEDY ’76

(Belfond, 2023) Kennedy’s twenty-seventh book, Flyover, in English, is a huge hit in France, receiving a nearly full-page excellent review in Le Monde and riding high in the bestseller lists. Kennedy’s work has been translated into twenty-two languages, and in 2007 he received the French decoration of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His first play in many years, La Bonne Erreur (The Right Mistake), will premiere at Theatre Marigny in Paris in September 2024.

Wars Civil and Great: The American Experience in the Civil War and World War I

Charm Offensive: Commodifying Femininity in Postwar France

Edited by David J. Silbey and

KELLY RICCIARDI COLVIN ’01

KANISORN

(University of Toronto Press, 2023)

WONGSRICHANALAI ’03

Tradition

Passing the Duck If there is an animal mascot for the kind of commitment to meticulous planning needed to keep Bowdoin Dining ready for anything (on top of serving more than five thousand meals every day during the academic year), it just might be a duck. Through power outages and other unseen calamities, Ken Cardone, who retired last year after thirty-three years with dining services, was known for having back-up plans for the back-up plans, and he became famous early on for saying during menu meetings, “Make sure you have your ducks in a row!”

He said it so often, Doug Pollock, head chef at the time, festooned to a board three rubber ducks he found at a yard sale and presented the cheeky gift to Cardone so that he might always be reminded of his credo. “I’ll admit I used that phrase more than a few times to make my point,” said Cardone, who remembers receiving the ducks after Thorne Hall was completed in 2000.

The ducks remain, passed like an inspiring yellow torch to new executive director Ryan Miller. Pollock was pleased to learn the ducks still represent the alwaysnimble operation. “We need tradition,” he said. “We’re lost without it.”

Above: Passed down from Ken Cardone, the “ducks in a row” sculpture reminds Executive Director Ryan Miller of the power of organization.

(University Press of Kansas, 2023)

Inauguration

LOCAL COLOR

Whitey’s Legacy

Culture by Design: The Discovery Process as a New Way for Schools

JIM HUGHES ’67

MALCOLM GAULD ’76

(Barringer Publishing, 2023)

(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2023)

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Just after the community lunch to celebrate the inauguration of Bowdoin’s new president, Safa Zaki, students and others on campus for the festivities planted flowering bulbs together. Eighty-five tulips, some of them purple peony double tulips and some the heirloom Mount Tacoma variety, were chosen for the bed, located near the polar bear sculpture at Whittier Field.

Growing up to eighteen inches tall, the flowers will bloom in late spring and are bee friendly. Since tulip bulbs are also notoriously attractive to squirrels, grounds and landscaping manager Shawn Robishaw says the bulbs were planted with seashells, “which works great.”

PHOTO: RYAN MILLER

Outdoors

Catch and Release

The Lineman in its original spot.

Students learn the art of fly-fishing on the Kennebec River.

ONE SATURDAY at the start of autumn, biology and biochemistry lab instructor Kate Farnham met a group of students at the Kennebec River’s East Outlet in northern Maine to take in a day of fly-fishing.

For most of the students, it was their first attempt at the sport. Farnham has been at it for twenty years; she’s a certified fly-casting instructor and registered Maine fishing guide. “What an amazing day, and a great opportunity to share with students one of the most precious wilderness places—truly the crown jewel of salmon and trout fishing in Maine,” Farnham said about the trip she led for the Bowdoin Outing Club, an all-day affair wading through the cold, clear river, and casting, catching, celebrating, and releasing fish back to the wild.

Catch and release, she added, is important “because I want to be able to teach the next generation to fish and enjoy some of the large fish I have had the luxury of catching. They’re beautiful—when you get them out of the water, they look at you with beautiful onyx-colored eyes.”

Farnham said she made the decision at age thirty to pick up three new skills: fly-fishing, guitar, and Italian. These days, she said, “I can play a couple of chords on the guitar, I can speak a little Italian, and I have become addicted to fly-fishing.”

She loves the connections she makes with fellow fly-fishers, the “challenge and grounding” that the activity provides, the hours she spends outside, and the way it requires she tune in to the environment.

“It is not just making the perfect cast and catching a salmon. You have to observe everything around you,” she said. “You get to a body of water, you note the insects flying around, you turn over rocks to look for the aquatic invertebrates that the fish eat [to match your fly to the prey]. It’s very science-y.”

Students with Farnham’s dog, Chase, at the Kennebec River’s East Outlet.

PHOTOS: (FLY-FISHING) KATE FARNHAM; (THE LINEMAN) GEORGE J. MITCHELL DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES

Campus Life

OUTSTANDING IN HIS FIELD After more than sixty years at Bowdoin, The Lineman, a life-size representation of a football player crouched and ready for action, is finally out standing in his field. For those of you keeping score, it’s the fourth and what would seem to be the winningest move yet. The statue, carved for the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games by American painter and sculptor William Zorach H’58, did a victory lap around the country, traveling from exhibit to exhibit, until it was presented by the artist to the College in 1960. It originally stood in the Museum of Art rotunda before taking a position outside Morrell Gymnasium for more than forty years. When the Peter Buck Center for Health and Fitness was added to the Morrell complex in 2009, a new game plan was needed, and a plaza was built for The Lineman at the north end of Farley Field House, where the statue cast his watchful gaze up Coffin Street. This summer, the line of scrimmage was moved again, this time to Whittier Field, where The Lineman is in the pocket where he belongs, at the north side of the west end zone.

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Forward Environment

Going Green to Cut the Grass Bowdoin facilities staff recently did their bit for the environment when they opted to replace the College’s diesel lawn mower with an electric model that’s augmented by solar power.

THE MEAN GREEN EVO 74 is described as the industry’s largest electric zero-turn mower (meaning it can turn on a dime).

The battery, which can produce up to eight hours of continuous mowing, is supplemented by a solar panel that adds an extra thirty minutes of life daily. It can operate on a 20-degree slope and cover fifty acres a day. Performancewise, it’s comparable to a large diesel mower, says Bowdoin equipment technician Dana Greindl.

Last year, he was tasked with finding a machine that would support the bulk of the mowing requirements within the interior areas of the campus to replace the diesel mower that grounds staff were using. “After witnessing a demonstration of the Mean Green on the College grounds,” says Greindl, “it was clearly the best candidate. The ride and controls are very much the same as gas-powered zero-turn mowers, so there was little training required. Also, they’re significantly quieter to operate, so no ear defenders needed!” Once the local John Deere dealership started to stock the Mean Green, explains Greindl, it made it an even easier choice.

Mean Green EVO 74 in action.

Academics

MERGING SCIENCE AND ART After Visiting Artist Barbara Putnam led a workshop about seals in a Printmaking I class last spring, the students created informative art books about four North Atlantic species: harbor, grey, hooded, and harp seals.

Professor Mary Hart gave them the freedom to focus on any theme related to the animals, and the groups chose to examine how seals interact with their environment or the threats they face.

The final black-and-white prints vibrate with movement, suggesting the shifting play of light and color in the sea. One seal swims through a wavy kelp forest. Another chases ornate fish. A seal skeleton floating in trash warns us of our wasteful ways.

Putnam, who collaborates with marine scientists, will share the art books at upcoming marine mammal conferences.

The students “were interested in the overlap between science and art,” Hart said. They saw their prints as “a way to say something about climate change and how it is affecting the environment around them.”

Most chose themes reflecting our embrace of nature and instincts to take care of it. “Many of the students didn’t want to be dark,” Hart said.

“They’re tired of apocalyptic world views. The project made them feel good, for their audience and themselves.”

Sophomore Sam Stevenson’s print reflects the research she did into seal prey. “I took some creative liberties with it!” she said. She added that she appreciated knowing her intended audience. “It was cool that we were making art for scientists to see. I am interested in communicating science and scientific messages through art.”

Above: Print by Samantha Stevenson ’26.

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PHOTOS: (MOWER) MEAN GREEN PRODUCTS; (PRINT) SAMANTHA STEVENSON

Arts

The Art of Tradition The annual Student Night at the Museum has become a highly anticipated event on campus.

On a September evening, more than 650 students enjoyed refreshments in the lobby and walked through the galleries to review the latest exhibitions. Here, two students are looking at Ghada, by Shirin Neshat, part of People Watching: Contemporary Photography since 1965.

PHOTO: ANDREW ESTEY

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Forward

45

Duration, in minutes, of the entire inauguration ceremony for William DeWitt Hyde, seventh president of the College, in 1886.

1st Inauguration, that of Joseph McKeen in September 1802, which was held in a grove of pine trees.

9

2,145

3

Number of people, all men, who had graduated from the College at the time of William DeWitt Hyde’s inauguration.

32 Age of Roger Howell Jr. at the time of his inauguration as Bowdoin’s tenth president, making him the youngest college president in the country.

Items presented to the president at inauguration: the College charter, seal, and keys, following a precedent that began with Joseph McKeen in 1802.

$2.50

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By the Numbers

Keys to the College Officially ushering in Safa Zaki as its sixteenth president, the College adhered to tradition while also embracing a modern and pressing issue of the time: artificial intelligence. Zaki’s inauguration was celebrated October 12–14, 2023, coinciding with Homecoming Weekend, but with waves of activity all its own.

It began on its feet with music, dance, and poetry performances by students before sitting down for an engaging discussion moderated by faculty member Eric Chown about the challenges, opportunities, and perils posed by emergent and ever-evolving artificial intelligence. The series of events included elements of the same pageantry inherent in the induction of Bowdoin presidents since its earliest days. A procession by President Zaki and the officers of investiture, delegates from other educational institutions and organizations, members of the board of trustees, and faculty and staff of the College culminated at the steps of the Walker Art Building for the official installation ceremony, the format of which has changed little over the years. Remarks are perhaps more numerous, though they are in English rather than Latin as once was the case, with the president’s inaugural address remaining the centerpiece of the occasion.

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Professional guest artists at the inauguration of Robert Edwards, Bowdoin’s thirteenth president, in addition to twenty-seven student performers.

Items on the menu of a 1943 dinner commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kenneth C. M. Sills’s inauguration.

They included lobster salad, chicken salad, tomato juice, hot rolls, ice cream, assorted cake, coffee, and spring water.

5

Number of alumni who have served as president: Samuel Harris 1833, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain 1852, Kenneth C. M. Sills 1901, Roger Howell ’58, and Barry Mills ’72.

Advance ticket price for the inaugural concert for Roger Howell Jr., featuring famous blues musician B.B. King and Carla Thomas.

Attendees who waited paid $3.00 at the door.

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Bales of hay ordered as decorations for the late October inauguration of Barry Mills, along with sixteen pumpkins, sixteen cornstalks, and thirty-two chrysanthemums.

1,100 Attendees at the inauguration of Clayton S. Rose, Bowdoin’s fifteenth president, of which 125 were students.

Stonington, Maine

Small World

HATS OFF

Maine

Reviving Stonington Students worked with the changing small fishing town to better tell its story.

“STONINGTON IS on the brink of survival,” Linda Nelson ’83 told the nine Bowdoin students who were in her town for their community-immersion orientation trip in August. Nelson, who founded Stonington’s Opera House Arts in 1999 and has decades of experience in the media industry as a writer and editor, is now the town’s economic and community development director.

Stonington, a small fishing community on Maine’s coast, is being buffeted by the rise of seasonal residents as the fisheries decline. “We have lost a lot of families to gentrification,” Nelson said.

“We need to keep our schools open, our medical center open, and other year-round services.”

For the second summer, Nelson arranged with the McKeen Center to host a group of seven firstyear students and two orientation trip leaders.

She gave them two jobs. One was to stake out high-traffic spots to ask local people and visitors questions as part of a new economic resiliency plan the town adopted last spring.

PHOTO: TERRY DONNELLY; ILLUSTRATION: JING JING TSONG

Their second job was to tell good stories. To encourage this, Nelson ran a storytelling workshop in the town hall to coach students on how to share a compelling narrative.

“The stories you tell change the world,” she said. “You Bowdoin students are the next generation of leaders, and a big part of leadership is telling a story in a way that convinces people to follow you.”

Nelson’s own goal was to hear ideas about how to draw more young people to the area.

“We don’t know how to communicate and attract young families,” she said.

On day two of the workshop, students had several opportunities to present a story in front of their peers. One was a hypothetical account of what they would do to help Stonington.

“Sometimes fresh vision is the best thing, and we will benefit by hearing what you think,” Nelson said. “Think as big as you can. The bigger your vision, the more you’ll create change.”

The students had a lot of ideas, including opening a vocational program to retrain fishermen and improving internet access.

The students’ final stories were about the time they had just spent in Stonington. Jenn Barac ’25, a trip leader, recounted, “I could live here for years and years and still learn something new every day. I don’t think I could describe a community with so much heart as Stonington.”

It’s funny how the universe works sometimes. Someone loses a hat.

That person mentions that in a message to a radio personality, and then another fan finds the hat. This small-world series of events played out in Brunswick and featured Professor of Cinema Studies Tricia Welsch in the role of hero—as told by author, humorist, and radio host Garrison Keillor.

In gratitude for Welsch’s finding and returning the cap and sending along a Bowdoin hat, the woman who had been visiting from Florida wrote again to Keillor with an update and a plea for the host to pay Welsch a visit. While there has not been a sighting of him on campus, the man behind the Garrison Keillor and Friends show did compose a limerick for Welsch on his website and shared a mea culpa for being a bit callous about having written “finders, keepers” earlier in the saga.

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Forward Sound Bite

Chris Adams-Wall ’10

Alumni Life

BISCUITS, BASEBALL, AND BIG BREAKS Chris Adams-Wall ’10 called a lot of games for Bowdoin— but not one of them baseball. Hired by Sports Information Director Jim Caton as a first-year, Adams-Wall, now an announcer for the Tampa Bay Rays, broadcast play-by-play action for Bowdoin football, basketball, and ice hockey, including what he calls the men’s “epic overtime win” against Colby in the 2010 NESCAC playoffs.

After failing a job interview at ESPN because he didn’t know the formula for an earned run average, Adams-Wall taught English in Grenada, Spain, for a year and then worked in communications for Major League Soccer, traveled in South America and Asia, and decided he wanted to be an actor.

His time in Los Angeles yielded, he says, “a commercial for a Norwegian supermarket that I’m not sure ever got made,” so when a job calling college football games for FOX Sports 1 came up, he took it.

That led to an opportunity with the Montgomery Biscuits, the Double-A affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays—“I finally learned to call baseball,” he says. Now he hosts a weekly radio show and podcast in addition to game-day shows and fills in as a play-by-play broadcaster, calling twenty games for the Rays in 2023. “I felt like a proud parent when I tuned to the Rays-Yankees game on SiriusXM MLB radio and heard his voice,” says Caton.

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“One of the most uplifting pieces of this rather grim situation for us has been the support that we have received from Evan’s friends from other journalistic institutions, from Bowdoin, and other places that Evan cherishes, and that’s been a silver lining to what has been, frankly, a very stressful six-month grind to make sure that his case remains top of mind.”

—PAUL BECKETT, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF AT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, SPEAKING AT THE SEPTEMBER 26 CAMPUS EVENT “JOURNALISM IS NOT A CRIME,” HIGHLIGHTING THE PLIGHT OF DETAINED JOURNALIST EVAN GERSHKOVICH ’14.

Support

Fish Tackles Football A generous commitment by John Fish ’82 will allow the College to endow the position now known as the Fish Family Head Coach of Football. An offensive tackle and two-time Colby–Bates–Bowdoin (CBB) champion on the Bowdoin football team from 1978 to 1980, Fish, who was elected to Bowdoin’s board of trustees in 2017, founded and leads Suffolk Construction, one of the most successful privately held general building contractors in the country. This marks Bowdoin’s third head coach endowment, following the Morse Family Baseball Head Coach and the Sidney J. Watson Head Coach for Ice Hockey.

PHOTO: BECCA CARNEY

On View

Grounded in Place

Jenny Irene Miller, Nora’s hair cut (lock 1 of 6), 2021, from the series Where the tundra meets the ocean.

PHOTO: JENNY IRENE MILLER

Jenny Irene Miller is an Inupiaq artist originally from Nome, Alaska. A photographer whose portfolio also includes works made with sound, video, and sculpture, Miller describes her art as being grounded in “place, storytelling, Indigeneity, queerness, and familial and community relations.”

The online arts magazine Lenscratch calls her work “quiet and intimate.”

Six of Miller’s photographs are included in the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum exhibition Iñuit Qiñigaanji: Contemporary Inuit Photography, which showcases and celebrates a new initiative by the museum to broaden perspectives and highlight those of Indigenous people living and working in the Arctic, both in the past and the present.

“We have a wonderful collection of thousands of photographs, taken mostly by Donald MacMillan [Bowdoin Class of 1898], and they capture the everyday life of people there in the many years he was traveling to Greenland and Labrador,” said museum director Susan Kaplan at a roundtable discussion about the new show and initiative. “He never staged photos, just took what was happening.

And that’s so valuable. But almost all of our collection are photos taken by white men,” she says. “And we thought it’s time to start changing that.”

Kaplan and museum curator Genny LeMoine worked with Iñupiaq photographer Brian Adams, whose work is also represented in the show, to curate the exhibition and select new works for museum purchase.

Other photographers whose work is included in the exhibition are Jennie Williams, Niore Iqalukjuak, and Minik Bidstrup. The exhibition runs through May 26, 2024.

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Forward History

Bringing Home Their Memories

Forbes Rickard Jr., Class of 1917

Peter Chandler ’83 is honoring American soldiers buried overseas and telling their stories.

What better place to start than the battlefields of World War I?

Alumni Life

QUITE THE CATCH In a decidedly Maine twist on the old tossing-the-bouquet tradition, Isabel Thomas ’20 and Cole Crawford ’20 tossed lobsters before tying the knot in October.

As a pre-wedding gift to her fiancé, Thomas arranged for the couple to participate in the between-innings lobster toss at a Portland Sea Dogs game, something he had always wanted to do. Front and center at Hadlock Field and with Sea Dogs staffers dressed as fishermen using lacrosse sticks to chuck fake lobsters at them, our bride and groom attempted to catch as many of the crustaceans as they could using an old lobster trap—and left happy as a clam. They work well together on campus too. Crawford is associate director of employer relations at Bowdoin’s Office of Career Exploration and Development (known as CXD); Thomas is assistant director of annual giving.

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FORBES RICKARD JR., Bowdoin Class of 1917, was a gifted student, an athlete, and a renowned poet (the College has a poetry prize named for him). He was also a young man keen to do his duty who signed up to fight in World War I while the ink was still wet on his diploma.

Barely a year later, on July 19, 1918, Second Lieutenant Rickard of the 59th Infantry Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, was killed in action in France, less than four months before the armistice that ended the war. Rickard is one of seven Bowdoin graduates to die in that war who are buried in France. Today he lies in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in northern France, alongside more than two thousand fellow Americans who did not make it home after paying the ultimate price. A couple of hours’ drive east is the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery, where the largest number of US military dead outside America rest, including more Bowdoin graduates.

High school history teacher Peter Chandler ’83 has now made two pilgrimages to France to honor these fallen veterans as part of a project he started a few years ago called “Bringing them Home,” dedicated to honoring the memory and telling the stories of some of the 130,000-plus American veterans buried overseas.

As well as visiting the graves of Rickard and the other Bowdoin graduates, Chandler also paid his respects to a number of soldiers from Boulder County, Colorado, where he lived and taught for many years. Back at his school, he developed a project in which students pick

a headstone and write short biographies of particular soldiers, with the help of ancestry.com and the American Battle Monuments Commission website. Having now relocated back to Maine, Chandler hopes to continue the project with educators in his home state.

“As a teacher, I was frustrated how history was often taught from the top downward, where you learn a lot about armies and generals, for example, but very little about the ordinary people fighting the battles,” said Chandler. “My vision is to bring history alive for young people, and, in the case of this project, I want to bring home the memories of those Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice and never made it back.”

ILLUSTRATION: BIBADASH; PHOTO: GEORGE J. MITCHELL DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES

Research

Courses

Listening to Lobsters

Responding to the World

Just outside the Schiller Center marine lab sits a “lobster box,” a large soundproof tank draped in thick blankets. Constructed by Renske Kerkhofs ’24, it is the foundation of an experiment that requires a perfectly quiet environment to pick up barely audible lobster noises.

For their senior-year honors project, Renske (who prefers to go by their first name in articles) is investigating whether American lobsters make sounds to communicate with one another or with other species.

The creatures are known to make a little hum, or grunt, when they’re startled.

“It is possible they’re humming at each other even though they’re solitary animals,” Renske says.

To test their hypothesis, Renske is using underwater speakers to play the lobster’s humming sound and other “white noises” inside the tank, recording reactions both by individual lobsters and pairs of lobsters.

The hours of careful listening have led to an intriguing finding. Adjunct Lecturer in Biology Olaf Ellers, who is mentoring Renske, says, “The really exciting part is that Renske has possibly discovered a new, previously undescribed sound that is a much higher-frequency version of the previously low-frequency sound.”

Faculty members teach classes in material set in every era— including ones that respond to the issues, culture, and environment of the moment.

PLANT RESPONSES TO THE ENVIRONMENT Samuel S. Butcher Professor in the Natural Sciences Barry Logan “At time scales of seconds to seasons, the plants around us sense and respond to their growth environments, to each other, and to other organisms. Plants provide people with food and fiber; they capture atmospheric carbon, influence the weather, provide clean water, and stabilize coastlines. Plants affect our mood and in large measure define our aesthetic sense for the world. In this class, students lead discussions exploring a diversity of phenomena from the impact of land-use history on present-day ecology to life in extreme environments and the growing appreciation for the role of trees in the ecology of cities.”

YOUTH AND AGENCY IN INSECURE TIMES Professor of Anthropology Krista Van Vleet “How might focusing on youth illuminate questions about agency, identity, and inequality in the contemporary world? Children and young adults move between families, communities, and nations; claim belonging to divergent communities; create distinct identities; and navigate power hierarchies. This course considers culturally specific notions of childhood and adulthood as these intersect with gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class. We highlight youth as social actors who navigate sometimes precarious contexts and (re)shape their worlds.”

VISUAL LITERACY IN A DIGITAL WORLD Professor of Art History Pamela M. Fletcher “We live in an image-saturated world, and we communicate, learn, and express ourselves in a world of visual tools and images. Yet all too often we treat images as transparent vehicles of communication, immediately comprehended and obvious to all. This class brings the art historical tools of close looking and visual analysis to the materials of the digital world. We cover early mass media, including wood engraving and photography; family albums and scrapbooks; the news media; the visual architecture of the internet; social media platforms; video games, advertising; digital art; and AI.”

ILLUSTRATION: BRIAN STAUFFER

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Column

Valuing the Arts Remembering a moment at Bowdoin that set him on a path toward music, James Gadon ’07 makes a case for the arts as critical to our sense of humanity and key to the liberal arts.

I REMEMBER the moment I wanted to pursue music more seriously. I was standing in Joshua’s Tavern in Brunswick, Maine, watching a bluegrass trio perform a song I recognized. The song spoke to me as I sang along to the familiar tune and its infectious chorus. I couldn’t quite place whose song it was, though. If that were today, I would simply pull out my phone, and Google would instantly provide an answer, but at the time, the smartphone was still about a year away from being everywhere. On my walk home, I kept hearing the hook in my head: “Love the One You’re With, Love the One You’re With….do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do do do, do do do.” When I made it back to my apartment, I immediately searched the lyrics online and was pleasantly surprised to discover the songwriter was none other than Stephen Stills. The next day, I walked down the street to Bull Moose Music and purchased Stephen’s self-titled debut album, and it instantly became the soundtrack to my senior year. An odd choice, since it was 2006 and the album had dropped thirty-six years earlier, but it spoke to my old soul. It was one of those defining moments that you never forget, and it wasn’t long before I was on a deep dive into the Stills catalog, including his work with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.

My experience at Joshua’s Tavern on that crisp October night was the first memory that came to mind when I read an article in The Bowdoin Orient discussing the college’s need to put the “arts” back in the “liberal arts.” Perhaps the piece struck a chord since I was both a studentathlete and a songwriter/musician. Despite playing varsity hockey and being welcomed into

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a privileged community on campus, I struggled to fit in at Bowdoin. I felt isolated and as if I had made a terrible mistake accepting admission.

I was in a different world, one where I felt I didn’t belong. I thought about transferring, and perhaps returning home to Toronto, where I could reconsider my future. But, working through those uncomfortable feelings of loneliness and isolation, I turned to music and felt really inspired artistically. I had previously dabbled in writing songs on the guitar, but it wasn’t until I was at Bowdoin that the music really started pouring out of me. I even formed a little acoustic writing/performing duo with a classmate of mine. Perhaps it was the feeling of being an outsider in a different culture, or the

familiar faces I saw in a small town, or the unique environment I had never experienced before.

Maybe there was just something in the air.

At the time, Jessica Gorton opened a café called the Sweet Leaves Teahouse on Pleasant Street. She created a warm environment and offered an encouraging space for artists to perform. On one occasion, I was gearing up to play an open mic night at Sweet Leaves on my own but was insecure about the thought of a solo performance. I told my hockey teammates about the show about a week before the date.

On the night of the performance, I bought a six-pack of Rolling Rock at 7-Eleven and started downing the beers in an attempt to relieve some of the anxiety, but at one point I just decided to

ILLUSTRATION: JOEY GUIDONE

There’s something to be said about the relationship between creativity and a quiet, isolated environment. throw in the towel and not play—my insecurities were getting the better of me. None of my teammates had spoken about the gig in the past couple of days, so I assumed they had forgotten and probably wouldn’t show. I remember feeling so down on myself, wallowing in self-pity while I sat alone in the living room of my apartment, watching sports highlights on NESN. That’s when my phone rang. “Jimmy, where the hell are you?” It was one of my teammates. I said, “I’m at home, why?” He said, “All the boys are down here at Sweet Leaves ready to watch your set! Get your ass down here!” With that, I had no choice. I had to perform! So, I slung my guitar case over my shoulder and headed to the teahouse. Sure enough, there were all my teammates, and even Pat Pye, who worked in the dining hall of Moulton Union, all there to cheer me on. To this day, I still get emotional thinking about that call. I may just have given up my artistic pursuits altogether if it hadn’t been for my friends and the welcoming environment at Sweet Leaves Teahouse.

During those years, I experimented with recording and mixing songs in the rooms I lived in, on and off campus. I also played house parties and jammed with teammates on the hockey team who were ironically into ’70s folk rock as well. It wasn’t uncommon to have Saturday night singalongs, fielding requests for songs by The Band and Neil Young. I even brought my guitar to the Bowdoin College Children’s Center, where I was fulfilling a placement for an infant and child development psychology course. The singalong was joyously received, and it was one of my favorite Bowdoin memories. But after running out of songs and even recycling renditions of “Old MacDonald” and “The Wheels on the Bus,” I ended up playing Bob Dylan and Creedence Clearwater Revival hits to the teacher and a confused bunch of four- and five-year-olds. I also

spent a lot of time on the road, both for hockey and personal exploration, staying in hotels, traveling on buses, trains, and planes in and out of Logan Airport and South Station, and weaving my way through the many small New England towns where the sights and sounds were all so new to me. It provided an inspirational fabric for crafting the stories and songs I would go on to write.

It’s been a long time since I graduated, and the College has made incredible strides in fostering creativity on campus. But I think there’s a real opportunity for Bowdoin to embrace the arts even more. Empowering students with additional resources and choices can help lift the creative energy and pursuits of the student-artist and make them feel as valued as the student-athlete. Students need it. Bowdoin needs it. And the world needs it.

Valuing the arts just as much as any other field or discipline is needed, because art saves. It helps people and communities feel seen; it’s healing and even rehabilitative. TV shows, films, and music helped us get through the pandemic. Actors, singers, musicians, painters, poets, and dancers make us feel human and trigger emotions that can be hard to reach. Yet why does society still look down on the artistic path, and why do so many still feel that art should be consumed for free or well below a minimum standard of living? I know it can be difficult to encourage artistic pursuits when creative industries face some of the greatest threats: low wages, lack of residuals, the rise of AI, and the difficulties of securing health insurance, to name a few. Just ask the WGA and SAG-AFTRA members who fought for the possibility of simply making a livable wage while media conglomerates and streamers chose to devalue the artists who make their platforms even possible. What artists are looking for is

a concept so basic to survival it’s absurd there ever had to be a conversation to begin with.

However, artists are scrappy, and despite the difficult times, I’m optimistic about a future where we can start shifting the narrative on how to properly value the arts. And what better place to start than on the next generation’s campuses?

The arts helped me get through a difficult time in my life, and I know they have been a source of inspiration for others too. With the challenges of mental health, the pressure to succeed in the classroom, and the rising cost of living, we’re at a juncture in time where we need to support students with more artistic resources and outlets.

This applies to those pursuing the arts for pleasure, as a potential career, or both, because how we earn money doesn’t have to dictate what we call ourselves or what creative pursuits we should or shouldn’t be working toward. Academics are important, but when I think back on my time at Bowdoin, some of the best memories I have are creative ones, ones with friends and ones that involve the arts. Those priceless moments shouldn’t be considered any less valuable than achieving an A on an exam or scoring a big goal against Colby.

Bowdoin and the town of Brunswick are creatively inspiring places. One might think that cities such as New York or Los Angeles are more suitable for artistic inspiration, but there’s something about the relationship between creativity and a quiet, isolated environment. Stephen King certainly felt it when he was writing those bone-chilling stories. There’s a uniqueness to Bowdoin and Maine, and I think the College has a special opportunity to continue encouraging more creativity on campus. Artistic storytelling is such an important way of inspiring others and creating change in an unstable world, but not everyone has a teammate calling them to tell them to get their ass down to the show. We can be that call for each other by putting the arts squarely in the liberal arts.

James Gadon ’07 is a freelance writer, producer, and musician based in Toronto. He is the founder of Route 84 Music, an independent music publishing business, and Six Miles Productions Inc., where he writes and produces for film and television. He played ice hockey and majored in psychology at Bowdoin.

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THE VERY SPOT

BY REBECCA GOLDFINE PHOTOGRAPHS BY LILLIAN FRANK ’25, AGGIE MACY ’24, AND DONALD MACMILLAN, CLASS OF 1898

Over the summer, Aggie Macy ’24 and Lillian Frank ’25 traced northerly routes that explorer Donald MacMillan took at different times a century ago, up the coasts of Labrador and Greenland.

Their journeys put one of them on the same ship deck as MacMillan and the other searching for the exact places where he had put his feet and trying to replicate the angle of his camera.

In the course of their journeys, they would not just discover and learn for themselves. The work was funded by grants from Bowdoin, provided by donors, and it would itself be a gift—to Greenlandic communities, to Bowdoin’s Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum, and to the scholars themselves.

Opening spread: Icebergs in Notre Dame Bay, Newfoundland, as seen from the deck of Bowdoin, summer 2023.

Opposite page: The harbor seen from Narsannguaq, which means “the little plain” in Greenlandic. MacMillan’s photo, called Street and Harbor, was taken in 1926 and shows the schooner Bowdoin, the white boat with two masts, in the harbor. The 2023 photo shows the expansion of the harbor and where the rocky peninsula was blasted to build a road.

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THE STIRRINGS that would lead to Aggie Macy’s voyage up the coasts of Labrador and Greenland began last year, in the summer of 2022, when she was hired by the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum to research one of its old maps of Greenland.

The 39.5-inch-by-23.25-inch map, now timeworn and colored the hue of well-steeped tea, was hand-drawn on waxed linen in 1917

by Illinois-born geologist and botanist Walter Ekblaw. He had sketched it at a doctor’s home in Greenland while recuperating from frostbite at the end of a perilous four-year Arctic expedition, led by MacMillan, in search of the mythical Crocker Land. In his neat, slanted script, Ekblaw had written the Inuktitut names for the region’s geological features, settlements, and waterways.

The museum staff wanted to make the rare item more accessible to its visitors, so they asked Macy, an accomplished Arctic studies student, to learn more about the descriptions and translate them to English. “The names are full of meaning,” Curator Genny LeMoine said. “They’re sometimes physically descriptive.

Sometimes they describe what people did or do there, or the animal hunted there. Or they describe a historical event.”

To aid the translation, Macy scoured other old maps of Greenland and cross-referenced their toponyms with MacMillan’s 1943 dictionary, Eskimo Place Names: An Aid to Conversation.

MacMillan was a Bowdoin graduate from the Class of 1898 who repeatedly traveled to the Arctic over his adventurous forty-six-year career, becoming a sought-after expert on the region and its people.

At the end of her internship, Macy had created an interactive interface of Ekblaw’s map for a museum exhibit that lets visitors scroll through the region using the poetry of Inuit place names as their guide. All that work—and all that poetry—led to an abiding desire to see these places for herself, in person.

Lillian Frank’s journey north began with an email last spring from Macy, who is one of her best friends at Bowdoin. Macy found out from the Arctic Studies Program that there was an opening on the two-masted schooner Bowdoin— MacMillan’s own ship—to sail up the coast of Labrador. The captain was inquiring whether any Bowdoin students would be interested in

joining his Maine Maritime Academy crew for the six-week summer trip.

“She forwarded the email to me and said, ‘You should do this; it is everything you like to do,’” Frank recalled—that is, be immersed in history, travel, sail, and discover. Frank, a visual arts minor, was also taking a photography class that semester, and she wondered if she could turn the trip into a photo project. So she applied for and was awarded a Koelln Fund mini-grant from the College to record her impressions of the journey through photographs.

In her project proposal, Frank notes that she would “be one of the first Bowdoin students to return to this region on the Bowdoin since 1954.… I am committing myself to a journey upon the same vessel that MacMillan once sailed, continuing Bowdoin’s long history of connection to the Arctic. In doing so, I hope to form a deep connection with the land.”

Macy was excited by Frank’s proposal to incorporate photography into her trip because she too was planning a photo-based Arctic journey and had received a fellowship to support it. She had proposed a project to her advisors where she would retrace one of MacMillan’s expeditions up the coast of western Greenland and restage the exact images he took. In this way, she would create a record of all that has changed and all that has stayed the same in the nearly one hundred years that have lapsed between the two journeyers. “She was going literally to the very spots he had stood,” LeMoine marveled.

Using a map of Greenland scrawled over in pencil by MacMillan, Macy plotted her itinerary, with visits to Ilulissat, which, according to her translation, means “icebergs”; Disko Island (“the big island”); Aasiaat (“spiders”); Sisimiut (“the place with fox dens”); and Kangerlussuaq (“the large fjord”). MacMillan’s 1926 Greenland trip was one of his more comfortable and leisurely excursions. He traveled with twentythree others, including wealthy tourists, his ship hands, and a taxidermist. He and his party took hundreds of photographs and short films—including hand-tinted glass lantern slides—of everyday activities in the communities they visited: men fishing from kayaks and fileting their catch, women working at a newly opened canning factory, villagers performing

PHOTO: (OPENING SPREAD) LILLIAN FRANK

“Service will be questionable, wildlife is plentiful, the swell at times doubtful, and the food less than bountiful. But here I am, optimistic and ready for whatever this way comes.”

—FROM LILLIAN FRANK’S JOURNAL, JUNE 9, 2023

PHOTOS: (TOP) PEARY-MACMILLAN ARCTIC MUSEUM, GIFT OF DONALD AND MIRIAM MACMILLAN; (BOTTOM) AGGIE MACY

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Below: Masts, lines, and sails of the schooner Bowdoin.

Opposite page: When MacMillan visited the church shown here in 1929, the town was known as Godhavn. Both the town and the island it is on, Disko Island, are now called Qeqertarsuaq, which means “the large island.” Disko Island is one of the 100 largest islands in the world, just fifty square miles smaller than Corsica.

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PHOTO: LILLIAN FRANK

traditional dances. Some of the photos depict women in beaded collars and wearing beautifully tailored clothing.

All of these images are in the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum’s collections. When Macy was preparing for her summer trip to Greenland, she packed camping gear and many layers of warm clothing in a sturdy backpack to rough it for four weeks on snow and ice. She also downloaded onto her iPad many digital scans from the MacMillan archive to use as reference.

Once Macy had convinced Frank to make her own Arctic journey, she asked her if she could also try to re-create MacMillan’s photos of Labrador as she sailed north along its shore? Frank agreed.

“I met Agnes last year, and we became close quickly,” Frank said. “She’s brilliant. She’s naturally smart but works hard all the time. She has done an insane amount of research and background work and is healthily obsessed with all this history, particularly around Greenland.” But Frank, who only found out she was going on the Labrador sailing trip three weeks before, didn’t have much time to study up and prepare. She also downloaded MacMillan’s Labrador photos on her phone but didn’t look at them a lot. She reflected on what she wanted out of her trip.

Growing up in Maine, Frank says she has a “very healthy relationship with land and what it means to be on land and what a gift it is to be on this earth. So what I wanted to focus on was how I was going to foster my connections with this place.”

As it turned out, even more important to Macy than taking her comparison photos was her wish to share MacMillan’s images with Greenlanders. She suspected—rightly, it turned out—that most local people had never seen his photographs and films.

As soon as she arrived in Ilulissat, her first stop in Greenland, she made an appointment to meet the local museum director, to tell him about her project and show him her iPad galleries. She also began posting the images to Facebook. Within hours, people were commenting in Greenlandic, supplying names of ancestors and other people they recognized. The posts eventually reached a university scholar in Greenland who offered his translating services to Macy.

“I was able to share pictures with captions in Greenlandic and English, and people were PHOTOS: (TOP) PEARY-MACMILLAN ARCTIC MUSEUM, GIFT IN MEMORY OF INGER KNUDSEN HOLM AND THE KNUDSEN HOLM MORSE FAMILY; (BOTTOM) AGGIE MACY

“For about six hours we sailed with no problem, with fine wind, beautiful weather, and limited fog. Going to sleep after my watch, I woke up to a small knock against the hull and scurried up on deck. We were surrounded by about five-tenths of ice in thick fog. It was brilliant.”

—FROM LILLIAN FRANK’S JOURNAL, JUNE 26, 2023

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Above: A whaler’s lookout in Qeqertarsuaq, Disko Island. Whalers began to settle the island in the eighteenth century. The lookout in the MacMillan photo (dated August 18, 1924) blew away in a storm; the newer lookout is painted with the Danish flag.

Opposite page: Battle Harbour, Labrador. Part of Canada’s National Historic Trust, Battle Harbour is preserved as a complete settlement.

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commenting, ‘Oh, this is my grandmother!’”

Macy said. “That is pretty amazing, because MacMillan took the pictures, but he didn’t collect the names of the people in them.” Macy will use the information she’s learned to add metadata to the Arctic museum’s photo archive.

“In this way, my project felt really meaningful, because there was a reciprocity to what I was doing,” she continued. “I wasn’t just taking photos for myself. I was also giving the community access to them.”

At every stop of her trip, Macy reached out to local museum staff who instantly recognized the value of her offering. In Sisimiut, a small city situated at the end of one of Greenland’s many ice-carved peninsulas, she emailed Dorthe Katrine Olsen, director of the Sisimiut & Kangerlussuaq Museum. “She responded in twenty minutes,” Macy said, and “invited me to come that day.” When Macy arrived at the museum, she settled in with Olsen to swipe through her gallery. “Dorthe was excited by all of them; I could tell there was urgency in her wanting the pictures for herself and her community.

She wanted me to share them on the museum’s Facebook page immediately,” Macy said.

Then Macy clicked open a film taken by MacMillan of a welcome celebration in an Inuit village. “We were watching it, and there were pictures of women dancing, and she couldn’t take her eyes off the screen,” Macy recalled.

“She exclaimed, ‘They could be my ancestors!’”

The video also includes footage of a small village, now long gone. When Olsen saw this, “she gasped and said she’s never seen this village on film. She kept rewinding it over and over.”

The village’s name was Narswangwak, or “grassy plain,” and it was once located in an area in front of the museum, today the site of a hotel.

When the hotel proposed an expansion several years ago, Olsen was able to stall the development for three years, long enough to do archaeological excavations. But she had never seen any images of the town she was trying to re-create through its remains. Macy worked with LeMoine to give Olsen access to the photos and videos.

“It turned into a dream of a trip,” LeMoine said. “Aggie made great connections with curators and with museums that our museum has not had direct contact with, as well as colleagues we’ve had PHOTOS: (TOP) PEARY-MACMILLAN ARCTIC MUSEUM, GIFT OF DONALD AND MIRIAM MACMILLAN; (BOTTOM) AGGIE MACY; (OPPOSITE PAGE) LILLIAN FRANK

“It was a feeling of bliss that lets the weight fall off your shoulders and happy tears leak from your eyes. I am feeling such gratitude for our earth and the wonderful people I keep meeting who have such a great appreciation for the magic she holds.”

—FROM LILLIAN FRANK’S JOURNAL, JULY 4, 2023

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PHOTOS: (LEFT) PEARY-MACMILLAN ARCTIC MUSEUM, GIFT OF DONALD AND MIRIAM MACMILLAN; (RIGHT) AGGIE MACY

for many years. This will lead to more intensive collaborations with museums in Greenland.”

Frank took two cameras with her. One was a digital Nikon camera, about twenty years old, that belonged to her grandfather who passed away two years ago. She learned how to use its manual settings on the trip, taking photos of creamy-looking icebergs 175 feet tall, a solitary boat anchored in a harbor at night, the ship’s captain silhouetted by the setting sun.

She also brought a black-and-white film camera, with a plan to develop the negatives in Bowdoin’s darkrooms when she was back on campus. But she ran out of time before departing for her study-away semester in Botswana. “When I look at them later and develop them, I will learn so much more about the trip and about myself and what I was seeing that I didn’t realize at the time,” she said. “That is a gift, and a gift for me … so I can experience it all over again.”

As promised, she also took as many comparison photos as she could for Macy’s project before the ship hit sea ice and had to turn around, cutting short its original plan to sail as far north as Nain.

Frank said the trip this summer was healing, especially after some stressful times at college.

“At sea, you spin around. It makes me feel that I am a small part of this beautiful thing. I feel so lucky to be part of it.” And she said she is grateful to have had the chance to become part of the history of the Bowdoin, which MacMillan had specially designed and built to withstand the ice and storms of the Arctic. “Bowdoin, the ship, has a heart to it,” Frank continued. “It has been used by students since the beginning, for science since the beginning, and that is a big part of what our trip was about. Bowdoin has always been used to teach, to foster learning, to show people on it a new part of world, and you can feel that when you’re on deck, that there are spirits there.”

Macy said she’s long loved maps, a predilection she thinks was instilled by backpacking and hiking with her family in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. “I became fascinated with maps and route-planning, and the idea that my ancestors before me walked the same trails and routes,” she said. Her specific interest in the Arctic was piqued by an earth and oceanographic studies class with Collin Roesler she took in 2022 called Poles Apart: Exploration of Earth’s High Latitudes.

From there on out, she focused many of her class essays and assignments, for all sorts of courses, on Arctic subjects.

Reading and studying MacMillan’s journals, maps, and photographs, she developed an affinity for the intrepid Arctic explorer. As she and her companion, Caleb McDaniels ’25, traveled from place to place in Greenland this summer—by ferry and on foot, camping each night—Macy kept her own ethnographic journal, as MacMillan did, and restaged as many of his photos as she could. In some places, she found very little had changed. In other spots, she had to crisscross the area back and forth repeatedly, trying to figure out exactly where MacMillan was when he framed his shot. At times she had to give up, daunted by new development that had sprung up in his former field of vision.

But she was often successful. “Many of the original buildings were there,” she said. And the natural features—the ridge lines of hills and craggy formations that she used to situate herself— remain unchanged. “I really did feel like I was retracing MacMillan’s footsteps, actually trying to stand exactly where he stood, and that felt really powerful and meaningful to me,” Macy reflected.

“Obviously, there were so many places around Bowdoin where he stood, but to go all the way to Greenland, I felt very connected to him.”

Rebecca Goldfine, senior writer, works in the communications office doing research, writing, editing, photography, and video for the College.

PHOTO: PEARY-MACMILLAN ARCTIC MUSEUM, GIFT OF DONALD AND MIRIAM MACMILLAN

Above: Taken by Donald MacMillan in Qeqertarsuaq in 1926, this photograph was titled by MacMillan Eskimo [Kalaallit] women and young girls.

Opposite page: A wooden gravestone in Sisimiut, legible in MacMillan’s photo, Tombstone and epitaph at Holsteinborg, but no longer in 2023. Now a modern fishing port, Sisimiut is on the west-central coast of Greenland.

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Artificial intelligence is booming, and opinions abound about how and whether it should be used. In a discussion with alumni from three decades who work in a world in which AI is not just impacting the workplace but forming it, changing it, and defining it, we hear loud and clear that engaging with AI, the transformative invention of this age, is not optional. They talk about the potential of AI to remake workplaces and job quality, the imperative of learning about and engaging with this revolutionary technology, and the best mindset with which to approach this moment.

INTERVIEW

BY ALISON BENNIE ILLUSTRATIONS

BY CELYN BRAZIER BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2023 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 33

PARTICIPANTS

BOWDOIN: So much of the media focus is on whether artificial intelligence is a danger or an opportunity—to paraphrase Stephen Hawking, the best thing, the worst thing, or the last thing. The three of you work in this world every day and are considering all this carefully. What are some ways this technology connects to doing good?

NEAMTU: One of the reasons I’m building the

Matt Beane ’96 is an assistant professor at University of California– Santa Barbara and a digital fellow with Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab. He does research on work involving robots and AI to help understand the implications of intelligent machines for the broader world of work.

technology I am [in support of home-care providers] is because it has a positive social impact. A lot of people depend on the services our providers provide. A lot of people who provide those services also depend on the paychecks and all the information that goes into the software that we build. So, it adds a very tangible purpose.

BOWDOIN: What ways do you think AI could be society-changing and outcomes-changing for people? What are the hurdles we have to get over before that could happen?

Allison Ryder ’06 is program director for research at MIT Sloan Management Review, where she leads research teams exploring topics at the intersection of management and technology and she is the producer of the podcast Me, Myself, and AI.

Octavian Neamtu ’12 is the lead software architect at HHAeXchange, a home-care management software company that supports the Medicaid long-term services ecosystem. He was captain of Bowdoin’s Northern Bites RoboCup team.

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RYDER: There’s so much fear that AI is going to take over all of our work and automate everything away. What I’ve heard people say is, “You won’t lose your job to AI; you’ll lose your job to someone who knows how to use AI.” What I find interesting about that is that, the more we think about how we can use that technology ourselves—and that might be a really small effort, depending on the type of work you do or what’s important to you, or it could be something huge, like disease detection. You still need that human touch and analysis, but you can just increase the volume of what you do exponentially with AI. And that’s true of so many different industries, that you can automate things that are just tedious.

I heard an executive say recently that they have writers who have gotten really good at writing prompts for tools like ChatGPT. So, instead of just saying, “I’m losing my job because now a machine can write,” they’re reskilling themselves to become prompt writers. I think what’s interesting is that we can learn the skills we want, we can be passionate about the fields we want to be in, but if we think about how technology is kind of a coworker for us, or a support, or an

additional piece that we can leverage, then we can really make an impact. It doesn’t have to be something as huge as health care and saving people from really detrimental outcomes. Even in more routine work or office work we can find some really good opportunities. But you’ve got to be willing to learn the tools now.

BOWDOIN: Does that align with what you have been finding in your work, Matt?

BEANE: No. But it’s what we should try for.

The science we’ve got available predicts pretty strongly that this technology is no different from any other in that it will be used by those who use capital to accrue more capital. That’s not ascribing any intention to those people. It’s just a function of things like our tax law. Absent some big intervention, it’s just not rational to expect this technology, without other change, to distribute gains in a way that some of us might think of as more equitable.

And the technology doesn’t cause harm— that’s the big sort of mind hack we all need to work on. There’s no such thing as an effect from technology unless somebody is using it.

But there are many, many choices around how it’s designed, how it’s sold, how it’s put to use.

I talk about one in my TED Talk that’s very easy to get your head around, which is bomb disposal. The way we use technology there actually greatly enhances human connection, skill transfer, information gathering, the quality of bomb disposal, instead of weakening. The norm is a lot of these things get weakened, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It also doesn’t have to be that we concentrate wealth, power, or status in the hands of a few. But it would take quite a bit of effort to change it.

I try to unearth exceptions and show places where people are doing it a different way, where it worked better for everyone. What would it take to replicate that? We can and we totally should try for a “one plus one is three” solution—the problems are too big not to. But the inertia is often in the other direction.

BOWDOIN: Kate Crawford [who studies the social and political implications of AI] says she’s worried not so much that robots will become

human but that human workers will be treated more like robots. What can we do to make sure we keep humanness in the workplace?

NEAMTU: That’s really interesting, “Humans are

becoming more like robots.” The etymology of “robot” comes, I think, from a Polish word that means “worker.” Even without AI, you would have organizations that were thinking of people as just cogs, robots, workers, whatever— at great detriment to the humanness, to how we derive meaning.

RYDER: Our research has looked extensively at

the ways humans and machines interact—we identified five modes of human-AI interaction, depending on the task at hand. We conducted a survey where a significant percentage of our respondents said they viewed AI as a coworker.

So there is this weird humanization thing happening, but it’s not necessarily fear that these things are becoming humanoid and taking over what we do, but how can we work with these systems more effectively?

BOWDOIN: I think the example about human workers being treated like robots was Amazon, where you’ve got humans doing part of the work and machines doing part of the work and people feeling treated like machines—monitored differently, measured differently.

BEANE: I can speak to that, having spent hundreds of hours in warehouses in the last few years. I think that’s a good ground zero to get at this. That is a function of a low-road approach to automation and has been evident in research going back to Taylorism in the 1900s. So, that is not to do with AI, although we have data that show it’s more intense in some ways with AI. But getting improved productivity at the expense of job quality is a common tradeoff, because to preserve or enhance job quality while you implement automation is a more complex endeavor.

Pick some non-fancy automation, like a cross-feed sorter. Instead of having people carry things from one point to another, you just put it on a belt and you scan it, and then the system automatically directs that parcel to the right zip code. You turn that on, and there are fewer

“If we think about how technology is kind of a coworker for us, or a support, or an additional piece that we can leverage, then we can really make an impact.”

—ALLISON RYDER ’06

jobs available in that work zone because you need less handling. But the jobs that remain, unless you’re careful, become quite deadly dull.

Extraordinarily repetitive. You’re separated from your coworkers. You’re trying to meet a quota, so you don’t even interact with them.

And you get repetitive motion injury cropping up. And yet, your throughput and profitability take a nice bump immediately. That’s a very, very hard target to walk away from and has been since the Industrial Revolution.

Job quality, I think, is really what people are worried about in the end. The stats and the research are pretty clear that there are jobs gained and lost with automation, but the volume of change is pretty low—and societally, maybe healthy, actually, compared to change in job quality—the meaning, skill, career, pay, and dignity that can come from doing a job. You can suck the air right out of the working experience through automation. It doesn’t have to be AI. I am particularly focused on skill because I think it bundles together a lot of those things, like meaning, feeling like the human is enhanced by working in the system rather than degraded. I know for certain from my research that there’s a way to implement automation that builds skill and as a result enhances the dignity of entry-level, minimum-wage workers all the way up to surgeons. But it is not obvious, and it is more complicated than the immediate profitability you can get from just “Buy this thing.

Everyone read the training manual. Bolt it to the floor and turn it on.” We can grind people—it doesn’t have to be manual repetitive work.

There’s a lot of sort of data moving, processing, especially in HR in organizations or accounting or finance, law, where you have people just

repetitively doing some slightly different version of a task. And then, you put in more automation and it makes it even worse for those who remain, not better. That’s a completely optional, just totally sloppy waste of human potential.

BOWDOIN: So, if you are starting a business, what do you do? How do you create the human jobs around your business in a way that’s intentional?

NEAMTU: I think you really have to be intentional.

A lot of times it’s easier to deploy technology that gets you results and you don’t design it with that human element. I think you have to really be intentional about the human element. Health care is a bit different because you always have the human element because, well, there’s the care.

There’s going to be a person you’re servicing, rather than an inanimate object. So it’s going to be harder to take the human element out of it. It’s going to be hard to fully automate. In the home-care industry, people have to go into people’s homes, help them with a variety of different tasks. That inherently requires a lot of skills that I think are less prone to being automated.

But there’s definitely a huge wave of automation happening right now with office work. A lot of knowledge work is going to be enhanced by these tools that can summarize knowledge, like helping people get onboarded, which I think actually will be an overall benefit to people joining our organization, understanding what the organization is doing and so on, as long as those tools are designed with the human element in mind.

BOWDOIN: What should a place like Bowdoin emphasize for its students to equip them for the world ahead?

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BEANE: We are in the middle of the introduction of a general purpose technology, the equivalent of electrification or the internet. And no one knows what the right thing is to do because no one understands precisely what we’ve been handed. It certainly hasn’t been converted into useful applications. There is an excellent historical account of the introduction of the dynamo, where for the first forty years factories just swapped out a giant steam engine for a giant dynamo and kept all the infrastructure in place for connecting that dynamo via belts to remote machinery throughout the factory. It took ten or twelve years for someone to figure out you could make a small dynamo and put one on each machine and reconfigure the factory.

It just takes organizations and humanity a fairly long time to figure out what to do. And education is a kind of factory. History is going to judge who’s right or what parts of their points of view are right. Anyone who says they know may be useful to listen to but is also dangerous, I think.

Personally, I tend to be on the more optimistic, experimental, risk-tolerant side. For example, I have master’s students I’m teaching in a couple of weeks, and I just trashed a third of my curriculum and am going to make a fairly large chunk of their grade dependent on learning to code—from not knowing how to code—and coding up a web app for use to manage technical projects. Almost none of them will know how to code. Ten years ago, I learned to use Python a bit, and I haven’t touched it since. In the last two days, I started from a cold start on a MacBook Pro and am almost done with a web app that the rest of the world can use for project planning and estimating using a

Monte Carlo simulation to estimate how long a project is going to take. I have no idea what I’m doing in a traditional sense, but it’s almost done.

Plenty of people have ethical concerns and are saying we shouldn’t teach any of this stuff.

They’re probably also partially right. I think it’s really good that there are diverse points of view.

There’s a lot of good research that supports the idea that more complex social and critical thinking skills are really important for a career.

It’s all accurate. But not engaging with AI is the new third rail. You just can’t do that. Whether you’re building physical skills and want to be a welder or want to be somebody like one of us, producing knowledge, you’ve got to engage with that tool in some way.

BOWDOIN: Allison, in your podcast you don’t shy away from diverse opinions. You have people who say AI without intervention just reinforces power structures and inequalities that currently exist. Then you have other people who say, “I understand these algorithms aren’t built for my objectives; they’re built for the company’s objectives. But if they come close to meeting mine, I’m good with it.” Where do you think Bowdoin would best put its energies around educating people who are going to be in this era?

RYDER: You might be thinking about conversations we had with folks from Amnesty Tech at Amnesty International. It really exemplified and amplified comments I’ve heard from other people, just on a bigger scale, about, if your dataset is not complete or not holistic, you’re going to introduce bias. And in some ways it’s inevitable, but what can you do about it?

“The world is running the experiment without your consent right now. At high velocity.”

—MATT BEANE ’96

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What the Amnesty folks are concerned about are things like surveillance and why it is being deployed in specific areas—facial recognition systems, what have you—and saying, “This just reinforces these really inappropriate views we have about certain demographic categories, and we’re just going to use this tool to kind of support our own biases on this.”

So, that gets really scary. When you think about what people are doing inside business, the end goal might not be super philanthropic, but if the company’s mission is to make the world something of a better place or is fueling some commercial interest, it’s not horrible. For me, mine is to teach people how to manage and lead organizations better, and I can feel good about that. But we’re also not using AI to make ourselves more profitable like a lot of organizations are—and need to.

But in terms of what you can teach, there’s a really interesting inflection point now between these biases that are inherently being built into datasets and just everything blowing up in the world around social issues. So, you have awareness about what’s important and how to be more aware of things that impact how decisions are made and you’re thinking, “Well, I don’t want to be isolating a group or targeting a group from something with the tool I’m creating”—that’s easier said than done. But I think if you’re thinking about what’s important to be a good human, be a good citizen of the world, and you take that mentality into the work you’re doing, specifically when you’re using technology, that’s going to help.

That’s a very lofty thematic way to think about it.

NEAMTU: To reinforce Allison’s point, I think

it’s really important to understand what are the strong points, what are the weak points of this technology? Bias in the data and bias in all the models that we’re producing is a huge, open, very hot topic right now. But it’s kind of a mirror reflection of how humanity isn’t perfect and is biased, and all of the ways we’ve implemented human systems in past centuries. That’s what’s at the core of the liberal arts—complex social issues and developing critical thinking, that kind of broader picture. I came from a particularly STEM-y high school. I could have easily gone into a program where I could have just focused on the

things I find really cool, like abstract mathematics and computer science, and not really think about, well, who is this actually going to impact?

Both are really important. I think it’s great to be able to have options in terms of curriculum and be able to learn how the models work, how the systems work, have a deep understanding of that from kind of a scientific perspective but also at the same time reinforce that with the other side of critical and more socially oriented thinking.

BEANE: All day long I’m studying what sociologists

would call second-order effects or unintended consequences. However Bowdoin helps students get there, I think it’s important to understand that there are unintended consequences from technology or general societal choices, and those tend to be much bigger and have greater consequence than the effect you intended to create— just getting that idea encoded instinctively. You think you’re doing something awesome, and a common outcome of something awesome is something far more terrible.

So, just knowing that’s the story and that you have to do extra work to anticipate that—climate and environment is a nice example. You create externalities from this great new thing you’ve invented. It’s called a coal-fired engine. It takes fifty or eighty years for the unintended consequences to kick in, but boy, are they nasty. That kind of thinking is really important. You can get that lots of ways, though. You can get that by reading Chaucer. You can get that by doing philosophy. You can get that by studying anthropology.

Ecology. Anything focused on complex systems.

But it’s hard for me to imagine a class now where you shouldn’t be forced to engage even with the raw, messy, untooled version of generative AI tech to try to amplify or extend your creativity—try to build something, to support it, even if it’s just reading Shakespeare.

How could you use ChatGPT or some variant— Claude, say—to help you be a better reader of Shakespeare and a better writer? I’m hard pressed to think of a class where 15 percent of the curriculum shouldn’t be around the idea of “The calculator was just invented for thinking, and we have no idea what to do with it, but we’ve got to mess around with it. Otherwise, we’re doing you a massive disservice.”

There will be plenty of other people who are like, “No, the calculator is bad. We shouldn’t use this.” But I don’t know. I mean, if Bowdoin were the kind of place I would want to show up to, it would mandate that in every single class. Faculty would have no idea what they’re doing. Neither would students. And it would be messy and maybe parents would complain: “What is this experiment you are running on my child?” But the world is running the experiment without your consent right now. At high velocity. I just think it should be immediately mandatory. And a lot of forgiveness granted to everybody.

BOWDOIN: Allison, I’m going to steal an idea from your podcast and ask you each some rapid-fire questions. What is an activity that you like that doesn’t have anything to do with technology?

NEAMTU: Climbing.

BEANE: Live music. I just went to a Jacob Collier concert at the Hollywood Bowl a few days ago with my wife. It was amazing. Incredible.

BEANE: Wow. RYDER: I had seen Dick Tracy. So, it was a very PG thing.

BOWDOIN: Last question: What do you wish AI could do that it currently cannot do?

RYDER: I wrote these questions and I don’t even­­­— BOWDOIN: I know. I’m sorry, I stole them all.

RYDER: No, no. It’s fine! We know our devices are listening to us all the time. Probably something Matt said in today’s conversation I’m going to get some kind of ad for in about twenty minutes. But what my device can’t do is just always meaningfully automate or auto-populate or suggest. What the automation thinks is helpful is not necessarily what I find helpful. So, just more seamless integration across my devices and my life in a way that isn’t creepy.

BOWDOIN: What’s the first career you wanted?

BEANE: I’d like to nudge us all to more capability, just by using it. Personally, I want something to design a new course for project management by a host of distributed agents.

Or book the coolest new vacation after having read every post I’ve ever written and all of my email and listening to all of my voicemails.

I don’t care about the invasiveness. I’m like, “Just make my life better now, please.” That feels like no more than ten years away, maybe even two. I mean, awful things could also happen. But what I’m wishing for I feel like is now actually possible.

NEAMTU: I wanted to be a musician, be in a band.

BOWDOIN: Octo, you get the last word.

BEANE: Same.

NEAMTU: Take care of my grandma.

RYDER: On construction paper I think my mom still has: kindergarten, back-to-school night, and it said, “I want to be when I grow up…” I said a singer and a dancer.

RYDER: [Laughs] We have these selfish “Help us do our work faster and better,” “Give us good vacations” ideas, and you’re like, “Let me just take care of someone.”

BOWDOIN: Such a performance mindset here with you all!

Alison Bennie is editor of Bowdoin Magazine.

RYDER: I wanted to say that too, but then I was thinking about how much tech goes into production of shows. I would feel guilty not saying time with my dogs, but I also just really like to exercise. And what I really don’t do when I exercise is rely on metrics. I don’t want a thing I have to charge and remember to bring with me and constantly look at. That actually makes it less enjoyable and feels less productive.

Celyn Brazier is an animation and art director RYDER: I was really into Madonna.

and editorial illustrator based in London, England.

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As the founding executive director of Second Chance Cars in Massachusetts, Dan Holin ’87 is making it easier for people financially struggling to get to work by awarding them affordable cars.

INTERVIEW BY KEN ANDERSON ’68

Driving Change How do you determine who needs a car and which car they’ll receive?

We have guidelines for income that can’t be exceeded, and we partner with about fifteen organizations, including three veterans’ affairs offices, the US courts, and a host of nonprofits who make determinations based on training we provide.

We receive an average of just under ten cars a month from donors. We also just established a partnership with Village Automotive Group, which is starting to give us cars. But not every car is appropriate for low-income ownership, so cars that are more expensive to own we sell on the retail market to subsidize the smaller, frugal, reliable cars like a Honda Civic or Toyota Prius.

Where did you get the idea for starting Second Chance Cars?

A few years ago, I was in my mid-to-late fifties and wondering what to do “with the rest of my life.” At that age, you come to the profound realization that you’re not going to live forever, and if you want to do something that will either make you rich or happy, or both, now is the time.

I went to my neighbor, who is not a Bowdoin alumnus but still a great guy, and we created a Venn diagram that included cars, entrepreneurship, and social justice. Once we got that Venn diagram going, I went and looked around

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for models for organizations that feature all those ingredients that I wanted. I found one in Maryland called Vehicles for Change, and now their CEO is on my advisory board.

How do you prepare the cars for recipients?

We work with ten vocational schools to refurbish them. These schools need to teach their students how to fix cars and to engage them in the community in hopefully meaningful ways, and we do both those things for them, so it’s a win-win for both of us. We award cars at the school, so the students get to see the fruits of their good work and meet and learn about the journeys of the people that they’re helping, be it veterans or single moms or refugees.

In terms of the cost, each car is worth between $5,000 and $6,000 but only costs the new owner $900. We secure a zero-interest loan for them, regardless of their credit, which gives them a chance to rebuild what can sometimes be a very poor credit score. They leave with the car, and once they pay back the loan, the car is in their name.

What’s the impact?

We interview each recipient twice over the course of the year. For example, in 2022, we had a 99.3 percent average increase in annual income, which amounted to $20,000, so people

went from $21,000 a year income to $41,000 a year, and there was almost a 50 percent average increase in hours worked, from 28 hours to 42 hours, and a little over a 50 percent decrease in commute time. There was a study by a university that begins with H that found that the longer your commute time, the less likely you are to climb out of poverty.

You were in the Israeli army before starting at Bowdoin. How did that shape your experience?

I had an amazing experience, both academically and socially at Bowdoin, but I can tell you without a doubt that my experience was profoundly better than it would have been had I gone before I went into the army. War makes you mature fast, and it allowed me to take my academics more seriously, and to really appreciate the experience.

Dan Holin ’87 worked for the Jericho Road Project, The Leadership Connection, and UTEC before combining his passions to start Second Chance Cars.

Ken Anderson ’68 was an actuary for fifty-three years before selling his business. He is now pursuing a dream ignited at Bowdoin to write a column like Russell Baker.

For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

PHOTO: JESSICA SCRANTON

Whispering Pines

A Fountain of Youth The words of an 1871 graduate are part of Bowdoin’s past, present, and future legacy.

AT THE BEGINNING of the academic year, what first-year student

hasn’t felt a mixture of pride and apprehension when meeting the college president and signing the matriculation book, ceremonially connecting them with all alumni? In the fall of 1867, fifteen-year-old Edward Page Mitchell joined “that proud company.” Mitchell may not be well known today, but he left an impressive legacy—at Bowdoin and in life.

When Mitchell was eight, his family moved from Bath, Maine, to New York City, shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. In July of 1863, draft riots swirled outside their 5th Avenue home for four days. After the war, the family moved to a subdivided North Carolina plantation in a brief (but unsuccessful) attempt at cotton cultivation.

Early in August, three weeks before the fall semester began, Mitchell attended the 1867 Commencement. There he watched five elderly gentlemen dancing around the Thorndike Oak. They were members of the Class of 1817, back for their fiftieth reunion; Mitchell realized that they were sophomores when Napoleon met his Waterloo. For Mitchell, these ancient alumni became a metaphor for the pure, youthful joy that he later experienced whenever he returned to campus.

Mitchell’s class spanned the entire presidential term of Samuel Harris (Class of 1833), Bowdoin’s fifth president.

Back then, the academic year was divided into three terms.

Courses were prescribed, with no electives: emphasis on classical languages and mathematics in the first two years; classics and French for sophomores; German and science for juniors; and senior classes in mental and moral philosophy,

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English literature, and science. Mitchell’s gifts were in writing and oration, and he was the recipient of the Class of 1868 Prize at Commencement.

He also had an “extracurricular” association with Phi Chi, a sophomore hazing society. In 1869, a group of freshmen armed themselves with clubs and barricaded themselves in a room in Appleton Hall to prevent members of Phi Chi from hauling them into “court” in a vacant room on the fourth floor of Winthrop Hall, where Phi Chi handed out “convictions” and sentences. When the sophomores demanded entry, they were refused. In Mitchell’s account, a sophomore took an axe to the door, climbed in, and was promptly knocked unconscious. Others broke in, including Mitchell (a junior), and more were injured. Mitchell was suspended for almost a year. He later said he felt great shame for participating in “organized insurgency against legitimate authority.”

Mitchell cofounded and named The Bowdoin Orient in 1871 and also wrote the words to “Phi Chi,” originally drafted for the Class of 1873’s use. The song, set to the tune of “Marching through Georgia,” was heard for many years at athletic contests.

Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah for old Phi Chi! Hurrah! Hurrah! And may she never die!

While pluck beats luck, and Prex is stuck, and Profs are high and dry, We will follow her to glory!

After graduation, Mitchell wrote for newspapers in Lewiston and Boston. He was hired in 1875 as a writer at The Sun in New York, later becoming editor in 1903. Among the articles that Mitchell wrote (without a byline and presented next to news articles) were science fiction stories. Science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz identified Mitchell as a pioneer of the genre, years before H. G. Wells began his career. In the 1870s and 1880s, Mitchell wrote at least thirty such stories— about a machine that could travel faster than the speed of light (“The Tachypomp”), a computer-human cyborg (“The Ablest Man in the World”), time travel (“The Clock That Went Backward”), and an invisible person (“The Crystal Man”).

Bowdoin awarded Mitchell an honorary degree in 1906, and in 1917 he joined the Board of Overseers, a position he held until his death in 1927. He was a popular speaker at alumni events, where his humor, modesty, and ability to personalize the College’s history was on full display. He often spoke of the optimism of youth “before Predestination stepped in and took charge of the job which Self-Determination had so nicely arranged . . . [sending] us tumbling in unexpected directions.” His joy at recalling 1817 alumni at their 50th Reunion is a gift to us—now and into the future that Mitchell might have imagined.

John R. Cross ’76 is secretary of development and college relations.

ILLUSTRATION: ERIC HANSON

Connect ALUMNI NEWS AND UPDATES

SUSAN FINIGAN COONS ’73

THE TRAILBLAZER When I started at Bowdoin in 1971, I was often the only woman in my chemistry classes, women represented only 10 percent of my class, and there were no women professors. It was hard to hide that we were different, and that Bowdoin was changing. As I look back, in addition to a great education, there were lasting benefits and important perspectives gained in that time. We had a right to be in places that had been limited to men, and we were claiming our place in this specific institution that was still very early in its own progress toward gender parity. It was a trial run, of sorts, for the rest of our lives—and a topic I returned to later in my career.

After Bowdoin, I did biochemistry research at Massachusetts General Hospital, then at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. In 1978, the opportunity to apply my skills in chemistry to complex projects with an interdisciplinary approach drew me to the environmental field. I joined the environmental practice at Arthur D. Little (ADL) in Cambridge and eventually moved to California to develop an office focused on environmental assessment and remediation. After thirty years at ADL, I accepted a position at the University of California–Irvine as assistant director of the UCI Environment Institute, initially focused on interdisciplinary initiatives in environmental sustainability and later expanding to include programs for women and gender equity.

Throughout my career, I’ve enjoyed working with people on multidisciplinary projects and being involved in the community.

And I feel lucky in many ways that I was part of the second class of women to graduate from Bowdoin. In some ways, I think our presence and subtle feedback were foundational to the overall experience that characterizes the College today. And it’s where I met my husband, John. We celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary this year and enjoy traveling and spending time with our two sons, their wives, and our four grandchildren.

For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

PHOTO: MAX S. GERBER

In addition to having a career focused on collaboration, community, and sustainability, Susan Finigan Coons ’73 is a trained yoga instructor, which she says allows her to access the right side of her brain and plays a big part in keeping her sane.

Connect

1955

From Phil Weiner: “Phil Weiner keeps in close touch with his college roommate Pete Forman, who is retired and lives with his wife, Laberta, in Texas. Bob Morris ’52 and Phil would love to hear from other classmates. Contact p.weiner@earthlink.net.”

1957 Phil Weiner ’55 and Bob Morrison ’52 met at a retirement village in Silver Spring, Maryland, when Bob and his wife, Nesta, moved in about a year ago (Phil called it “a reunion of two alumni in their nineties”). Phil and his wife, Diana, are longtime residents there and were thrilled to meet a fellow Bowdoin grad. Bob has a Bowdoin banner prominently displayed at the entrance to his apartment, which made him easy to find!

On a beautiful summer day, Rod Collette ’56, Charlie Sawyer ’58, and John Marr ’55 enjoyed lobster rolls and each other’s company at the home of John’s daughter, Abby Marr Psyhogeos ’87.

Dave Ballard ’61, Jim Coffin ’63, Dave Luce ’62, and Jack Abbott ’63 sang “Rise Sons of Bowdoin” in honor of Steve Coffin ’62 at his memorial in July.

The four traveled together to the service in Hancock, Maine.

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Marvin Frogel: “I once again opened my copy of Bowdoin Magazine and once again was very distressed to find that my class of 1957 has disappeared from print.

This is unacceptable. Clearly there are more of us living than have passed away, so the only conclusion I can reach is that Ed Langbein is either no longer able or willing to continue following the ongoing exploits of our class in his Boswellian fashion. Whatever the reason, I want to thank him for his decades of service to our class. No other class news contained the activities of its members in the detail that Ed chose to embrace. I often wondered why I was so fascinated by the—sometimes pedestrian but often surprising—daily doings of people who were in my class, many of whom I hardly knew. I followed the lives of people I once knew and was always saddened to hear that one of them had died. It was like a novel with characters I got to know better as the years and decades passed. The faces were always of young men who never aged. I liked it better that way. I write in the past tense but hope that, like me, classmates who never updated their lives in the class news start doing it, and those whom Ed so graciously chronicled continue sending in news of their lives. We are only eighty-six or eighty-seven and are still doing things. I have

decided to send in news about my life on an ongoing basis. In this way, 1957 class news will be in Bowdoin Magazine again. Please join me.

As for myself, I have been living in Lake Worth, Florida, for the past two years with my wife, Barbara, and our cat, Etsy. Both of us are still working part time. Barbara is a life coach and interior designer, and I still see a few of my former psychiatric patients on FaceTime.

After leaving Bowdoin, I spent six years in Geneva at the Faculty of Medicine. After returning home, I interned at the Newton-Wellesley Hospital, followed by a psychiatry residency at Hillside Hospital in Queens, New York. I practiced psychiatry in Great Neck, Long Island, until 2011. We moved to Hilton Head, South Carolina, and remained there until 2020, when we moved here. We have two children and four grandchildren.

This is obviously bare bones but will be followed up by more details in future class news. In the meantime, I would love to hear from anyone who remembers me as well as see any class members who might be living near me. My email address is mpfrogel@gmail.com. Once again, let’s make an effort to keep our class news alive.”

1962

Dave Luce: “On Saturday, July 15, 2023, four DKE brothers— Dave Ballard ’61, Jim Coffin ’63 (Steve’s brother), Jack Abbott ’63, and I—drove to Hancock, Maine, to attend the memorial service for our brother Stephen (Steve) E. Coffin. The congregation as well as the family enthusiastically enjoyed our rousing rendition of ‘Rise, Sons of Bowdoin.’ And who said the Dekes could never win an interfraternity sing?!”

Remember

HONORARY

The following is a list of deaths reported to us since the previous issue. Full obituaries appear online at: obituaries.bowdoin.edu

Theodore D. Lazo ’54 May 7, 2023

Roger K. Stone ’62 December 26, 2022

A. Austin Albert ’55 July 21, 2023

Gilbert E. Zatkin ’62 July 7, 2023

Elmer M. Sewall ’41 April 20, 2023

Clyde E. Nason Jr. ’55 May 14, 2023

Walter E. Berry ’63 August 19, 2023

Campbell Cary ’46 April 13, 2023

Curtis Webber ’55 June 21, 2023

David C. Wollstadt ’63 June 26, 2023

Harry D. McNeil Jr. ’46 July 22, 2023

Richard W. Kurtz ’56 July 22, 2023

Timothy T. Curtis ’64 May 18, 2023

Richard C. Hatch ’50 July 16, 2023

Richard T. Downes ’57 August 17, 2023

Donald C. Freeburg ’65 May 11, 2022

Josiah P. Huntoon Jr. ’50 August 17, 2023

David S. Sherman ’58 April 30, 2023

Robert E. Harrington ’65 June 20, 2023

Robert W. Waugh ’50 July 29, 2023

Kemler Appell ’59 May 28, 2023

Wilson E. Smith ’67 July 2023

Gary M. Boone ’51 August 1, 2023

Alton F. Gross ’59 August 17, 2023

Robert G. True ’68 May 7, 2023

Grover E. Marshall ’51 July 30, 2023

Stephen D. Oppenheim ’59 June 6, 2023

George S. Isaacson ’70 August 19, 2023

James D. Murtha ’51 July 6, 2023

Donald A. Hatch ’60 June 10, 2023

R. E. James Hunter ’72 April 24, 2023

Roger W. Sullivan ’52 April 9, 2023

Frank C. Mahncke ’60 March 16, 2023

Karen Johnson Battle ’76 June 12, 2023

Harris I. Baseman ’53 April 26, 2023

Alvin E. Simonds Jr. ’60 August 25, 2023

Dana Laliberte ’76 May 1, 2023

Ronald R. Lagueux ’53 May 3, 2023

Carl H. Smith ’60 July 6, 2023

Robert C. Blaney ’99 June 12, 2023

John D. Dunham ’54 July 26, 2023

Arthur M. Van De Water Jr. ’60 August 21, 2023

L. Blakeney Schick ’04 July 24, 2023

Richard A. Foley ’54 July 5, 2023

Richard Cornell ’61 July 22, 2023

PHOTO: ARTIST_CREDIT

Tina Howe H’88 August 28, 2023 John W. Stevens H’72 July 22, 2023

GRADUATE Thomas B. Baker G’69 June 6, 2023 Bernadette Morris Nicolaus G’69 April 21, 2023 Judson M. Stuart G’70 July 29, 2023 Eugenia H. Czajkowski G’71 July 24, 2023

FACULTY/STAFF Beverly P. Gelwick July 21, 2023 John C. Walter March 21, 2023

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.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2023 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 43

Connect Hank Hubbard ’69

Catching Up

THE ADVOCATE Hank Hubbard ’69 turned his experience with inequality into a lifelong mission to advance opportunities for others.

COMING FROM AN ALL-BLACK PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL in segregated

Lynchburg, Virginia, created some challenges for me at Bowdoin. I think there were eight black students when I arrived, and I was not prepared for the academic rigor and discipline.

But Bowdoin did prepare me to live and work in a diverse world—especially in a company like Aetna, where I was the first African American hired as a marketing trainee in the company’s 150-year history. I worked there until I retired as a senior VP. BEING A VOLUNTEER IN MY HOMETOWN is very gratifying. Growing up with racial segregation and the civil rights movement helped create an ethic—almost an obligation—to make sure all our children have the same or better opportunities than I had. It’s exciting to see programs I’ve been a part of—such as Beacon of Hope, which provides scholarships for Lynchburg graduates to pursue college, and Randolph College, which became more diverse during my term—having a positive impact.

AFTER MOVING MANY TIMES, my wife, Christine, and I moved to Lynchburg in 2007, when she became very ill. My high school girlfriend, she sadly passed in 2015. I’ve since married Ryan Russell, also a Lynchburg native, and we just celebrated our third anniversary. We live on an idyllic farm in Forest with our goldendoodle, Remi, and all sorts of wildlife.

For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

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1967

The Alumni Council has honored Tim Brooks with the Alumni Footprints Award. In keeping with the heralded words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Class of 1825, this award recognizes a volunteer who has left “footprints on the sands of time” through professional, academic, and/or volunteer activities demonstrating leadership for the common good and a commitment to serving others. His past service to the College as chair of the Alumni Council Awards Committee, his service as a 1st Lieutenant combat platoon leader in D Company of the 11th Armored Cavalry in Vietnam, his distinguished career as a college administrator, and his tireless advocacy on behalf of those with disabilities, as inspired by his son Ross, are just some of the reasons for consideration of this award.

Bill Hoar: “At the historic Monteleone Hotel in May, Bert Kendall and I, along with our (respective) spouses, Marilyn and Louisa, celebrated a mini-Bowdoin/ Chi Psi reunion in New Orleans.

There was plenty of jazz to enjoy and a humongous amount of food to consume at top restaurants. We generally followed an itinerary set by the Road Scholar folks, which included nightlife in the French Quarter; visits to Lake Pontchartrain, the Garden District, and the revamped National World War II Museum; talks on local architecture, music, and authors; and plenty of tips and chow from a chef at New Orleans School of Cooking. We added a paddle-wheeler cruise down the Mississippi River that focused on Andy Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans, as well as a visit to the Chalmette Battlefield. It is a (bare) possibility that there are some beignets and seafood still left in the city.”

1972

Cliff Webster has been honored by the Alumni Council with a Polar Bear Award in recognition of his steadfast service to the College.

Webster served the Class of 1972 both as a longtime class agent and Reunion committee member and chaired his 50th Reunion under unusual circumstances during the pandemic and an out-of-the-ordinary fiftieth-year celebration. He is a critical link for his classmates back to Bowdoin and to each other. He has served the College community more broadly as a Campaign for Bowdoin volunteer, Hall of Honor selection committee member, Office of Career Exploration and Development advocate and volunteer, and as an Alumni Fund director.

1973

The Alumni Council has selected Michael Owens as the 2023 recipient of the Foot Soldiers of Bowdoin Award in recognition of his service to the College in many capacities—as a class agent, a member of the AF/AM/50 celebration committee, a member of various reunion committees, and at the highest level as a member of the Bowdoin College Board of Trustees. His leadership has been transformational, as he has helped to guide the College through the creation and implementation of the Bowdoin College Black Alumni Association, of which he is now chair of the coordinating council. Established by the Alumni Council in 1999 to honor “one who exemplifies the role of a foot soldier of Bowdoin through his or her work” for the College, it was created through the generosity of David Z. Webster of the Class of 1957.

Along with the award, a scholarship will be awarded to a deserving

PHOTO: THE NEWS & ADVANCE

Bowdoin student in Owens’s name through the Foot Soldier of Bowdoin Scholarship Fund.

1975

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, August 4, 2023. Ellen Baxter H’05, visionary advocate for the homeless, is resigning as founding executive director of Broadway Housing Communities (BHC) after forty years. In 1983, after seven years of advocating for people’s basic right to housing in New York City—and getting results—Baxter moved her vision forward by forming what would become the nonprofit organization. It was a demonstration of her core belief “that permanent affordable housing, paired with services for those who need them, was the most effective— and most cost-effective—solution to the homeless crisis,” writes BHC in a tribute to the longtime leader. A year later, in 1984, the state of New York donated almost $283,000 to support the purchase of a vacant building for BHC in Upper Manhattan, “the first instance of government funding for supportive housing and a turning point in efforts to address the homeless crisis. That first building, The Heights, opened in 1986, providing permanent supportive housing for fifty-five single adults.” Over four decades, BHC grew to seven residential buildings in Washington Heights and West Harlem, two early childhood centers, three community art galleries, and a new cultural institution, the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling. In 1994, Bowdoin College honored Baxter with a Common Good Award and, in 2005, it presented her with an honorary degree. Current BHC board members include Richard Mersereau ’69, Saddie Smith ’75,

Barbara Tarmy ’75, Michael Sullivan ’94, Roman Jackson ’07, and Chris Omachi ’12. Many more Bowdoin alumni have supported Baxter’s work and are expected to join BHC when she is honored at the organization’s fortieth anniversary gala on November 28.

Bill Hoar ’67 and Bert Kendall ’67 celebrated a mini-Bowdoin/Chi Psi reunion in May at the historic Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans.

Bill notes that while a larger get-together was contemplated earlier, “the pandemic and other developments had different ideas.

Regardless, the good times did indeed roll.”

1976

From Nick Kaledin ’77: “My wife, Catherine Claman, was in the second class of women to attend Bowdoin College. I am pleased to inform Bowdoin that Catherine was granted an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the Maine College of Art and Design in Portland on May 12. She is currently president of the Stephen and Palmina Pace Foundation (www. stephenandpalminapace.org), a New York-based foundation that provides grants to artists and institutions, in addition to preserving Stephen Pace’s legacy in the field of American fine art.”

From Douglas Kennedy: “Douglas Kennedy published his twenty-seventh book recently: Flyover (or in French: Et C’est Ainsi Que Nous Vivrons). It is a huge hit in France, receiving a near fullpage excellent review in Le Monde and riding high in the bestseller lists. Kennedy, completely fluent in French, is currently finishing a nine-week book tour of France and Belgium. His first play in many years, La Bonne Erreur (The Right Mistake) is getting its premiere at the famed Theatre Marigny in Paris in September 2024.”

1980

Audrey Gup-Mathews: “After four years of writing grants as a ‘side gig’ (following five years as a grant writer at York County Community College), I’ve gotten

On a gorgeous day in August, Captain Dudley Welch ’67, John Raleigh ’66, Paul Fehling ’66, and Doug Hotchkiss ’66 gathered to sail Marblehead Harbor.

Out on the water, the four Bowdoin scholars reminisced about being part of the crew that sailed from Miami to Nassau for spring vacation in 1966.

Laura Fried, president of Maine College of Art & Design, with Catherine Claman ’76 (right), who was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the college in May.

Dayl Ratner Rosenthal ’77 and Peter Karofsky ’62, both from Middleton, Wisconsin, reunited at the end of August for what Rosenthal described as “a fantastic time.” The license plate leaves no question about how they are connected!

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2023 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 45

Connect

On Saturday, June 24, Ted Dierker ’78, Vin Gandolfo ’77, Mike Popitz ’77, Deb Ham ’77, Bruce Lynskey ’77, and Pam Fye-Mauer ’77 gathered on the South Coast to celebrate the beginning of summer and share Bowdoin stories.

Dave Barnes ’81, Chris Schenck ’84, Gil Eaton ’82, and Adam Hardej ’83 got together to represent the Polar Bears playing lacrosse in a Lake Placid tournament.

Lance Conrad ’91 on BowdoinOne Day in February.

He volunteered to accompany the Polar Bear mascot on his rounds and got to interact with people across campus, including, as he said, “the legendary coach John Cullen.”

46 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2023 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

so busy writing grants that I had to give up my ‘day job’ to go full-tilt into grant writing again—only this time as an independent. For more information, check out my Maine Grant Connection website: mainegrantconnect.com. Happy to be spending my time helping nonprofits reach their goals!”

From a Harris K. Weiner Law press release, June 6, 2023. “On June 6, 2023, Rhode Island Lawyers Weekly inducted litigator and adjunct professor Harris K. Weiner into its Excellence in the Law Hall of Fame for his career in private practice and public service. A trial lawyer focused on commercial and real estate disputes, Weiner has counseled the governor, senate minority leader, department directors, quasi-publics, and municipalities. His forty reported cases range from constitutional law to property, employment, probate, and contracts. He has published articles on eminent domain, public contracts, and the legal profession and teaches business law at Bryant University. Attorney Weiner is a graduate of the School of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. He clerked for Rhode Island Supreme Court Justice Thomas F. Kelleher and United States District Court Judge Ronald R. Lagueux.

Weiner opened his own law office in East Providence in 2021 after three decades at prominent Boston and Providence commercial firms.”

1982

Randy Shaw: “Cheverus High School in Portland, Maine, where I’ve been for seven years now, serves as a sister school to the Leone XIII Institute, a secondary school in Milan, Italy. While visiting Cheverus in May as part of a cultural immersion program, eleven

Leone XIII students spent a day at Bowdoin, exploring campus, enjoying the award-winning food at Thorne Dining Hall, and posing for a group photo with the Hyde Plaza polar bear.”

1983

Bob Whelan has been honored by the Alumni Council with a Polar Bear Award in recognition of his steadfast service to the College. Over the years he has served the Class of 1983 as a class agent and a Reunion Committee member. But his impact does not begin and end with his classmates.

He has served the college community more broadly both inside and outside of the classroom, and as a resource and mentor to current students. His annual visits to campus as a guest lecturer and speaker at Bowdoin Public Service Initiative and Office of Career Exploration and Development programs have helped ease the transition from college to the professional world for countless students. He always carries the Bowdoin banner wherever he goes and grows and nurtures community along the way.

1988

From an Orange Bank & Trust Company press release, June 15, 2023.

“Jacob Rahiman has been appointed chief human resources officer and senior vice president for Orange Bank & Trust Company, a premier Hudson Valley, New York, financial institution focusing on commercial lending, business banking, and wealth management services. The newly created position reflects the bank’s continued growth, which now extends to more than 220 employees and sixteen offices across Orange, Westchester, Rockland, and Bronx counties.

Rahiman is an HR executive with over twenty-five years of financial services experience. He was previously director of talent management at Valley National Bank, where he handled recruiting, leadership development, and performance management bank-wide.”

1989

Reunion

From the roundtable.org website and course listing. Over the summer, Kate Papacosma taught a live, virtual course through Roundtable, “an online evolution of the 92nd Street Y—a cultural and community center where people all over the world connect through culture, arts, entertainment, and conversation.” Her lecture series, Central and Prospect Parks: The Genius of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, is described as “the ultimate liberal arts subject, as New York City’s two internationally renowned parks epitomize the intersection of art, science, and social ideals. Both Central Park and Prospect Park were conceived, designed, and built with a complex, idealistic mission that included serving the common good and improving the public and mental health of all citizens. While these two design masterpieces have always served these purposes, the pandemic made it abundantly clear that all parks are a necessity, not an amenity. Papacosma’s training as a landscape historian and psychotherapist has led her to decode and interpret places wherever she goes, whether professionally or personally. She uses many of the same skills of observation, attunement, and communication as a psychotherapist and feels fortunate to be able to connect these disciplines in the service of others. She earned her MA in landscape studies from the

PHOTO: COURTESY OF TODD HERRMANN

Bard Graduate Center and wrote her master’s thesis about Prospect Park, its history and design, and the city of Brooklyn. Papacosma spent five years working as a planner for the Central Park Conservancy, leads her own tours of Prospect Park, Green-Wood Cemetery, and Central Park for people of all ages, and has led tours for the Municipal Art Society, NYCH2O, Open House New York, and Victorian Society New York. She has taught at The New School and elsewhere, in the classroom and beyond.”

1990

From the Milton Academy website.

“On May 5, the Milton Academy Board of Trustees honored Head of School Todd B. Bland with its highest honor, the Milton Medal, recognizing his fourteen years of exemplary service to the school and the love and care for all members of the Milton community at the heart of his work. The Milton Medal recognizes extraordinary service to the school. . . . Since his arrival in 2009, applications in all three divisions of the school increased precipitously, more than doubling in the upper school and nearly doubling in the lower and middle schools. Bland’s tenure has also seen the implementation of a diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice strategic plan and the representation of more students, faculty, and trustees of color. All three divisions underwent comprehensive curriculum renewal, and Milton became a national leader when it removed grades from the grade nine transcript, ensuring that all students beginning in the upper school can focus on growth and mastery of academic concepts. Bland joined Milton as its twelfth head of school in 2009 and [departed] July 1, 2023.”

Todd Herrmann ’85

Catching Up

THE CONNECTOR Todd Herrmann ’85 has spent more than fifteen years connecting students—many of them Polar Bears—with careers.

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A COACH AND A SALESPERSON. After a

successful sales decade at Verizon, I went back to tennis and ended up teaching in the summer and coaching in the winter.

When arthritis in my hips drove me off the court, I found my coaching and sales experience worked well in the career advising world. The road from there to Bowdoin was lined with alumni connections and networking, including working with the Bowdoin Alumni Council.

WHENEVER I CAN HELP A LIBERAL ARTS STUDENT discover their value to the world, there is good work to be done. I started in career advising and employer relations at Colby and was honored with the Colby Service Award before coming to Bowdoin in 2010. Now I’m back at Colby, and we work with Bowdoin and Bates every week on recruiting efforts. I couldn’t have imagined when I moved into Copeland House in fall 1985 what an impact Bowdoin would have, being a daily part of my life so many years later.

I’M INSPIRED BY the success and boundless generosity of Polar Bears across the world, and by my partner, Kathryn Nielsen, and the work she does at North Shore Community College in Massachusetts. And I’m pretty surprised by how much I suddenly love dogs.

For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2023 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 47

Connect

1991

Marisa Frieder ’91 paused during a hike to capture herself amidst the scenery of Oregon, where she has lived since 2002 and where, she says, “I’m having a pretty great time.”

Doctors Lucy Tomb ’16 and Erin O’Neill Balog ’93 shared some Bowdoin spirit at the Medical University of South Carolina. Both started working in the department of pediatrics there in July 2022.

Jennifer Collins Moore ’96 took a break from writing mysteries and running her business, Meez Meals, to hike Rouvas Gorge in Crete with her husband, Pete Moore ’96, and their sons, thirteen-year-old, Harry, and eight-year-old, Gus.

48 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2023 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

Lance Conrad: “My first year of Bowdoin service as an alumni fund director has been outstanding.

Perhaps my favorite experience was returning to campus to participate firsthand in BowdoinOne Day last February, assisting the Office of Annual Giving in a variety of capacities. Catching up with legendary coach emeritus John Cullen was certainly a highlight!

Staying connected to Bowdoin as a fund director, a BRAVO alumni interviewer, and CXD Boot Camp volunteer has been rewarding and certainly ‘for the common good.’

It’s never too late to reconnect, my friends! In my professional capacity, I’m in my eighteenth year leading Chapel Hill-Chauncy Hall School (chch.org). As head of school, I often connect with many Bowdoin alumni in the independent school network, including fellow school leaders and classmates Marshall Carter and Chris Cheney. Look me up if you’re in the Boston area!”

Marisa Frieder: “I’ve been in Portland, Oregon, since moving here for a postdoc in 2002. I’ve changed careers twice since then. I manage the bacterial testing section of the state public health lab and got to spend the pandemic working alongside Nicole Galloway ’05.

I’ve been an active masters swimmer for over twenty years, which is where I’ve found my people. I prefer sprinting but stumbled into the world of marathon swimming several years ago. I’m the founder and race director of an eleven-mile swimming race in the Willamette River. My husband is also a swimmer, so when we got married a couple of years ago, we had a nice ceremony and then went for a swim in the river with our friends. So here I am with a couple of awesome young-adult

stepkids, a husband who shares my love of poorly thought-out adventures, a community I treasure, and a job that allows me to put my love into the world. I’m having a pretty great time.”

From Matt Rogers: “Matt Rogers will be assisting the Bowdoin baseball team again this coming year.

This will be Matt’s sixth season as a volunteer assistant coach, where he works as a hitting coach and outfielders coach. If you happen to make a baseball game, please come say hello! In the business world, Matt is entering his thirty-second year as a registered portfolio manager and investment advisor with Raymond James. He was once again named to the Forbes ‘Best in State’ advisor list for the state of Maine. Matt and his wife, Stacey, will be celebrating their twenty-third wedding anniversary in September. Their son, Nate, will be a senior at Saint Michael’s College, and their daughter, Liza, will be a junior at Fordham University.”

1993

From a Michigan State University College of Law online news story, August 29, 2023. Professor Barbara O’ Brian has joined the new member class of the American Law Institute (ALI). Elected members of ALI reflect the excellence and diversity of today’s legal profession.

Those elected have demonstrated excellence in the law, are of high character, will contribute to the work of the institute, and are committed to its mission. O’Brian’s scholarship focuses on applying empirical methodology to legal issues, such as identifying predictors of false convictions and understanding prosecutorial decision-making.

Aside from teaching classes in criminal law and procedure, she is also the editor of the National Registry of

Exonerations. The National Registry “collects, analyzes and disseminates information about all known exonerations of innocent criminal defendants in the United States, from 1989 to the present.”

1996

From Jen Collins Moore: “Jen Collins Moore is delighted to announce the launch of the second book in her ‘Roman Holiday Mystery’ series, Murder in Trastevere.

It’s not exactly what she thought she’d be doing when she graduated nearly thirty years ago, but her Chicago-based business, Meez Meals, continues to thrive, and she’s having a blast writing mysteries.”

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, June 7, 2023. Tina Satter’s career as a film director could not have gotten off to a better start. Her big-screen debut, Reality, about NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, has received rave reviews since its release earlier this year. Praise for the movie in the media includes The Guardian’s Mark Kermode, who called it a “palm-sweatingly tense” drama, while Ann Hornaday at The Washington Post describes the film as a “flawlessly calculated thriller” whose genius lies in its “utter banality.” Reality is Satter’s adaptation of her 2019 stage play, Is This a Room, which is based on the real-life interrogation of former Air Force linguist and intelligence contractor Winner, who served four years behind bars for espionagerelated charges. Winner, who speaks several Afghan languages and had US Department of State top-secret security clearance, was arrested in 2017 and charged under the Espionage Act. The following year, she pleaded guilty to leaking a classified document to the media about Russian hacking in the US

presidential elections. The dialogue for the play and movie was taken verbatim from the FBI transcripts of Winner’s interrogation, which Satter came across while browsing the internet. As she told The New York Times at the time, when she discovered the material, she thought, “This is a play; this is a thriller.”

The drama begins one afternoon when Winner arrives at her house in Augusta, Georgia, to find two FBI agents waiting for her. Her subsequent interrogation begins as a casual conversation and becomes gradually more menacing as Winner realizes she is being accused of espionage. The movie, which stars Sydney Sweeney (White Lotus, Euphoria) in the lead role, premiered at Germany’s Berlin Film Festival in February 2023, and was released in the US on HBO on May 29.

2000

From Dave (Ferris) Lawrence: “Tim Hayes, Seth Ritter, and Dave (Ferris) Lawrence traveled to the Pacific Northwest to visit Tim Dwyer in his hometown of Friday Harbor, Washington, in late July. While in the San Juan Islands, they were able to meet up with Jess Rush for an evening. From the San Juans, the Coles Tower roommates traveled to North Cascades National Park for five days of backpacking.”

From the vanderbilt.edu website, May 23, 2023. “Gretchen Selcke has been named one of the new Dean’s Distinguished Teaching Fellows in the College of Arts and Sciences at Vanderbilt University for 2023–2024. The fellows represent faculty excellence in teaching effectiveness, imaginative and innovative teaching practices inside and outside of the classroom, and extraordinary contributions in designing and advising undergraduate immersion

Good Things Downstream Arranging a deferred charitable gift annuity as part of your downstream planning allows you to make a gift to Bowdoin and receive income for life.

When you defer the payment start date, you get a higher gift annuity rate and available tax benefits.

Nancy Milam and Liz Armstrong in the Office of Gift Planning can help you consider your options, wherever you are in the stream of life.

207-725-3172 giftplanning@bowdoin.edu bowdoin.edu/gift-planning

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Former Coles Tower roommates Dave (Ferris) Lawrence ’00, Seth Ritter ’00, Tim Dwyer ’00, and Tim Hayes ’00 pause while trekking in North Cascades National Park for a shoutout to Bowdoin, with Doubtful Lake and Sahale Glacier in the background.

Whitney Rauschenbach ’06 and Caroline Murphy (Yale ’10) welcomed a baby boy, George Quigley Murphy Rauschenbach, on February 25, 2023.

experiences. This year’s group of Dean’s Distinguished Teaching Fellows span all three divisions of the college (humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences), and include a diverse set of pedagogues drawn from the range of faculty ranks and tracks. The dean’s office received compelling and moving nominations from department chairs, program directors, colleagues, and students attesting to the awardees’ immense dedication to students’ learning, discovery, and development. Through creative, intentional, and innovative practices in the formal classroom and in independent research and immersion projects, these faculty have spurred students’ individual self-discovery and fostered connections between students and their community.

Selcke is the assistant director of the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (CLAX). She was elected as the 2022–2023 president of the Latinx studies section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). Her research interests include Latinx literature and culture, Afro Hispanic literature, and Latinx entrepreneurship. Currently, she is working on a book-length manuscript on contemporary Latinx narratives.”

2003

From Michael Morris: “Michael Morris was appointed

by President Biden as the assistant national cyber director for public affairs in the Office of the National Cyber Director, The White House.”

Michael Wood ’06 celebrated his fortieth birthday with a “Night of Forty Michaels” party in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in July. Guests were encouraged to dress like their favorite version of the birthday boy for the festivities. The Bowdoin contingency included Eli Maitland ’06, Emily Sheffield ’06, Nick Ordway ’06, Christi Gannon ’06, Ruth Jacobson Franklin ’06, Lucy Van Hook ’06, Schuyler Dudley Freeman ’06, Michael, Katie Swan Potter ’06, and Natasha Camilo Waite ’06.

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2004

Reunion

Shoshana Kuriloff Sicks has been honored by the Alumni Council with a Polar Bear Award in recognition of her steadfast

service to the College. Over the years she has served the Class of 2004 and the College in a broad range of capacities. She has been a longtime class agent, with her service culminating as chair of the Alumni Fund directors. She has served as a BCAN advisor, BASIC interviewer, and event host, and has sat on each reunion committee.

Additionally, she always steps up for important college initiatives like the celebration of Fifty Years of Women at Bowdoin and working with student orientation volunteers.

She is an important link for her classmates back to Bowdoin and each other. She has consistently made time for the College while she’s navigated her career, family life, and doctorate degree program.

2005

From Ben Kreider: “Ben Kreider completed his PhD in social policy at Brandeis University during the pandemic. Since graduating, he has worked as a consultant on a US Department of Labor contract and for the research department of the National Education Association.

Ben lives in the Washington, DC, suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland.

He has enjoyed visiting Bowdoin nearly every year and staying in touch with fellow Polar Bears, including David Duhalde ’06, as well as Alex Lorch, Dan Varley, Fred Fedynyshyn, Jon Harris, and Taylor (Miller) Goodfellow, among others.

2006

From Michael Wood: “On June 17, 2023, Michael Wood hosted a fortieth birthday party called ‘Night of Forty Michaels’ for over fifty friends and family in the queer wonderland of Provincetown, Massachusetts. The party theme

was ‘come dressed as your favorite version of Michael from over the years.’ A solid Bowdoin contingency was on hand for the festivities, two of whom even dressed as Michael from his Bowdoin days!”

2008

John B. Hall: “In April, the Credit Union Cherry Blossom Ten Mile Run celebrated its fiftieth running, and my artwork was featured as the race logo across 20,000 T-shirts, 10,000 finisher medals, and a bunch of other merchandise. This race is one of DC’s biggest and most popular races, and it’s dubbed the ‘runner’s rite of spring.’ I’ve been running it with my family since 2009, after having moved to DC in 2008 after graduating from Bowdoin. They hold a contest every year for the T-shirt design, so this year I submitted a design that commemorated the fiftieth running, and my entry was chosen.

The design features a cherry blossom composed of 500 dots, where each dot represents one mile of Cherry Blossom Ten Miler history. I created the blossom programmatically with code using a generative art scripting language called Processing. Once I learned in November that my design won, I then designed variants for the 5K, Double Blossom (people who run the 5K and the ten mile), virtual run, and all the finisher medals.

The race was the first weekend in April, so I spent that Friday and Saturday manning the T-shirt artist booth at the expo, showcasing the design, and autographing shirts. And then on Sunday I raced and finished 180th in a time of 57:49 (5:47 pace). It was an epic weekend. This whole project has combined so many of my passions

during my Bowdoin experience: I ran on Coach Slovenski’s crosscountry team (and still love to compete); I designed a bunch of T-shirts and other apparel while at Bowdoin—NESCAC track meet T-shirt, Bowdoin tour guide T-shirt, Alumni Pine Stride T-shirt, Bowdoin Nordic hat, Bowdoin Nordic uniform, freshman class T-shirt, Bowdoin math T-shirt, The Bowdoin Experience T-shirt, Bowdoin XC T-shirt—and still have the graphics of all of them if you’re curious; I majored in math (and had to use lots of math to generate the design); I majored in computer science (and wrote code to generate the design); and I minored in visual arts, which of course helped me with the overall aesthetic, especially when illustrating the Capitol building for the 5K design. I made a T-shirt reveal presentation in February, and I also made an animated video explaining the design, which played behind me on a big screen at the expo.”

2014

Reunion

Sophia Cornew has been honored by the Alumni Council with the Young Alumni Service Award, granted annually to an alum who has graduated within the past ten years. It recognizes that individual’s exemplary continued service to the College, rather than a single act. Since her graduation nine years ago, Cornew has distinguished herself as a dedicated and reliable volunteer with seemingly endless enthusiasm for all things Bowdoin. She has stayed connected to her class as an associate class agent and serves the College more broadly as a BRAVO volunteer with admissions, an important networking and

John B. Hall ’08 sporting one version of the winning T-shirt designs he created to commemorate the fiftieth running of the Credit Union Cherry Blossom Ten Mile Run, one of the biggest and most popular races in Washington, DC. Not only did Hall win the design contest, he went on to compete in one of the races and says, “It was an epic weekend.”

Sarah Lord White ’10, Helen Wen ’10, and Libby Wilcosky Lee ’10 met on a sunny day in August to reconnect and introduce their little future Polar Bears to campus.

Sally Hudson Dill ’10 had the opportunity to drop by the Bowdoin Museum of Art in August with her husband, Josh, and their children, Nicholas, Marie, and Antonia.

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Connect programming contact for the Office of Career Exploration and Development, and as a host for Bowdoin events in San Francisco.

She always goes above and beyond in whatever she is asked to do on behalf of the College. She connects with alumni and students in a way that is meaningful, thoughtful, authentic, and motivational. She is a dedicated ambassador and always offers new insights and creative suggestions to the great benefit of the College.

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, June 7, 2023. Professional actors Robbie Harrison and Michael Wood ’06 featured in a critically praised production of Shakespeare’s prototypical romantic comedy As You Like It this summer. Fans of the bard caught a “spirited production” of the play, which showed at the Theater at Monmouth, a forty-five-minute drive from the Bowdoin campus.

Wood, who majored in English and theater, as well as French, tackled the role of Jacques, while Spanish major Harrison played the witty jester Touchstone. The production was described as “highly entertaining” by Steve Feeney in The Portland Press Herald. “In the magical forest of Arden, in which exiled nobles must mingle with fools, philosophers, and various rustic characters, anything might happen. And that everything eventually skews toward the good makes the play a hilarious delight,” he writes. “It’s so great to see Bowdoin alums out there in the real world playing two of the great comic archetypes together in the same show: Touchstone and Jacques in As You Like It,” said Professor of Theater Davis Robinson, who taught both Wood and Harrison. “Both arrived at Bowdoin and dove into theater

as first-years,” he recalled. “Mike Wood showed up as a freshman and was such a natural comic, while Robbie had a beautiful singing voice.” The Theater at Monmouth’s production of As You Like It ran until August 13, 2023.

2015

From a Food Business News article, August 9, 2023. Sophia Cheng has founded and is chief executive officer of Oddball, “a chefcrafted, whole-food-based snack company looking to break the mold in how we eat. With snacking on the rise, food entrepreneurs are breaking into the category with new takes on classic applications. From bars to jelly products to crunchy formats, start-ups are finding a variety of snacks to make their own. New York-based Oddball, for example, is aiming to compete with the 126-year-old Jell-O brand. Oddball’s line features plant-based jelly snacks that have been formulated with a full serving of fruit and no preservatives, sugar, or gelatin.

The flavors include grapefruit, berry, and mango coconut. Cheng, who describes Oddball as ‘a superfruit jiggly snack,’ partnered with a Michelin-starred chef to develop the products, which have been rolling out to specialty grocers in New York this year. A native of Singapore and Hong Kong, Cheng saw an opportunity to expand the jelly category, which is a $5 billion market in China. ‘When I came to the US for college...I thought it was really strange that Jell-O was the only brand of jelly and also the category here,’ she said in an interview with Food Entrepreneur.

‘In Asia, jellies are a huge industry because fruit is such a big part of our culture, and it is a more fun way to eat fruit.’”

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“In Asia, jellies are a huge industry because fruit is such a big part of our culture, and it is a more fun way to eat fruit.”

—SOPHIA CHENG ’15, FOUNDER AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF ODDBALL, A COMPANY THAT MAKES JIGGLY SNACKS FORMULATED WITH A FULL SERVING OF FRUIT AND NO PRESERVATIVES, SUGAR, OR GELATIN

2019

Reunion

Madeline Rolph: “Jack Moynihan and I got married on June 17, 2023, in Charleston, South Carolina. We were randomly assigned as chemistry lab partners our sophomore year at Bowdoin, and the rest is history!

Jack’s uncle Michael Moynihan ’89 was our officiant for the wedding, which was super fun!”

2022

From a SpinSheet Magazine article, July 25, 2023. Preston Anderson was featured in an article about bridging the gap between junior, high school, or collegiate sailboat racing and the one-design racing method where all vehicles have identical or very similar designs or

models—the type of long-course competitions among adult/older groups and leagues. Anderson is currently a volunteer assistant coach for the Georgetown University sailing team.

2023

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, July 12, 2023. Drew Hofer is heading to Accra, Ghana, to begin a yearlong fellowship at Pangea Global Ventures, a business development platform that seeks to spur investment in the region. His fellowship was awarded by Princeton in Africa, an independent, nonprofit organization affiliated with Princeton University that aims to develop a network of future leaders dedicated to African affairs both

ILLUSTRATION: ERIC HANSON

personally and professionally. “To achieve this, we match highly qualified and passionate recent college graduates with host organizations across Africa for yearlong fellowship positions,” wrote Executive Director Damilola Akinyele in a letter to Bowdoin College President Safa Zaki, notifying her of Hofer’s award. “I’m honored to receive this fellowship and am excited to represent Bowdoin on the African continent,” said Hofer, who began his fellowship in August. “With a focus on West Africa, Pangea accelerates the growth of emerging agri-business by connecting accomplished entrepreneurs with global impact investors,” explained the computer science and economics major. Hofer said he’s also looking forward to immersing himself in Ghanaian culture and traveling around Africa. Since 1999, Princeton in Africa has placed over six hundred fellows with more than a hundred host organizations in some thirty-six African countries, said Akinyele.

“Some of our partner organizations include the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Gardens for Health International, Save the Children, African Leadership Academy, and African School of Economics,” he added. Hofer, a former track and field athlete and a Sarah and James Bowdoin scholar, among other things, is among twenty-nine fellows working with nineteen organizations in ten African countries over the coming year, said Akinyele. “We are thrilled to welcome Andrew Hofer to the Princeton in Africa community,” he continued, “[and] look forward to continuing a relationship with students from Bowdoin College in the future.”

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, September 7, 2023. Over the summer, Colby Santana worked for eight weeks with refugees in Tbilisi, Georgia, as the recipient of a prestigious Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) awarded by the US State Department. Santana’s Russian language skills had been sharpened by a summer spent in the central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan last year—also funded through a CLS award—and he returns there this fall for a ten-month stint teaching English as a Fulbright scholar.

A Russian major, Santana knew he wanted to help the Ukrainian refugee population in Georgia, so he reached out to a group called Volunteers Tbilisi about a month and a half before heading there. “I wanted to help the Ukrainian refugee population that had resettled here in Tbilisi and use my Russian in ways that didn’t just benefit me,” he said. There are an estimated 26,000 Ukrainian refugees currently living in the Georgian capital, and Volunteers Tbilisi helps them access medical care, housing, and other essentials. Santana’s work included helping to distribute supplies of donated goods, from rice to laundry detergent. He worked directly with many refugees to help assess their needs, although he admits that a decrease in both funding and donations made it harder to give people what they required.

In addition to those duties, Santana pitched in where he could, providing translation services when needed— something that tested his linguistic skills to the limit. “Encountering people who have lost so much in the face of violent attacks can be depressing,” he said, “but at the same time, to help them is incredibly rewarding work, and the people I worked with were amazing.”

Once a Polar Bear, always a Polar Bear.

Stay engaged with Bowdoin in whatever way works for you—volunteer, attend an event, make a gift, or tune into an online program.

All of it matters for the campaign, and more importantly, keeps the bonds of the Bowdoin community strong.

Find out more about how you can engage by scanning this code, or visit bowdo.in/engage.

bowdoin.edu/fromhere

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1. Chris Granata ’14 and Danielle Greenfield (Lehigh University ’15) were married on August 12, 2023, at Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, Washington. Pictured: Bill Griffiths ’14, EJ Googins ’13, James Denison ’14, Peter Deardorff ’15, Marcus Schneider ’13, Katie Ross Schneider ’14, Natalie Clark Weyrauch ’14, Sam Weyrauch ’14, Brian Jacobel ’14, Kate Featherston ’15, Kasey Suitor ’13, Chris and Danielle, Peyton Morss ’14, Adam Zhang ’14, Colin Kennedy ’12, Marc Veilleux ’14, Alex Tougas ’14, Caitlin Hutchinson Maddox ’14, Linc Rhodes ’14, Fred Elias ’14, Teri Faller ’15, Karl Reinhardt ’15, Katie Carter ’16, Sue Sim ’16, Megan Chong ’15, and Joe Celestin ’15.

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2. Ellen Cahill ’17 and Patrick Kearon ’17 were married on May 27, 2023, at Coach House at the Ryland Inn in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. Pictured: Molly Rose ’15, Austin Downing ’17, Matthew Dias Costa ’17, Henry Quinson ’17, Emma Hamilton ’17, Ashley Koatz ’17, Cedric Charlier ’17, Patrick and Ellen, Noah Safian ’17, Elizabeth Rill ’17, Michael Eppler ’17, Bridget Went ’17, Kiefer Solarte ’16, Benjamin Citrin ’16, and Mariette Aborn ’17.

3. Catherine Cyr ’17 and Nate Miller were married on June 24, 2023, in Rockport, Maine. Pictured: Noah Bragg ’15, Matt Jacobson ’17, Dave Ruuska ’17, Adam Bakopolus ’16, Conor Donahue ’18, Olivia Bean ’17, Dhivya Singaram ’17, Bella Tumaneng ’17, and Catherine and Nate.

4. Zachary Kubetz ’11 and Elena Crow were married on February 18, 2023, at the Mauna Kea Resort in Hawai’i. Pictured: Wes Fleuchaus ’11, Mark Oppenheim ’11, Jacob Kubetz, Zachary, Tomas Crowe, Evan Coates, Christian Ebersol ’11, and Schuyler Ransohoff ’11.

5. Imelda Ko ’14 and Amy Hunt were married on July 9, 2022, at Lanikuhonua Cultural Institute on Oahu, Hawai’i. Pictured: Jennifer Helble ’14, Imelda and Amy, Noelani Rosillo ’14, and Brittany Vernon ’14.

6. Madeline Lamo ’14 and Harkaran Rana (New York Institute of Technology ’15) were married on May 27, 2023, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Pictured: Brenna Fischer ’15, Sam Seekins ’14, Olivia MacKenzie Seekins ’13, Madeline and Harkaran, Molly Porcher ’13, Caroline Prokopowicz ’14, and Andrew del Calvo ’12.

7. Elizabeth Schetman ’13 and Joe Grimes (Stanford University ’13) were married on June 10, 2023, at The University Club of New York City. Pictured: Simon Bordwin ’13, Chris Omachi ’12, Daniel Dickstein ’13, Charlotte O’ Halloran Gorman ’13, Ali Fradin ’13, Bridget O’Carroll Freidberg ’13, Brooke Phinney ’13, Avery Loeffler ’15, Eliza Weiss ’13, Molly Clements Fisher ’13, Emma Stanislawski Millard ’13, Lidey Heuck ’13, Elizabeth and Joe, Sam Patterson ’14, Helen Conaghan Renninger ’13, Molly Lammert ’13, Julia Bensimon ’13, Louisa Cannell ’13, Jeremy Ross ’09, Judy Yang ’13, and Marcella Lovo ’13.

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Celebrate

8. John Malusa ’16 and Alexandria Ropski (University of Wisconsin ’17) were married on June 3, 2023, at Hoosier Grove Barn in Streamwood, Illinois. Pictured: Matthew Rubinoff ’16, Dylan Shamburger ’16, Alexandria and John, Christopher Fenwick ’16, and Kevin Perron ’16.

9. Marc Veilleux ’14 and Gabrielle Flaum (Johns Hopkins ’12) were married on July 30, 2023, at Fiddler’s Elbow Country Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Pictured: James Denison IV ’14, Caitlin Hutchinson Maddox ’14, Linc Rhodes II ’14, Chris Granata ’14, Bill Griffiths III ’14, Gabrielle and Marc, Wen Barker IV ’14, Adam Zhang ’14, Carolyn Veilleux ’16, Natalie Clark Weyrauch ’14, and Sam Weyrauch ’14.

10. Emma Young ’15 and Christian Boulanger ’15 were married on June 24, 2023, in New York City. Pictured: Dave Bean ’13, Ezra Duplissie-Cyr ’15, Jordan Voisine ’15, Varun Wadia ’15, Daniel Zeller ’15, Kate Witteman ’15, Ali Considine ’15, Kendall Kyritz ’15, Anna Cumming ’15, Emily Clark Bean ’15, Emma and Christian, Caitlin Whalen ’15, Lucy Saidenberg ’15, and Erin Silva ’15.

11. Matt Carpenter ’10 and Jennifer Hicks were married on August 27, 2022, in Eygalières, France.

Pictured: Bill Skarinka ’10, Tom Wakefield ’10, Matt and Jenn, Jordan Termine ’10, Chris Rossi ’10, and CJ Bell Rossi ’10.

12. Madeline Rolph ’19 and Jack Moynihan ’19 were married on June 17, 2023, in Charleston, South Carolina. Pictured: Michael Moynihan ’89, Sean MacDonald ’19, Marlaina Reidy ’19, Elizabeth D’Angelo ’19, Connor Rockett ’19, Luca Ostertag-Hill ’20, Amalia Roth ’19, Kate Moynihan ’22, Madeline and Jack, Mike Moynihan ’24, and Caroline Rice ’19.

13. Linc Rhodes ’14 and Caitlin Hutchinson Maddox ’14 were married on October 1, 2022, at Blooming Hill Farm, New York.

Pictured: Sam Weyrauch ’14, Natalie Clark Weyrauch ’14, Wen Barker ’14, James Denison ’14, Omar Sohail ’15, Alex Tougas ’14, Adam Zhang ’14, Colin Kennedy ’12, Marc Veilleux ’14, Fred Elias ’14, Megan Massa ’14, Chris Granata ’14, Linc and Caitlin, Karina Graeter ’14, Janki Kaneria ’14, Peyton Morss-Walton ’14, Chrissy Hayes ’14, Amanda Zalk ’14, Liz Owens ’14, Taylor Voiro ’14, Fiona Stavrou ’14, Aubrey Zott ’14, and Trey Linke ’15.

14. Matt Friedland ’15 and Patty Boyer ’15 were married on August 22, 2022, in Germantown, New York.

Pictured: Ujal Santchurn ’15, Rachel Lopkin Kennedy ’13, Walker Kennedy ’15, Dan Cohen ’15, Keely Boyer ’05, Taylor Salinardi Boyer ’05, Ben Osher ’15, Richard Friedland ’84, Matt and Patty, Erin Leddy ’15, Caroline Watt ’18, Avery Loeffler ’15, Trevor McDonald ’15, Andrew Ward ’15, Tom Gawarkiewicz ’15, and Christian Dulmaine ’15.

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Here Maine has its homegrown artists, and Wabanaki people were making art in and from this land for thousands of years before artists from away started to come here. But come they did, and starting in the 1800s—drawn by the inspiring beauty of its landscapes, its seclusion, and its affordability—they began schools and established art colonies and a tradition of summer art in Maine that persist today.

Drawn to Maine SEASCAPES AND MODERNISM Ogunquit has been an art colony since Boston painter Charles Woodbury brought his largely female art classes, known locally as the Virginal Wayfarers, to the beach resort in 1898 and New York art critic Hamilton Easter Field began inviting Modernists to town in 1902. Long a full-fledged art colony, Ogunquit boasts the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, the Ogunquit Art Association’s Barn Gallery, and a host of private galleries.

CLIFFS AND CRASHING SURF Monhegan is a monumental little island twelve nautical miles from land in midcoast Maine. It has been attracting artists since the mid-1800s, among them George Bellows, Robert Henri, Rockwell Kent, Andrew Winter, Jamie Wyeth, Elena Jahn, and Lynne Mapp Drexler. The Monhegan Museum of Art and History documents and displays the island’s art history and, with the island becoming very expensive, the Monhegan Artists’ Residency program helps keep the island accessible to working artists.

CRAFTY ISLE Haystack Mountain School of Crafts is to the craft world what Skowhegan is to fine art. Located on Deer Isle, Haystack attracts artisans from all over the country to study and create with the best craftspeople in the world. Thanks to Haystack, Maine is filled with talented ceramic and fiber artists, glassblowers, blacksmiths, graphic artists, and woodworkers.

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FAMED ART RESIDENCY Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture was founded on Lake Wesserunssett in central Maine in 1946. It is today as it was then, an art school run by artists. Each year, sixty-five of the best young artists in the country spend the summer studying with veteran artists—as a result, Skowhegan has colonized the whole state of Maine with its alumni, and the school is Maine’s chief connection to the New York art world.

LITTLE KNOWN Seguinland, a name invented by a developer to attract buyers to the Sheepscot Bay town of Georgetown, is Maine’s least known art colony. Between 1900 and 1940, a group of artists and photographers, including Marsden Hartley, Gaston Lachaise, Paul Strand, and William H’58 and Marguerite Zorach, summered there. The Zorachs’ daughter, beloved Maine artist Dahlov Ipcar, settled there permanently. The Portland Museum of Art resurrected the colony in 2011 in Maine Moderns: Art in Seguinland, 1900–1940.

KATZ AND COMPANY Slab City is an area of Lincolnville where a group of New York artist friends began summering in the 1950s. Alex Katz eventually purchased a bright yellow home on Slab City Road, and Neil Welliver moved year-round to a secluded Lincolnville farm.

Among other Slab City artists were Rudy Burckhardt and Yvonne Jacquette, Lois Dodd, Rackstraw Downes, and Red Grooms, all realists of one stripe or another.

A MECCA IN MONSON Monson is an old slate quarrying town in western Maine. The Libra Foundation, using money left by Fairchild Semiconductor heir Elizabeth B. Noyce, has spent more than $10 million purchasing properties in the village for studios, galleries, and lodgings as it seeks to reinvent the remote town as an artists’ mecca. Photographer Berenice Abbott was the most famous local artist resident.

TIME TO CREATE More than a true art colony, Hewnoaks, the former summer estate of artists Douglas and Marion Volk, has a mission “to give artists time and space to create within a natural, rustic environment” on the shores of Kezar Lake.

PHOTO: © ESTATE OF LYNNE DREXLER, COURTESY BERRY CAMPBELL, NEW YORK

Smoked Green, 1967, oil on canvas, by Lynne Mapp Drexler.

Bowdoin Magazine Bowdoin College Brunswick, Maine 04011

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