Nebraska Quarterly - Winter 2018

Bullets flew in Vietnam. Campus sparked with protest. And a group of students, mired in existential dread, began to question the academic system. Searching for answers, they formed a commune adjacent downtown Lincoln, in a large, old home they called The Castle. In the end, the results were ambiguous, but they would never forget their time at

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a l so: DOG DAYS A new research lab will study canine psychology and human interactions. page 10 SPORTING LIFE Campus Rec hosts over 8,000 students in club and intramural sports. page 44

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BIG RED RIDE RS Oh what fun it is to ride...

The club is a motorcycle safety group consisting of students and alumni.

WHAT’S THE MISSION? To promote motorcycle riding as a fun, efficient and space-saving way of commuting while encouraging a culture of excellence, skill, safety and good habits.

LET ’ER RIDE The group organizes rides throughout the year, but they have the most fun with their Halloween ride when members don costumes and the Santa ride through campus and down O Street each December.

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Contents 2018

What and where is home? The answer certainly changes throughout our lives, but the sense of nostalgia remains strong. In 1968 the College of Architecture graduates were finishing up their degrees and figuring out how to stay connected. They ultimately mastered that mission and returned to campus for their 50th reunion this fall. P14 For grad student Ă ngel GarcĂ­a, his Southern California birthplace has become the basis of a stirring, new book of poems. P34 Attorney Astrid Munn left Nebraska when she graduated in 2009, but now she has returned home to Scottsbluff to work and become her best self. P59 Wherever you call home, be sure to nurture that place and keep a little bit of Nebraska therein. david wilder jr./ee dee imaging

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4 Contributors 6 Bill Moos 8 Community 10 Campus News 29 Voices 55 Bulletin 56 Alum Profiles

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Club Sports

Class Quotes

Love Story

More than 8,000 students participate in Club Sports including the lesser-known ones like broomball, judo and dodgeball.

Alumni from all decades share their most interesting stories about their college roommates, both good and bad.

A gal who grew up in North Carolina and claimed to know all about Southern hospitality has fallen in love with Lincoln.

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NEBRASKA

CONTRIBUTORS

QUARTERLY

Winter 2018 VOLUME 114 NO. 4

JULIA DEAN

Julia Dean grew up in Broken Bow and earned a master’s degree in journalism in 1992 while also teaching photojournalism classes. She is a photographer, educator and founder of the Los Angeles Center of Photography. For the past eight years, Julia has concentrated on shooting street photography in downtown Los Angeles.

Shelley Zaborowski, ’96, ’00 EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Kirstin Swanson Wilder, ’89 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF SENIOR DIRECTOR, PUBLICATIONS

Charley Morris ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR

Kevin Wright, ’78 DIRECTOR, DESIGN

CARROLL MCKIBBIN

Carroll McKibbin joined the political science faculty in 1967 and served as department chair from 1970-74 before accepting a dean’s position in the University of California system. Now retired, he has renewed contacts with UNL via former students, contributed to several scholarship programs and been appointed a Foundation trustee.

Jenny Chapin ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR, BUSINESS/ALUMNI RELATIONS

EmDash MAGAZINE DESIGN

Paul Blow COVER ILLUSTRATION

NEBRASKA ALUMNI ASSOCIATION STAFF

ÁNGEL GARCÍA

Ph.D. student Ángel García is the author of Teeth Never Sleep, which was published this fall, and also the recipient of the 2018 CantoMundo Poetry Prize. His work has been published in The American Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review and Huizache, among others. In addition to his creative work, Ángel is the cofounder of nonprofit organization Gente Organizada that educates, empowers and engages communities through grassroots organizing.

CHUCK HIBBERD

A Lexington, Neb., native, Chuck Hibberd graduated in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture as an animal science major with a dream of one day being a scientist. When UNL came calling with an offer to return to Nebraska, Chuck became the director of the Panhandle Research & Extension Center in Scottsbluff. Today he is dean and director of UNL Cooperative Extension.

Stephen Boggs, ’12 ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, VENUES

Katie Brock, ’16 ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, ALUMNI AND STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

DIRECTOR, COMMUNICATIONS AND MEMBERSHIP

Justy Bullington

Tracy Moore

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, VENUES

EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT

Conrad Casillas

’03, ’11 SENIOR DIRECTOR, ALUMNI ENGAGEMENT

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, VENUES

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SE ND MAI L T O:

Nebraska Quarterly Wick Alumni Center / 1520 R Street Lincoln, NE 68508-1651 Phone: 402-472-2841 Toll-free: 888-353-1874 E-mail: nebmag@huskeralum.org Website: huskeralum.org Views expressed in Nebraska Quarterly

do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Nebraska Alumni Association. The alumni association does not discriminate on the basis of gender, age, disability, race, color, religion, marital status, veteran’s status, national or ethnic origin, or sexual orientation.

EDITORIAL QUERIES:

Kirstin Wilder (kwilder@huskeralum.org)

ADVERTISING QUERIES:

Jenny Chapin (jchapin@huskeralum.org)

Carrie Myers,

CUSTODIAN

Heather Rempe, ’03 ASSISTANT

Derek Engelbart

DIRECTOR, DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS

Charles Dorse

ASSOCIATE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ALUMNI RELATIONS

Julie Gehring ’91

materials and reader comments are welcome.

DIRECTOR, VENUES

Jessica Marshall, ’11

MEMBERSHIP AND PROGRAMS ASSISTANT

Nebraska Quarterly (USPS 10970) is published quarterly by the Nebraska Alumni Association, the known office of publication is 1520 R St., Lincoln NE 68508-1651. Alumni association dues are $50 annually of which $10 is for a subscription to Nebraska Quarterly. Periodicals postage is paid at Lincoln Nebraska 68501 and at additional mailing offices.

POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS. Requests for permission to reprint

Michael Mahnken, ’13 ASSOCIATE

Larry Routh ALUMNI CAREER SPECIALIST

Viann Schroeder ALUMNI CAMPUS TOURS

Jordan Gonzales ’17

Deb Schwab

DIRECTOR, ALUMNI ENGAGEMENT

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, VENUES

Hanna Hoffman, ’16

Andy Washburn,

ALUMNI RELATIONS AND PROGRAM COORDINATOR

’00, ’07 ASSOCIATE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, OPERATIONS

Wendy Kempcke

Hilary Winter, ’11

ADMINISTRATIVE COORDINATOR

DIRECTOR, DIGITAL STRATEGY/PR

Tyler Kruger VENUES COORDINATOR

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We go way back.

On May 3, 1888, community members met to form a fine arts society to support the study, exhibition, and collection of art at the University of Nebraska. With holdings growing in number and prominence, the art association and university opened Sheldon’s landmark Philip Johnson building in 1963.

Some things never change, however. Sheldon, like the university, remains dedicated to the missions of teaching, research, and service on which we were founded.

HANGIN’ WITH BILL MOOS

FACETIME Bill Moos is making it a priority to meet Husker students and fans from all across Nebraska.

Q:

Now that you’re one year into the athletic director job, what are your next priorities?

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championship level across the board, we need to continue to invest in our coaches and studentathletes. Whether it be top-notch facilities, our nation-leading Academic and Life Skills programs, or continuing to build our performance and nutrition areas, we are committed to providing the best resources in the country.

With those goals in mind, over the past few months we have e n ha n ce d s ta ffin g a n d better defined the focus in our fundraising and development area. We have great donors with a long history of providing generous financial resources to the Athletic Department.

Going forward our development team will be looking to grow philanthropic giving to Athletics.

The Huskers Athletic Fund is seeking individuals who are

willing to help at any and all giving levels. Increased philanthropic giving will be essential to future growth as we continue to commit to championship facilities and provide the nation’s best support services to our student-athletes.

In the next year we will continue to look for ways to offer a wonderful game day experience in Memorial Stadium and all of our athletic venues. Nebraska fans deserve the finest experiences and amenities when they come to a game in Lincoln, and our staff will continue to develop new and creative ways to ensure this happens.

A personal goal of mine in the next year is to continue to meet more of our great alumni and friends — not just former studentathletes, but Huskers from all walks of life and professions. —Bill Moos Athletic Director

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lincoln journal star

A: First and foremost, what a great first year Kendra and I have had at the University of Nebraska. The reasons I pursued the job have proven to be true.

This is a world-class university in a state with wonderful, friendly people who also happen to be the most loyal and passionate fans in college athletics.

My guiding philosophy in each of my stops in college athletics has been Honor the Past, Live the Present, Create the Future. That is no different at Nebraska.

We have accomplished a lot in a year, but there are many opportunities ahead. Our overarching and long-term goal is to have all of our teams in a position to compete in the upper half of the Big Ten and ultimately win conference championships.

In order to compete at the

Visit nebraskarep.org for schedule and tickets.

Professionals in Residence at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln

COMMUNITY

Herbie Husker Lends a Hand Student Alumni Association

Ryan Wolff, a sophomore from Brookfield, Wis., helps Herbie Husker check in attendees for the Student Alumni Association’s kickoff event in September. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students, SAA was founded in 1974 by the Nebraska Alumni Association. The group is dedicated to enhancing the connection between students and alumni by providing the fullest Husker experience through social, professional development and networking events, as well as one-of-kind campus traditions.

The Art of Conversation Nebraska Women’s Leadership Network

The Network, which got its start in 1999 under the name Cather Circle, is open to alumnae and students who partake biannually in professional development and mentoring. In October the group gathered at Sheldon Museum of Art for the conference’s opening night. Network members, from left, Barb Batie, Mari Lane Gewecke, Trudy Hines and Sue Beckman, enjoyed catching up.

Find Archie!

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from top: courtesy photo; david wilder jr./ee dee imaging

Morrill Hall’s famed Archie is hiding somewhere in the magazine, like only a 20,000-year-old mammoth can. Find him on a subsequent page, email us with his location at alumni@huskeralum.org and you’ll be entered into a drawing for a fabulous Husker prize! Congratulations to Diane (Schrad) Magill (’82) who found Archie watching wheelchair softball on page 40 of the fall edition.

Diane also surprised our communications staff by finding a second Archie on the back cover!

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KICKING OFF 150 YEARS The University of Nebraska was chartered on February 15, 1869 and charged with its land-grant mission of public education and service to Nebraska.

In 2019, we mark a 150-year legacy of improving the quality of life for Nebraska and beyond. Please join us in celebrating the historic past of your University and innovating a new future.

CHARTER WEEK

A lineup of special events and tributes are set for February 11-15, 2019.

STATE OF THE UNIVERSITY

Chancellor Ronnie Green will kick off the year with his vision—charting the course for the next 25 years, guided by the work of the Nebraska Commission of 150. The address will be streamed live online.

BE FIRST TO GET THE BOOK

“Dear Old Nebraska U,” a new lavishly illustrated book available for pre-order now, celebrates the University of Nebraska’s first 150 years with a look at the colleges, research, athletics, students, places, and people and their impact on the university and the world. ›› go.unl.edu/150book

LECTURE SERIES

The “Nebraska Lectures: Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecture Series” will offer one talk each month exploring the rich history of Nebraska’s land-grant institution. In partnership with Nebraska Humanities, all talks will be live-streamed via social media channels and captured as podcasts for public access.

Huskers Care Join the Husker Volunteer Challenge.

Glow Big Red Show your Husker spirit.

Light it.

Fly it. Wear it.

Music & Milestones Celebrate Charter Day with a monumental performance of the arts featuring UNL students, faculty and distinguished alumni—and toast the next 150 years.

LEARN MORE! n150.unl.edu The University of Nebraska does not discriminate based upon any protected status. Please see go.unl.edu/nondiscrimination. ©2018, The Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.

All Rights Reserved.

photo ©sheldon museum of art

SHARING THE VIEWPOINTS OF OUR ALUMNI, FACULTY AND STUDENTS

Artist Jacqueline Bishop recalls the deafening silence that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005: “There were no birds for days.” A selfproclaimed birdwatcher, Bishop often incorporates avian imagery into her work to evoke issues of climate change, species extinction, and migration. Sheldon Museum of Art acquired this work in 2018.

JACQUELINE BISHOP NEW ORLEANS I Monotype on commercial map with folds, 2015, 22 × 30 inches SHELDON MUSEUM OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA–LINCOLN, NORMAN GESKE WORKS ON PAPER FUND, U-6752.2018

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“I’m interested in a dog’s patience, and if they can control temptations they face. Once we figure that out, we can develop training techniques that will help dogs behave better.”

— JEFFREY STEVENS, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY

Husker DogFest included Frisbee dog tricks in the green space adjacent Hamilton Hall on City Campus where the first university building once stood.

BIG BRAG Seniors Gage Hoegermeyer of Herman and Monica Rogers of Omaha were crowned homecoming king and queen on the field at Memorial Stadium during halftime of the Sept. 29 NebraskaPurdue football game.

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ipant’s stress and improves their ability to pay attention and increase memory.

Understanding how animal interactions influence people’s psychology can help target animal-assisted therapies and interventions to address individuals’ specific therapy needs. Comfort dogs go to universities and to K-12 schools to help students, but researchers don’t understand when or why dog interactions improve educational outcomes.

Stevens launched the lab in August by organizing Husker DogFest — which included Frisbee dog tricks, police dog demonstrations, obedience class demonstrations, lab tours, dog games, pet-related vendors and food vendors.

“One of the most exciting parts of this new research program is the opportunity it has given me to bring science to the Lincoln community,” Stevens said. The lab works with Prairie Skies Dog Training to assess the characteristics of dogs that predict which dogs will successfully complete the Canine Good Citizen test at the end of the Prairie Skies obedience class.

The hope is to discover ways that trainers and owners can improve their dogs’ obedience.

The lab uses undergraduates as study subjects, but Stevens would like to expand the scope to explore how pet dogs influence owner behavior, as well as how working dogs interact with and affect their handlers.

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david wilder jr./ee dee imaging

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projects. I returned from my sabbatical eager to build my own dog cognition lab.”

Stevens began asking questions that were not only about dog cognition but also about how human psychology is influenced by interacting with dogs — questions that directed the development of the lab.

He received a college partnership grant, aimed at building connections between college faculty and the community, which helped make the lab a reality.

The canine cognition part of the lab aims to understand how dogs process information and make decisions. Owners bring their dogs to the new lab space in the 501 Building on City Campus. Undergraduate research assistants engage with the dogs by playing games with them for treats or toys and collecting data on their behavior. Owners can watch their dogs participate from the adjacent room via video monitor.

Most of the studies give dogs choices between different options to assess their self-control, or how well they can resist temptation. Researchers want to know what factors influence this ability and whether it can be trained.

The second part of the lab focuses on dog-human interactions, studying how interacting with dogs influences cognition and decision making in people.

For example, student participants pet a dog for a few minutes to see if the interaction decreases the partic-

BIG BRAG Art professor Peter Pinnell will be the next president of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. He will begin the four-year presidential cycle in spring 2019.

ENGINEERING

courtesy photo taylor seeley

ICE, ICE BABY Finding suitable snow for winter fun can be tricky in Nebraska, which is why civil engineering major Taylor Seeley was looking forward to his annual family getaway.

The Seeleys weren’t schussing down the slopes of a ski resort. Instead, they were competing in the US National Snow Sculpting Competition in Lake Geneva, Wis. With the sculpture “Crab Grab” — a depiction of two crabs taking a pearl from an oyster — Team Nebraska took third place. It’s the third top-three finish in this competition for the Seeley clan.

Taylor’s father, Matt Seeley, is a veteran of the event and has risen in the ranks of competitive snow sculpting. Matt, a systems engineer with the USDA, was part of the US team that finished third out of more than 30 teams at the 2012 world championships in China. He even had a stay in the Guinness Book of World Records for creating the largest ice cream scoop sculpture (3,010 pounds) in 2014.

“He’s really the creative genius on the team,” Taylor said.

On Team Nebraska, Taylor puts his engineering passions to good use. Studying to be a structural engineer, Taylor works to find ways to include “negative space” in the team’s designs and analyzes the structure to determine its strengths and weaknesses.

“I just took Mechanics of Elastics Bodies, and that class is all about shear and stress and buckling and

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loads on support structures,” said Taylor. “I now have a better understanding of how to structurally set up our design so it stays.”

That, Taylor said, is very important for Team Nebraska, especially since his father’s designs are rarely set in stone … or clay … or ice.

“There’s a lot of problemsolving that goes into this competition, and that’s where I have value to this team,” Taylor said. “We like to be risky and push the boundaries — like using a lot of negative space or creating antennae that are sticking three feet up in the air — but at the same time you have to be reasonable.”

“Dad will make a clay sculpture and then I will look at it and try to analyze whether we could pull that off using snow or whether we’ll need some sort of support structure or a clever way to support this.

We’re both engineering-minded, but I’m learning things that will definitely help us.”

This was Taylor’s seventh year of competing on Team Nebraska, and he plans to enter his eighth competition in January with a yet-to-be-determined design.

—Karl Vogel

Student Taylor Seeley is flanked by his dad, Matt, and Jason Perreault at the U.S. National Snow Sculpting Competition in Wisconsin.

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Architect Philip Johnson talks with students outside of the Sheldon Museum of Art in 1963.

Far right, from left: Robert Lezotte, William Rogers, Russ Weber and Ed Kodet during their college days.

ARCHITECTURE

Building Friendships

“W

e graduated in 1968, and as soon as we cast off our caps and gowns, hugged our friends and family, we scattered to the winds with several of our 41 class members off to Vietnam,” said alumnus Larry Jacobsen.

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Fast forward 50 years and a core group of 22 alumni and 16 spouses from the Class of ’68 gathered on campus in early September for their 50th reunion.

The group toured new campus buildings and discovered spaces that never existed in 1968.

“Our first reunion was held in 1993 with 27 class members and nine of our former professors in atten-

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courtesy of college of architecture

CLASS OF 1968 MARKS 50 YEARS OF CONNECTIVITY AND GIVING BACK

BIG BRAG

from top right: illustration by morris schoff; university communications

Results from the 2018 Nebraska Rural Poll show that most Nebraskans are positive about their community and current situation and optimistic about the future, but Panhandle residents are more pessimistic. Fifty-two percent of respondents to the largest annual poll of rural Nebraskans’ perceptions on quality of life and policy issues said they were better off this year than five years ago.

dance,” said Pat McDermott. Since then we’ve come together for reunions about every five years, with the strong desire to keep our friendships alive and our group together while also hashing over old times.”

But it wasn’t just a gathering that made this group unique. They have a strong desire to give back.

“As members of our college’s alumni association, a few of us discussed how we could best give back to the university,” said Jacobsen. In 2008, for their 40 th reunion, they started the Class of 1968 Scholarship Fund with the University of Nebraska Foundation. “The fund quickly reached the sum needed to become an endowment for the scholarships. As we kept growing the fund, we felt the satisfaction of continuing to give to those who, like us at one time, were working hard as students, but liv-

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“Our first reunion was held in 1993 with 27 class members and nine of our former professors in attendance.” ing on very limited budgets.” To date the fund has provided scholarships for 18 students.

Coming together for a noble, academic cause wasn’t the only glue that held this class together.

“We also participated together in many extracurricular activities while students, and those experiences helped build long-lasting friendships,” said Gordon Scholz.

As students, the majority of class members were active in the Nebraska Student Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Annually

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Dean Katherine Ankerson welcomes the Class of ’68 to Architecture Hall in September.

BIG BRAG

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the film to DVD format. The class sold more than 100 copies and the proceeds went to the Architectural Foundation of Nebraska for scholarship support.

As one would expect, a great deal has changed since 1968. The architecture branch library has moved twice since they graduated, moving from what is now room 305 to the Architecture Hall Gallery and now to its present-day location, the north wing of Architecture Hall. The current library location had been three floors of studio space, and the now-iconic attic studio area was restricted to students in 1968.

“We never had studio here; it was off limits and locked,” said one alum during their tour of the attic studio. One alum whispered to another, “I remember sneaking up here when the door was accidentally left unlocked.”

A lot has changed over the years, but one thing has been pretty consistent from class to class: the strong, long-lasting bonds among friends.

—Kerry McCullough-Vondrak

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kerry mccullough-vondrak

General public season tickets are sold out for the men’s basketball season. This is the fourth time in the past six seasons that the Huskers have sold out their entire season allotment of tickets at Pinnacle Bank Arena.

they participated in trips to the national convention, competed in the Nebraska Concrete Masonry Association design competition and came together for the promotion of A Week, a weeklong series of events and programs that benefited college and high school students visiting the campus.

Back in the day, favorite pastimes included an annual pig roast, softball games and staffing their own coffee shop — on the honor system, of course.

Those good times didn’t end with graduation. In addition to meeting regularly for reunions, the group set up a blog where class members could share news, remember those who had died, and celebrate each others’ joys and accomplishments.

About 10 years ago, they discovered a 16mm film of Linus Burr Smith’s final lecture. Smith was the first chairman of the Department of Architecture in the 1930s and was still chair when the students enrolled as freshmen. With Smith’s final lecture preserved on film, class members organized an effort to digitally convert

JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATIONS

courtesy rdg planning & design and wtw achitects

Community Impact When Collective Impact Lincoln launched a canvassing and community building effort in the city’s six most economically challenged neighborhoods, college faculty saw an opportunity to immerse students from all of its majors in a hands-on civic engagement project.

The result is “One Project, One College: The Heart of Lincoln,” which began this fall and involved students in nine classes working on a variety of assignments and projects that focus in some way on the six neighborhoods. Students in journalism and broadcast news classes are reporting on the people and issues in the neighborhoods while broadcast production, advertising and public relations students are formulating communication strategies and creating content.

“This project encourages students to think deeply about community problems while considering the role and impact of journalism and strategic communications in exposing and addressing those problems,” said Michelle Carr Hassler (’80, ’89), an associate professor of practice who is coordinating the effort.

“It’s an amazing hands-on experience for them.”

The neighborhoods, located in the city’s core, are historic and diverse. They correspond with areas of extreme poverty where 40 percent or more of residents are at poverty level. They were identified in the 2015 Lincoln Vital Signs, an annual report, produced by the University of Nebraska Public Policy Center.

Hassler saw parallels between what Collective Impact Lincoln was doing in the neighborhoods with what good journalists should try to do: listen deeply and engage with diverse communities that often are overlooked. So, she started planning ways to involve a reporting class, including having students accompany community builders as they canvass so students can learn how to better communicate with residents, understand their concerns and tell their stories.

In talking with Collective Impact Lincoln officials, Hassler realized there were additional learning opportunities for students at the college. Hassler rallied other faculty who were eager to involve their classes.

One of those is assistant professor of practice Kelli Britten (’13), whose advertising-public relations campaigns class is working on a marketing campaign for South of Downtown Community Development Organization. Students in this senior capstone class

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are looking at ways to solve consumer challenges, including trust and awareness for the organization.

Some students will develop an integrated media communications plan for Collective Impact Lincoln to help neighborhood leaders identify target audiences and strategize ways to connect with them, while a broadcast production class will conduct public service interviews as part of their final audio project.

On the news side, two reporting classes are working to produce a variety of news — from personality profiles to issue stories — that will be published on the college’s news website. Accompanying those stories will be photographs and aerial videos of the neighborhoods. A senior-level broadcasting class that produces the weekly Star City News program is reporting on issues and initiatives in the neighborhoods.

—Molly Chapple

BIG BRAG In what is a decadeslong homecoming tradition on campus, students, faculty and staff donated 1,000plus pints of blood benefiting up to 3,000 lives. This is the Cornhusker State’s largest single blood drive.

FIRST LOOK The Nebraska East Union has kicked off construction of a $28.5 million renovation that will be completed in 2020. Although this project will permanently shut down the bookstore and Corner Deli, the modernization will make eating there a more social experience. The renovation will relocate the dining hall to the first floor and convert the second floor into a large open lounge with study rooms. Other changes will be expanding the Great Plains Room to twice its current size, revamping the bowling alley and adding a Starbucks.

The restoration will update more than 100,000-square-feet of space.

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WINTER Ed Cahoon and his colleagues recently discovered two new fatty acids in the oil of the Chinese violet cress.

INSTITUTE OF AGRICULTURE AND NATURAL RESOURCES

Fatty Finding NEBRASKANIC ACID NAMED FOR STATE BY HUSKER BIOCHEMIST

BIG BRAG

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vegetable oils, which are best known for their role in the kitchen but have also found use in biodiesel fuels, lubricants and other industrial applications. The structures of the fatty acids housed within an oil help dictate both its health effects and industrial merits.

Most off-the-shelf vegetable oils, such as canola or soybean oil, contain the same five fatty acids. Those conventional fatty acids all contain either 16 or 18 carbon atoms and feature similar molecular structures.

By contrast, Nebraskanic and Wuhanic rank among a class of “unusual” fatty acids that contain fewer or more carbon atoms — both have 24 — and uncommon molecular branches that stem from those carbons.

Whether conventional or unusual, all known fatty acids generally obey the same instruction manual: They add two carbon atoms at the end of a four-step biochemical cycle, then continue doing so until assembly is complete. But the Nebraskanic and Wuhanic acids seem to go off-book, Cahoon said, in a way rarely, if ever, seen outside of certain bacteria. —Scott Schrage

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francis gardler, journal star (2)

The Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts opens in fall 2019 offering a bachelor of fine arts in emerging media arts. Applications are being accepted for the first cohort at carsoncenter.unl.edu.

Decades after scientists discovered hundreds of different fatty acids in vegetable oils, two that had managed to elude detection have finally revealed themselves to a team led by UNL and Huazhong Agricultural University in China.

Named for the sites of the two leading institutions, Nebraskanic acid and Wuhanic acid make up nearly half of the seed oil found in the Chinese violet cress, a plant native to central China. According to the research team, the discovery may be the first of its kind since the 1960s and 1970s, when biochemists identified troves of new fatty acids in various vegetable oils.

“People thought maybe they’d found everything there was to find,” said Nebraska’s Ed Cahoon, a George Holmes University Professor of biochemistry who co-authored an Aug. 27 study on the discovery in the journal Nature Plants. “It’s been at least several decades since somebody has discovered a new component of vegetable oil like this.”

Fatty acids represent the primary components of

DEVOUR IN HUSKER COUNTRY

Skate

Railyard Ice Rink The outdoor Railyard Ice Rink is open from December to March when Mother Nature is cooperating.

Head down to the Haymarket District with the kiddos or for date night and have some festive, winter fun.

clockwise from top left: courtesy of dooney & bourke; courtesy of harpercollins children’s books; journal star; courtesy forever collectibles; courtesy green flash

Read

Buy

Husker Handbag It’s the N-genious pattern that makes this Dooney and Bourke purse the perfect addition to any Husker fashionista’s wardrobe. Its double handles, bottom feet and spacious interior make this satchel ideal for any alumnae.

The Afterlife of Holly Chase Alumna Cynthia Hand (’06) gives a modern, youngadult spin to A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is a 17-year-old named Holly who has been trapped in a miserable afterlife for five years as the Ghost of Christmas Past, but this year everything changes.

Build

Memorial Stadium and Herbie Husker It’s a decidedly Husker twist on a classic building toy from BRXLZ that will keep you (and the kids) entertained and add a fun touch to any sportsthemed room. The 3D puzzle sets can be found at sportsfanisland.com.

Drink

Green Flash Brewery Opening last summer, this hip downtown spot at 16th and P streets serves up craft brews and laidback bar food. All beers are brewed in-house, and you can even take a growler to go.

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WINTER Observing plants in their outdoor classroom are clockwise from lower left, J.P. Davis, Ian Cuevas, Mariah Livingston and Kristina Insingo.

OVERHEARD

“I’m super excited for the opportunity to be on the 2019 staff in a slightly different role.

Coaching is something that I wanted to do since stepping foot back on campus following my playing career.”

FINE AND PERFORMING ARTS

Art in the Park CEDAR POINT OFFERS UNIQUE CLASS EXPERIENCE

— C U RT IS L E D B E T T E R (’05,’12) , on taking a new role with the Nebraska baseball team as the volunteer coach after spending 10 years as the team’s director of operations.

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Point, which has been in operation since 1975. “It provides a setting where we are not a national park or a state park in the sense that we are preserving it as pristine. It’s much more about having an area where we can protect long-term research plots where it’s okay to manipulate the environment.”

It’s not uncommon for biological field stations to have some kind of humanities embedded within their science context, Garbisch said. A conversation with Karen Janovy, who was the long-time education coordinator at Sheldon Museum of Art, led Garbisch to connect with Cather Professor of Art Karen Kunc.

“It was Karen (Kunc) who came up with the idea that we could do one advanced art

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from top: santiago cal; scott chambers

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heir art classroom for two weeks is 280 miles due west from the campus in Lincoln. It is located in western Nebraska near the city of Ogallala and Lake McConaughy.

Art at Cedar Point is a two-week, interdisciplinary art course offered by the School of Art, Art History & Design each summer and taught at UNL’s Cedar Point Biological Station, a field research facility and experiential classroom.

“The core mission of most biological stations is about place-based research,” said Jon Garbisch, associate director of Cedar

from top: kristina insingo; santiago cal

class that rotates through senior faculty, and have a few resident artists and an art camp,” Garbisch said. “It’s grown out of Karen pushing a couple of faculty to come out here.

You come here for a holistic experience.

You’re embedded in the environment. The interaction between students, the interaction between students and their instructor, and the interaction between those people and the resident scientists for the summer is just something that happens naturally.”

Last summer’s class, “Making Your Mark: The Figure and Nature” was taught by Associate Professor of Art Santiago Cal. Ten students took the intensive studio course, creating artworks based on their experience at Cedar Point.

In addition, 12 artists in residence attended for one- and two-week residencies throughout the summer at Cedar Point. And Art at Cedar Point also organizes community outreach events that include a speaker series and hiring Nebraska undergraduates to gain teaching experience through an art and science adventure camp for area students.

For Kristina Insingo, a senior art major from Floral Park, N.Y., Art at Cedar Point was a whole new experience for her. “It’s been really eye-opening because, obviously being from New York, this kind of stuff is completely new. I’ve never been so in touch with nature,” she said. “Just going on hikes and seeing the monuments and going and doing

Mariah Livingston works on a painting.

and adventuring — it’s just really cool to be part of a different kind of culture like this.”

Insingo said she knew she was signing up for something different, but she didn’t realize exactly what it would be like.

“It’s amazing. Honestly, when I signed up for Cedar Point, I was like, sure, something different,” she said. “I wasn’t really expecting living in a cabin, and bugs and spiders and snakes. I wasn’t really ready for that, in a sense. But not being ready for it just allowed me to be more open to it. And it’s just so beautiful out here. I didn’t even know this existed in Nebraska.”

Art at Cedar Point has been offered since 2014. Courses have focused on photography, printmaking, mixed media and now this summer’s drawing and the figure in nature course. Next summer, Professor of Art Aaron Holz will teach a watercolor journaling course.

—Kathe C. Andersen

“I wasn’t really expecting living in a cabin, and bugs and spiders and snakes. I wasn’t really ready for that, in a sense. But not being ready for it just allowed me to be more open to it. And it’s just so beautiful out here. I didn’t even know this existed in Nebraska.”

The embroidery project created

by Lindsey Pinkerton.

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WINTER BIG BRAG Xiaoshan Xu, assistant physics and astronomy professor, was awarded nearly $1 million to fund his research on spintronics, a technology that creates new ways for computers and data to become faster, cheaper and more efficient.

craig chandler

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BL A M E I T ON THE RAIN Boneyard Bash The opening football game for new head coach Scott Frost on Sept. 1 was a washout due to lightning which put the game into a two hour and 40 minute delay before being canceled.

HOW DID FANS PASS THE TIME? Those in the stadium started the wave (a fast and slow version) and sang along to Toto’s Africa and Garth Brooks’ The Thunder Rolls.

WHAT STUDENTS SAID “Even though I was soaked, and it was probably a little dangerous to be out in a lightning storm, I had the time of my life.” —Jessica Larkins

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WINTER Beatrice native Dani Havekost student teaches in the classroom.

OVERHEARD

“Louise Pound embodied so many leadership ideals.

She advocated for herself and for others and made a significant impact on our history as a university.”

EDUCATION AND HUMAN SCIENCES

Boosting the Teacher Pipeline

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the state. UNL recognizes the PK-12 teacher pipeline is slowing down, and the college is reaching out to school districts, potential teachers and other Nebraska teacher preparation programs to get the pipeline flowing at a sustainable rate.

“This college has a shared responsibility to ensure that Nebraska schools have highly qualified teachers to work with our children,” said Beth Doll, interim dean. “That’s the next generation for our state. They are the leaders. Of all the things we’re responsible for, that takes precedence.”

Collaborating with Omaha and Lincoln public schools on para-to-teacher programs is one innovative approach to filling the

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from top: craig chandler; scott chambers

— DO N D E P L O WMA N , EXECUTIVE VICE CHANCELLOR AND CHIEF ACADEMIC OFFICER, on why the former College of Business Administration building at 12th and R streets was renamed Louise Pound Hall.

F i r s t t h e g o o d n e w s . N e b ra s k a ’ s teacher shortage is considerably less severe than national trends. Guy Trainin, chair of the Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education says the “quality of students admitted to our teaching programs are consistently strong and considerably higher than the national average.” While enrollment numbers are down slightly in recent years, UNL is providing the state with well-prepared teachers who are effectively meeting the challenges of students and schools.

But the demand for teachers in Nebraska is increasingly greater than the supply — especially in certain subjects and areas of

from top: ryan j. lane/istock; scott chambers

pipeline. Paraprofessionals are invested in and familiar with students, schools and communities. Getting paras certified to teach while continuing their work is a challenge. The college is providing classes in Omaha and adding some online options to help meet the need. Both school districts are providing tuition incentives to reduce the barriers for paras to become teachers.

“There’s a synergy that is developing into partnerships across the state,” said Sara Skretta, certification officer for the college.

“It’s been fun to see this willingness to work together to address the pipeline issues.

People in Nebraska understand the importance of education and the importance of getting teachers to their communities.”

Skretta and others in the college are also working with rural schools to expose pre-service teachers to opportunities in smaller Nebraska communities. Rural districts are getting creative — offering job guarantees for student teachers, loan forgiveness, housing support and even paying new teachers’ grocery bills.

“Districts are super receptive to getting in front of our students,” Skretta said.

“They want our kids to come out and visit.

We have not had this level of collaboration before. Districts want it, and we’re eager to offer that to our students as an option.”

Sherri Jones, professor and chair of the Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders, says recent collaborations between the University of Nebraska, UNL and the Nebraska Department of Education have supported new faculty positions to increase course offerings in early childhood special education and tuition support to help address the persistent shortage of special education teachers.

“The university is investing because early childhood is important to the future of Nebraska. NDE is investing because of shortages of early childhood special educators and early intervention specialists.

They want them to have the best knowledge and training available,” said Jones.

No one entity can fill the Nebraska teacher pipeline by itself, but through creative, innovative collaboration, our state will continue to meet the challenge of preparing excellent teachers. —Brad Stauffer

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LAW

Space Granted The University of Nebraska has received a $250,000 NASA Space Law pilot-program grant to create a nationwide network of students, faculty and practitioners interested in space law and policy.

“NASA understands workforce development is crucial to the United States’ prosperity in space. We hope to foster a great pool of attorneys to pull their legal workforce from,” said Elsbeth Magilton, executive director of the Space, Cyber and Telecommunications Law program. “The key objective of the Space Law Network is to implement a system to support, educate and provide opportunities to law students across the country interested in space law and policy.”

The project is facilitated by the NASA Nebraska Space Grant office at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, led by Scott Tarry, director; and Michaela Lucas, associate director. It will be implemented by Nebraska’s space law program, led by Matt Schaefer, co-director and program faculty; and Magilton.

“This g rant allows the Space Law Network to fund legal internships at NASA, as well as bring students from all over the U.S. to numerous national conferences, where they’ll hear from leading scholars,” Schaefer said. “This April, Nebraska Law will host a student and new scholar space law workshop, focused on research, writing and publication, while also giving students the opportunity to build career-development plans targeting careers in space.”

OVERHEARD

“I strive to make my courses interesting and relevant by bringing in lots of contemporary examples and case studies from the real world.”

— DI P RA J H A , AS S O CI AT E PR O F E S SOR OF P RA C TICE AN D T H E D I R E CT O R OF GL OBA L E N G AG E ME N T F O R T H E H OSP ITA L ITY, RESTAU R AN T AN D T O U R I S M M A N AG E ME N T PR O G R AM, on being the highest-rated UNL professor on Rate My Professors, a popular website that allows students to grade their professors.

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WINTER Researchers measured temperatures of grouse nests and nearby available spaces conducive for nesting in the Valentine area of the Nebraska Sandhills. They also documented the vegetation characteristics of the sites.

BIG BRAG

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AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES AND NATURAL RESOURCES

A

Hot Topic

study by UNL researchers has found that predicted increased temperatures across the Great Plains are likely to influence the survival of the sharp-tailed grouse, a native game bird species, by reducing nesting space.

“Our study carried out in the Sandhills rangeland of western Nebraska provides a baseline for understanding sharp-tailed grouse thermal ecology,” said E.J. Raynor, postdoctoral research associate in agronomy and horticulture and lead author of the study.

“Our findings suggest sharp-tailed grouse selected nest sites that reduced their exposure to high temperatures during the hottest part of the day.”

Those nests experienced 88-degree or higher tem-

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peratures for at least an hour less than nearby available sites in the same pasture, Raynor said, noting that 88 degrees is the threshold where sharp-tailed grouse experience heat stress and pant to cool their bodies.

Past research found the birds preferred small shrubs and yucca plants as nesting locations. The study showed that availability of these fine-scale vegetative habitats within grasslands is important because they regulate nest temperature more than other vegetation in the study area.

For the study, Raynor and colleagues Larkin Powell, professor of ecology, and Walt Schacht, professor of agronomy, measured temperatures of grouse nests and nearby available spaces conducive for nesting in the Valentine areas. They also documented vegetation characteristics of the sites. Temperature measure-

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from top: e.j. raynor/agronomy and horticulture; eric schacht

The university’s Digital Commons reached 50 million downloads in September, making it the most accessed digital repository for full-text items written by UNL faculty and students in the nation. The Digital Commons holds more than 100,000 academic papers available to the public and is the third-largest in the country, behind the University of Michigan and the University of California.

OVERHEARD

“We as a Legislature need to support this group of students. We need to figure out what we can do differently to support first-generation students. When they complete higher education, it helps every sector — agriculture, manufacturing, entrepreneurship.”

ments were then compared to future projections of air temperature under different emission scenarios for the year 2080.

Based on those projections, in 2080, grouse will face nest temperatures of 93 degrees or higher for five hours per day if greenhouse gas emissions are low and seven hours per day if they are high.

“Available locations on the Sandhills landscape would be over 93 degrees for six and nine hours of the day depending on future low- and high-emission scenario predictions,” he said, “indicating thermal space not only at the nest will be more limited in the future.”

The Nebraska Sandhills, where the grassland is intact, provides more appropriate nesting site options than other Great Plains grasslands, where higher grazing rates occur, and future climate conditions could further restrict the availability of nesting sites that meet the heat-stress temperature threshold.

To survive, the sharp-tailed grouse’s nesting behavior may need to change.

—Shawna Richter-Ryerson

—TONY VARGAS, NEBRASKA STATE SENATOR FROM OMAHA, upon visiting campus to see how UNL serves students who are the first in their families to attend college.

BUSINESS

French Flair

scott chambers

INTERNING ABROAD PROVIDES MORE THAN SCENIC VIEWS Participating in a study abroad program conjures up images of exploring captivating landscapes and culture of a foreign land. However, Hunter Kelley, a senior international business and management major from Lincoln, spent last summer immersing himself in an internship and courses while in Aix-enProvence, France.

“I took a global brand management class through the Institute for American Universities in France, and also tackled two online classes in finance and international business through Nebraska,” Kelley said. “I also interned 25-30 hours a week at Geo Sentinel, which specializes in making smart watches to track and store vitals via GPS.” The work at Geo Sentinel gave Kelley an inside look at new technology and the many ways it can help people. It provided a different kind of fulfillment than exploring ancient ruins or attending a soccer match.

“The technology helps Alzheimer’s and dementia patients, and others who need help. Equipped with an SOS system, the watches track patient location

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and other information using the Geo Sentinel App. I loved working there, as the group dynamic was high-energy and inclusive,” he said.

A large part of his eight-week internship involved preparing Geo Sentinel for the Consumer Electronics Show held annually in Las Vegas. A world-renowned technology show, CES highlights cutting-edge products in the technology industry.

“My boss liked my work and invited me to join them at CES in January. I am also in the process of helping them classify their product as a health care device, making sure it follows FCC guidelines and drafting an export plan,” he said.

Kelley, who leads the Student Ethics Board at the college, serves as a peer career coach in the Business Career Center and is a student coordinator for Nebraska Business Global Immersion programs. Since this was Kelley’s first glimpse of life outside of North America, he said his time overseas served as a gateway to more opportunities than he had before the journey.

—Roger Simonsen

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KICKING OFF 150 YEARS The University of Nebraska was chartered on February 15, 1869 and charged with its land-grant mission of public education and service to Nebraska.

In 2019, we mark a 150-year legacy of improving the quality of life for Nebraska and beyond. Please join us in celebrating the historic past of your University and innovating a new future.

CHARTER WEEK

A lineup of special events and tributes are set for February 11-15, 2019.

STATE OF THE UNIVERSITY

Chancellor Ronnie Green will kick off the year with his vision—charting the course for the next 25 years, guided by the work of the Nebraska Commission of 150. The address will be streamed live online.

BE FIRST TO GET THE BOOK

“Dear Old Nebraska U,” a new lavishly illustrated book available for pre-order now, celebrates the University of Nebraska’s first 150 years with a look at the colleges, research, athletics, students, places, and people and their impact on the university and the world. ›› go.unl.edu/150book

LECTURE SERIES

The “Nebraska Lectures: Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecture Series” will offer one talk each month exploring the rich history of Nebraska’s land-grant institution. In partnership with Nebraska Humanities, all talks will be live-streamed via social media channels and captured as podcasts for public access.

Huskers Care Join the Husker Volunteer Challenge.

Glow Big Red Show your Husker spirit.

Light it.

Fly it. Wear it.

Music & Milestones Celebrate Charter Day with a monumental performance of the arts featuring UNL students, faculty and distinguished alumni—and toast the next 150 years.

LEARN MORE! n150.unl.edu The University of Nebraska does not discriminate based upon any protected status. Please see go.unl.edu/nondiscrimination. ©2018, The Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.

All Rights Reserved.

photo ©sheldon museum of art

SHARING THE VIEWPOINTS OF OUR ALUMNI, FACULTY AND STUDENTS

Artist Jacqueline Bishop recalls the deafening silence that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005: “There were no birds for days.” A selfproclaimed birdwatcher, Bishop often incorporates avian imagery into her work to evoke issues of climate change, species extinction, and migration. Sheldon Museum of Art acquired this work in 2018.

JACQUELINE BISHOP NEW ORLEANS I Monotype on commercial map with folds, 2015, 22 × 30 inches SHELDON MUSEUM OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA–LINCOLN, NORMAN GESKE WORKS ON PAPER FUND, U-6752.2018

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State Impact

Our Towns Invigorate Our State The university plays an important role as it nurtures Nebraska’s rural communities B Y CHUCK HIBBERD ( ’ 77) Dean and director, UNL Cooperative Extension

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h at I k n o w b e y o n d a shadow of a doubt, is that Nebraska is a stronger and m u c h m o re i n te re s t i n g place with thriving rural communities. I grew up in Lexington, Nebraska, and embraced small town life.

Every school event was a community event whether it was sports, arts and culture or graduation. I remember engaging high school friends at the local A&W fast-food joint after school events while sharing stories and laughs. Lifelong friendships were built at that A&W. Most of the 300 communities in Nebraska are relatively small and rural and historically were created to serve Nebraska’s farms and ranches.

They are hometowns to hundreds of thousands of Nebraskans and the places where rural people send their children to school, buy groceries, shop and access health care services. Rural communities are core to Nebraska’s culture and represent significant place and human wealth.

But we have a problem. While the Great Plains is home to productive farming and ranching, many,

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if not most, rural communities in the Great Plains are challenged today. A quick review of county and community population statistics finds many communities peaked in population in 1920, 1930 and 1940. In Nebraska, there were between 700 and 800 communities around 1900. Now there are just over 300 Nebraska communities. With each 10-year Census, rural Nebraska’s population declines while urban Nebraska grows. This chronic and severe depopulation is the greatest challenge facing rural communities today.

Driving our depopulation crisis is the technical advances in production agriculture. These advances lead to increased automation and outsourcing, which undermines the need for rural workers and their families. Development of manufacturing, tourism and transportation corridors helps to offset depopulation in some rural communities. Despite these long-term dire trends, rural communities have the potential to thrive and reverse population loss.

So how can we at the University of Nebraska help?

Through our Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, UNL Cooperative Extension, Community Vitality Initiative (CVI) team and the Rural Futures Institute which are all committed to be a strong partner with rural communities.

Employing the Land Grant University Extension model, a key role CVI plays is listening to the needs and opportunities of rural people, and then networking folks to resources that can help rural communities and their development efforts.

The Community Vitality Initiative is advancing a rural community formula for success known as Prosperity Communities. This formula embraces the idea that any rural community with deep commitment can achieve sustained prosperity by weaving together three development strategies: • Renew community population by attracting people and families.

• Increase economic diversification and prosperity to generate jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities.

• Create community attributes and resources to enhance quality of life.

However, rural community development is a team sport. UNL Cooperative Extension, in partnership with the University of Nebraska Rural Futures Institute, the Nebraska Community Foundation (NCF), Center for Rural Entrepreneurship and the Heartland Center for Leadership Development, are field testing the Prosperity Communities strategy with encouraging success. Let me share some examples.

VALENTINE (POP. 2,803)

This is a can-do community focusing on assets rooted in ranching, transportation and tourism to grow a thriving rural community. Extension CVI educators

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VOICES Jenny Nixon and Jay Jenkins have partnered with Valentine to explore their development opportunities. Others at the university have provided research to help Valentine explore its future. Professor Kim Wilson and her landscape architecture students have helped Valentine visualize a renewed main street, housing development and a high-amenity, people-focused community.

CHAPPELL (POP. 898)

Chappell, like so many small rural Great Plains communities, has faced many challenges including the loss of a school, the closing of a care home and now the impacts of changes at Cabela’s. Connie Hancock, UNL Cooperative Extension CVI educator, has worked closely with Chappell to address the challenges and craft a strategy forward to prosperity.

nebraska tourism commission (2)

RED CLOUD (POP. 948)

Building on its role as a farming service center and its heritage tourism opportunities rooted in Nebraska author Willa Cather, Red Cloud has created a remarkable development vision and is experiencing real progress. Rural community development is a team effort with the Red Cloud Community Fund (affiliated with the Nebraska Community Foundation), the Willa Cather Foundation, the Regional Development District, Nebraska Extension and the College of Architecture all partnering to envision a better future and move to meaningful action.

NEBRASKA CITY (POP. 7,347)

Once defined as a “dying river town,” the people of Nebraska City proved this label wrong. They worked hard, made smart development decisions and are now thriving. But a community’s development is never done. Successful communities continue to explore their development opportunities and invest in their future. Rex Nelson, UNL Cooperative Extension CVI educator, is facilitating a visioning process within the Prosperity Communities framework. The Nebraska Community Foundation and the Nebraska City Fund along with so many other groups in Nebraska City are making a difference. A new and exciting initiative is focusing on making the Missouri River an amenity. Professor Wilson’s landscape students are also in the field helping Nebraska City envision how this asset can come to life contributing to the community’s success.

The annual Nebraska City AppleJack Festival, above, features a parade down Central Avenue.

The Red Cloud Opera House, at left, includes a bookstore, art gallery and performance stage.

There are many more stories with capable players locally and statewide all working hard to grow stronger rural communities. This work is essential, and the University of Nebraska is committed to acting as a foundational resource and partner with rural people dedicated to community development and prosperity.

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VOICES

Statuesque

Walking Down Memory Lane Campus memorials speak volumes B Y CARROLL MCKIBBI N Political Science Faculty and Department Chair from 1970-74

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trolling about the university campuses o n a re ce n t v i s i t from my home in California, six statues of noteworthy people caught my attention. I have visited many universities, but none with so many monuments paying tribute to individuals who have so honored their institutions and states. Then again, how many universities can boast of four U.S. secretaries of agriculture and two football coaches who won a combined five national titles?

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VOICES Standing before the statues, several came to life in my memory. On East Campus I recalled pleasant associations with Clifford Hardin and Clayton Yeutter who served in the Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush administrations, respectively.

Near Memorial Stadium I had a similar personal reaction to the bronze figures of Bob Devaney and Tom Osborne.

I never knew the two other secretaries of agriculture commemorated on the East Campus. J. Sterling Morton served under Grover Cleveland years before my time, and I never had the pleasure of meeting Mike Johanns from George W. Bush’s cabinet.

S o o n a fte r my 19 67 a p p o i n t m e n t to t h e University of Nebraska as an assistant professor in the political science department, I sat down at a two-person table for lunch at the Faculty Club. A handsome, middle-aged man approached, nodded at the empty chair, and asked, “May I join you?”

“Please do,” I replied.

My tablemate introduced himself as “Cliff.” Being new on campus, I didn’t realize I was sharing lunch with Clifford Hardin, the university chancellor.

Soon thereafter I did learn of his identity, something I would never have suspected from our first meeting. He never mentioned his title and treated me more like a peer than a subordinate.

I discovered Chancellor Hardin was a regular at the Faculty Club, sitting at various tables and conversing with faculty members. No doubt I shared lunch with him on other occasions, but I only recall that first time when a true gentleman made me feel at home.

Bob Devaney appeared at the Faculty Club on Tuesdays in the fall for luncheon football talks. I never missed his sessions and admired how the jovial coach seemed to take his wins and losses in stride, more so than many Husker fans — including myself.

“Didn’t it hurt to lose last Saturday on a fluke play?” a professor asked.

“Sure, it hurt,” Devaney replied. “But we’ve won a couple like that, too.”

Devaney could have been a successful politician.

He possessed a convivial, inviting personality, combined with a knack for recalling names. When we met on several social occasions, he always remembered me by my nickname. “Hi, Mac,” he would say with an engaging smile.

When asked to help recruit a quarterback prospect from California interested in a political science major, I readily agreed. Tom Osborne, then an assistant coach, picked me up at home and drove me to Scott’s Pancake House. There I met the recruit and Frank Patrick, the Husker quarterback at the time.

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While I talked with the young athlete about the university curriculum, but mostly about football, Osborne and Patrick sat in the next booth.

I knew nothing of recruiting methods and should have steered clear of football talk. But Osborne, who could clearly hear what I was saying, never interrupted nor criticized me later.

I bungled the recruiting assignment. The young man went elsewhere. Instead, the Huskers signed Jerry Tagge, the quarterback who led the Huskers to consecutive national championships in 1970 and 1971. Perhaps my botched recruitment effort played a role in that happy outcome. I would like to think so.

On the ride home, I asked Osborne about his aspirations. “Coaching is a young man’s game,” he replied. “If it doesn’t work out early, you need to move on.”

A few years later, at age 35, Tom Osborne succeeded Bob Devaney as the Husker football coach and led his teams to three national championships.

I wondered for some time about the secret of Osborne’s success. A good clue surfaced while talking to a former Iowa State tackle. He said many universities, including Nebraska, recruited him.

Although highly impressed with Osborne, he told the coach he always wanted to play for Iowa State.

After committing to the Cyclones, he received a congratulatory letter from Osborne wishing him every success. That thoughtful deed is the nature of Osborne, and no doubt a major reason for his remarkable success.

A brief, but revealing, acquaintance with Clayton Yeutter occurred at a Husker football game in the mid-1970s. We were sitting side by side, chatting, and trying to enjoy the game despite the antics of a young man two rows ahead. Filled with the spirit of both the emotional and liquid kind, the obnoxious kid blocked the view of an elderly man seated behind him and in front of us.

“Would you please sit down so we can enjoy the game?” the older man asked of the rowdy boy.

The young fellow whirled about, grabbed the gray-haired gentleman by the lapels, and shouted, “Are you gonna make me do it, gramps?”

Yeutter leaped forward, grabbed the assailant by the wrists, and pulled him off the frightened man.

“Now sit down and be quiet,” he scolded.

The offender, thoroughly chastened, left his seat and never returned.

My contacts with the aforementioned individuals were not numerous, nor of great depth. But I observed enough to admire each one. Standing before their statues provided an opportunity, if only in my memory, of recalling cherished moments of the past.

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Poetry by Ángel García

Coming Home I am trying to remember the exact pitch of my mother’s young voice as she cried out — chicles, chicles — earning pennies in the Plaza Municipal. I am trying to remember the sheen of my father’s skin as he cut sugarcane, sweat glowing on his darkened body, toiling from dawn til dusk.

So that now, I might take the gum from my mother’s hand and reach out for my father’s wrist to take away his machete.

So that I can lead them across time, across land, to the house they will build cinder block by block, and guide their walk across the tile they will lay, square after square, and introduce the children they will bear, boy after boy after boy after boy.

The only house they can afford to build on a dirt road three tollbooths south of Tijuana. Or this: a simpler truth: as a thirty-year-old man I’ll return to do the work that must be done. Retrieve, from behind the door, the broom to sweep from the house lightweight blankets of dust, sweep up from the floor the work of forgetting the termites have done, sweep the memories hanging from ceiling corners like spider webs.

I’ll sweep the last echoes of silence from what’s been abandoned: a child waiting for his parents to come back home.

Dinner Time

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ángel García is a third year Ph.D. student in creative writing. He is the proud son of Mexican immigrants, born in Texas and raised in Southern California.

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julia dean

Doors are not to be slammed in this house, but closed, gently.

The click of a door latch before each room takes a last breath.

At the table, I sit in front of a massive feast. It is only us three: what’s left of a family: my father, my mother, and I, each of us breathing slowly in our seats while I pass the minutes before bed, starving for a glance. My father sits, hands clutching fork and knife, his jaw pulsing as he devours every morsel on his plate. My mother stares off. Not through the dining room window, not at family photos nailed to the wall, but at the wall itself. I spread mounds of food shoveled before me across my plate, hunched over in my chair, holding, in my left hand, my fork. Sit close to the table. Finish everything on your plate. Sit up straight. Neither one reprimands.

When they push away from the table to their separate rooms, I clear away the leftovers I’ll eat later, alone in my room, with my door closed.

In the kitchen, over the sink, I wash each utensil, scrub each glass and plate, careful not to drop, nick, crack, or smash a single dish.

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VOICES

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The students, who called themselves the Communards, took a camping trip to Indian Cave State Park in 1969. In the foreground is Paul Johnson, with Paul Canarsky behind and Bob Erickson running.

E N U M M O C E H T S A C E H AND T

E V A R N AN U ) AUGHAN (’10

BY CARSON V

T

hey called it “The Castle.” Most people did, its crenellated, Romanesque tower standing vigil over Lincoln’s Near South Neighborhood, the Colorado redstone august and unshakable. Finished in 1890, the three-story mansion boasted 15 fireplaces, oak floors, a veranda above the tower and a matching carriage house, too, in case any doubts remained as to the eminence of its owner, the Pennsylvania-born Rollo Phillips, a representative for the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad, later a state senator.

By the late 1960s, however, Phillips and his Shakespearean goatee were long gone. The castle and its carriage house had been converted into nine separate apartments. The times, as Bob Dylan so keenly observed, were a-changing. American troops had flooded the shores of Vietnam, waging a war

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against the North that seemed to grow more suspect each year. Buoyed by the Civil Rights Movement of a decade prior, a new counterculture was brewing, opposed to the draft, to the war itself, to an “establishment” that continually undercut women and minorities and the lower class. Musicians were protesting with song, poets with verse. Fingers snapped.

Hair grew long. Fists shot up in solidarity. And a band of existentially fraught students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln moved into Phillips’ old castle, searching for answers together. They called themselves “The Communards.”

“It was exhilarating and frightening at the same time,” says Paul Canarksy, one of the castle’s mainstays.

“There were lots of very spirited discussions: would there or would there not be a revolution? And if there was, which side of the barricades would you be on?”

Nowhere was the societal discord of the ’60s more N E B R A S K A Q U A R T E R LY

PHOTOS BY BILL CR OSBY (’71)

STLE:

ELING

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visible than America’s college campuses, where students often led the charge, sometimes against each other, more often against the administration. Stacked amid the myriad goals of the counterculture movement was university reform, an attempt to radically democratize the teaching process, to abolish the academic hierarchy. Starting in 1965, students all over the country — many of them members of the activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) — established so-called “free universities.”

They offered counter-curricula devised by the students themselves, courses on Eastern religion, sexuality, politics, psychedelic drugs, the occult and what Saturday Review, in June 1970, called “an extension of the curriculum into hippiedom.”

In 1967, after accusing the university of teaching “an academic rote game,” according to the Daily Nebraskan, a committee of UNL students organized the Nebraska Free University (NFU). Courses ranged from human reproduction, “a factual and empirical approach to human reproduction, which will disregard the moral and social implications of reproduction,” to psychical research, “an introduction to psychic phenomena, including extra-sensory perception, mental telepathy, clairvoyance and others.” More than 600 students and others from the Lincoln community registered.

Whether these free universities were successful in disrupting the academic system is doubtful. Even the SDS, which could rightfully take the majority credit for the idea, ultimately sided against it. According to a 1967 report by Carl Davidson, the national vice president, “At best, they had no effect. But it is more likely that they had the effect of strengthening the existing system.” Davidson’s words would come to seem prophetic in Nebraska, where registration in the free university quickly declined while UNL simultaneously launched an experimental, though official, Centennial College, a residential college designed, much like its independent predecessor, to give students more control over their course subjects.

Whether or not the rise of the free university influenced the experiment in communal living and alternative education at the Phillips castle is — now 50 years later — unclear. According to Mick Lowe, who lived in the carriage house and served on the NFU’s coordinating committee, “There’s some weird synchronicity there, clearly.” Regardless, by June of 1968, The Communards had infiltrated The Castle, a perfectly poetic sign of the times. Out with the bureaucrats. In with the bohemians.

Can you dig it?

Before his furniture landed in the Smithsonian, before he enrolled at Nebraska and planted the seeds of the commune, Bob Erickson wanted to be a dentist. His true passion lay in the arts, but he never harbored any fantasies of building a career out of it. He wasn’t that good, he says, and more importantly, it never seemed practical. His mother was 40

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a nurse. His father was the director of a farm cooperative. He would do something equally straightforward: he would be a dentist.

Always a strong athlete, he was “lightly recruited”

by Tom Osborne, who met him on the steps of the field house, chauffeured him around campus and introduced him to the dean of the dental college in 1965. He never joined the football team, but he spent one year as a pre-dentistry major and two on the wrestling team before the arts crept back in, a testament to the power of a single professor.

During his sophomore year, Erickson took an English course with Dr. Les Whipp, a soft-spoken Renaissance scholar whose seminars “developed more like symphonies of exploration into what it is to be alive,” wrote David Martin, another former student. Well before the era of university reform, Whipp seemed to embody its mission, often extending the course material beyond the halls of academia and into the world at large, eschewing lectures in favor of open-ended conversation with his students. He often let his classes grade themselves, claiming the traditional process “sets up an inhuman relationship between teacher and pupil,” he told the Daily Nebraskan.

Before the end of his sophomore year, Erickson had pivoted from pre-dentistry to English and philosophy, and he began experimenting with 8mm film.

Much like his impressionistic shorts, Erickson’s ambition wasn’t yet totally in focus, but Professor Whipp had diverted his path from the visceral to the cerebral, from the body to the mind.

The decades have begun to cloud the timeline, Erickson says, but after a summer in San Francisco he returned to Lincoln and began reaching out to a few friends, many of them students of Whipp, eager to explore “alternative means of higher education.”

Life felt suddenly bigger, more exciting, more confusing, more complex — and he was no longer sure that academia was asking the right questions.

One of those friends was Mick Lowe, an old high school classmate (now a leading campus radical) who had recently moved with his wife into the carriage house of a grand old mansion at 18th and D streets. They called it The Castle, Lowe told him.

And there were nine available apartments inside.

Two months later, on the evening of Aug. 28, 1968, Lowe and the others — an often nebulous cast of eight men, two women — huddled around a black and white television on the second floor of the castle, watching live coverage from the Democratic Convention in Chicago. The electricity on the floor of the International Amphitheatre, delegates from all 50 states milling about inside.

The footage of massive protests outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel, thousands of anti-war demonstrators met by a police and military force nearly double in size. The Chicago Police Department wielding billy clubs, dragging protesters across the pavement, shoving them inside the paddy wagons, shooting N E B R A S K A Q U A R T E R LY

tear gas into the crowds. “Almost universally, the bystanders have been horror-stricken by this action by the police,” Walter Cronkite reported.

The Communards watched in silence. Milo Alexander, a military brat from a family of Goldwater conservatives. Canarsky, a German Lutheran farm boy from tiny Rosalie, Neb. Erickson, “the godfather” of the commune, as Lowe called him. And Lowe himself, once the youngest HAM radio operator in western Nebraska. They, too, were horror-stricken, the ripples of the protest emanating through the corridors of the castle, each of them internalizing the images in their own way, each of them privileged recipients of a student deferment, questioning what they believed in, and what they were all doing, here, together, in this drafty old mansion in this quiet old neighborhood in this stalwart capital city in the plains of a suddenly convulsive country. They wondered where another year might take them; whether they’d land with a job and a family or a gun they never asked for in a jungle they couldn’t navigate. They wouldn’t find all the answers — but they’d certainly try.

“Somewhere between these people — in the shadowy, unknown land where their efforts to reveal themselves, to live and learn with each other, came thundering ineptly together — existed the commune,” Erickson wrote. “Momentarily, all of these divergent histories and personalities … came flowing chaotically together into something new — something which partook of all of them, but which was none of them.”

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“Somewhere between these people — in the shadowy, unknown land where their efforts to reveal themselves, to live and learn with each other, came thundering ineptly together — existed the commune.’’

In September 1968, Lowe suggested they read The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community. Alexander lobbied for The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Another pushed for Rousseau’s The Social Contract. Some wanted to focus strictly on America in the 20th century, others on the French Revolution, and others still on the great Russian novelists.

“Much confusion as to what the goals of the group are,” Erickson wrote in his journal. “How do we make the study relevant? More frustration.”

From the very start, the commune resisted definition: members came and went, each with different agendas, different attitudes toward the experiment, different expectations for each other. “It was here and now,” Erickson wrote, “but it was then and somewhere else too with a good deal of tomorrow and over there to further complicate matters.” The revolving door of transients and couch surfers muddied the roster. Competing interests blurred the goals of the experiment. And the ratio of men to women often stoked a certain emotional bedlam, a passive aggression that sometimes threatened the whole undertaking. In fact, the separation between Lowe’s apartment in the carriage house and the rest of the castle stoked so much controversy the whole

The roommates lived together off campus during college.

Pictured are Paul Canarsky, walking, Mick Lowe lying on sofa and Milo Alexander in the platform rocker opposite the couch.

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“By the time dinner was over, any lingering vestiges of authority that clung to our guest had been removed and we were ready to talk.’’

Communal dinners were part of the Commune daily life with rotating cooking duties. From left facing the camera, Cater Chamblee, Milo Alexander, Bob Erickson and Paul Johnson.

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commune moved to a separate home several blocks away after their first semester together.

“You have 10 people — eight males, two females — so you do the math,” says Lowe, whose marriage wouldn’t survive the experience, what he considers “one of the tragic narratives of that extraordinary time and place.”

And without the scaffolding of the campus environment — without schedules and syllabi — the academic goals of the commune quickly waned. What took its place was an emphasis on each other, Erickson wrote, “the things within us and between us.” What took its place was friendship and envy and laughter and resentment and sometimes hallucinogens, too, what Lowe called “a way of reaching Nirvana on the cheap.”

Ironically, one of the few elements

that kept the Communards functioning even loosely as a unit was their shoestring tether to the university. They convinced a pod of university professors not only to offer them course credits, but to facilitate intellectual debate at the castle. Once a week, they’d gather for a long dinner — prepared by a different Communard each time, paid for by the entire group —

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and discuss a chosen text, sans the stiff upright chairs of the classroom, the lectures and the grades and the pre-requisites. They gathered in the basement, an exception to the grandeur of the castle, where the ceiling hung low and two desks were pushed together and draped with a single cloth to form the dining table. They ate on Goodwill plates and drank from pickle jars, students and professors alike.

“By the time dinner was over, any lingering vestiges of authority that clung to our guest had been removed and we were ready to talk,” Erickson wrote, remembering a visit from professor Bernice Slote, a former editor of Prairie Schooner, to discuss the poetry of William Blake. “When we were done … we had a fairly good interpretation of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and America, a little better acquaintanceship with the period, and at least in my case the feeling that I had grown from the reading and widened my experience.”

Disorganized as they

were, the Communards hadn’t waded into this experiment blindly. They understood that confrontation with the administration would shut it down before it even began, and thus Erickson and the others approached the professors individually, asking permission to pursue independent study within a communal environment, “to sign up for their courses and then not attend their class, but work out our own class with

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our own reading lists and assignments.” Rather than challenge the higher-ups, Erickson wrote, “We simply bent the university to fit our needs.”

As beneficial as the agreement may have been for the Communards, it posed a conflict for the professors who helped facilitate them. Robert Hough, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, was “taken aback and wanted to know more,” Erickson wrote, after he let slip that he and others were earning course credits for their time in the commune.

Soon the faculty members involved were meeting with Peter Magrath, the dean of the college and perceived by many as hostile to campus leftists, on the 12th floor of Oldfather Hall, overlooking all of downtown Lincoln. Erickson and four other Communards arrived “to inform the administration of our feelings,” but were denied entry to the meeting.

They were concerned for the commune, but perhaps even more so for the professors who had taken legitimate risks to help it succeed. They fidgeted in their seats outside the door, fearing the worst. It’s easy to be liberal, Erickson thought, when nothing is at stake. But 45 minutes later, Whipp “opened the magic door of the fates” and delivered the news: barring several “bureaucratic changes,” the commune would be allowed to continue “unaltered.”

By the spring of 1969,

less than a year after they began, the Commune was falling apart. They would complete a final paper, roughly 40 pages, single-spaced, an amalgamation of crude journal entries and sometimes sparkling prose that offered hints of both their ambition and their many distractions. Otherwise, Erickson admits, “there wasn’t too much product coming out.” Despite sharing a roof, the Communards were hardly communicating at all near the end. In their paper, Erickson would deem the group, if not the experiment altogether, a failure.

“The group was made of people and although at times it may have appeared to have had some sort of life of its own, these people were its life force and assassins,” he wrote. “The initial excitement and energy of certain people within the group delayed the eventual paralysis, but could not overcome its course.”

The night before Lowe and his wife left the commune for good, Alexander sat alone in the living room listening to Bob Dylan’s Dream with his headphones on. He rocked back and forth with a cigarette lodged between his fingers, watching the record spin.

With half-damp eyes I stared to the room Where my friends and I’d spent many an afternoon Where we together weathered many a storm Laughin’ and singin’ till the early hours of the morn He pictured the young couple pulling away in the morning, driving off to Colorado and their futures beyond; how the house wouldn’t feel quite the same; how eventually the whole place would empty, one by one, until they were all gone and the commune was nothing more than a specter of the past. He couldn’t have known then — none of them could — where

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they would all end up, and what their time together would ultimately mean, if anything at all.

He couldn’t have known that Lowe’s marriage would crumble; that he would dodge the draft and flee to Vancouver; that he would carve out a nearly 50-year career writing for some of the top publications in Canada, from Maclean’s to The Globe and Mail; that he would author a slew of books in multiple genres, including the award-winning Conspiracy of Brothers: A True Story of Bikers, Murder and the Law, published in 1988 by Penguin Random House; that by the summer of 2018, he would be polishing up a new memoir called Generation of Misfits that covered much of his time in the commune.

Or that Canarsky would draw a high draft number and avoid the horrors of war; that he would earn his law degree at UNL and spend the bulk of his career providing legal aid to villagers in the Alaskan bush country; that he would encounter racial bias within the Alaska judicial system and work every day to spotlight the injustice at trial, educating one jury after the next; that he would come to cherish that frigid existence, where a flag in front of the captain’s house meant he had landed a whale, where he could witness a lunar eclipse and the northern lights at the same time.

Or that Erickson would develop a passion for woodwork; that he would hitchhike his way to California, searching for a mentor in the craft; that he would befriend Gary Snyder, help the poet build his house, and later build his own next door; that he would pursue his craft until he reached the very top of his game, placing handcrafted furniture in galleries across the nation, from the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery to the Yale University Art Gallery.

Alexander couldn’t have known that despite his current blues, he, too, would carry on; that he would serve two years in a medical clinic in Okinawa as a conscientious objector; that he would earn a law degree from the University of Connecticut and return to Nebraska; that he would spend 27 years as an attorney with the Legal Aid Society in Omaha; that he would fight the Social Security under the Reagan Administration tooth and nail to help his mentally ill clients keep their disability benefits, “holding our government accountable for promises it made to the people.”

No, Alexander couldn’t have known that despite their unraveling, each of them would finally come to cherish their time in the commune, and more, to credit their experience with helping to shape their world views. They would trace their openness to possibility, their sense of social justice, and something more they can’t quite define, a togetherness, all of it back to the castle.

In the moment, Alexander just kept rocking, back and forth, back and forth. Eyes moist, he took another drag from the cigarette, watched the smoke drift away.

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain That we could sit simply in that room again Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that

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The Sporting Life PHOTOS BY CRAIG CHANDLER

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From dodgeball to broomball, club sports on campus offer students camaraderie and oodles of athletic options.

BY ELLIS CLOPTON

Dodgeball ESTABLISHED: 2009 STUDENTS INVOLVED: 24; 120 since club formed FUN FACT: The team’s biggest achievement so far was attending nationals for the first time this past spring.

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W ithin the

h usker Athletic D epArtment

there Are

660

student-athletes who don the scarlet and cream representing Nebraska in varsity sports. But a far greater number of students — around 8,400 — participate in intramurals and club sports through Campus Rec. And while their names aren’t plastered on the local sports pages and websites, they are equally passionate about their sport of choice.

Duck, Dip,

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For some people, the prospect of playing dodgeball invokes deeply repressed middle school gym class trauma. For another group of students on campus, the idea of having to scurry around a gym court testing their dexterity while an opponent whips a rubber ball 70-mph at their chest sounds like fun.

One of the more popular niche sports clubs on campus, the dodgeball club boasts more than 20 members and competes against other schools frequently, including travel tournaments.

Dodgeball Club president and history major Tanner Obermeier said the team is active in the National Collegiate Dodgeball Association, the largest collegiate dodgeball league in the country.

He said the league requires them to work with standard rubber balls, which allow players to grip the balls tighter and throw faster.

“There’s guys that can really lob those things, it’s really painful sometimes,” Obermeier said. “No kidding, I’ve been knocked about before from a headshot.”

The team pays for its own travel and schedules matchups through a Facebook page. From there, Obermeier said each school’s captain joins a group chat and figures out logistics. Looking to make the group more active in competitive play, Obermeier said traveling and hosting is his main goal as a captain.

“When I first started we played two or three games in a year. During (the 2017-18 school year) we went to over 10,” Obermeier said.

The team practices twice a week but cranks up the routine toward the end of the year as they draw closer to national tournament competition.

Obermeier said this means studying film, scrimmaging and working on specific techniques. He said he hopes to build on it during the coming year.

“I think we’ve got a really good team coming up,” he said. “The amount of quickness and court alertness we see in our players is incredible, and we have freshmen who are doing things I was never able to do when I first started.”

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Broomball ESTABLISHED: 2009 STUDENTS INVOLVED: 12; 199 since club formed FUN FACT: This year, they won the USA Broomball Class D National Championship for the first time in club history.

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craig chandler

Previous page: Brennan Roberson goes airborne to make a throw during a late-night dodgeball practice in the Military and Naval Science building gym.

From left are fellow teammates Tanner Obermeier, Bailey McLean and Jessica Blum.

Dive and Dodge

Skating on Thin Ice

said it quickly became her favorite sport to play after the first couple games, even if they ended in losses.

“Honestly, it was one of the most fun experiences

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One of the more accessible sports on campus, broomball attracts students from a variety of disciplines and campus corners. Much like hockey, the sport is played on an ice rink and tasks its players with guiding a rubber ball into the opposing team’s net. However, players wear tennis shoes and use sticks with spatula-shaped ends.

Hope Wilke, a senior biological sciences major and 2017 fall semester intramural broomball champion, said she’d never heard of the sport before she signed up herself and her Kappa Delta sisters. She

“Honestly, it was one of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had with my sisters. We were just running around and falling on our butts. Some of us were laughing so hard we couldn’t stand back up.”

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Hope Wilke powers the ball toward the goal during a pick-up broomball game between intramural and UNL club members. They practice at the John Breslow Ice Hockey Center adjacent the Haymarket Park baseball stadium.

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Judo ESTABLISHED: 1995 STUDENTS INVOLVED: 13; 473 since club formed FUN FACT: Derived from jujitsu, judo is a mix of throwing, falling, chokes, armbars and pins.

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I’ve ever had with my sisters,” she said. “We were just running around and falling on our butts. Some of us were laughing so hard we couldn’t stand back up.”

In the true spirit of intramural sports, Wilke said the underdog Kappa Delta team shocked their more competitive opponents when they started winning, culminating in a championship win.

“I don’t really know what we did differently, but it was super intense going up against people who were being really competitive,” Wilke said. “We were just having fun and some of our girls got pretty good.”

Bowing Down Husker wrestlers aren’t the only students on campus with a gift for grappling and martial arts, as evidenced by the judo club, a tight-knit group of students who strap on their gis and light up the mats in the Campus Rec’s combative arts room every Monday and Wednesday night.

Andrew Klingemann, the judo team president and junior business administration major, said the sport differs from wrestling in that its focus lies in its various throws and takedown techniques.

“The very first thing they teach in judo is how to fall. It looks ridiculous if you watch us do it, because you’re basically watching a bunch of us falling backward and forward on the mat, but it’s really important,” Klingemann said.

Klingemann said the sport has a heavy focus in discipline and respect, both rooted in numerous formalities the club makes sure to follow to the letter. Usually, this requires a lot of bowing, one of the

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“The very first thing they teach in judo is how to fall. It looks ridiculous if you watch us do it, because you’re basically watching a bunch of us falling backward and forward on the mat, but it’s really important.” oldest demonstrations of respect.

“When practice starts we all have to line up and bow in, and whenever you want to work with someone or practice a throw, you have to bow and come to an agreement,” Klingemann said.

He said much of the club began judo in college, and few had experience before joining. Klingemann himself had only competed in soccer and trapshooting before deciding to join the club.

“It’s intense. I went from trying to score goals to trying to physically move someone,” he said. “It’s a completely different feeling from anything else I’ve done.”

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Andrew Klingemann does a tomoe nage throw on Kayci Channita during a practice session. The club works out in the combative arts room in the City Campus Recreation Center.

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More Cow Bell Though a staple sport for most Ivy League universities, a small group of dedicated students run a crew team on campus in this landlocked state from a hidden-in-plain-sight boathouse at 16th and X streets.

Given the lack of lakes and rivers within close proximity of the campus, the team practices at 4:30 a.m. three times a week at Branched Oak Lake until winter sets in. Then, they move back into the boathouse to practice on rowing machines.

“Rowers kind of have to be weird people, because you have to be able to live in your mind and row with the team.”

Crew Club president and senior electrical engineering major Drew Van Heuveln said the team competes in multiple long-distance rowing races during the fall and then shifts to sprinting during the spring semester.

Van Heuveln said the sport requires intense concentration and conditioning. Each boat has

Yeah, They Play Like Girls Despite being one of the most popular sports in the United States, the campus very recently became home to a women’s basketball club. Started by current president and junior journalism major Emma Young, the club is currently in its first year after being approved by the sports council over the summer. Young started the club with another woman she lived next door to at Smith Hall and a mutual friend after they discovered the university didn’t have an active basketball club.

“There wasn’t even a co-ed club,” Young said. “It

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Drew Van Heuveln and members of the Nebraska Crew team row at sunset on Branched Oak Lake northwest of Lincoln.

nine people in it, eight of whom do the bulk of the rowing. A ninth person sits at the front of the line, shouting commands and steering the boat.

“The general attitude is if you’re rowing, you shut up and row,” he said. “Rowers kind of have to be weird people, because you have to be able to live in your mind and row with the team. If you can talk, you’re not working hard enough.”

Crew ESTABLISHED: 1969, women’s 1972 STUDENTS INVOLVED: 25; 1,522 since 199596 academic year FUN FACT; Crew is the longest, continuous club sport at Nebraska.

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Emma Young takes a jump shot during an intrasquad scrimmage during an evening practice in the Mabel Lee Hall gymnasium.

Women’s Basketball ESTABLISHED: 2018 STUDENTS INVOLVED: 13 FUN FACT: The team hopes to join the National IntramuralRecreational Sports Association and compete regionally.

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was so weird because there’s always so many people playing at the Rec.” Young set to work late in the summer recruiting other girls to join the team. After several event fairs, Young said she has assembled a team with 13 women. Her hope is to eventually form a dedicated travel team. In the meantime, she said she’s most

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impressed with the amount of passion displayed by the young team.

“We have three practices a week, and one of them is at 6:30 a.m., but almost all the girls show up dedicated to get better,” Young said.

For now, much of Young’s duties as the club’s inaugural president include administrative tasks.

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Badminton ESTABLISHED: 2016 STUDENTS INVOLVED: 30; 150 since club formed FUN FACT: The team has taken home at least three gold medals in every tournament itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s participated in so far.

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She is currently trying to join a dedicated collegiate women’s basketball club conference. She said she hopes to get the team traveling and competing by the spring semester.

“I’m really looking forward to seeing where this goes,” Young said.

Smashing In many Asian countries, badminton is revered as the fastest racket sport in the world with a community that has helped it find its way into a club on campus. Frederick Chua, a junior business management major from Malaysia, is the founder and president of the badminton club. Chua started the club with a friend in 2016 after Ming said he noticed an active badminton community on campus that didn’t have a club to call their own. “People had tried to form a club in the past, but it’s really hard to start a new club on campus,” Chua said.

After spending a semester filling out the required paperwork and appealing to the campus’ sports

“I want to grow this sport, and it’s already kind of got a small base in the Midwest.” club council, Chua began recruiting a team and raising money. By the spring semester, he pulled together a team of around 20 people, consisting mostly of Asian international students.

Since then, the team has grown to over 30 students. Chua said this makes him hopeful for the future of not just the club, but the growth of badminton’s popularity in America.

“I want to grow this sport, and it’s already kind of got a small base in the Midwest,” Chua said.

“Badminton is really popular in Malaysia and other places. When I moved to the United States, I would play Americans and they would tell me I was playing on a different level than them.”

Emphasizing wrist flicks and lightning-quick reaction times, badminton has players smashing a birdie back and forth in a series of volleys that have reached speeds up to 206 miles per hour.

Chua hopes to keep building on the foundations he started with the club. Every March, the team holds an annual tournament in Lincoln called Nebraska Open. He said it attracts people from all over the Midwest and serves as the club’s biggest fundraiser.

He said he hopes to start taking his team on the road to other tournaments once they’ve raised enough money to pay traveling costs. “I want to take the team out and let everyone compete; that’s how we get better,” Chua said. “It’s also how we keep this team going.”

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Frederick Chua dives as Poh Ling Lim backs him up during an evening practice in the City Campus Recreation Center.

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ADV E RT I S E M E N T

NEBRASKAAUTHORS Featured books by Nebraska alumni, faculty and staff

Be Gentle with Me

Courage in a White Coat Mary Schwaner

Biljana D. Obradovicé

Bringing a new baby home is a happy occasion.

However, for a brother or sister who is just a few years older than the baby, it can be a confusing time. The older sibling may love the baby very much and have the best intentions but not know how to play properly with the little one.

Instead of using negative words and constantly scolding the child, Be Gentle with Me puts a positive spin on discipline.

This sweeping biographical novel recreates 17 years in the life of a valiant woman doctor who lived her life on the razor’s edge and survived it. From performing surgeries by lantern in remote Asian jungles in 1928 to surviving starvation in a Japanese prison camp, Dorothy’s remarkable spirit will move you in ways you never expected.

This Serbian American poet in her fourth collection, travels the world and poetically reports on its diversity and the value of understanding others. Among these 53 poems are tableaux and vignettes from Belgrade, New Orleans, Venice, Padua, Cleveland, Kosovo, China and Nebraska, among many other locales.

Nadine Turner Jordan

Incognito

?

Meet Me at the Manger

Portraits of the Sandhills

Your Book Here

Whether a child at heart or a future Cornhusker, the first Christmas is revealed through the eyes of creatures big and small in the journey to the manger. Meet Me at the Manger was written as an entertaining and educational way for children to understand Biblical scripture, but the illustrations have brought smiles to nursing home residents as far away as Africa!

This pictorial journey contains stories of Sandhills ranchers and residents. Some of these stories are humorous and others poignant, but they all demonstrate the culture of hardworking, independent people who are quick to offer help to neighbors and even strangers when needed. The tales within these pages will envelope the reader in the warmth and beauty of the Sandhills.

Approximately 275 characters will go here to describe your book. You can provide the copy block or we can work with you to write something scintillating and drive interest toward your project. This is a terrific way to expose your prose to a highly-educated audience.

Rogene McPherson

Richard Schilling

Your Name Here

To advertise your book in our next edition of Nebraska Quarterly, email kwright@huskeralum.org or call 402-472-4227.

57 58 60 63 64

ALL IN More than 100 ornaments cover Peggy Roeder’s Christmas tree.

COMING HOME A 2009 graduate leaves Nebraska only to return home to Scottsbluff.

CLASS QUOTES Alumni from many decades recall their college roommates.

OBITUARIES Jack Goebel, 87, was a longtime professor and administrator.

LOVE STORY Grad student Lauryn Higgins left Carolina and fell in love with Lincoln.

nebraska athletics communications office

BULLETIN Broadcast Buddies

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Kent Pavelka’s broadcasting career included a stint calling Husker football games in Memorial Stadium. He’s shown here in 1979 flanked

by Lyell Bremser and Jack Payne. Pavelka is a six-time winner of the Nebraska Sportscaster of the Year Award, a Special Merit Award recipient of the Nebraska Basketball Hall of Fame and a Hall of Fame member for the Nebraska Radio Personalities.

>>

Events JAN. 25 LINCOLN State of the University Address Chancellor Ronnie Green will reflect on the first 150 years and present a vision for the next 150 years by unveiling the university’s strategic plan.

FEB. 11-15 LINCOLN Charter Week .Feb. 11 • Nebraska Press unveils its commemorative book Dear Old Nebraska U • The original university charter goes on display in Love Library Feb. 12 Nebraska Lectures: Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecture Series kicks off.

Feb. 13 Morrill Hall — the University State Museum — will unveil its $11.4 million privately funded redevelopment project of the museum’s fourth floor.

Feb. 14 • #GlowBigRed: Nebraska landmark buildings and businesses will be illuminated red.

Alumni can show their Nebraska pride by flying Husker flags or illuminating their homes.

• Love Nebraska Giving Day: Show your support and gratitude for our alma mater by participating in a day of giving to support current and future students.

• A Celebration of Music and Milestones concert at the Lied.

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BULLETIN

Alumni Profile

Broadcast Reality Kent Pavelka reaches milestone

BY CHUCK GREEN (’93)

Kent Pavelka interviews Tyronn Lue in February 2017 during Lue’s Nebraska basketball jersey retirement ceremony.

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nebraska athletics communications office

K

ent Pavelka has vivid memories of fall Saturdays during his childhood, growing up in his northeast Lincoln neighborhood. The smell of the dew-covered grass, the multicolored, fallen leaves that littered the lawns, the chilly sting in the breeze that confirmed summer was melting away. And the sound of the radio, propped in a windowsill, as he and his friends played football in the backyard.

Cutting through the crisp autumn air in those days were the voices of Dick Perry and Bob Zenner, whose play-by-play of Nebraska football games provided some sound effects for those epic backyard battles — and fueled the imaginations of the young players. “Everybody else wanted to be on the team,” Pavelka recalled. “I wanted to be the announcer.”

As Pavelka is poised to begin his 34th year as the voice of Nebraska basketball, his name and voice have become indelibly linked to Husker

athletics. Since his interest in broadcasting was sparked in junior high school, Pavelka has worked hard to perfect his craft, painstakingly preparing for games and choosing the right words on the fly to paint as clear a picture as possible for those Husker fans tuning in.

Of course, he has had his ups and downs. He even has a few memories he wouldn’t mind forgetting. After calling the play-by-play for one of his first Husker junior varsity football games as a broadcasting student, Pavelka smiled broadly as he walked back to the KRNU station.

He knew he had nailed it. As he strode confidently into the building, he was met in the hallway by Larry Walklin, his student adviser.

“Recepted pass?” Walklin said to Pavelka, incredulously. “What is a ‘recepted pass?’ ” So began a legendary broadcast career that has spanned decades, with far more ups than downs.

As a student from 1967 to ’71, Pavelka — ever the perfectionist — strove to find his voice, figuratively and literally. He also worked at Lincoln’s KFMQ — which at the time split its broadcast day between classical and rock music — as well as a few other Lincoln stations, juggling shifts between classes. His focus on the voice was not limited to the broadcast booth, either. As a member of the men’s varsity glee club, Pavelka traveled throughout the state with the group to sing at various venues.

After graduating with a bachelor of journalism in broadcasting in 1971, he landed at KHUB in Fremont, where he called high school games. A few years later, in 1974, he joined Omaha’s KFAB as the play-by-play man for Nebraska men’s basketball, calling the Huskers’ games at the Coliseum.

That fall, he was doing color commentary for Husker football games, too, with play-by-play announcer Lyell Bremser.

A decade later, Pavelka found himself talking to the Husker broadcast legend in his office the day before the start of the 1983 season. That morning, Bremser — then vice president and general manager of KFAB — revealed his plans to retire after that season.

Half stunned, half confused, Pavelka had to ask: “Does this mean I’ll be doing play-by-play next year?”

“Of course!” Bremser shot back. “Who else?”

“So I knew his whole last season that it was his last, and that the next year would be my first of play-by-play,” Pavelka said.

Pavelka continued to call Husker football and basketball games until 1996, spanning some of the most glorious years in Husker football his-

justin mohling

ALL IN

tory. National championships, near misses, offfield drama and athletic department evolution. But after the 1996 football season, a new radio contract brought changes to the Husker athletics broadcast booths. Warren Swain took over play-by-play duties for the 1997 football season and Pavelka was out.

He was bounced from the basketball booth, too.

Finally, after a decade of various radio gigs in Omaha, Pavelka returned as the voice of Nebraska basketball in 2006 and has been calling Husker hoops ever since.

Nebraska Coach Tim Miles has known Pavelka well since taking over the program in 2012. “Kent is engrained in the fabric of Husker basketball and Husker athletics, and has been for years,” Miles said.

“He is one of the very best in nailing a call. He is outstanding, and we are lucky to have him.”

Sometime toward the middle of this season, Pavelka will call his 1,000th basketball game.

Ironically, he is not sure which game — he simply has lost count. “That’s remarkable to me,” Miles said.

“I’ve worked with a lot of radio guys over the years, and there aren’t many people who have been doing it as long and as well as Kent.”

Through the span of those hundreds of games, Pavelka’s still ranks the Husker basketball team’s home upset of Wisconsin in 2014 as one of his alltime favorites. The game was dubbed No-Sit Sunday and the raucous crowd obliged as the Huskers defeated No. 9-ranked Wisconsin 77-68.

Another game that came close was Nebraska’s win over TCU in the National Invitation Tournament in Lincoln at the end of the 1982-83 season. The victory sent the Huskers to the NIT Final Four in New York.

Pavelka can still hear the strains of Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York reverberating through the Bob Devaney Sports Center as players and fans alike celebrated on the court.

Through it all, Pavelka is still enjoying the ride. He stays busy during the off-season with Kent Pavelka and Associates, an advertising consulting company he and a partner co-founded in 2006. He also hosts Metro & More, a 60-minute public affairs TV interview program for Metro Community College on Omaha’s Cox Cable.

As he closes in on that 1,000th basketball game, Pavelka still loves his work and remains committed to painting a vivid mental picture of events not everyone can be there to see.

“I’m their window into the action,” he said. “This is a business where you have a chance to leave a legacy, and I hope people know me as someone who has worked hard at what I do.”

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O CHRISTMAS TREE, O HUSKER TREE It’s beginning to look a lot like Peggy Roeder will soon need a bigger tree to display all of her Husker ornaments.

You’ll find Roeder donning the color red every time the Huskers play and at every home volleyball, basketball and baseball game. But for away games, she cheers on the Huskers from the comfort of her basement, which during the winter months, includes a very special flourish — her 7½-foot Husker Christmas tree.

WHEN DID YOU START COLLECTING ORNAMENTS? PEGGY: In 1991 I was in Kansas City with my friend and her daughter, Kristin Ringland (’90). My basement had a lot of space, and Kristin said, “Peggy, you’re such a Husker fan, you should start a Husker tree.” So I bought two ornaments and I always put those toward the front.

HOW MANY ORNAMENTS DO YOU HAVE? PEGGY: I have 105 — a lot of them are gifts. The basketball, baseball, football and volleyball ones have their own sections.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE ORNAMENT? PEGGY: The Rose Bowl ornament from a friend who has since passed away, and the high heel ornament in memory of my mother.

HAVE YOU HAD MORE THAN ONE TREE? PEGGY: I outgrew the first two trees, so this is my third. The first was very little, only 3-feet tall. The second was 7-feet but very skinny.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE HUSKER MEMORY? PEGGY: For volleyball, the 2017 regional in Kansas City — we beat Penn State whose coach whined that the venue wasn’t fair because there were too many Nebraska fans. For basketball, I enjoyed the 2014 Wisconsin game — it was a No Sit Sunday.

Bo (Pelini) and (Ndamukong) Suh were on the floor and never sat down either.

For baseball, a few years ago Texas came and we swept.

WHAT SPORT ARE YOU MOST EXCITED FOR THIS SEASON? PEGGY: Probably volleyball. Volleyball is my favorite in the fall. Men’s basketball is my winter sport, and spring is for baseball.

—Aakriti Agrawal

BULLETIN Alumni Profile

Returning to Her Roots

BY STEVE FREDERICK, SCOTTSBLUFF STAR-HERALD

B

efore she graduated from Scottsbluff High School in 2005, Astrid Munn had been on state champion journalism teams. After graduation, she attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she was selected for the prestigious Scripps Howard Foundation’s “Semester in Washington” program and News21, a national journalism fellowship sponsored by the Carnegie and Knight foundations. She graduated in 2009 with her journalism degree, and in 2010, she changed her career track, studying to become an attorney at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis and eventually working on human rights and immigration cases in the nation’s capital.

Her story was common in only one respect: She was a promising Nebraska high school graduate who had moved out of the state. Known as “brain drain,” the phenomenon has become a source of vexation for business and political leaders. The brightest stars of our educational system often move away, taking with them their community’s investment in their education and the leadership they might have provided in their hometowns.

Census estimates from the American Community Survey in 2016 showed that Nebraska was annually seeing about 2,300 more highly educated people move out than move in. In the five-year period from 2009 to 2013, Nebraska lost a net 1,069 people annually who held bachelors and advanced degrees.

But Munn, who had often cut against the grain, once again did something different. She came home.

As a journalist, Munn had often tackled stories related to Native Americans — their troubles, their achievements and their mistreatment by government in issues such as policing and voting rights.

She reported for a two-year investigative project called “Native Daughters,” involving five UNL professors and about 30 students. It resulted in a magazine and website, now used as a college text.

But she chafed at the journalist’s role as an impassive observer. Her passion for justice led to a career in law.

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“I resented that all I could do was write the story,” Munn said. “It’s important to do those stories, but I didn’t want to stop at telling the story. I wanted to get more involved.”

The law had always been an option, she said, even as she was a 17-year-old touring the UNL campus. “You have to be a good writer to be a good lawyer. Becoming a lawyer was always an option I took very seriously.”

While in college, she had worked as interim news editor of Hispanos Unidos, a Spanishlanguage newspaper. Awaiting her law license, she worked as a Spanish-speaking paralegal. She had picked up the language, and a good share of her idealism, in her home. Her father, Mike, had been a Peace Corps volunteer. Her mother, Carmen, is from Guatemala. They spoke Spanish in the home, and Munn finds bilingualism to be an important asset in her legal work.

Throughout law school, she took several internships, with the Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing Opportunity Council, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The latter was unpaid, though it earned her college credit. “Much of it involved federal law and agencies dealing with tribal law,” she said.

Though it interested her, she declined another unpaid internship. “It was a hard field to break into. I didn’t see how I could survive in the city doing that.”

Licensed as a lawyer in 2014 but not working in law, she joined and eventually managed a political canvassing agency, the Fund for the Public Interest. The work involved protecting waterways in Virginia.

“That was good for me,” she said. “Basically, I learned how to go door-to-door and do political fundraising. It was empowering for me because I became a saleswomen for political action.”

Eventually, she became an immigration lawyer in the Washington D.C. area. Her work took her to Baltimore, where the death of suspect Freddie Gray, who suffered a fatal spinal injury while in

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steve frederick/scottsbluff star-herald

Astrid Munn walks her dog Duffy near Scotts Bluff National Monument. The Scottsbluff HIgh School graduate has returned home after beginnning her career in law in the Washington D.C. area.

police custody, led to a week of protests and riots.

Several clients of Munn’s law firm got caught up in the mass arrests of demonstrators, including a man with mental problems who was denied access to his medications and a transgender woman who was placed into a holding cell with male prisoners after being charged with a misdemeanor.

“They threw her in with the men, which was very dangerous for her,” she said.

Nearly a decade after leaving Scottsbluff, Munn found herself working on significant cases in the D.C., area. In many ways, it was a dream job.

“It’s a city of lawyers,” she said. “It’s the Hollywood of the legal world.”

It was also a place where she encountered things around her that caused the law to lose some of its appeal: people working themselves to exhaustion, people being needlessly hard, people drinking too much. The atmosphere was stressful. She began to feel burned out. “I wasn’t balancing work and selfcare. You can’t take care of others if you’re not taking care of yourself.”

She decided she needed a break.

“All I wanted to do was crawl in bed at my parents’ house. Dad flew out and picked me up, and we drove west,” she said. “I came back seeking shelter

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from the storm.”

She got a job with the Robert Pahlke Law Group, taking personal injury and medical malpractice cases. She also found an outlet for community activism, speaking out as a supporter of a community redevelopment grant for southeast Scottsbluff, supporting human rights events, reviving an annual neighborhood cleanup day and helping develop a community garden space in Veterans Park — opportunities where she can play a role without being in charge.

“I don’t know if boards are for me,” she said. “If there’s something to do, let’s do it. That’s a more sustainable way for me to get involved.”

In her old hometown, she finds quality coffee, good food, places to exercise.

“I’m increasingly finding the creature comforts I could get in a city,” she said. “I didn’t realize what a big difference having your family and friends around you does for your well-being.”

She also re-ignited her passion for practicing law. “There’s exciting legal work out west that would be harder to find elsewhere,” she said.

“There are a lot of good lawyers out here. It’s a good bar. A lot of them have known me since I was a kid, and it’s exciting to work with them.”

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BULLETIN

Class Quotes

QUESTION

What is your best roommate story?

1953

“Graduate school. Efficiency apartment. Roommate’s night to cook. Rice, one cup for me and one for him. Add water — enough rice for a week!”

Carlos Harrison is active in Peru State College (Neb.) national alumni activities and was chosen grand marshal for that institution’s homecoming parade in October.

1966

“I taught my freshman roommate to play the ukulele and we ‘took our act on the road.’ We practiced Kingston Trio and other songs. We entertained at nursing homes, the VA and other facilities in Lincoln, likely through the Red Cross Committee on campus

during 196263 academic year.”

Linda Muff Schreiner of Scottsdale keeps busy with a Bible study group and two women’s social groups as well as jobs around the house and giving her dog Holly lots of attention.

“Occasionally, I get to spend time with my terrific grandchildren,” Schreiner says.

1970

“My first college roommate was

Joanie. We were living in Pound Hall in a small room at the end of the hallway on 6th floor.

One night I came in after Joanie had gone to bed, and I heard her say, ‘Would you crack the window?’ (Now, I came from a small home with old-fashioned double-hung windows.

None of this fancy crank type in our dorm room — and I had NEVER heard that expression before.) I was pretty

sure she didn’t want me to break the window, but I had NO idea what she meant.

I pretended that I didn’t hear her and went to bed.

She then got out of bed, walked over to the window, and opened it a little bit. Ah ha! My first lesson in ‘colloquialisms’ was learned.”

Virginia Ailes Hoelscher, a retired English teacher in Williams, Iowa, loves retirement, traveling, playing bridge, going to the theater, visiting her children — and educating Hawkeye and Cyclone fans on the finer points of Husker Nation.

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fied our bond as sisters and made us lifelong friends, too.”

Carol Lauritzen of La Grande, Ore., is a “mostly retired” professor and president of the Oregon State Literacy Association.

1972

“I met one of my roommates in the Interior Design program located on East Campus. Kathy (Gilroy) needed a roommate for the summer to fill in for another design student who was going home for the summer. I had accepted a job at a local company and was to share the apartment with her and two other students. That was a pivotal moment because from that summer on those ladies, and a few other additional add-ons have become lifelong friends who

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drue wagner (3)

“I arrived at Sandoz Hall as a freshman in the fall of 1966.

My sister, Mary, had just transferred as a sophomore to UNL to become a microbiology major.

She was also assigned to Sandoz but on a

different floor.

We rarely saw each other as we pursued our own activities and classes. Much to the puzzlement of our friends, we requested each other as roommates for the 196768 school year. Maybe we knew it would be our last chance to live together.

I got engaged that year and we planned a wedding and sewed my wedding and her maid of honor dresses.

Although we were close as sisters growing up, it was during the year in the southeast corner room on the second floor of Sandoz Hall that we laughed and talked for the first time as adults, sharing our thoughts and dreams for the future.

We now live on opposites sides of the country but being roommates solidi-

get together on a regular basis all over the country.

Kathy was Irish and had the typical coloring associated with being Irish of pale skin. During a “get-together” at the apartment, another newbie to the group commented on Kathy wearing white socks. Not the thing to do back then!

Unfortunately, there were no socks on her feet, just tennies. It remains a joke amongst us about Irish socks. Unfortunately, Kathy passed away three years ago but she is still with us all in spirit,

white socks and all. Best friend ever.”

Pamela Evans was named the 2018 Educator of the Year by the Commercial Interior Design Association. She is the director of interior design at Kent State (Ohio) University as well as the associate dean of that institution.

1974

“Being a Lincoln girl, I never lived on campus.

Although, as a music major, I think I can say I ‘lived with’ my fellow musicians who stayed late nights practicing in the Westbrook Music Building. We certainly spent more time together

than most roommates!”

Terry Baughan of New York City

1977

“My best friend and I are still best friends because we decided NOT to be roommates. We lived on the same floor, but in different rooms.”

Kim Robak is a partner in the lobbying firm Mueller Robak in Lincoln and has been selected for inclusion in the 2019 edition of The Best Lawyers in America in the field of Government Relations Law.

1979

“My roommate telling me that my sweat clothes were begging him to wash them.”

David Hemsath has recently retired from IBM after 39 years and lives in Lincoln.

1982

“My roommate and I putting on Elton John and Foreigner records and blasting tunes

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out of the tiny corner room windows of Cather Hall room 411 every spring so all the world could hear.”

Dan Poppe is president/CEO of Archer Credit Union in Central City and enjoys small town living and serving the folks in rural Nebraska. He is “still married to my beautiful wife of 34 years, with four children and our first grandchild on the way.”

1988

“Waking up one morning in the dorm to hear Bill say, ‘had a horrible nightmare that we all got arrested.’

I replied, ‘That was no nightmare.’ ”

Brad Albrecht has been teaching and coaching several sports in area high schools in Houston since 1988.

1989

“Freshman year in student-athletes study hall, after having studied for several nights with the same

swimmer, I asked her if she had pledged a sorority? She said ‘Yes, Tri Delt!’ I replied, ‘No way! Me too!’ and we cracked up laughing over how busy we were that we didn’t even know we were both in the same sorority house.”

Janelle Frese resides in La Palma, Calif., along with her three children.

A public school teacher for 28 years, she was named California

Interscholastic Federation Coach of the Year in 1993 as well as 2014 Teacher of the Year by the Anaheim Union High School District and California League of High Schools.

1993

“I lived in Love Hall on East Campus.

My roommate and I were each there to see our “first dates” with our now-husbands. And we both served as bridesmaids in

each other’s weddings.”

Jody L. Lamp, Scottsbluff, is the co-founder of the American Doorstop Project, which recently released its first book, A History of Nebraska Agriculture: A Life Worth Living.

In addition, she and co-founder Melody Dobson co-produced Born to Rein, a documentary film that chronicles the lives and careers of native Nebraskans and National Hall of Fame horsemen, John Nerud, and Marion and Jack Van Berg.

SHARE YOUR MEMORIES

What is your most vivid classroom memory?

Do you want to be featured in the spring issue? Email your answer to this question to kwright@huskeralum.org.

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BULLETIN Obituaries

1939

Fred L. Egley, Norfolk, Aug. 11; Virginia Fleetwood Ramey, Lincoln, July 25

1949

Catherine Smith Harding, Lincoln, Aug. 26; Marjorie Rivett Hickey, Omaha, Aug. 29

Truman Bachenberg, Nebraska City, Sept. 1; Kay Kinsey Hall, Omaha, Aug. 25; Leroy Klein,Napa, Calif., June 29; Anne Miles Fletcher, Saint Joseph, Mo., June 22; Billie J. Sanchez, Sun Lakes, Ariz., June 17; Leroy W. Thom, Hastings, July 29; George W. Underwood, Lincoln, Aug. 5

1945

1950

1940

Jack R. Cory, Grand Island, Sept. 4; Quentin T. Wiles, Mission Viejo, Calif., April 28

1943

Mary Winter McIver, Winter Haven, Fla., Sept. 4

1948

Charlotte Rieke Bruce, Ithaca, N.Y., July 25; Harriet Quinn Johnson, Boulder, Colo.,June 27; Adeline K. Kano, Fort Collins, Colo., July 30; Beth Noerenberg Moede, Seguin, Texas, July 22; Ada Harms Munson, Lincoln, July 30; JoAnn Guenzel Pegler, Lincoln, June 30; LaRayne Steyer Wahlstrom, Sioux Falls, S.D., July 17

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C. Phillip Agee, Northfield, Minn., July 11; Harold L. Allen, Lincoln, Aug. 18; Jeanette M. Hansen, Grand Island, Sept.

10; Wallace T. Hill, Broomfield, Colo., June 15; J. Myron Lanspa, David City, Aug. 6; Max A. Rogers, Scottsbluff, Aug. 8; Richard W. Ryman, Glenwood Springs, Colo., July 25

1951

John R. Anderson, Greencastle, Ind., Aug. 5; Edward A. Cook, Georgetown,

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Texas, Aug. 13; Harold H. Hatch, Darien, Ga., July 24; Donald W. Hodder, Golden, Colo., Feb. 5; Wendell G. Jensen, Minden, June 24; Leonard L. Lichti, Hesston, Kan., June 7; Kenneth A. McCormick, Auburn, July 4; George R. McMurray, Bigfork, Mont., July 8; Frances Wallace Mulvaney, Overland Park, Kan., Aug. 5; William S. Olson, Oshkosh, Aug. 19; Nancy Noble Olsson, Lincoln, Aug. 27

1952

Welland J. Bates, Omaha, June 16; Rex A. Brown, Montrose, Colo., June 27; Marilyn Coupe Gangel, Columbus, July 24; Norman L. Sothan, Littleton, Colo., May 13; Albert P. Tilley, Cupertino, Calif., July 13

1953

Clem W. Hagedorn, Delray Beach, Fla., May 6; Ernest E. Haight, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., May 23; Kenneth E. Neff, Lincoln, Aug. 28

1954

James M. Quinn, Omaha, June 27

1955

James A. Bartosh, Fremont, Sept.

9; Norma Carse McCoy, Medford, Ore., June 26; Adelaide Laux Paradise, Alton, Ill., June 24

1956

Corliss Kruse Clay, Kennewick, Wash., Aug. 7; Russell C. Lang, Craig, Aug. 24; Floyd R. Nelson, Littleton, Colo., Aug. 5

1957

Belva Hahn Albert, Omaha, July 7; Merle O. Brestel, Englewood, Fla., June 30; Jon P. Grenseman, Lincoln, Aug. 21

1958

Howard C. Jensen, Rochester, N.Y., July 20; Agatha F. Schuller, Beatrice, June 21; Richard D. Wilson, Falls City, July 11

1959

Jacqueline Higbee Baluch, Lincoln, July 2; Roy H. Boyd, Chicago, June 27; Charles

R. Grady, Omaha, Aug. 2; J. Stanley Hargleroad, La Jolla, Calif.,June 14; Patrick E. Mallatt, Lincoln, Aug. 4; Michael L. Wray, Fremont, July 3

1960

William J. Esch, Muscoda, Wis., June 27; Paul H. Kruse, Lincoln, June 26; Janet K. Mahlman, Lincoln, Aug. 6; Richard L. Nelson, Omaha, Aug. 29; Sandra Luchsinger Peeks, Milford, Aug. 2; Mary Lee Wagner, Omaha, Sept. 2

1961

Charles J. Divis, Wahoo, Sept. 2; Jack L. Eriksen, Morongo Valley, Calif., June 10; Darrell W. Frenzel, Highlands Ranch, Colo., July 11; Richard P. Garden, Norfolk, July 26; Donna Kunc Knoche, Beatrice, Aug. 15; Quentin D. Moore, Omaha, July 17; Luanne Raun Smith, Denver, Aug. 2

1962

Patricia Bogar Burford, Omaha,

Aug. 4; Carol Harris Clark, Lincoln, June 22; Marion Miller Cook, East Granby, Conn., June 26; Kenneth P. Knothe, Ontario, Ore., June 22; Nancy Campbell Peterson, Omaha, June 12

1963

Arlo W. Doehring, Superior, June 16; Kenneth A. Hueske, Lincoln, June 16; Dorothy Jones Schneider, Kennett Square, Penn., June 21

Omaha, July 30; Terry L. Jenkins, Santa Barbara, Calif., July 9; Patrick H. Kennedy, Tyrone, N.M., July 30; Grant A. Petersen, Denver, July 18; Kenneth M. Shemberg, Bowling Green, Ohio, July 26; Billy D. Wrightsman, Lincoln, July 6

1967

Larry J. Fruhling, Ankeny, Iowa, Aug. 6; Dan L. Greer, Taylor, Sept. 4; Susan Yost Stilwell, Sierra Vista, Ariz., June 16

Billie Spruill Dittmer, Camdenton, Mo., July 30; Ruth Harrison Goodrich, York, Aug. 11; Norman W. Ochsner, Norfolk, May 12; Barbara Jenkins Peery, Omaha, Aug. 2; Don L. Rademacher, Lincoln, Aug. 1

1965

1968

1964

William K. Ellgren, Minneapolis, June 16; David J. Frank, Kimball, Aug. 17; Hubert G. Gustafson, Grand Island, Aug. 1; Robert E. Reynolds, Overland Park, Kan., May 7; Joe H. Youssefi, Phoenix, Aug. 27

1966 Charles E. Goodrich,

John D. Abbott, Blair, July 12; Bradley H. Baskin, Lincoln, Aug. 19; George G. Bastian, Seaside, Calif., Sept. 7; David H. Brady, Stamford, Sept.

7; Merlin G. Brodd, Fremont, June 15; Evelyn Wilson Jenkins, Wymore, July 2; John S. McCune, Plymouth, Minn., Aug. 9

N E B R A S K A Q U A R T E R LY

1969

Thomas M. Egley, Mission Viejo, Calif., March 18; Terry K. Eicher, Omaha, Sept. 8; Cheryl Pospisil Fisher, Omaha, July 1; David L. Johnson, Lincoln, Aug. 29; Shirley Whitaker Sibert, Kearney, July 6; Michael P. Towey, Lincoln, July 12; Jerry B. Weber, Lincoln, Aug. 11

1970

archives and special collections, unl libraries

Martha Ferris Hunzeker, Wahoo, Aug. 9; John M. McHenry, Lincoln, Aug. 18; Laurell Southwick Schuerman, Omaha, July 19; Richard P. Schuessler, Lincoln, Sept.

8; Leonard J. Stelmach, Lincoln, Aug. 16; Gregory D. Thomas, Enid, Okla., March 31; Rogene Hansen Wenburg, Beaver City, July 25

1971

James B. Beck, Austin, Minn., May 20; Roger G. Belohlavy, Crete, June 15; Richard D. Chalupa, Muncie, Ind., July 26; Paul V. Chiles, Inwood, W.Va., June 22; David A.

1983

Jacobson, Omaha, July 4; Candace Ostby Pajak, Omaha, July 8; Richard M. Patterson, Lincoln, July 25; Jerry L. Rosener, Fairbury, Aug. 30

1972

Audrey Bartlett Faxon, Beatrice, Sept. 3; James B. Goodwin, Lincoln, July 4; Alice Combs Hickey, Lincoln, July 26; Sandra Scott Marquart, Lincoln, July 3; Christopher B. Stasheff, Champaign, Ill., June 10; Barbara Grundman Swarthout, Omaha, Aug. 18; Michael D. Zeman, Norwalk, Conn., July 19

1973

Stephen H. Hull, Lincoln, July 10; Edward H. Matney, Sioux City, Iowa, June 27; Cheryl Schuetz Vice, Springfield, Mo., June 7; Daniel E. Walsh, Lincoln, July 12

1974

Carl L. Deruyscher, Leavenworth, Kan., June 10; Thomas A. Stankiewicz, Omaha, July 3

N E B R A S K A Q U A R T E R LY

1930-2018

Jack Goebel John (Jack) Goebel, 87, longtime professor and administrator, died July 16 in Lincoln. During his 43-year career, the U.S. Army veteran and 1968 graduate served in various roles, including interim chancellor, vice chancellor of business and finance, professor of accounting and commercial law and dean of the College of Business.

In 1997 he received the College of Business Administration Alumni Association Honorary Lifetime Membership Award and five years later was honored for his exceptional service to the university with the Louise Pound-George Howard Distinguished Career Service Award.

1975

Francis S. Christopher, Gilbert, Ariz., Sept. 10; Martin L. Conradt, Lincoln, June 13; Michael S. Gollehon, Lincoln, June 19; Olivia M. Guerra-Keating, Omaha, June 24; Eloise Parker Hill, Lincoln, July 18; Foster L. Kent, Lees Summit, Mo., Aug. 22; Douglas H. Kramer, Lincoln, Aug. 25, Donald F. Prochaska, Omaha, June 29

1976

Curtis L. Cornils, Chandler, Ariz., July 4

1977

Jeffery Elliott, Lincoln, July 24; Larry J. Held, Fort Collins, Colo., June 28

1978

Barbara J. Dunn, Aberdeen, S.D., July 30; Kevin J. Lingren, Malvern, Iowa, Aug. 13; Emil J. Radik, Omaha, Aug. 1

1979

Randy L. Scott, Westerville, Sept. 2

1980 Randy L. Nathan, Farmington, N.M., July 21; Robert E. Pewthers,

Lincoln, July 12; Celia K. Smith, Lincoln, Aug. 27; Lila L. Tooker, Lincoln, June 24

1981

Candace Axe Billingsley, Omaha, Sept. 6; Warren J. Hingst, Bellevue, Jan. 16; Terri Thoms Lenzen, Lincoln, July 25; Russell D. Williams, Lincoln, July 23

1982

Frederick S. Bartenbach, Bellevue, July 10; Lori Weber Jarvis, Coloma, Mich., June 20; David L. Jefferson, Lincoln, July 24; Stephen L. Stastka, York, July 31

Gary J. Cheloha, Lincoln, July 25; Deanna Hanson Hageman, Lincoln, June 18; Kathryn L. Kluck, Denver, June 2; Rhonda King Smith, Temecula, Calif., July 10

1985

Helen Moorhouse Crosswait, Spearfish, S.D., Aug. 19; Lisa K. Metzler, Martindale, Texas, Jan. 9; Jeffrey L. Steward, Chambersburg, Pa., Sept. 1

1986

John P. Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Keefe, Lincoln, Aug. 8; Donald E. Urbach, Glencoe, Minn., March 27

1987

Kimberly Mann Grinsted, Blowing Rock, N.C., June 15; Vicki J. Grossenbacher, Lincoln, Sept. 6

1989

Harold R. Spencer, Omaha, July 31

1990

Amy Vojtech Beran, Sachse, Texas, Sept. 7; Dale A. Kittelson, Omaha, July 20; Kay Vivian

McGuigan, Omaha, Aug. 31

1991

Mary F. Manhart, Omaha, Aug. 12

1995

John K. Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Hara, Bellevue, June 24; Eric I. Wright, North Platte, June 21

2001

Timothy J. Kraft, Lincoln, Aug. 30

2004 Christopher L. Jessen, Omaha, June 12

2005 Michael N. Broderick, Scottsbluff, July 11

2006 Jonathan S. Werner, Lincoln, June 10

2007

James M. Pogue, Lincoln, Sept. 5

2009 Donald R. Bohnenkamp, Omaha, June 18; David P. Broderick, Scottsbluff, July 13; Zachary J. Miller, Aurora, July 20

2010

Alex J. Mastera, Hoffman Estates, Ill., June 3

WINTER 2018

63

Love Story

Lincoln Parks a Place in Her Heart Carolina girl now has Nebraska on her mind B Y LAURYN HIGGINS

64

WINTER 2018

N E B R A S K A Q U A R T E R LY

mario zucca

M

y father tells me my favorite string of words as a little girl were, “I do it, Daddy.”

Those words can be found in the form of a scar on my right knee from the time I swore I could ride a bike without training wheels. And I’m certain they can still be found inside the crevices of the walls of my childhood kitchen that housed more pancake batter than any hot griddle ever did.

And most recently those words found themselves inside Lincoln, Nebraska.

I decided to pursue a master’s degree in journalism without any real plan. I researched a few online programs and found the price tag somewhere between,

“Um ... what,” and, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

That was until Nebraska.

The online program was affordable, the number of female professors was inspiring, and truth be told, red had always been my favorite color. So, I applied.

I was accepted into the program in 2016 and after three semesters of working on my degree from my home state of North Carolina, I decided I needed a significant change in my life. I ended a three-year relationship that was becoming unhealthier as each day passed and knew that if I didn’t begin seeking joy for myself before trying to provide it for others, that I might never find it.

I decided a change in scenery might help, and accepted a graduate assistantship for 2018. In the weeks leading up to the move I found myself waking in the middle of the night panic-ordering hangers and dish towels on Amazon. I prematurely shipped four boxes to my apartment in Lincoln without realizing you have to actually be living in your apartment before you can start shipping things to it.

My plane touched down in Lincoln on a bitterly cold January afternoon, I carried with me two suitcases and a mountain of nerves.

They say when you move to a new city the first 10 people you meet will tell you all you need to know about that place, and if that sentiment holds true, Lincoln felt like coming home after a long day.

I was greeted into my new role by professors and fellow graduate assistants who made this Midwest city feel like a sanctuary. Within weeks I began to feel a sense of peace and understanding like never before.

The cookie-cutter buildings and pothole ridden streets that every city has, seemed to glow in a way that I had never experienced. Every person I met had a sense of southern hospitality that not even my real southern roots were used to. The phrase “Nebraska Nice,” wasn’t a buzzword, but a lifestyle that oozed out of every grin and pat on the back from strangers I passed in coffee shops.

Maybe my younger self knew all along that if I made my joy non-negotiable and went after what I wanted, things would fall into place, but I am certain Lincoln and all its hidden magic is the reason for that.

This city gave me eyes to see what is plain, as a Rembrandt. And so, for the rest of my life I’ll have the gift of knowing I don’t need pretty things to have a beautiful life.

My greatest love story to date does not include a castle or a boy with great hair. My greatest love story to date is where girl meets herself, falls madly in love with her reflection, and I have Lincoln to thank for that.

I guess my new self should start saying, “I did it, Dad.”

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