ember
FEATURES| 7
11, 2014
Denison Dunestones
Remembering the untimely death of Laura Carter, class of ‘84 KRISTOF OLTVAI News Editor The day: April 17, 1982. It must have been a crisp spring afternoon when Laura Carter ’85 headed into Columbus in her parents’ car, accompanied by mom, dad, and three friends for a nice dinner on the town. The 18-year-old freshman, a native of Wayne, Pa., must have been feeling good coming off an 11-1 victory over Oberlin in women’s lacrosse as her dad cruised down East Broad St., OH-16, the only major road between Granville and the state capital at the time. Unbeknownst to the Carters, the area was gang territory and the site of an ongoing drug war between Columbus racketeers and a Cleveland gang trying to gain influence in the city. An argument between four men, all members of the Columbus group, only a block away from East High School exploded into violence only minutes before their car pulled past Winner Ave. As the gangsters opened fire on one another, the Carters’ car—and Laura—were caught in the crossfire. The single bullet hit all the worst spots, severing three major arteries in Laura’s chest and ending up in her left lung. Though her father, Edward Carter, rushed her to nearby St. Anthony’s Hospital, doctors on the scene told her family the damage was too severe. Laura died about an hour later. From the records we have, it seems Laura was not immediately immortalized. The Denisonian did not run a story investigating her death. This newspa-
Grammy for Album of the Year. The fifth track of Another Page eventually reached #9 on the Billboard Top 10, in late 1984. It would be Cross’s last song to break into the Top 10. The track was called “Think of Laura.” “A friend of a friend, a friend ‘til the end/That’s the kind of girl she was/Taken away so young/Taken away without a warning,” the lyrics say. Cross, then 31 years old, had been dating Paige McNinch, a Denison student and Laura’s best friend. The two women were roommates in Huffman Hall and sisters of Kappa Alpha Theta. Cross wrote the song as a comfort to Paige and tribute to Laura. The four men found responsible for the drug feud that started the shooting were
taken to court. One member of the gang was acquitted at trial, while the other three were convicted. One of the men in particular, Gordon Newlin, was sentenced to life imprisonment, although he was at one point believed to be the target, and not the shooter, of the rounds that slew Laura. After serving 25 years in prison, Newlin was released on parole June 18, 2012. But it is likely the kind words of a parent meant more to Laura’s friends than any pounding of the gavel could. “Laura lived life more eagerly and fully in 18 years than many of us will do in a lifetime,” her father wrote in 1982. “Her cheerful, enthusiastic kindness toward others and her love of beauty is both her legacy and ours.”
All photos courtesy of Denison’s 1982 Adytum
Laura Carter ‘84 was a Big Red lacross player and a member of Kappa Alpha Theta. See right for Carter (middle right). per’s only mention of what happened to her is a letter to the editor, dated April 30, by her father. She is remembered in the 1982 Adytum alongside Susan E. Ryder ’83, who had died Dec. 1981 of illness. Almost everything we know about her comes from Columbus Dispatch stories. But Laura’s story was meant to live on, it seems, in a subtler way. In 1983, Texan singer-songwriter Christopher Cross released his second studio album, Another Page, the sequel to his self-titled album the year before, which had won the
Denison’s political past and political present MATTHEW PENNEKAMP Forum Editor Much has been made of the fact that after a two year hiatus, a Denisonian will once more walk the corridors of congressional power. Indeed, Robert Dold ’91, a former president of DCGA, inheritor of his family’s pest-control business, and one-time congressman (having lost in the slight Democratic wave of two years prior) has reclaimed the mantle of representation in his suburban Chicago North Shore district. This, in conjunction with the election of Charles Baker, Jr., the father of a recent alum, to the governorship of Massachusetts (see Kristof Oltvai’s article on pg. 1 for more details) might speak to a noticeable pattern: the revival of Denisonians’ interest in the political arena. With that being said, it would serve us well to examine some of Denison’s past political luminaries. Tony P. Hall, a Dayton-based alum who served for twenty-four years in the House of Representatives, is one such example. He came to Denison to play football (his profile can still be viewed alongside the images of legendary Big Red athletes in the front hall of Mitchell). Elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1978 after a stint in the Peace Corps and state politics, he spent the duration of his career there focusing on issues of food security and starvation, even going so far as to fast for twenty-two days to bring to light issues of hunger when congressional Republicans were determined to scrap the committee he had
All photos courtesy of Wikimedia
Photos of Denison alumnus politicians: Tony P. Hall (bottom left), Charles Baker, Jr. (bottom right), Robert Dold (top right), and Judson Harmon (top right).
cofounded to publicize the problem. Well-respected on both sides of the aisle, Congressman Hall was nominated by President George W. Bush to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, a bipartisan selection on the president’s part that spoke to the merits of a man who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize on three separate occasions. Judson Harmon is another famous (or perhaps not-so-famous) name. He was the only Denisonian to serve in a presidential cabinet and was also Grover Cleveland’s attorney general from 1895 to 1897. Hailing from a small town near Cincinnati, Harmon had the double misfortune of attending Denison both as an impoverished teacher’s son and as an able-bodied male at the beginning of the Civil War. Therefore, to help pay for his education at was then still a seminary for would-be Baptist clergymen, Harmon served in a collegiate militia unit designed to help repulse any Confederate raids emerging from Kentucky. After graduating from Denison and later Cincinnati Law School, Harmon rapidly shimmied up the totem pole of the legal profession, eventually becoming a well-respected judge, attorney general, and later in life, Ohio’s fortyfifth governor. With the return of Denisonians to office, it is clear that politics is just one of the many professions that Denisonians have made their mark in throughout history.
Dunestones