Tulanian Summer 2009

T H E M AG A Z I N E O F

Helluva Hullabaloo

Newspaper staffers stay cool during the tumultuous year 1969–70.

ROAD WARRIOR Photographer Julie Dermansky travels worlds of war and survival.

BOUQUET IN HAND Poet and professor Peter Cooley shares his romance with words.

TULANE UNIVERSITY

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12 Helluva Hullabaloo by Nick Marinello The campus roils with protest and change in 1969–70, and the newspaper staff rolls with the punches.

18 Road Warrior Photographer Julie Dermansky, Newcomb class of 1987, chases hot spots around the world.

24 Bouquet in Hand by Mary Ann Travis Looking for an emotional experience?

Try the poems of English professor and poet Peter Cooley.

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4 President’s Perspective Scott Cowen sees students making a difference in the community.

5 Inside Track • Art history’s west wing • Summer orientation • Regrowing limbs • Sustainable paper products • Dinwiddie transformation • Masters of plaster • Service learning in Malaysia • Steak house delivers health care • New talent on theater scene • Music centennial • Change of leadership • Genes make you fat

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10 Photo Riff Gutted Dinwiddie Hall glows in early morning light.

30 Giving Back Support solidifies for university’s civic engagements.

41 The Classes Read about what your classmates and other Tulane alumni are doing.

40 New Orleans Cicadas play a little (a lot, really) night music.

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Dr.Tina Thethi, assistant professor of endocrinology, leads a study of genetic links to obesity.

Front cover: The Hullabaloo newspaper covers a riotous year.

Photos (clockwise from top) by Michael P. Smith, Buddy Brimberg and Matt Anderson.

Inside front cover: Rain boots line up at the uptown campus bookstore. Photo by Paula Burch-Celentano.

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Editor Mary Ann Travis mtravis@tulane.edu Features Editor Nick Marinello mr4@tulane.edu

“The Classes” Editor Fran Simon fsimon@tulane.edu Contributers Alicia Duplessis Jasmin aduples@tulane.edu Ryan Rivet rrivet@tulane.edu Keith Brannon kbrannon@tulane.edu Kathryn Hobgood khobgood@tulane.edu Arthur Nead anead@tulane.edu Mike Strecker mstreck@tulane.edu Maureen King mking2@tulane.edu Art Director Melinda Viles mviles@tulane.edu University Photographer Paula Burch-Celentano pburch@tulane.edu Production Coordinator and Graphic Designer Sharon Freeman sfree@tulane.edu Graphic Designer Tracey O’Donnell tbodonn@tulane.edu

Good things in small packages “Small is beautiful” is an economics idea that has been floating around for decades.

And now at the Tulanian, lucky us, we get to put to test the notion that bigger is not always better and that budget constraints are good for creativity.

When you lift this issue of the magazine (if you’re reading the print version), you’ll notice that we’ve gotten lighter. We’ve slimmed down to fewer pages—in the interest of economies and due to the reality of a drastically reduced budget.

Tulane is doing well in its recovery from Hurricane Katrina: Enrollment is almost at prestorm levels and repairs to damaged facilities continue at a fast clip. But the current national financial crisis led university administrators to allocate considerably less money for the production of the magazine.

Consequently, we’re sharpening our focus while still striving to keep you connected to the university and to present the stories of Tulane in lively and compelling ways.

In this issue, Nick Marinello in “Helluva Hullabaloo” tracks the saga of 1969–70 Hullabaloo staff members. It was a volatile time, and, man, do they have tales to tell.

In “Road Warrior,” check out a sampling of photographs by Julie Dermansky, a 1987 Newcomb College graduate, who brings her artistic eye and cosmic sensibility to all corners of the globe.

English professor Peter Cooley, on the other hand, usually stays close to home and family in his poetic explorations. In “Bouquet in Hand,” he muses on his affec-

President of the University Scott S. Cowen Vice President of University Communications Deborah L. Grant (PHTM ’86) Executive Director of Publications Carol Schlueter (B ’99) cjs@tulane.edu Tulanian (USPS 017-145) is a quarterly magazine pub lished by the Tulane Office of University Publications. Periodical postage at New Orleans, LA 70113 and additional mailing offices. Send editorial correspondence to: Tulanian, 31 McAlister Drive, Drawer 1, New Orleans, LA 70118-5624, or e-mail tulanian@tulane.edu.

Opinions expressed in Tulanian are not necessarily those of Tulane representatives and do not necessarily reflect university policies. Material may be reprinted only with permission.

Tulane University is an affirmative action/equal opportunity institution.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Tulanian, 31 McAlister Drive, Drawer 1, New Orleans, LA 70118-5624.

Summer 2009/ Vol. 81, No.1

tion for poet Emily Dickinson and his dedication to the craft of writing.

Enjoy!

Mary Ann Travis Editor, Tulanian

Your letters are always welcome.

E-mail is the best way to reach us: tulanian@tulane.edu.

You can also write us by U.S. mail: Tulanian, University Publications, Suite 219, 200 Broadway, New Orleans, LA 70118.

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backTalk URGE TO WRITE With each issue of the Tulanian, I’ve thought I should write and say how much I enjoyed it and what a very fine publication it is. Somehow it never happened.

On receiving the spring 2009 issue, however, the urge was so compelling that, well, here I am.

First of all, the magazine meets and exceeds every high standard for university publications, certainly in content, but also in the quality of its art, its design and its final product.

Then, what captured my attention and interest was the article, “Agents of Change,” concerning the melding of the schools of science and engineering. A truly bold advance in technical education. Exciting, fascinating, imaginative— and Tulane has pioneered a move that others may follow. It’s all so logical.

I graduated June 10, 1946, with a BS in physics.

Even then degree requirements (at least for physics), as I recall, included courses in mechanical and electrical engineering. They not only kept my feet on the ground but also were valuable in my subsequent 39 years with the Chevron Corp.

Once again—it’s all so logical, and others have to ask the age-old question, “Why didn’t I think of it?”

Finally, I have to applaud the administration, the faculty, the many support groups and, of course, the students for the remarkable achievement post-Katrina. I’m so proud of each and every one.

I would be totally remiss if, in closing, I did not include a few laudatory words about President Scott Cowen. He is obviously very knowledgeable and articulate—I enjoy his column in each issue. What’s more important though is his feeling for and his dedication to Tulane University and its students.

James Clifford Benjamin, A&S ’46 Los Angeles COLD WATER ON DIVERSITY Your spring edition which arrives in late summer for some reason brought about new hope that perhaps, just perhaps, the move to change the name of Tulane University to Diversity University just might be losing some momentum.

It appears from the responses to your earlier feature article, about Tim Wise and his diatribe about white guilt, I may not be the only Tulane alum with a touch of political and social conservatism still intact.

As a 75 year old, some of my fondest memories are imbedded in situations where I, a somewhat typical Southern Caucasian, was the only diverse person in the group.

I can remember a memorable time at a night club in pre–Castro Cuba in 1946, an evening in a pool hall with a bunch of Norwegian seamen in 1974, a somewhat fuzzy recollection of a late night in a French Quarter bar in 1981 when I was the only non–African American in attendance, a delicious evening in a Lima, Peru, dance hall with hundreds of Peruvians in 2008, stomping on the floor with a hofbrauhaus full of Germans in 1971, and on and on.

Those that cannot begin a sentence without heralding diversity remind me of “Little Jack Horner” when he said, “What a good boy am I!” Thank you, letter writers, for being brave enough to throw a tiny bit of cold water on the sacredness of “diversity.”

William W. Watson, L ’58 St. Joseph, La. INSPIRED READER I received the spring issue of the Tulanian yesterday and was blown away by its design, photography and content. A wonderful read! Thank you so much. You are to be congratulated. I receive the Tulanian because my husband, Ham Richardson (A&S ’55), who died several years ago, was a proud graduate of the university. But more to the point of my praise of your publication, is that I was the former editor of Seventeen Magazine for 18 years and fully appreciate the

work it takes to produce a lively, interesting magazine. And of course, it does help to have the inspirational commencement address of President Scott Cowen as a centerpiece. Tulane University is not only an inspiration to the city of New Orleans, but to all of us around the world who realize the important role the university’s faculty, staff and students played in the recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina. You captured this spirit on the pages of the Tulanian.

Midge Richardson New York DOWN-TO-EARTH I have only just now gotten around to reading the winter 2009 issue, and am so glad I did! After reading it, I am amazed to feel transported back home—right into the heart of the inspiring story of Newcomb “gals” rebuilding the city, “Friends in Deed,” Professor Nick Spitzer, and Tim Wise who so clairvoyantly speaks of race. The downto-earth nature of the articles is appreciated, and I hope that Tulane meets its fund-raising objectives, as it really seeks to preserve the creative spirit of the city, and grow the hearts and minds of New Orleanians. Bravo!

Robin Rafferty, B ’85 Nashville, Tenn.

SPRING, AGAIN Loved the first two articles about the wonderful class of 2009. … Keep up the great work!

Jeanne P. Hanley Rabig, NC ’60 Gretna, La. STAYING IN TOUCH I have always enjoyed receiving the Tulanian. As the wife of a graduate (Ray Silverstein, A ’86), receiving the Tulanian has afforded us the opportunity to stay in touch with the university and keep tabs on former classmates and professors. …

As I begin to prepare to send my first child off to Tulane as part of the Class of 2013, I find that I read each issue with new eyes. … and then I pass it along to my daughter, excited that she will be attending such a fine university!

Beth Silverstein New Albany, Ohio

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president’sPerspective Tea and community Summer has always been a good time for me to catch up on my reading. Even though early American history and biographies are my primary areas of pleasure reading, I happily will stray from them for a book that may help me know and understand our current world a little better.

Greg Mortenson’s best-selling book, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at Time, is just such a book. It is a remarkable story of how one person has devoted his life to building schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Thus far, Mortenson has built more than 170 schools in the most remote areas of these countries so the next generation of young women will not only have a better life but also have the skills, knowledge and resources to make life better for others, who in turn will themselves become difference-makers.

Those who make a difference see their efforts paid forward over and over again in the countless good works of others. I am fortunate to have a job at an institution where people are making a difference each and every day. Whether in their classrooms, their labs, at their computer workstations or out among the people of this city, our faculty, students and staff are changing the world around them.

Sometimes that change occurs in small but important moments, as when a professor finds the right words or imagery and a student suddenly understands something he or she was not before able to grasp.

Sometimes the moment is more dramatic.

While still in high school, current Tulane University student Laura White volunteered to help out on a camping trip with low-income kids from Atlanta. During the trip, she was charged with supervising a swimming outing that suddenly turned disastrous. Fortunately, Laura, a competitive swimmer, was able to rescue five children from drowning.

Laura is a hero, but for me her heroism is not defined solely by that rescue.

You see, Laura immediately understood that

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she had a valuable skill that could be shared with children whose lives are so disadvantaged that they had hardly ever been in a swimming pool, much less received instruction on how to swim.

At 16 years of age, Laura started Wild and Water Swimming, a nonprofit organization that teaches swimming and water safety to lowincome urban youth. When she began her studies at Tulane last year, Laura expanded the program to New Orleans.

Laura is now a sophomore majoring in political economy and social policy. She also is a Youth Venture Ambassador, working to inspire other youth to start nonprofit organizations and social ventures. Laura is truly a difference-maker.

I told Laura’s story to the assembled class of 2013 at this year’s convocation. It was an audience of the best and brightest this country has to offer, and most of them, I believe, are here at Tulane because they want to make a positive difference in the world. Over the next four years, they will acquire the knowledge, values, experiences and interpersonal skills necessary to do just that.

My wish for the class of 2013 is for them to develop the habits of the mind and heart that will allow them to make substantive lifelong contributions to their chosen professions and to society in general. Hopefully, four years from now they will graduate from Tulane as responsible adults, respectful, tolerant and accepting of others and eager to fully embrace the communities to which they belong.

You may have heard that Three Cups of Tea takes its name from a Balti proverb: The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time, you are an honored guest. The third time you become family.

Communities are held together by great acts as well as small ones, by people who are willing to work together for the common good.

inside Track Lamplight Quiet during the summer, the stately Joyce Frank Menschel Art History Wing of the Woldenberg Art Center entices students to lectures, films, poetry readings and art history professors’ office hours during the academic session. Sometimes called the West Wing, the building houses the Montine Freeman Auditorium and faculty and staff offices.

newsNotes | insideTrack Lost limbs may grow back

First-year students learn the lay of the land during summer orientation.

Summer looks A crumpled printed map of campus is a thing of the past if you’re a first-year student looking for the mailroom so that you can pick up a care package sent from home.

Print is passé. And GPS technology is hot.

This summer, more than a thousand incoming students used GPS devices and text-messaged clues to find the Bruff Commons mailroom.

They also located the laptop repair shop, library, classrooms, academic advising center and other essential campus resources.

The seek-and-find games were part of summer orientation in which the students participated throughout the month of June.

The students and their parents—in seven groups of a hundred or so—spent a couple of days on campus, getting to know Tulane,

New Orleans and each other.

The students spent the night in residence halls, and the parents stayed in hotels. Students had the chance to obtain ID cards and register for classes, while parents attended financial aid and public safety sessions, along with the ever important, “letting go seminar.”

The purpose of summer orientation, says Penny Wyatt, director of the Office of Orientation and Student Transitions, is to help students “feel more confident about coming in August. We give them a little taste of everything.”

At the end of August, the summer orientation participants were among the more than 1,500 firstyear students who arrived on campus to stay for good. The class is among the most academically qualified and accomplished in Tulane history, and their numbers indicate that Tulane has rebounded from that big storm of four years ago.

Green toilet paper Thanks to research by a group of students, the Tulane uptown campus will be switching its toilet tissue and paper towel products to a new supplier whose operations are “greener” and more sustainable.

Students in the Tulane Environmental Action League conducted a Greenpeace KleerCut campaign in the spring semester, attempting to get people, businesses and institutions to switch to more sustainable bath paper and tissue products.

After meetings with Tulane administrators in facilities services and other departments, the students were successful in encouraging the campus switch to SCA Tork products. The student group says that SCA Tork uses much higher post-consumer recycled content in its products than other companies and has a much better holistic, sustainable production process.

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Could the salamander’s natural ability to grow back severed appendages lead to a scientific breakthrough for humans who have lost limbs?

With the help of a $6.25 million U.S. Department of Defense grant, professor of cell and molecular biology Ken Muneoka, who holds the John L. and Mary Wright Ebaugh Chair in Science and Engineering, will lead a team of researchers from the University of California–Irvine and the University of Kentucky to identify the genes that trigger regeneration in the axolotl, a Mexican salamander.

The researchers then will attempt to determine how the same genes are regulated in response to injuries in mice. Because of their similar genetic characteristics, mice serve as a model for humans.

“The hope is that once the genetic signals for regeneration are identified, therapies can be developed to enhance the regenerative response in humans,” says Muneoka.

Regeneration of tissue in humans is Muneoka’s long-term goal.

While the salamander is the only animal capable of regenerating lost appendages, a child can grow back the tip of a severed finger, and, even in adults, bone, muscle, cartilage and skin can independently undergo a healing and regeneration response.

“What’s missing is a way to coordinate these events so complex structures can be restored,” Muneoka says. “By establishing a comprehensive database that identifies all the genes involved in regenerating a salamander limb, we will essentially create a genetic blueprint of how to do the same in humans.”

—Mike Strecker Mike Strecker is Tulane’s public relations director.

Cell and molecular biology professor Ken Muneoka explores regeneration of appendages.

CAMPUS PHOTO BY ALICIA JASMIN. ILLUSTRATION BY TRACEY O’DONNELL. KEN MUNEOKA PHOTO BY RICK OLIVIER.

insideTrack | newsNotes Green light for Dinwiddie Dinwiddie Hall, situated on Gibson Circle and visible from St. Charles Avenue, is undergoing massive renovations to transform it into the greenest building on the uptown campus.

The goal is for the home of science departments and the Middle American Research Institute to receive a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification from the Green Building Certification Institute, which is not an easy thing to do.

“This is exciting for Tulane because green is truly the way the country and the world is going,” says Clarence Odom, facilities services project manager.

To achieve the LEED certification, the renovated building must meet strict guidelines for water and energy efficiency and indoor air quality. Also, green space must be incorporated into the new design.

By this summer, all offices and classrooms were gutted and everything moved out, including the Middle American Research Institute’s valuable collection of artifacts.

Materials from the old structure, including windows, doors and floors, have been salvaged and are being reused in the renovation of the 86-year-old building.

Construction is scheduled to take more than a year. When the work is complete, the museum will return to a new space on the third floor. And plans call for the anthropology department to move its offices into the building. New classrooms also will be built and elevator access added.

David Curtis, grandson of the building’s original architect, Nathaniel C. Curtis, is the architect for the $9 million project.

Dinwiddie Hall, built in 1923, is named for Albert Bledsoe Dinwiddie, professor of mathematics and president of Tulane from 1918 to 1935.

(See “Photo Riff” on pages 10–11 for an early morning view of Dinwiddie.)

—Alicia Duplessis Jasmin Alicia Duplessis Jasmin is a staff writer in the Office of University Publications.

Help is on the way for crumbling cemeteries. With guidance from master craftspeople, students are acquiring skill in setting stone and applying plaster to preserve the aboveground tombs.

Art and craft A 19th-century tomb within New Orleans’ Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 underwent significant restoration this summer when students enrolled in the Preservation Studies Summer Field School at Tulane used traditional techniques for applying plaster, mortar and masonry.

“People have written songs about the beauty of this work,” says Heather Knight, director of the summer field school and an adjunct professor in the School of Architecture. “When master craftspeople work, there’s an art to it—a poetic rhythm you can hear.”

Working under the tutelage of master craftspeople, conservationists and architects, the students learned historically appropriate treatments for restoring the decrepit aboveground tomb.

In addition to their work in the cemetery,

Public health in Malaysia The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Malaysia is no longer a faraway concern for about a dozen Tulane undergraduates.

These students spent four weeks this summer in the Southeast Asian country as part of the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine’s first international undergraduate service-learning course.

They learned on the ground about the stigma associated with AIDS and refugee issues

the students also applied a lime washing at the historic Pitot House.

“We’re lucky that we’re working with a second-generation master plasterer, Tevis Vandergriff,” says Knight.

The architecture school is a partner with the Preservation Trades Network on the project.

In the afternoons, students set aside their trowels to conduct archival research and attend seminars on architectural history, landscape architecture, funerary iconography and the history of New Orleans cemeteries.

Four of the students who were enrolled in the field school were accepted into Tulane for the fall semester.

—Kathryn Hobgood Kathryn Hobgood is assistant director for web communication and public relations at Tulane.

that hamper disease-control efforts. Among the student projects was the design of an educational manual about reproductive health to distribute in schools. The students also surveyed clients at drop-in health centers and at a hospice for AIDS patients.

Malaysian organizations will use the data to improve services and in grant applications.

The course was offered in partnership with the University of Malaya and the Malaysian AIDS Council.

—Fran Simon Fran Simon is “Classes” editor of Tulanian.

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newsNotes | insideTrack Original Ruth’s Chris serves health care A neighborhood health clinic has been named in honor of the late Ruth Fertel, founder of Ruth’s Chris Steak House.

Fertel worked as a lab technician at Tulane University School of Medicine before she founded the steak restaurant in New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood that eventually grew to become an international chain of upscale steak houses.

Ruth’s Hospitality Group donated the restaurant building at the corner of Broad and Orleans avenues for the creation of the Ruth U. Fertel/ Tulane Community Health Center.

The 9,200-square-foot building will be

transformed into a neighborhood clinic that will provide health care to patients regardless of insurance status or ability to pay. In the new facility, doctors will be able to serve more than 1,200 patients per month and offer adult and pediatric healthcare services to entire families.

Tulane will relocate the Tulane Community Health Center at Covenant House, which opened in September 2005 and currently serves 900 patients, to the new site.

Construction is expected to begin on the new clinic this year, and plans call for it to be open by summer 2010.

—Keith Brannon Keith Brannon is assistant director of public relations at Tulane.

Ruth’s Chris Steak House at the corner of Broad and Orleans avenues is being adapted into a neighborhood health clinic—the Ruth U. Fertel/Tulane Community Health Center.

Listen up, music lovers The Newcomb Music Department of Tulane is celebrating its 100th year with a round of free concerts and performances during the week of Nov. 2–8.

From players of classical to jazz, computer music to Broadway tunes and marching music, faculty and student performers will fill Dixon Hall, the Recital Hall and the Louisiana Superdome with melodious sounds.

A faculty recital by Faina Lushtak, Amy Pfrimmer, Jesse McBride, Jon Gerhardt, Leonard Raybon, Mark Lighthiser and Mendel Lee will be a highlight of the centennial celebration.

Also Barbara Jazwinski, Tae Hong Park and

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Eli Shoot will present a concert of new music compositions.

Barry Spanier and Max Samarov will strike up the marching band and concert band. And Leonard Raybon and Max Samarov will direct the Tulane choir and orchestra. Faina Lushtak and Amy Pfrimmer will present their students in concert. John Doheny will lead student and faculty jazz ensembles. And Bruce Raeburn and John Baron will offer their musical insights.

The centennial celebration includes a halftime show directed by Barry Spanier at the Homecoming game in the Superdome on Saturday, Nov. 7.

For more information about the musical events, contact Diane Banfell, 504-862-3214, or James Velasquez, 504-862-3216.

Applause for Two Hands It’s been a big year for Helen Jaksch.

In May, she wrapped up her college career as the student commencement speaker.

Before that, the directors of the Shakespeare Festival at Tulane had seen a stage reading of her honors thesis play and approached her about producing it.

This summer, Jaksch debuted the play she authored, Fighting With Two Hands, for a three-night run.

When Jaksch originally wrote the play, it solely focused on Minnie Maddern Fiske, an actress of the late 19th and early 20th century who fought for artistic freedom and against the Theatrical Syndicate, a monopoly that controlled every aspect of the New York theater business for almost 20 years.

As she reworked the script for production at the Shakespeare Festival, Jaksch added a contemporary flavor with a second plot line about a modern theater company.

The cast of Fighting With Two Hands was mostly new theater graduates.

“It’s nice for us all to expand that relationship that we started in school,” says Jaksch.

“It’s nice for the festival to recognize that there is this talented group of students that has put in so much time and has been trained here.”

—Ryan Rivet Ryan Rivet is a staff writer in the Office of University Publications.

The Mandolin-Guitar Club of 1922 plays a tuneful part in the history of the Newcomb Music Department.

RENDERING BY CAMPO ARCHITECTS. PHOTO PROVIDED BY NEWCOMB-TULANE MUSIC DEPARTMENT.

insideTrack | newsNotes New leaders Newcomb College Institute Sally Kenney has been named the first permanent executive director of the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College Institute. Her appointment begins in January. Kenney also will hold the Newcomb College Endowed Chair and will join the faculty as a member in the Department of Political Science.

Kenney comes to Tulane from the University of Minnesota, where she is a tenured professor and director of the Center on Women and Public Policy at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.

Murphy Institute Steven M. Sheffrin, professor of economics at the University of California–Davis and director of its Center for State and Local Taxation, will become the new director of the Murphy Institute at Tulane effective in January.

Sheffrin’s research interests range from macroeconomic theory and policy to public policy and public finance. Currently, he is pursuing an interdisciplinary project on tax fairness and has authored Rational Expectations and co-authored Property Taxes and Tax Revolts: The Legacy of Proposition 13, and Economics: Principles, Applications and Tools, an introductory economics textbook.

Richard Teichgraeber, who has been the director of the Murphy Institute since 1984, will return full time to the faculty to teach as a professor of history.

Law School Stephen M. Griffin, vice dean for academic affairs at Tulane School of Law, has been named interim dean of the school.

He will serve as dean while a search is under way to replace Larry Ponoroff, who stepped down on July 1. Ponoroff, who has been dean since 2001, is leaving Tulane to become dean of the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law. Griffin has been a law school faculty member since 1989 and serves as the Rutledge C. Clement Jr. Professor in Constitutional Law. He is the author of American Constitutionalism: From Theory to Politics and the recently published Lexis reader, Constitutional Theory: Arguments and Perspectives.

PHOTO BY CHERYL GERBER.

Tina Thethi, assistant professor of endocrinology, is the principal investigator in a study probing genetic links to obesity.

Why are people fat?

Obesity is a condition proven to increase the chances of developing diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and other ailments.

But why do some people tend to become fat and others stay slim? Tulane University researchers are engaged in a study focusing on this question.

The study aims to characterize the genetic relationships between race, gender and obesity, says Dr. Tina Thethi, assistant professor of endocrinology and the study’s principal investigator.

The researchers are looking at the operations of the endocannabinoid system, a recently discovered endocrine system that has a role in regulating appetite.

“There is some preliminary data that obesity and the endocannabinoid system are different among ethnic groups,” explains Dr. Vivian Fonseca, who holds the Tullis-Tulane Alumni Chair in Diabetes at Tulane.

“Our varied population in New Orleans, with a lot of obesity, gives us a unique opportunity to study this,” he adds.

Thethi and her colleagues began recruiting residents of New Orleans and surrounding parishes to participate in the study in July 2008, and they are continuing to recruit participants until they’ve seen 700.

They are recruiting equal numbers of men and women and equal numbers of African Americans and Caucasians.

In addition, the researchers established a control group composed of people with a body mass index of less than 27, which will be compared with an obese group that includes people with a body mass index of more than 30.

The study team performs simple physical exams of participants, drawing blood, collecting urine samples and noting what medications individuals are taking.

Data show that two hormones, anandamide and 2-arachidonoyl-glycerol, exist in different levels among people who are obese versus lean.

If a person has a higher level of these hormones, he or she is probably eating more and would be more likely to be obese.

“We’re looking at these two hormones that we know are high in people who are obese and actually stimulate food intake, and we’re looking at that part of the gene that is supposed to turn off these hormones,” says Thethi.

“The main purpose in doing the study is to characterize the differences between men and women and African Americans and Caucasians, because I’m not sure we know the differences between these groups.”

—Arthur Nead Arthur Nead is a media specialist in the public relations office.

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The copy is set in standard eight-point Times

Daredevils

Roman on a leading of nine but it may as well be chiseled in a Maya burial glyph. The 40year-old stories that cling to these bound, yellowing pages of the campus newspaper have long outlived the urgency with which they were written and the context in which they were read.

The news that sizzled beneath the banner of The Tulane Hullabaloo during the turbulent academic year of 1969–70 now floats inertly between headlines, chilled in the cold vacuum of history. Such is the fate of news and newsmakers. No news may be good news, but old news is, well, oxymoronic.

So what makes turning these pages so irresistible?

The thing is, the past can be damned addictive, especially if you can take it out of cold storage, warm it up and make it personal. And the stories you find in newspapers and magazines are testimonials not only to the people in them, but also to those who write them. You see a name pop up in a few bylines and the next thing you know you’re checking the masthead to find his or her title. After going through a few issues you begin to piece together the trajectories of these 19- and 20-year-old journalists who together made a record of one small and specific corner of a fabled time.

The first thing you notice about the 1969–70 Hullabaloos is that they are crammed with news. Stuff was happening and happening fast and often furiously. A list of the top stories of that year includes the burning of an ROTC barracks building, the student takeover of the University Center, the Board of Administrators’ dismissal of tenured math professor Edward Dubinsky for his role in disrupting academic activities, the ongoing review of ROTC as a viable component of Tulane’s curriculum and citywide planning for the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. Jammed in between these explosive stories you can find coverage of an overhaul of the curriculum credit-unit system, major policy changes relating to residence halls, a heated election for Student Senate

officers, a football victory at the Liberty Bowl and the first-ever Earth Day. “It’s hard to appreciate now how turbulent and chaotic those times were,” says Margaret Blain Cervarich (NC ’71), a native of Beaumont, Texas, who arrived at Newcomb College in 1967 to study journalism only to find out the school hadn’t had a journalism department in years.

Oops. That must have been an eye-opener for the brash young Texan, who in those days may have been more aware of her ambitions than she was of her tendency to be impulsive.

But Cervarich rolled with the blunder, opting to pursue a degree in English and figuring to get hands-on training in journalism by working on the Hullabaloo.

Meanwhile, somewhere across campus

Matt Anderson’s photograph of Tulane students burning President Richard Nixon in effigy appeared in Time magazine’s May 18, 1970, issue.

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PHOTO BY MATT ANDERSON.

Matt Anderson (E ’71), a native of Miami, was becoming all-too-acquainted with the harsh realities of freshman calculus and beginning to think that pursuing an engineering degree might not be his best course of action. He was also enrolled in the ROTC program, another choice he would eventually question. Anderson began nurturing his interest in photography and was trying to figure out how he could gain access to the student darkroom located in the basement of the University Center. By spring 1970, Anderson was chief photographer of the Hullabaloo, Richard Nixon was burning in effigy on Tulane’s campus and Time magazine was running Anderson’s photograph of the incendiary statement.

John Yearwood (A&S ’69, G ’70), the son of an Air Force officer, was born in Hawaii when it was still a territory. In 1969, he was a senior at Tulane with his sights set on a doctorate in English. But first there was the matter of the Vietnam War. Yearwood was in his fourth year as an ROTC cadet and was looking at coming face-to-face with active duty in the near future.

Despite having ambitions to be a writer, Yearwood hadn’t considered joining the Hullabaloo staff until his friend Tom Ireland, the newly appointed editor, invited him down to the basement of the University Center to check out the scene.

John and Steffi Yearwood “If it hadn’t been for Tom, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought,” says Yearwood.

Tom Ireland (A&S ’71) was born and bred

in uptown New Orleans and had been active in publications at Jesuit High School. Even before becoming editor, Ireland was always looking to bolster the Hullabaloo staff.

“If Tom hadn’t been there then I guess I wouldn’t have been,” says Frank Barry (A&S ’70, L ’73), who joined the Hullabaloo’s staff as a freshman in ’67. Barry, who worked on the Jesuit Blue Jay with Ireland, was entering into an amped-up three-year matriculation to get his undergraduate degree but still found time to put in about 15 hours a week on the paper.

Another veteran of the Blue Jay Ireland tapped was Jim Dalferes (A&S ’71, L ’74).

Dalferes had less interest in journalism than Barry, but chipped in as copy editor during his first two years at the university.

Both Barry and Dalferes were in the Army ROTC program, something that Dalferes says gave them “probably a little different perspective” from most of the students who were active in protesting the war.

During their sophomore years, Linda Willis and Janice Gonzales worked in the HowardTilton Memorial Library. It’s there that they happened to meet Dalferes, who was also putting in a few hours each week among the humanities and fine arts stacks. Dalferes admits that he may have had a little bit of a crush on Willis, but seeing that going nowhere, he did the standup thing and introduced her to his friend Ireland.

“Jim Dalferes told Tom to come look at me in the library while I was on work study,” says Linda Willis Ireland (NC ’71), whose married name should be enough to tell you how that worked out. While he was at it, Dalferes engineered another future marriage when he introduced Gonzales to Barry.

The two women joined their future spouses on the Hullabaloo staff in summer 1969.

Janice, who had been the editor of her high school’s literary magazine, recalls that the paper needed a sports editor.

“None of the usual guys were around and they thought it would be funny back then to have a girl do the sports,” she says.

New Orleanian Rick Streiffer (A&S ’73) was

Margaret Blain

Linda Willis fresh out of high school in fall 1969, when Ireland and Willis approached him to join the paper. Streiffer suffered no burning in his gut to be a journalist, but he had experience editing his high school’s literary magazine and since he was living at home with his folks, he welcomed the chance to have a place to hang out on campus and meet new people.

There were dozens of others who contributed in varying capacities to the Hullabaloo that year—all of them, no matter what experience they brought to the table, and whether or not they knew it, catching a ride on history’s wave.

“I think our ill-assorted band of daredevils did pretty well by the Hullabaloo,” says Cervarich. “Even if we were making it up as we went along.”

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Lightning rod It’s interesting how an editor can put his thumbprint on a publication without even having to pencil out a word. Of the eight people interviewed for this story, only Matt Anderson and Margaret Blain Cervarich arrived at the Hullabaloo unguided by Tom Ireland’s direct or indirect influence. The fact that four of those interviewed were signed up for ROTC and were involved in covering this hottest-button issue on campus is, well, maybe a karmic twist in the law of averages.

(It should be said that Dalferes exercised his option to leave ROTC after his sophomore year and in fact spent the 1969–70 academic year in England as a participant in the Junior Year Abroad program.)

Campus unrest in the late 1960s was typically energized by two separate but harshly harmonizing issues: the war and student power. And ROTC was a lightning rod for both. Not only were uniformed ranks of ROTC cadets marching across the quad the most visible symbol of the war, but a series of reports in the 1968–69 Hullabaloo raised questions concerning discrepancies in the number of ROTC academic credits accepted toward graduation among different colleges, as well as “indoctrination” within ROTC courses. As ROTC became a curriculum issue, students angry about their lack of representation on the Board of Administrators and the University Senate were ready and willing to flex their muscle through loud and often strident protest.

“Tom and I were intrigued by the political expression of others, and wondered at what we took to be their excessive rhetoric,” says John Yearwood, who functioned as executive editor under Ireland.

Janice Gonzales Barry (NC ’71, L ’73) quickly rose in the ranks to become news editor.

She has two lasting impressions about the campus protests. One is what she calls the “overheated rhetoric” of some of the student leaders and the other is the “sensationalist coverage” by local news media. “The TV media,” she says, “would focus on a little knot of demonstrators and they would make it look

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like Columbia,” referring to the unrest at the New York university. Yet what she says she saw was, “Greenie cops putting handcuffs on some people, and there was a lot of joking going on back and forth.”

Frank Barry was assistant to the editor. He remembers students catcalling while his drill squad marched across the quad, but downplays the unrest on campus as “not as weird as what was going on in the Northeast. It was more laid back, as you would think in New Orleans.”

“Honestly, I think Tulane felt that it was left out of the action around the country,” says Rick Streiffer, who joined the Hullabaloo staff as assistant features editor and later became executive editor.

In looking through old Hullabaloos, Cervarich notes how much the paper reflected a community agitated in any number of ways. “I ran into a story about a PE major and people being fired up about that. I mean, gimme a break.”

“I think there were two camps,” says Anderson. “There were those who were very much energized and angry and politically focused

The flavor of the times is captured in a political cartoon by Francisco Alecha (A ’76), an ad for a local department store and (on opposite page) photos and captions as they appeared in the Hullabaloo.

and those who were focused on their mission, which was to get into medical school or to move further along and stay on track.”

Sometimes, however, it wasn’t easy to discern the difference. “There was a lot of subterfuge and a lot of distrust at Tulane in the late ’60s,” says Anderson. “I don’t think people were really sure who was on whose side.”

“Unless you knew somebody before the revolution, you didn’t know who they were,” agrees Yearwood. “There were people who just showed up. They didn’t act like Tulane students … you never saw them in any classes.”

As Ireland developed his editorial voice you can almost hear him wrestling to balance indignation with restraint, and passion with reason. If Janice and Frank Barry thought Ireland was “bashing the administration a little too much,” Cervarich thought he was not trying hard enough to “rock the boat.”

In an editorial about the “Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam,” a nationwide strike organized by antiwar activists, Ireland wrote: I encourage all students who feel strongly about this matter to participate in the activities. … But I DO NOT endorse a general boycott of classes “in support of a war moratorium.” This is worse than purposeless—it is engaging in the kind of mindless activity that causes war.

As student protests against the war and the Tulane administration were coming to a boil in spring 1970, Cervarich was promoted to

TULANIAN SUMMER 2009 | PAGE 15

Rick Streiffer associate editor. Finding her own editorial voice, she used it to support the 500 students who underscored their demands for administrative reforms by occupying the University Center for six days.

“It was my temperament,” says Cervarich. “I thought there just had to be a better way for the world to work—not that I knew very much about how the world worked.”

For his part, Anderson kept shooting pictures. In April, he was still in the engineering school, but had known for a while that he could not remain in ROTC, despite signing an advanced commitment contract at the beginning of the year.

“It stuck in my craw so much that I didn’t cash any of the checks that ROTC provided me,” he says. “I eventually put the checks on the table and said, ‘I don’t want this. I want out of my contract.’” During an ROTC hearing, Tom Ireland gave a testimonial on Anderson’s behalf.

Anderson remembers that it was the morning after the Kent State shootings in which the Ohio National Guard killed four students

during a campus protest that he received a call from the campus ROTC office. “They said they were giving me an honorable discharge and dropping me from the program,” he says.

“That same day I took pictures of Nixon burning in effigy.”

Yearwood, who was scheduled to report to flight training in June, understood how anyone could be against the war or frustrated with how it was being conducted.

“I thought there were a lot of things wrong with the war,” says Yearwood. “I thought it was morally questionable.”

But when Army ROTC barracks on Tulane’s campus were set on fire by arsonists, Yearwood was incensed.

“Tom saw my outrage at the fire and wouldn’t let me write about it,” says Yearwood. “He himself stayed in the Hullabaloo office so he would not get swept up in the emotions of the crowd.”

Growing up

Good thing, unlike the stories they write, student journalists do not remain frozen in time, but rather are allowed grow up and move on with their lives. Four decades later, they have random memories that stick with them.

Linda Willis Ireland remembers a mattress occupying a corner of the Hullabaloo’s office that was reserved for anyone who needed to crash after a long night. Margaret Blain Cervarich remembers waking up at 3 a.m., her forehead resting against the IBM Selectric after an unscheduled catnap. “The hum of the typewriter was actually quite pleasant,” she says.

For some reason, Frank Barry can tell you how author and commentator William F. Buckley Jr. was dressed during an interview he gave to Hullabaloo staffers following a presentation at McAlister Auditorium, and Matt Anderson can recall the moment that the venerable photographer Michael Smith, then the chief student phoMatt Anderson is reflected in the tographer, invited him to use sunglasses of an unnamed student.

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Jan Gonzales and Frank Barry the darkroom. (It was while they were shooting the funeral of New Orleans clarinetist George Lewis in December 1968.)

Rick Streiffer remembers the frivolity and good spirits surrounding the football team’s victory in the Liberty Bowl and the incongruity of those feelings with the raw emotions of the war protests.

Jan Gonzales Barry still marvels at a particular call-to-arms she heard from the mouth of an angry student during the occupation of the University Center. “It was something like, ‘we’re going to take over and hang all the fascists,’” she says. “I looked at Frank and started laughing because what could be more fascistic than that?”

Some of John Yearwood’s best memories have to do with working closely with Tom Ireland. “I loved working with him. … Often he would ask me to ‘block out’ a story for him, meaning to write something up that he could edit and put his name on. And a few times he would block out an editorial for me. It was great fun getting the paper out together.”

Some of Yearwood’s worst memories are of the brief but alarming moments when Ireland doubled over in severe pain. “He would clutch his stomach and would hurt,” says Yearwood. “But he would pop back up, give a twinkle and off we would go again.”

That twinkle is captured in a photo of Ireland printed in the 1970 Jambalaya student yearbook. Ireland is looking sidelong at the camera, his face beaming with a playful, mischievous expression that belies the episodic spasms of pain that had become part of his life since high school, when he underwent surgery to remove a portion of his stomach.

“He was in constant, constant pain,” says Yearwood, who remained close friends with Ireland, whose condition seemed to progressively worsen over the years as his battle with pain led to dependency on prescribed painkillers.

“I don’t think Tom was ever comfortable,” says Linda Willis Ireland.

In January 1986, perhaps physically and emotionally worn down by the pain, Tom Ireland took a deliberate overdose of his medication and died, leaving Linda with two young children.

“Tom was a terrific father,” says Linda Ireland. “That’s the hard part; to think that he would leave his children. I think he must have been in a tremendous amount of pain.”

Linda stayed in New Orleans to raise their children, working in a number of university settings as an administrative assistant. She is now back in her house after being flooded out

by Hurricane Katrina and is preparing to move to San Antonio to be with her daughter.

“One of the hardest things I had to do after Katrina was throw out my Hullabaloos,” she says, of her bound issues that were rendered into a slimy pulp by the water.

Only two months before he was to be commissioned as an Air Force officer, John Yearwood learned that he had a form of skin cancer that disqualified him from service. In his final year at Tulane he married Stephanie O’Brien (NC ’70.) The two went on to earn

doctorates in English from the University of Texas. The Irelands, in fact, joined them in Austin for a few years while Tom studied folklore in graduate school. In 1980, John started a small country paper in East Texas, growing it into a small group of publications that he eventually sold in 1992. He currently teaches courses in new media at Lamar University in Beaumont.

As Margaret Blain Cervarich walked across the graduation stage in 1971 to receive her diploma, Newcomb dean James Davidson shook her hand and said, “Now you can go do your rabble rousing someplace else.” That “someplace else” was graduate school at the University of California–Berkeley, where she says she “left the rabble rousing to the professionals.” She’s now living in Rockville, Md., and is vice president of communications, marketing and public affairs for the National Asphalt Pavement Association.

Frank and Janice Barry both went to Tulane Law School, where they joined other law students in laying the groundwork for what has become The Tulane Maritime Lawyer. Frank completed his officers training and in 1973 went into the Army Transportation Corps at Fort Eustis, Va., as a second lieutenant. Both Frank and Janice are now attorneys in New Orleans and stay in regular contact with Jim Dalferes, another Tulane law school alum who remained in town to practice law.

Early on as an undergrad, Rick Streiffer thought he might study business. Instead, he earned a medical degree from Louisiana State University Medical School and returned to Tulane to become the founding chair of the Department of Family and Community Medicine in the Tulane School of Medicine.

Matt Anderson edited the Jambalaya in 1971 and 1972, shaking up its content and appearance by rethinking the role and purpose of a school yearbook. Remaining in New Orleans after graduating (with a degree in engineering), Anderson continued to document the city

Tom Ireland through his photographs. As were thousands of New Orleanians, he was devastated by the flooding that followed Katrina, losing not only his place to live, but also all of his photography equipment and much of the film and photographic prints that constituted his life’s work.

After spending three nights in the New Orleans Convention Center, another night sleeping outdoors and 16 hours on a bus to a shelter in Fort Chaffee, Ark., Anderson called on John Yearwood. The two men had gone their separate ways since college but still kept track of each other through a loose circle of friends.

Yearwood drove the 900-mile round trip to bring Anderson to Beaumont.

“I hadn’t had even an improper bed to sleep in for four nights running, maybe five if you count the bus ride,” says Anderson.

“John put me in a real motel, with real sheets.”

Nick Marinello is features editor of Tulanian.

All photos of Hullabaloo staffers are taken from the 1970 Jambalaya school yearbook.

TULANIAN SUMMER 2009 | PAGE 17

hen Julie Dermansky (NC ’87) went to Iraq in December 2008 as a photojournalist embedded with the Louisiana National Guard, she planned on staying three weeks. She returned five months later and then got to work producing two books.

One is a compilation of her dispatches from the field and the other a memoir of her experience as a first-time war correspondent.

Asked why she would put her life on the line, Dermansky replies, “I wanted to learn about war, so I went to one.”

Dermansky first rode along with the Louisiana National Guard during their tour of duty in the streets of New Orleans in the months after Hurricane Katrina, which “served as a kind of warzone training,” she says. That experience allowed her to gain the troop’s trust, and the result is her book Under the Radar: The National Guard Patrolling the Streets of New Orleans.

“It was a natural extension to follow them over to Iraq,” says Dermansky, who also is currently at work on a film documentary about her time in New Orleans with the National Guard.

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“Was I scared?” Dermansky says that people ask her that question. “I should have been, but I was more curious than scared.”

After two decades as a studio artist, Dermansky switched from sculpting to photography in 2004 and has traveled the world working on long-term personal documentary projects, often in conjunction with humanitarian groups.

In one ongoing project, she is developing a series on “dark tourism” that includes photographs of genocide memorials and sites of historical tragedy. In another, Dermansky is documenting natural history museums around the world, including Tulane’s Museum of Natural History.

Dermansky acknowledges that making a living as an artist is a tough path. “Artists need discipline and a business sense to be able to get their work made,” she says. “Art-making is a serious matter, it is a job that includes its own set of legalities, equipment and professional network of players.”

The last couple of years have taken Dermansky to Armenia, Austria, Cambodia, China, Ecuador,

Egypt, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, Iraq, Kenya, Laos, Rwanda, South Africa, Thailand, Vietnam and the war-torn regions of Eastern Europe.

So often on the move, she taps into whatever Internet link she can find, sending her images to a large constituency of friends, fans, colleagues and clients. Those following her work have received from Dermansky a wide array of images, including those of obscure natural history museums, sign paintings in Cambodia, a Mardi Gras parade on a military base in Baghdad and a tour of Saddam’s former palaces.

It would be fair to call Dermansky a world traveler, but it might be more accurate to call her a “traveler of worlds,” and those worlds are constituted in the creepy esoterica of a natural history museum, the breezy bravado of national guardsmen, or the riveting anguish of a memorial to victims of genocide. It’s not so much the distance between places that matters to her, but the depth to which she can travel in any one place.

—Nick Marinello

(Clockwise from top) Just off the road from Yerevan to Spitak, a car-repair shop overlooks a valley • A resident of a home for the elderly run by Fund for Armenian Relief • Offerings from the faithful at the ancient Geghard monastery • A man stands outside a metal container provided to him 20 years ago as a “temporary” home after the Gyumri Earthquake, which killed 25,000, including his wife and children.

TULANIAN SUMMER 2009 | PAGE 19

(Clockwise from top left) A resident of an orphanage in the capital city of Kigali listens attentively to her teacher during a class • A river runs through a lush Rwandan valley • At the Murambi Genocide Memorial, a room displaying the clothing of victims of mass murder • Painted red, white and blue, a dumpster is used as a general store.

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(Clockwise from top left) Draped with saffron scarf, a headless statue of a monk waits patiently in a hall inside the Ankgor Wat temple • A sign of a weeping tooth offers an inauspicious greeting outside a dentist’s office • Skulls of victims are displayed in one of approximately 80 sites memorializing those killed in the Khmer Rouge pogrom • A boy poses for a picture next to an unexploded ordnance at the Landmine Museum in Seim Reap.

TULANIAN SUMMER 2009 | PAGE 21

(Clockwise from top) Looking out from a Humvee toward a Marshland Arab family in Maysan Province • A sunrise Easter service held at the archaeological site of Ur, the Biblical birthplace of Abraham • Marshland Arab fishermen pole their mashoof through the salt marshes of southern Iraq • Soldiers look down onto the main hall of one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, which now sits on the grounds of Camp Victory.

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The National Guard patrolled the streets of New Orleans for three and a half years after Hurricane Katrina. (From top) A multiplex cinema in New Orleans East flooded by Hurricane Katrina • Clearing an accident on the I-10 on a foggy night makes for dangerous work • The Rebirth Brass Band provides the music for a second-line tribute to Michael Jackson.

Julie Dermansky takes a moment to relax at the JVB Hotel in Baghdad’s Al Faw Palace complex.

Julie Dermansky is currently based in New Orleans but her home, she says, is wherever she is working. To see more of Dermansky’s work, check out her Internet site: www.jsdart.com.

TULANIAN SUMMER 2009 | PAGE 23

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.

C r e t o e P t e o P har oley s es his cou rtship with words

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very morning, without fail, Peter Cooley writes a poem. He’s up at the crack of dawn in his suburban New Orleans home, near River Road, putting in an hour to hour and a half writing. It’s the first thing he does, no matter what conspires to stop him—a headache or any other obstacle.

Sometimes he’s revising the previous day’s poem; often he’s writing a new poem. He estimates that he writes 300 poems a year and has written thousands of poems during his lifetime.

A professor of English, Cooley has had eight books of poetry published, seven of them by Carnegie Mellon University Press. And his poems have been printed in 500 literary magazines and journals and more than a hundred anthologies.

A humorous, gentle man, Cooley hardly seems like a hard-boiled detective—or a coal miner.

But he says that’s exactly what he is. Writing a poem is like investigating a mystery. And it’s like going under the earth, finding stuff and bringing it to the surface.

A poet is a lawbreaker, too, says Cooley. “A poem takes you into your self and says, ‘you can feel this, you can feel that;’ and consequently, you can do this, you can do that.”

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ooley’s poems are public writing, meant to be read.

“I write for a reader,” he says.

The role of a poet, says Cooley, is to “help people acknowledge their own feelings.” A poem is quickly read and, if successful, cuts right to the chase, aims straight for the heart.

“I want readers to get it,” he says. “I want them to have an emotional experience.”

In his poems, Cooley has dealt with a friend’s suicide, his long marriage, the loss of a child, the birth and growing up of his three children and the death of his parents, among other haunting things. He’s also written about artists such as Van Gogh and Rembrandt. His latest project is a series of poems about the sculptor Auguste Rodin.

Cooley writes sonnets, villanelles and other structured poetic forms as well as free verse, which is a form in itself, he says. Although a poet uses external images and metaphors, poetry is the “most internal of all the genres,” Cooley says. ‘That’s why I like it—and it’s musical.”

Poetry appeals to him because it offers the possibility of “going inside.”

He compares poetry to flying, while prose, he says, is like driving. It’s nice to drive and see the scenery whizz by on the ground but the view from above is more exhilarating.

The emotional experience of poetry is unlike that of any other art form, says Cooley.

ooley has now spent half his life in New Orleans. It’s the light that keeps him here— the way the light reveals things. There are also his teaching duties.

Cooley started teaching in the Tulane English department in 1975 after he received his PhD from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and spent a couple of years teaching at cold University of Wisconsin– Green Bay. “I like what the light does to things in New Orleans, how it reveals objects, how light brings out the inner experience.

“I don’t want to sound poetic,” he chuckles, “but the light brings out the inner experience of the tree. The way the light comes through the trees here, you get to see the tree from all different angles. So it brings out the soul of the tree, especially the live oaks. Just looking at the live oaks on St. Charles, you know.”

Cooley lives near the Mississippi River and often takes walks along the levee, looking for inspiration. He has written lots of poems about the river.

“I feel the Mississippi connects me with where I came from,” he says. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Shimer College, which at the time was located in Mount Carroll, Ill., not far from the river.

“It’s as if I followed the Mississippi down here, sometimes I think. It’s a connecting thread with the other part of my life.”

When he was at Cranbrook School for Boys, an Episcopal school for boys in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Cooley already showed literary promise and won some prizes, but for awhile he trained as an actor. He appeared in plays, starting with bit parts, working his way up to the lead. He learned that there are no small parts, only small actors.

TULANIAN SUMMER 2009 | PAGE 27

“There are no small poems, either,” he says.

His advice to students: “Throw yourself into whatever project you’re working on.”

Cooley has carried his acting chops to his literary life. Like a play, poetry is performance.

And the show must go on. You have to perform.

Finish the poem. And move on.

The creative writing program at Tulane has expanded since Cooley arrived as the only creative writing teacher. A concentration in creative writing is now offered for English majors. Two other full-time creative writing professors have joined the faculty plus several adjunct instructors.

Classes fill up instantly, says Cooley.

“The students are interested in having an experience in the arts while they are in college,” he says. “It is part of a liberal arts education. Most of the students will not go on and become professional poets, whatever that is, or professional writers. This is just a class that they’ve taken.”

But by taking a creative writing class, “they will have a richer understanding of literature.”

The Creative Writing Fund, established in 2007 and supported by an anonymous donor, also has increased the visibility of the creative writing program. Writers Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Louise Gluck, Joan Didion and Billy Collins presented readings on campus during the past three years. And in 2010, Carlos Fuentes and Rita Dove will make appearances.

Cooley agrees (as do probably all the famous and not-so-famous writers) with poet William Butler Yeats that the point of writing is “to get the disorder of one’s mind in order.”

“I do see the world as chaos,” says Cooley. And poetry creates a moment of order—a brief order.

“What other order can we have, right? ”

struggle with inertia happens at the beginning of every writing project, says Cooley. “I think I can’t do it. I don’t know how to do it.” He has to get going, but he doesn’t know where. He only trusts his intuition—and his way with words.

“Everything is based on resistance,” he says.

“Every book I write is a book I think I can’t write, so I write it.”

This makes sense to Cooley. “If I can do something, then I don’t do it. The resistance is a fence, but you jump over the fence, and then you start running,” says Cooley, “and you forget the fence was there.”

A case in point: Cooley’s latest book, Divine Margins. “I thought I couldn’t write Divine Margins because it was about my parents dying and the experience of being old.”

But, write it, he did. The result is a poignant and, in a way, practical, poetic memorialization of his parents—down to a poem about underwear because when “someone dies, things have to be gone through.”

Family issues, quirky Quick Stop encounters, a beach house in Sarasota, Fla.—all are subjects of Cooley’s poems.

he first poet to bowl over Cooley was Emily Dickinson. And he’s still attached. As a teenager, he connected with her the first time he read her poems. And he’s gone so far as to call Dickinson —a 19th-century New England poet—his imaginary girlfriend.

Inspired by a letter he discovered that Dickinson had written to a friend, Cooley wrote the poem “To Emily Dickinson in New Orleans.”

Dickinson’s friend was embarking on a trip to New Orleans, and urged Dickinson to travel south. Dickinson, a recluse for most of her life, declined the offer. She wrote that she was afraid of the heat—the “great suns” of New Orleans.

Cooley took his cue from the letter and imagined that Dickinson did make the trip and that she stayed in the French Quarter on Jackson Square in the Pontalba Apartments. Cooley inserts himself in the poem, playing the role of rejected suitor.

When he discusses the poem more than a decade after he wrote it, Cooley brightens, recalling the pleasure of writing it. “How much fun it was,” he says. “Like, what can I do next? If you’re going to put her in the Quarter, where is she going to be in the Quarter? And so on. One imaginary step after the next.”

Cooley tells his students about writing: “It’s supposed to be fun. I want you to enjoy writing.”

And you know Cooley has fun. He feels lucky to be doing what he set out to do nearly 40 years ago. His writing life has been a rocky road at times, and his career not a straight line, he insists. It’s been hard work.

Writing is a “practice,” he says. And like all practices, it gets easier when you stay with it.

For a poet, practice will never make perfect. It’s just what you do.

Mary Ann Travis is the editor of Tulanian

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TULANIAN SUMMER 2009 | PAGE 29

givingBack

Community spirit practically pops from the walls of Alice Harte School. Tulane students painted the mural at the New Orleans’ West Bank public charter school.

The civic generation When Tulane instituted a public-service graduation requirement in 2006, the university incorporated civic engagement within its core mission of education, research and community service.

As Tulane has strengthened and expanded its public-service efforts, it has garnered more support for its endeavors advancing patternbreaking solutions to societal problems.

To further Tulane’s focus on civic engagement and social entrepreneurship, an endowed chair has been established in the past few months, and the university has received a major gift for social entrepreneurship programming. Tulane also was named to the Changemaker Campus program.

CHANGE MAKING Ashoka, a network of social entrepreneurs, has designated Tulane as one of five universities selected to participate in the 2009–10 Changemaker Campus initiative. The other universities are the New School, Babson College, University of Colorado–Boulder and College of the Atlantic.

They will join last year’s group—Cornell, George Mason, Johns Hopkins and Maryland universities—in an effort to bridge the gap between theory and practice and to set a new standard for social entrepreneurship education.

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Social entrepreneurs function at the intersection of business, nonprofit organizations and government, creating mission-driven ventures to effect social change.

Ashoka aims to develop new models for higher education through its partnerships. Its goal is for universities to serve as enabling environments in which individuals have access to the resources, learning opportunities, role models and peer communities that they need to actualize their full potential, build their own future and create change.

SACKS CHAIR The Sacks Family Foundation has made a gift—and the Louisiana Board of Regents has provided matching funds—to establish the Sacks Endowed Distinguished Chair in Civic Engagement and Social Entrepreneurship.

The chairholder, who is yet to be named, will spearhead the development of the university’s social entrepreneurship activities and further expand civic engagement in the region. His or her expertise may be derived from any discipline represented in the university.

Currently, the A. B. Freeman School of Business, School of Liberal Arts and School of Social Work are engaged in this venture, which will be expanded to include all of the university’s schools.

NEWDAY FOUNDATION The NewDay Foundation has made a leadership gift establishing initiatives for social entrepreneurship programming at Tulane.

First up this fall is the NewDay Social Entrepreneurship Distinguished Speakers Series. Through the series, students will have the opportunity to meet and engage with prominent leaders in the field of social entrepreneurship. Confirmed speakers so far include Darell Hammond, founder and CEO of KABOOM! Playgrounds; Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka; and Blake Mycoskie, founder and CEO of TOMS Shoes.

The NewDay Foundation also has provided funding for the NewDay Social Entrepreneurship Challenge, a competition to generate new ideas. The competition will culminate in the awarding of a seed fund to launch an innovative, financially sustainable venture benefiting the New Orleans community. Students and student-created or student-led organizations are eligible to submit proposals.

Additional details about the NewDay Foundation speaker series and challenge can be found on the Social Entrepreneurship Initiatives website at http://tulane.edu/socialentrepreneurship/index.cfm.

—Maureen King Maureen King is a writer in the Tulane Office of Development.

s e s s a the Cl

Derby Day Law students in the class of 1942, wearing derby hats and carrying canes, gather at Bruno’s Tavern for Derby Day, a graduation week tradition. Photo courtesy of Maunsel Hickey (B ’39, L ’42), seventh from right. Hickey today lives in uptown New Orleans and continues to co-author annual editions of Estate Planning in Louisiana.

classNotes | theClasses HOW TO SUBMIT PHOTOS FOR CLASS NOTES Are you making a splash in your area? Send your photos to makingwaves@tulane.edu. Please be sure to include caption information, with each person’s name and title/job information, from left to right in the photo. We prefer candid photos of alumni in small groups (3–5 people maximum) or individually.

retired from private practice, but continues to serve at the Crippled Children’s Clinic.

JULIAN HILLERY (B ’59) wrote To Be or Not to Be a Successful Business Person, a book about his business, World Ship Supply. He lives in New Orleans.

PHOTO GUIDELINES

JOHN WOGAN (L ’66), a lawyer with Liskow

Digital photos should be taken on the highest-quality camera setting. They should be in a TIFF or JPEG format and be 4 x 6 inches or larger at 300 dpi. For more information, please e-mail makingwaves@tulane.edu.

1960s

1940s THOMAS LENNOX (A&S ’47) has published a novel, Wolf Among Wolves, about a white attorney in the 1950s who defends his longtime friend, an African American teacher and coach charged with altering an athlete’s grade before a championship game. Lennox served in the Marine Corps and the U.S. Navy during World War II and practiced law in New Orleans for more than 40 years. He lives in Covington, La., and Asheville, N.C. Psychiatry in Law/Law in Psychiatry by RALPH SLOVENKO (E ’48, L ’53, G ’60, ’65) received the Manfred Guttmacher Award of the American Psychiatric Association. The second edition of the book was published in March. Slovenko is a professor of law at Wayne State University and has published more than 20 books.

TAYLOR MORRIS (A&S ’49) announces the publication of All the Clouds’ll Roll Away, about New Orleans in the 1930s and ’40s.

Morris lives in Peterborough, N.H. For more information and to hear Morris read from his work, go to taylormorrisauthor.com.

1950s The Calcasieu Medical Society Foundation presented its 2009 Community Service Award to EDWARD (PETE) PHILLIPS JR. (M ’53). The presentation was made at a fundraiser for the Calcasieu Community Clinic, a free clinic for the working uninsured in Lake Charles, La. Phillips established his Lake Charles practice in orthopaedic surgery in 1960, the same year he began his service at the Crippled Children’s Clinic. Phillips has

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Columbia University/Harlem Arts Project Playwrighting, TV and Screenplay Writers Collective. A finalist in the James Jones first novel competition, she also is a theater critic for the Westview newspaper in New York’s West Village.

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Francoise Coty: Fragrance, Power, Money, a biography co-authored by ROULHAC BUNKLEY TOLEDANO (NC ’60) and Elizabeth Z. Coty, was published

by Pelican Publishing. Toledano is an artist, writer and preserver of historic American treasures. She lives in Charlottesville, Va.

and Lewis, is listed in 2009 Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business.

The Georgia Psychiatric Physicians Association named HOWARD M. MAZIAR (A&S ’68) Psychiatrist of the Year in February. He is vice president of the association and represents it at the Medical Association of Georgia’s Council on Legislation. Co-founder and treasurer of the Georgia Psychiatry Political Action Committee, Maziar also serves with the Georgia Physicians Partnership, advising the Georgia Department of Community Health.

In 2008, Maziar completed the Medical Association of Georgia’s Physicians Leadership Academy, a yearlong program to develop physicians’ leadership skills. Maziar has maintained a practice in Buckhead, Ga., for more than 32 years. He and his wife, Patty, live in Sandy Springs, Ga.

DONALD ABAUNZA (L ’69), a lawyer with Liskow and Lewis, is listed in 2009 Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business.

Holiday House published Cemetery Street

by BRENDA DANIELS SEABROOKE (NC ’63).

The novel, for ages 9 to 12, was a 2009 Edgar Award nominee for the best juvenile mystery book and a 2009 nominee for the young adult book award from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. Cemetery Street is Seabrooke’s 17th published book.

Her next book, Wolf Pie, is slated for publication next year. Seabrooke lives on a Florida island.

1970s

ROSARY O’NEILL (NC ’66, G ’67) taught a weeklong workshop, “Reading Dynamically From Your Work,” at the International Women’s Writing Guild summer conference at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. O’Neill has been invited into the Playwrights Division of the Actors Studio and the

MANUEL KNIGHT (A&S ’71) is a consulting

MARK R. HOROWITZ (A&S ’71) served as guest editor for a special issue of the journal Historical Research published on the 500th anniversary of the death of the first Tudor king, Henry VII. In addition to being a Tudor scholar, Horowitz is managing director of the Moorshire Group, producing programs to encourage the development of positive attitudes and behaviors, and principal of Mark Horowitz Consulting.

economist working for foreign destinations to develop tourism and ecotourism through action plans, master plans and feasibility studies for new hotels and resorts. He works for development agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development,

theClasses | classNotes the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.

LAWRENCE E. ABBOTT (L ’72), managing director of Abbott Simses in New Orleans, is listed in 2009 Outstanding Lawyers of America. He is one of 100 lawyers in Louisiana selected for the list, based upon nomination by peers and review of professional achievements and accomplishments.

MORRIS SILBERMAN (A&S ’79) completed a term as chair of the Florida Judicial Qualification Commission that investigates judicial misconduct and recommends discipline to the Florida Supreme Court. Silberman has served as a judge on the Florida Second District Court of Appeal since 2001.

RAMON A. ABADIN (A&S ’81) is listed in Florida Super Lawyers. He is a founding partner of Abadin Cook in Miami. He specializes in complex commercial, corporate, civil and insurance litigation, as well as medical malpractice, premises liability and automobile negligence.

IRENE H. WILLIAMS (SW ’79) is the voluntary

THOMAS A. FARLEY (M ’81, PHTM ’91) is

director of the Westbank Rangers Pathfinder Club in New Orleans. The club offered a youth camp experience in Oshkosh, Wis., in August.

the New York City health commissioner, leading a 6,000-person department. Farley was professor and chair of the community health sciences department and led the Prevention Research Center at Tulane. Starting in July 2007, Farley took a year’s leave of absence from Tulane to serve as senior adviser to Thomas R. Frieden, commissioner of the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and returned to Tulane full time for the fall 2008 semester. Farley is author of Prescription for a Healthy Nation. He was on the Tulane faculty from 2000 until he assumed his new role in June.

1980s

Aviation engineer THOMAS LEE (E ’76), left, met astronaut Neil Armstrong at the Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio, on July 18, 2009, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon mission.

KIMBERLY A. COOK (NC ’80) is listed in Florida Super Lawyers. An attorney with Abadin Cook in Miami, Cook specializes in medical and dental negligence defense, complex personal injury defense, general liability defense and representation of physicians and healthcare providers in claims brought by the Florida Department of Health Care Administration.

STEVE JORDON (A&S ’81), a captain in RICHARD DEICHMANN (A&S ’80, M ’82)

LAWRENCE P. SIMON JR. (L ’72), a lawyer with Liskow and Lewis, is listed in 2009 Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business.

Semiretired in Belize, VANCE C. TITUS (B ’72) is a registered professional architect designing homes and tourist facilities in the “Caribbean paradise.”

spoke about his book, Code Blue: A Katrina Physician’s Memoir, at a presentation for the Tulane Department of Health Systems Management in July. The book details his experiences at Memorial Medical Center (now Ochsner Baptist Medical Center) during Hurricane Katrina. Deichmann also discussed his work abroad with disaster planners from the Netherlands and other countries.

the U.S. Navy, reported with his family to Ottawa, Canada, where he is the naval attaché at the U.S. Embassy for the next three years.

LAURA STARKS (E ’80) is donating a percentROBERT J. FREEDMAN JR. (M ’73) received the Enrique Lopez-Cuenca Innovative and Humanitarian Cardiovascular Award in June in recognition of his ThermoSuit System, used in rapid body cooling. Freedman is founder and managing partner of Freedman Memorial Cardiology in Alexandria, La., and founder and president of Life Recovery Systems.

STEVEN G. LITTLE (A&S ’76, G ’87) received the Jack Bardon Distinguished Service Award from the Division of School Psychology of the American Psychological Association. He is a professor of educational psychology at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand.

PHOTO OF STANLEY DAY JR. BY BRIAN PETTIT.

age of the revenues from her first thriller written as L. A. Starks to a New Orleans rebuilding fund. Working for more than a decade in the oil industry in engineering, marketing and finance prepared Starks to write 13 Days: the Pythagoras Conspiracy, which is about a plot to sabotage oil refineries and a woman who discovers and stops it. Starks lives in Texas and has published technical articles, opinion editorials and short stories. She also is a consultant on energy economics and has prepared policy analyses of solar energy, oil shale and superconductor applications. For more information go to lastarksbooks.com.

STANLEY R. DAY JR. (B ’80) is president of SRAM, a company that markets performance bicycle components. Ten out of the top 29 riders in the 96th Tour de France were equipped with the company’s componentry, including winner Alberto Contador and secondplace and third-place finishers Frank Schleck and Lance Armstrong, who has invested in the company. Day is married to DANA VITT (NC ’80, L ’84).

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classNotes | theClasses WELLINGTON “DUKE” REITER (A ’81) is president of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Reiter manages a $100-plus million annual budget and guides the school’s academic, financial, operational and fund-raising activities. An architect and urban designer, Reiter previously was an architecture professor and dean of the College of Design at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz.

ANDREW T. CITRIN (A&S ’83) is in Alabama Super Lawyers 2009. Citrin represents injury and death victims arising out of automobile and truck accidents, nursing home neglect and workplace injuries at the Citrin Law Firm in Daphne, Ala.

MATTHEW BRONSKI (E ’87) received the The 28th historical romance novel, Wed Him Before You Bed Him, by DEBORAH GONZALES (G ’82, ’86), written under the pseudonym Sabrina Jeffries, hit No. 8 on the New York Times best-seller list, No. 25 on the USA Today best-seller list and No. 6 on the Publisher’s Weekly best-seller list in its first week of release. She has signed a new contract with her publisher, Simon and Schuster, for three books, to be part of a five-book series, The Hellions of Halstead Hall, about “a marquess, his four siblings and one very determined grandmother.”

National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and Conservation of the American Academy in Rome. He is one of only a few engineers to receive the Rome Prize in its 113year history.

DAVID KERN (A&S ’83) is listed in the 2009 corporate counsel edition of Super Lawyers.

Kern is an attorney with Buckingham, Doolittle and Burroughs where he practices in the areas of business, taxation, health care, trusts and estates, employee benefits and nonprofit law. Kern was named the Akron, Ohio, corporate lawyer of the year by The Best Lawyers in America (2009).

MIKE MASUR (B ’83) is a shareholder with

JULIE P. MEYERS (NC ’82) is chief marketing officer for Burns, White and Hickton, attorneys at law. Meyers has 20 years of business development and client-relations experience. She lives in Gladwyne, Pa.

makingWaves

Resource Consulting Group in Orlando, Fla. The firm is one of the largest fee-only financial planning and investment advisory firms in Florida. Masur, a certified public accountant and financial planner, is the group’s chief operating officer and works with clients as an adviser. He joined the firm in 2005.

WAYNE TROYER (A ’83) is one of the collabo-

DAN MAGINN LIVING IN THE ZONE TULANE DEGREE: M.Arch., 1989

RESIDENCE: Kansas City, Mo.

PROFESSION: Senior architect, el dorado inc.

QUOTABLE: “Know this: Sustainable design doesn’t have to suck.”

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When clients meet with the architects at el dorado’s office in downtown Kansas City, they hear something unique: the clanging of components being fabricated in the on-site steel shop.

“Building things ourselves makes us better architects,” says Dan Maginn, one of four partners who studied welding before founding the collaborative firm.

El dorado has made a name for itself by tackling some of the city’s more mundane projects— a car impound facility, a crime lab, bridge guardrails—and making them interesting.

Maginn (a former writer for the Tulane Hullaballoo back in the day) has written about design and sustainability for magazines like GOOD and Dwell. In a recent article, he penned: “A well-designed home that recognizes and responds to the unique characteristics of its site—its orientation, geography and climatic patterns—is inherently sustainable.”

El dorado has been featured on the cover of national design magazines five times in the last three years, including the June 2009 issue of Architect magazine.

—Fran Simon

rators for the St. Joseph Rebuild Center/ Father Harry Thompson Center in New Orleans, which won the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence, a national award for urban places that seeks to promote innovative thinking about cities and the urban-built environment. The center was commended for providing a model for disaster relief and delivery of homeless services that can be used in cities throughout the country.

DANIEL L. FINK (B ’84, PHTM ’84) is president and CEO of Riley Hospital for Children. He previously served as the chief operating officer of the Indianapolis hospital that is Indiana’s only comprehensive children’s hospital with pediatric specialists in every field of medicine and surgery.

ROBERT B. McNEAL (L ’84), a lawyer with Liskow and Lewis, is listed in 2009 Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business.

Fitness trainer MACKIE SHILSTONE (B ’84) trained Serena Williams, who won her third

PHOTO OF DAN MAGINN BY GAVIN SNYDER.

theClasses | classNotes Wimbledon tennis championship title and her 11th major title overall in July. Serena Williams and her sister Venus Williams also won their fourth Wimbledon doubles title.

PAMELA WHITTEN (B ’85) became dean of the Michigan State University College of Communication Arts and Sciences in July.

She is a professor in the college’s telecommunication, information studies and media department, and associate dean for research and graduate studies. Whitten’s interests have focused mainly on the use of technology in health care, particularly using technology to bring health services and education to underserved populations.

three-week Investment Banking Training Program in Verbier, Switzerland.

1990s DARRON DAVIS (B ’91) and his wife, Denise, announce the birth of Danielle, on April 14, 2009. Danielle joins her sister, Darryen, 6.

The Davises celebrated their 15th wedding anniversary on May 21. Darron Davis is chief of human resources for the School District of Palm Beach County, and the family resides in Lake Worth, Fla. The Avalon Glass shop in west Seattle owned

by SHANNON GROSS FELIX (NC ’92) and JON FELIX (A&S ’93) was featured on the June cover of Better Homes and Gardens.

KAREN SCONIERS WHITE (B ’86) announces publication of her novel, The Lost Hours.

White is the author of nine novels and has five other books scheduled for publication.

She lives near Atlanta with her husband and two children. For more information go to karen-white.com.

MARC D’ANTONIO (A&S ’88) was appointed full-time associate judge of the Muscogee County Probate Court in Columbus, Ga., on July 1, 2009.

ROSEANNA McCLEARY (SW ’88, G ’99) was recognized as the Kern County, Calif., Mental Health Professional of the Year by the Kern County Mental Health Department and the Kern County National Alliance on Mental Illness. The award honors someone who demonstrates commitment to recovery and wellness in the mental health community, reflects the skills to work with diverse cultures and serves as an example to others regarding professional ethics. A specialist in gerontological social work, McCleary teaches at California State University–Bakersfield.

KALAM A. MOMIN (B ’89) runs the U.S. southern command headquarters for Californiabased Critchfield Mechanical. He lives with his wife, Sufia, son Harun, 5, and daughter Hafsa, 3, in Weston, Fla. This past summer SCOTT PODVIN (A&S ’89) attended the Swiss Finance Academy’s

OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY LAWRENCE JACKSON.

STEVEN SINAI MEGIBOW (TC ’95) is vice president of investigations at Fortress Global Investigations and Security. Megibow lives on Long Island, N.Y., with his wife and family.

THEO EDMONDS (L ’94, PHTM ’94), now a professional visual artist, completed his first solo exhibition in New York and has moved to Europe to prepare for shows in Paris; Deauville, France; Dublin, Ireland; and Milan, Italy. For more information go to www.longitudeart.com.

PATRICIA GREENWOOD HARRISON (G ’94), chair of the history department at Spring Hill College, is the college’s 2009 Teacher of the Year for excellence in the fulfillment of the teaching mission of the college.

Harrison teaches modern European history, women’s history and Western civilization.

Her research focuses on the connections between the British and American women’s suffrage movements. She is the author of Connecting Links: The British and American Woman Suffrage Movements, 1900–1914.

JAY McDANNELL (TC ’94) joined Jackson and Campbell’s Washington, D.C., office as an associate in the firm’s general litigation and real property and asset management groups. He focuses his practice on complex commercial litigation.

CATHY SYLTE MEMORY (NC ’94) and her husband, Rob, announce the birth of Katherine Grace (“Kate”) on July 9, 2009. Based in Needham, Mass., Memory is a freelance writer/editor/publicist for colleges and universities.

REGINA BENJAMIN (B ’91) has been nominated by President Barack Obama to be U.S. surgeon general. Her nomination was announced at a Rose Garden ceremony in July. The nomination requires confirmation by the U.S. Senate. Benjamin founded a rural health clinic in Bayou La Batre, Ala., which serves the town’s 2,500 residents, many of whom have no health insurance. The first black woman to head a state medical society, Benjamin received the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights and in 2008 received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” She was featured in the spring 2001 Tulanian.

NEAL MORRIS (TC ’95, B ’99, L ’99), a real estate developer and attorney and founder of Redmellon Restoration and Development in New Orleans, is a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Design School, where he is in residence for the 2009–2010 academic year.

Morris plans to study design with the goal of becoming a better collaborator with the design professionals he hires. He also plans to study public policy and law as it relates to the low-income housing industry. He is overseeing the development of an on-site day care facility at a 36-unit apartment building for the elderly in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans.

ERICA S. PERL (L ’95) announces the publication of her latest children’s picture book,

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classNotes | theClasses Chicken Butt! Her book, Ninety-three in my Family, received a Reuben Award and was a Book Sense Pick, and Chicken Bedtime Is Really Early received a starred review from the American Library Association Booklist and was featured in the book, Reading to Babies, Toddlers and Twos.

LATOSHA LEWIS PAYNE (NC ’96) has moved her civil environmental litigation practice to Vorys Sater Seymour and Pease in Houston.

H Texas magazine named her one of the “Top Lawyers in Houston” and a “Texas Super Lawyer Rising Star.”

The U.S. Army named AIMEE ASHBAUGH SULLIVAN (NC ’97) a 2008 Language Professional of the Year. She is an Arabic linguist serving on active duty as a sergeant and living in Savannah, Ga.

SAMANTHA TENNANT (E ’97, ’03), a customer quality engineer in Texas Instruments’ mixed signal automotive quality group, is a

member of the Leadership Texas Class of 2009. She is one of the 2,500 outstanding women leaders competitively selected from across Texas to participate in the flagship program of the Texas-based Foundation for Women’s Resources. The yearlong program is the longest-running women’s leadership development program in the United States.

JEAN YOUNG (PHTM ’97) received the Outstanding Female Doctor Award in the first Ghana women’s awards ceremony held in Accra, the capital of Ghana, in May. The Ministry of Women and Children sponsored the awards to encourage girls to enlarge their vision and follow their dreams. Young was an adjunct professor in the Tulane Department of Tropical Medicine and earned certification in traveler’s health and tropical medicine from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, of which she is a fellow. Young is medical superintendent of the Saboba Medical Centre in the northern region of Ghana.

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J. KEITH MELANCON MARATHON MAN TULANE DEGREE: M.D., 1996

RESIDENCE: Baltimore

PROFESSION: Director of kidney and pancreas transplant surgery, Georgetown University Hospital

QUOTABLE: “As for the donors who come forward, it’s breathtaking for me and the team. We really get to see the best side of humanity.”

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In a marathon in July over four days, 14 patients were involved in an exchange of kidneys that drew the attention of national news media.

Keith Melancon organized and led the teams that gave seven patients kidney transplants, even though they had blood antibodies so high that a traditional donor match was virtually impossible.

It was the largest kidney exchange of its kind to take place in one city.

The recipients received a procedure called plasmapheresis before and after their transplants to lower antibodies so they could accept a kidney from a donor. Melancon helped pioneer this use of plasmapheresis during his time at Johns Hopkins Health System.

Melancon hopes this is a way to address the racial disparities that exist in kidney transplantation. Of the 80,000 people waiting for a kidney in the United States, 36 percent are African American. Yet this ethnic group only receives about 15 percent of the living donor organs available.

“When we have people willing to be donors, we need to try and make a transplant happen,” Melancon says.

SOFIA ESTEVES (L ’99) was appointed gaming commissioner for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, where she is in charge of the island’s 22 casinos. Sofia and her husband, Jaime, live in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with their two cats, Eureka and Flash Gordon.

2000s ALEXANDRA KUEPER (NC ’00) and PATRICK PLAISANCE (UC ’02) were married in Fort Myers Beach, Fla., on May 2, 2009. In attendance were KEVIN SCHORP (E ’01), SCOTT SALVATI (E ’01), J. CAMPBELL McLEAN (TC ’02), JON ROVICK (TC ’02) and PETER GARDNER (B ’01).

BRIAN HEDBERG (TC ’01) received the Gold Medal Award from the U.S. Department of Transportation for his work in reducing delays and aviation congestion at John F. Kennedy International, Newark and LaGuardia airports. He is the Department of Transportation’s lead air services negotiator for the Americas region.

ALISON GOLDMAN (NC ’02) married Alex Horowitz in February. Bridesmaids included REBECCA MASON (NC ’02) and JULIA SCIRROTTO (NC ’02). In attendance were WHITNEY CASE (NC ’02) and ALLISON OSTROVER (NC ’02). The couple resides in New York.

GEORGE HARTEL (E ’02) and MICHELLE BERGERON HARTEL (NC ’02) announce the birth of Harper Genevieve on April 21, 2009.

Harper joins her brother, Davis.

BRADLEY PARKER (L ’02) returned from Afghanistan and now lives in Yokosuka, Japan. He will be in Japan until 2011, working with the Navy in the U.S. Seventh Fleet.

MARISSA MOSES RUSS (B ’02) and her husband, Ben, announce the birth of Eli Eskind on March 20, 2009. Marissa Russ works as an attorney with her mother at Moses and Townsend, a family law firm, and Ben Russ is in private practice as a criminal defense attorney. The family lives in Nashville, Tenn.

DEIRDRE MARGARET McMAHON SANCHEZ (NC ’02) relocated to Azerbaijan from Paris in

PHOTO BY LESLIE KOSSOFF.

theClasses | classNotes 2007. She edits the national paper Caspian Business News, which is dedicated to reporting on human rights and corruption. She lives on the shore of the Caspian Sea.

be returned to the microentrepreneurs. The Timothy Sykes Award is a cash prize presented yearly to a Tulane staff or faculty member or alumnus with creative or “out-of-the-box” ideas. TIMOTHY SYKES (TC ’03) is the author of An American Hedge Fund: How I Made $2 Million as a Stock Operator and Created a Hedge Fund.

(E ’03), ABIGAIL SCHAFFER (NC ’06), and ELENA WATZKE (B ’03). Storey completed his PhD in March 2007 and is now a thirdyear medical student at Louisiana State University. George is a senior account and sales manager with Laboratory Corp. of America. The couple honeymooned in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and resides in Shreveport, La.

ROBIN SCHUTTE (B ’03) married Sebastian

ROSS A. PINE (B ’04) graduated in April 2009 from the National University of Health Sciences in Lombard, Ill., with a doctor of chiropractic degree. He is a partner at the Pine Chiropractic Center in Pompano Beach, Fla. Pine is a certified kinesio-tape practitioner.

Richert in St. Louis on Feb. 21, 2009. She is a client service supervisor for Paychex.

BRANDON SPANN (UC ’03) is operations manager of the national office of the Youth Impact Program in Alexandria, Va., where he leads the four regional divisions of the program. Spann was the assistant program director for the Youth Impact Program at Tulane in 2008. A former Green Wave student-athlete, Spann also played professional basketball.

CHRISTOPH KREY (B ’06) is lead singer of McAlister Drive, a Boston-bred, indie pop-rock band. The band’s second LP is slated for release in the fall. Krey also is an accountant at Brown Brothers Harriman in Boston. For more information go to www.McAlisterDrive.com.

TAMMY WHITE (UC ’02) is vice president of project management for HCA’s Central Group, which comprises 61 hospitals in Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Virginia and London. She retains her duties as director of project management with HCA’s Delta Division, which includes hospitals in Louisiana and Mississippi.

MATTHEW HOLLAND (TC ’03) received this year’s Timothy Sykes Daytrading Award for the Talented in recognition of his work to help entrepreneurs in developing countries.

Holland, who resides in North Andover, Mass., has a Red Sox paraphernalia business at FenwayGifts.com.

He has secured the domain name NonProfitProducts.org to provide a larger market for microentrepreneurs around the world. He says all of the money he receives for products sold will

PHOTO BY PAUL JANOVITZ.

CHRISTOPHER STOREY (E ’03, G ’04) and ANITA NOOR GEORGE (E ’06) were married in New Orleans on March 21, 2009. RANDALL TOEPFER (E ’03) and DAN WILTSHIRE (TC ’06) were groomsmen, and TIMOTHY BOX (TC ’04) was an usher. MARY McCARTY (E ’06) and DANIELLE NARVESON (B ’06) served as bridesmaids. Those in attendance included

JEFFREY CHASSEN (TC ’05), JONATHAN HOBBS (E ’03), MEGAN KANEDA (E ’03), GREG SABER

ERIN BERGNER (NC ’05) begins a PhD program in sociology at Vanderbilt University this fall.

RACHEL MOYNIHAN CARDIN (NC ’05) received her doctor of medicine degree in Beer-Sheva, Israel, in May from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Medical School for International Health in collaboration with Columbia University Medical Center. Cardin is serving a residency in rural family medicine in Indiana.

Her husband, PHILIP CARDIN (TC ’02), has been accepted at Purdue University into a doctoral program in political science. The Cardins have a 2-year-old daughter, Eris, and announce the birth of Meriel Rebecca on Aug. 13, 2009.

RACHEL CHOTIN (NC ’05) received a

Aw a rd i n m lu A r o f ll a C N o m in at io n s

ation is ni Awards celebr um Al ne la Tu e Th , at the ay, May 11, 2010 nd Su r fo d le du sche ans. om in New Orle Audubon Tea Ro eir nominations aged to send th ur co en e ar ni Alum sociation lane Alumni As for the 2010 Tu ni awards. inguished alum st di d an r ee nt volu criteria, riptions, awards sc de d ar aw d To fin form, visit d a nomination an , ts en pi ci re past wards.cfm ni/taa-alumni-a tulane.edu/alum 4TULANE 7Cannon at 87 or contact Gaby . or 504-862-8062

minations r submitting no The deadline fo 9. is Nov. 30, 200

master’s degree in interior architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. She is an associate with Billes Architecture in New Orleans and is celebrating the release of the second round of designs for the Make It Right Foundation, including a duplex she designed.

ADAM KWASMAN (TC ’05) is a senior economic adviser to Jesse Kelly, a candidate for U.S. Congress from southern Arizona.

JOSE CASIANO (A ’06) and MARIA GOROKHOV (NC ’05) were married on May 30, 2009, in Barcelona, Spain. RACHEL BALL (NC ’05) was

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classNotes | theClasses in attendance. The couple has relocated to Orlando, Fla., where Gorokhov is in her intern year as an obstetrician/gynecologist at Winnie Palmer Hospital. Casiano is an aviation architect designing commercial terminals.

CODY HILL (TC ’06) and MAKENZIE MORRIS (’07, B ’08) were married on June 13, 2009.

In summer 2008 Morris lived and worked in New York and then lived in Dallas before returning to New Orleans. She works at Deloitte and Touche. Hill is focusing on cancer research and expects to graduate from the Tulane School of Medicine in May 2011. He went on a three-week medical mission trip to Honduras in March to work in rural villages providing healthcare services to people who otherwise would have none. The couple resides in New Orleans.

LINDSAY PICK (NC ’06) joined the staff of For The Children through Tulane University’s

AmeriCorps VISTA program. After one term of service with For The Children, she signed on for a second year of AmeriCorps and became the VISTA leader for Tulane’s AmeriCorps program and the supervisor of the Tulane site for the Hispanic Apostolate English as a Second Language Program. Pick is assistant producer of “Category Five/Wetlands Watch,” a sixpart series that debuted in June on WLAE-TV, a New Orleans PBS affiliate. The show aims to increase the level of public awareness and involvement in the fate of Louisiana’s wetlands restoration. For more information go to categoryfivewetlandswatch.blogspot.com.

Pick plans to pursue a master’s degree in urban and regional planning.

JEREMY SCOTT EPSTEIN (L ’07) is an associate in the law firm of Herman, Herman, Katz and Cotlar in New Orleans. Epstein and his wife announce the birth of Sephorah on June 28, 2009.

makingWaves

NICK SHAPIRO OUR MAN AT THE WHITE HOUSE TULANE DEGREE: B.A., communication and sociology, 2002

RESIDENCE: Washington, D.C.

PROFESSION: Assistant press secretary for President Barack Obama

QUOTABLE: “I can’t imagine what could top this— it is a thrill every day to walk into the White House.”

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Nick Shapiro works 24/7 with reporters to answer their questions and make sure that President Barack Obama’s policies are communicated effectively to the public.

“I answer reporters’ questions on issues from homeland security to transportation to technology,” he says.

Shapiro landed the job in the White House after serving as deputy press secretary with the Obama for America 2008 election campaign. But that was not his first foray into a presidential campaign.

He was a dedicated laborer on John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and began to work on Louisiana political campaigns directly after graduation.

Shapiro cites John Patton, former professor and chair of the Tulane communication department, as a major influence in his college career and, in fact, the reason he became a communication major in the first place.

“Right off the bat, I had a real interest in learning about the American presidency and the communication side of that,” says Shapiro.

—Madison LaGrone Madison LaGrone is a senior majoring in communication at Tulane University.

SE-IL KO (L ’07) is an assistant professor at the College of Law of Pai Chai University in Daejeon, South Korea. He is teaching civil law, law of obligations, contracts and torts.

JAIME GARCIA (B ’09) earned the first-runnerup prize in the American Marketing Association’s Selling and Sales Management Special Interest Group’s best dissertation contest for “Contrasting the Motivation to Fight and the Motivation to Tend for Their Effect on Sustaining or Negating Sales Ability.” The University of Houston’s Sales Excellence Institute sponsored the competition. Garcia is director of marketing research with Grupo Christus Muguerza in Monterrey, Mexico.

The principal doctoral thesis experiment of MICHAEL HUBER (G ’09) in the laboratory of associate professor of physics Fred Wietfeldt at Tulane was the monthly highlight on the American Physical Society Division of Nuclear Physics website in June. Huber now lives in Germantown, Md., and works at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., as a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow.

JANET McKNIGHT (L ’09) was one of 10 finalists in the eighth annual New York Law Journal Fiction Writing Contest for her short story, “The Maze,” which she wrote for a Tulane Law School seminar on “Jurisprudence and Literature.” McKnight, who passed the Louisiana State Bar in February, traveled to Amman, Jordan, in June to take classes in Arabic at the University of Jordan. Last summer, while working on refugee rights in Cape Town, South Africa, her research on the subject was published in the Journal of Identity and Migration Studies. She plans to pursue international legal work.

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OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA.

theClasses | Deaths Lucile Torrey Barrett (NC ’32) of Mobile, Ala., on June 15, 2009.

Yvonne Jumel Simms (NC ’34) of Monterey, Calif., on June 20, 2009.

Stuar t N. Nicholas (M ’35) of Shreveport, La., on April 20, 2009.

Elvira Corrales Smith (NC ’35) of Tampa, Fla., on June 22, 2009.

George I. Weatherly Jr. (A&S ’37, M ’40) of Fort Payne, Ala., on March 29, 2009.

Clifford H. Kern Jr. (L ’38) of New Orleans on June 24, 2009.

Charles Bittenbring III (E ’40) of Washington, D.C., on July 15, 2009.

Claude Groves Jr. (A&S ’41) of Baton Rouge, La., on June 15, 2009.

Max P. Zander (B ’41) of New Orleans on May 14, 2009.

John L. Martinez (E ’43) of New Orleans on May 25, 2009.

Katherine Verlander Wakefield (NC ’44) of New Orleans on June 1, 2009.

Alvin Cohen (M ’45) of New Orleans on May 7, 2009.

Winston R. deMonsabert (G ’45, ’52) of Chantilly, Va., on June 8, 2009.

John W. Roark (A&S ’45, M ’49) of Washington, D.C., on June 10, 2009.

Noel J. Cipriano (L ’46) of Biloxi, Miss., on June 29, 2009.

Hubert L. Prevost (M ’46) of Alexandria, La., on Dec. 30, 2008.

John W. Young (B ’46) of Sapulpa, Okla., on Jan. 17, 2009.

Allan H. Chaney (A&S ’47, G ’49, G ’58) of Kerrville, Texas, on April 26, 2009.

William C. Keating Jr. (M ’47) of Fair Oaks, Calif., on Nov. 11, 2008.

Ann Holloway Murchison (SW ’47) of Union, S.C., on Nov. 15, 2008.

Alexander Athas (A&S ’48) of New Orleans on April 28, 2009.

Robert M. Billet (B ’48) of Rayne, La., on Jan. 26, 2008.

F. Pearce Bradburn (B ’48) of Glasgow, Ky., on Dec. 1, 2008.

Blaise S. D’Antoni Jr. (E ’48) of

New Orleans on June 4, 2009.

Charles J. Gadmer Jr. (B ’48) of Covington, La., on June 13, 2009.

Lor raine Steidtmann Querens (NC ’48) of New Orleans on May 26, 2009.

Jay M. Rowland Jr. (L ’48) of Summerville, S.C., on May 21, 2009.

Henry Hatty (A&S ’49) of Gretna, La., on March 29, 2009.

J.V. Leclere Krentel (B ’49) of New Orleans on May 9, 2009.

Eldon C. Blancher (B ’50) of Baton Rouge, La., on April 29, 2009.

Tiley S. McChesney (A&S ’50) of New Orleans on May 14, 2009.

Lucien Kennedy Moss Sr. (A&S ’50, M ’53) of Lake Charles, La., on May 25, 2009.

Charles D. Olivier (E ’50) of Diamondhead, Miss., on May 23, 2009.

Robert F. Holdren (M ’51) of Boise, Idaho, on April 23, 2009.

William P. Howard Jr. (A ’51) of Washington, D.C., on April 12, 2009.

Morton A. Madoff (A&S ’51, M ’55) of Lexington, Mass., on June 6, 2009.

Marilyn DeWint Orth (NC ’51) of New Orleans on June 9, 2009.

George Albert Danner Jr. (E ’52) of Conroe, Texas, on June 20, 2009.

Andrew F. Giesen Jr. (M ’52) of Fort Walton Beach, Fla., on June 11, 2009.

Gordon A. Saussy (A&S ’52) of New Orleans on May 31, 2009.

Robert Weihrauch (A&S ’52) of Worcester, Mass., on June 7, 2009.

William R. Giddens (M ’54) of Shreveport, La., on May 2, 2009.

Louise Gray (SW ’54) of Columbia, S.C., on May 25, 2009.

Robert L. Kovanda (A&S ’54) of North Myrtle Beach, S.C., on Jan. 14, 2009.

Merle F. Brown (A&S ’55) of Andover, N.Y., on Nov. 16, 2008.

Frances Black Fischer (NC ’55) of Monroe, La., on May 24, 2009.

John R. Hebert (A ’55) of Houston on May 28, 2009.

Joyce Armhein Loga (NC ’55) of Metairie, La., on June 19, 2009.

Janice Cohen Pastor (NC ’55) of Tulsa, Okla., on May 28, 2009.

Mayanice Walton (SW ’55) of Columbiana, Ala., on May 2, 2009.

John A. Koob (E ’56) of New Orleans on May 16, 2009.

Joseph A. Pavich (UC ’56, G ’61) of Metairie, La., on April 24, 2009.

Sunthorn Srihongse (PHTM ’56, ’58) of Marlton, N.J., on April 12, 2008.

William F. Baldwin (B ’57, L ’60) of Shreveport, La., on May 16, 2009.

Sanford E. Berger (L ’57) of Rivervale, N.J., on May 7, 2009.

Clayton J. Overton Jr. (M ’57) of Covington, La., on June 27, 2009.

Frank T. Tusa (UC ’57) of Mandeville, La., on June 15, 2009.

George H. Reese III (B ’58) of Pineville, Ky., on May 29, 2009.

Elizabeth Griggs Farrington (G ’59) of Alexandria, La., on April 19, 2008.

Angela Roddey Holder (NC ’59, L ’60) of Durham, N.C., on April 22, 2009.

Homer A. Jacobs (M ’59) of Island Park, Idaho, on May 15, 2009.

Charmaine Grinnell Noel (NC ’59, SW ’75) of New Orleans on June 4, 2009.

Paul A. Lea Sr. (M ’60) of Raton, N.M., on May 19, 2009.

Alvin C. Lum (A ’60) of Phoenix on May 28, 2009.

Alma Simons Perret (UC ’60, G ’62) of Jacksonville, Fla., on June 21, 2009.

Kelly E. Miller (L ’61) of Richmond, Va., on May 12, 2009.

Horace P. Rowley III (B ’62, L ’67) of Covington, La., on May 26, 2009.

William A. Bloom Jr. (M ’63) of Mandeville, La., on June 5, 2009.

Thomas W. Feary (G ’63) of Stockton, N.J., on Dec. 14, 2008.

Richard A. Kelley (UC ’64) of New Orleans on May 13, 2009.

Ann L. Schlosser (G ’64) of San Antonio on June 25, 2009.

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Victoria L. Roberts Giblin (NC ’65) of New Orleans on June 14, 2009.

Brooks B. McNamara (G ’65) of Doylestown, Pa., on May 8, 2009.

Joseph C. Gandolini (SW ’66) of Madison, Miss., on June 10, 2009.

Michael P. Redington (B ’66) of Dallas on April 20, 2009.

Richard J. Sullivan (G ’66) of Penn Hills, Pa., on June 27, 2009.

Claire C. Massey (SW ’68) of Longwood, Fla., on June 15, 2009.

John W. Scott II (A&S ’69) of Alexandria, La., on April 25, 2009.

Harold Ashton Thomas (L ’69) of New Orleans on May 17, 2009.

Bruce N. Young (A&S ’69) of Athens, Ala., on April 17, 2009.

Richmond M. Eustis (L ’70) of New Orleans on May 30, 2009.

Robert J. Sussman (A&S ’70) of Houston on April 28, 2009.

Richard L. Windsor (L ’70) of Tallahassee, Fla., on Dec. 7, 2008.

Jann Terral Ferris (NC ’71) of Covington, La., on June 23, 2009.

Lawrence H. Vinis (A&S ’71, M ’74) of Eugene, Ore., on July 15, 2008.

Edgar H. Mims (G ’74) of New Orleans on June 26, 2009.

James A. Meader (G ’75, ’78) of Sioux Falls, S.D., on May 24, 2009.

Thomas H. Emerson (A&S ’78) of Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, on May 8, 2009.

Brian Allen Hollander (A&S ’78) of Exton, Pa., on June 25, 2009.

Kay Brodnax Tiblier (G ’78) of San Francisco on June 22, 2009.

Jeffry S. Bodley (A&S ’79) of Fort Worth, Texas, on May 5, 2009.

Jerald D. Adair Jr. (A&S ’89) of Kenner, La., on Jan. 18, 2008.

Stefan A. Sessler (A&S ’91) of Delray Beach, Fla., on May 5, 2009.

Amy K. Covey (UC ’98) of Colorado Springs, Colo., on May 23, 2009.

Suren Stepanyan (L ’03) of Van Nuys, Calif., on May 24, 2008.

Joseph D. Simpson IV (E ’05) of Round Rock, Texas, on June 15, 2009.

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newOrleans What’s the buzz?

by Nick Marinello

cicadas, the insects that play out their lives in southeastern Louisiana make their appearance in less dramatic fashion, eschewing any kind of planned and coordinated effort. (Again, not unlike their human cohabitants.) Instead, each cicada waits for some personal cue to straggle out of the ground, pop from its homely husk with soft new wings and begin the business of reproducing.

It is the males who compose the sounds that surge and ebb from tree to tree as dusk falls.

Female cicada respond by flicking their wings in unison, producing a sharp and nervous chatter.

As mood music goes, it’s not Mantovani, but it apparently gets the job done.

Maybe it’s a sign of desperation on the part of those who have not yet mated, but toward the end of the summer the cicada seem to strike up their song earlier with each passing day.

This gradual intrusion into the afternoon may go on for days or weeks. And then something snaps.

What once seemed simply part of the city’s aura stops being background music and suddenly becomes startlingly noticeable. It’s as if the entire world has developed tinnitus. The cicada’s song has turned into Muzak in an elevator from which you cannot escape. Like the constant

beep from a forgotten alarm clock in the adjacent apartment or the relentless hum of a failing transformer on a nearby telephone pole, the sound persists beyond your control.

It’s then you realize the Greeks were right about the buzzing, buzzing, buzzing. If you focus on it for too long, that buzzing can go all Edgar Allen Poe on you, crawling inside your head until you think it’s the sound of own brain sizzling.

Pause.

It might not be quite that bad, but like the cicada, humans have a flair for the dramatic.

Well, at least some of us do, and the rest are bound to get at least a little punchy in the waning weeks of this interminable summer.

And come fall, when the weather cools to where we can turn off the rattling window units and our homes for the first time in months grow deliciously hushed and still, we can all hope that high above in the city’s canopy of trees the last couple of cicadas have found each other and, like their human counterparts below, are enjoying the change of season, chilling with a little quiet time.

With all its half notes, quarter notes and dotted sixteenth notes, when it comes down to it, music is simply a pleasant way to divide up time.

That music is mathematical is not a new idea. In fact, it was around 2,500 years ago that the Greek mathematician Pythagoras first pointed out the connection. But then he saw math in everything, believing the physical world could be understood through mathematics.

In the ensuing centuries, scholars and philosophers have pondered the various interconnections between math, music and other numerical proclivities of the universe, but few have put it all together in such a concise package as has that most tuneful of insects, the cicada.

Cicadas, which each summer gather by the thousands to serenade the coming of evening, are obsessive about numbers, rigidly organizing their lives around cycles of varying lengths.

Humans, another group given to numerical obsession, have counted 2,000 species of cicadas worldwide. While the more than 100 species found in North America have life cycles between Nick Marinello is a senior editor in the Office two and eight years, there are seven species that of University Publications. have opted for the extended life-cycle package of either 13 or 17 years.

These so-called periodical cicadas spend nearly all that time underground doing heaven knows what before emerging into the world en masse, their dramatic clockwork appearance being, frankly, a little spooky in a let’s-freak-out-thepharaoh kind of way.

The cicada gets its name from the Greek word meaning “buzzer,” which is a misnomer on the order of calling Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart “a songwriter.” An electronic entry system buzzes, a cicada produces a complex music that has the timbre of an itch, the rhythm of a busy signal, and the aching persistence of a mating call, which it is.

Unlike the flamboyant periodic The husk of a cicada is left behind on a porch as a reminder of summer night music.

PAGE 40 | TULANIAN SUMMER 2009

PHOTOGRAPH BY NICK MARINELLO.

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Office of University Publications 31 McAlister Drive, Drawer 1 New Orleans, LA 70118–5624

hiddenTulane The Rat Pack. Cats— feral and tame—roam the uptown campus.

Cared for by kindly faculty, staff and students, the cats earn their keep by curbing the rodent population. Their elegant, elusive presence adds a touch of mystery to campus nooks and crannies.