Portland Magazine Spring 2015

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UNDER WATER

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FIRST DAY When I went to college I carried a battered old green canvas duffel bag. My dad had stenciled my name on it in white paint at his basement workbench. The old black steamer trunk had been shipped ahead of me and it was waiting in the basement of my hall and I remember hauling it up the steps to my room just like a man would haul a recalcitrant walrus, with all his might and with no help whatsoever from the walrus. Other guys were hauling their trunks to their rooms also, and one older guy offered to help me, and I will always remember his face because he was the first person to help me on my first day at college even though he didn’t know me at all and I was only a freshman. The hallway smelled like wood chips and paint and turpentine and the shaggy musty dank of rooms being opened and aired after being shut tight all through the roaring American summer. My room was small but tall and I claimed the bottom bunk and the desk by the window and unpacked my stuff and then my roommate walked in. He was from Missouri and he carried a banjo. I had never seen a banjo before and said so and he said he would play it a lot which he subsequently did, sometimes at dawn, which was a mixed blessing.

He went off with his family, and I sat at my desk for a while fidgeting and pinning up photographs of my family and then even though I should have made the effort to be friendly and meet the other guys on my floor, or review my class schedule for the hundredth time, or hit the bookstore to get a running head start on syllabi, I did none of these things, for I was rattled and frightened and near tears for reasons I did not know, so I opened my old black trunk and got out my worn gleaming basketball and slipped out of the hall without saying anything to anyone and ran down toward the lake where I knew there were basketball courts because my brother had told me about them. He had been a student at this college also years ago and when he was lonely and rattled he went to the lake. Somehow having my ball in my hands and spinning on my fingers and whipping around my back on the dribble and bouncing between my legs occasionally was soothing and nutritious. Who would have ever thought that bouncing a basketball for an hour would be the mysterious food you needed at exactly that hour in your life? But it was so, and I shot baskets and ran through my ancient mindless drills for an hour there by the small glistening lake, with its fringe of reeds like a prickly fence between land and water, and when I was done, when I was dripping and tired and something sad had been burned away, I hit a last shot, because you can never never never leave a court without hitting your last shot, and then I dipped my hands in the lake and splashed my face and walked slowly back to my hall. On the way back people on the pathways smiled and said hey, and I smiled and mumbled, and when I got to my hall two older students on the steps said hey and asked me my name and shook my hand, and one of the older students said hey man grab me tomorrow and we’ll get some guys and run full-court down by the lake. I said okay, sure, thanks, great, thanks, and I walked down the hall to my room feeling some kind of different, like maybe just maybe things would be some kind of okay.

Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine, and author most recently of Children & Other Wild Animals (essays) and A Book of Uncommon Prayers (Ave Maria Press).

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F E A T U R E S 14 / Flying, by Dave Devine ‘05 The single best essay on running you will ever read. Really and truly.

18 / No More!, by Paul Myers We asked the University’s health director why America is a culture soaked in rape. He answered with a roaring passion that will make you weep. page 14

24 / The Angle of Mursey, by Brian Doyle Ensign Susan Moscato, United States Navy Nurse Corps, 1969.

26 / Francis, by Elisabetta Pique March, two years ago: a new pope, a new hope.

30 / Under Water, by Anne Fadiman ’15 hon.

Water, joy, water, grief.

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32 / Unconditional Surrender, by Elizabeth Samet A West Point professor musing on her hero: Ulysses Grant.

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4 / Saint Mary’s Home for Boys at age 125 page 24

5 / The stunning painter Alredo Arreguin on campus 6 / ‘My Home Town’; Eric Chambers ’03 on Oregonness 7 / The deft accounting professor Ellen Lippman 8 / 44 years of tart brilliance: Sue Säfve retires 10 / Physicist Max Schlosshauer: what is quantum machanics?

11 / Amanda Monroe ’16 rediscovers…the University of Portland

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12 / Sports, starting the national bronze medalist, men’s crosscountry 13 / Briefly, starring Oregon’s best educational bargain…

37 / Football All-American Joe Enzler ’37 48 / The wry brilliant Sister Veronica Baxter, S.N.J.M.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF PORTLAND MAGAZINE Spring 2015: Vol. 34, No. 1 President: Rev. Mark L. Poorman, C.S.C. Founding Editor: John Soisson Editor: Brian Doyle Cheerful Tempestuous Designers: Chris Johnson & Joseph Erceg ’55 Mooing Assistant Editors: Marc Covert ’93 & Amy Shelly Harrington ’95 Fitfully Contributing Editors: Louis Masson, Sue Säfve, Terry Favero, Mary Beebe, Anna Lageson-Kerns

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Cover: M Swiet Productions/Getty Images.

Portland is published quarterly by the University of Portland. Copyright ©2015 by the University of Portland. All rights reserved. Editorial offices are located in Waldschmidt Hall, 5000 N. Willamette Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97203-5798. Telephone (503) 943-8225, fax (503) 943-7178, e-mail address: bdoyle@up.edu, Web site: http://www.up.edu/portland. Third-class postage paid at Portland, OR 97203.

Canada Post International Publications Mail Product — Sales Agreement No. 40037899. Canadian Mail Distribution Information—Express Messenger International: PO Box 25058, London, Ontario, Canada N6C 6A8. Printed in the USA. Opinions expressed in Portland are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University administration. Postmaster: Send address changes to Portland, The University of Portland Magazine, 5000 N. Willamette Boulevard, Portland, OR 97203-5798.

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THE SEASON O were my love yon Lilac fair, wi’ purple blossoms to the Spring, and I, a bird to shelter there, when wearied on my little wing! singeth the farmer and poet Rabbie Burns, who died so very young, age 37. “His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity …his eye literally glowed when he spoke with feeling ... I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time,” wrote Walter Scott years later. ¶ among the saints of April: Abundius, Caidoc, Cellach, Dodolinus, Ebba (the Younger), Fricor, Volodymyr, Plato (not that one), Winebald, Julie, Dotto, Ruadan, and Zita (both of them). Catholicism is such a colorful faith.

ARTWORK BY MARY MILLER DOYLE

THE STUDENTS One of the most poignant and personal events of the spring: the annual Scholarship Luncheon, during which student recipients meet and dine with their donors. It’s burbling and funny and sweet. April 14, in the Chiles Center. Information: Laura Hanna, 503.943.8607. ¶ Founders Day is also April 14, honoring University founders Alexander Christie and John Zahm. Christie, the granitebrowed archbishop of Portland from 1899 to 1925, bought The Bluff and its lone hall (Waldschmidt); Father Zahm, the Congregation of Holy Cross provincial, lent money, books, and men to the new ‘Columbia University,’ which changed its name in 1935. ¶

Joining the graduating Class of 2015 at Commencement on May 3: noted essayist and author Anne Fadiman, the anti-cancer pioneer Dr. Walter Urba of Providence, Safeway Health president Larree Renda (who started her career as a bagger at Safeway and rose to the top, wow), prolific composer and author David Haas, Notre Dame financial wizard Scott Malpass (who also advises Major League Baseball on investments), and the legendary Father Bill Hayes SJ, of Jesuit High in Portland, who in a lot of ways is Jesuit High.

Father Bill receives the Christus Magister Medal; Renda will deliver the Commencement speech; and Fadiman will deliver the Graduate School’s commencement speech on May 2.

THE UNIVERSITY March has become the month of the President’s State of the University address, delivered as the University issues its annual alumni awards: this year the event is March 17, at the Sentinel Hotel, tickets available; call 503.943.7328. This year’s award winners: renowned math teacher and musician Scott Reis ’98, entrepreneur Christina Palmer Fuller ’07, and the remarkable Stan Muessle ’62, a former IBM exec who 17 years ago founded Global Outreach to introduce computer literacy into Tanzanian schools. ¶ March 21 at 6 p.m. in Bauccio Commons: ‘Taste & See,’ featuring Catholic winemakers in the Northwest pouring their extraordinary wines. Tickets are probably cheap at $100 for this. Call Jamie Powell at 503.943.7702. ¶ University president Father Mark Poorman, C.S.C., leads a cruise for alumni and friends through the Mediterranean Sea October 7-19; the wry Father Ed Obermiller, C.S.C. is cruise manager, obermill @up.edu,

503.943.7488 if you want to go. Venice, Naples, Greece, Monaco, Barcelona… sigh. ¶ April 1, the annual Bauccio Lecture: collaborative economics guru April Rinne of the World Economic Forum.

Free, 4 p.m., BC Aud.

ARTS & LETTERS On Hunt Theater’s stage, April 10-17: the greatest short story writer ever’s play The Three Sisters. Tickets and times for Dr. Chekhov: 503.943.7287. ¶ On Hunt’s boards June 5-28: Gilbert & Sullivan’s hilarious HMS Pinafore, the annual summer Mock’s Crest production. ¶ The University annually sponsors ticket packages to musicals downtown at Portland Opera’s Broadway series: this spring the events I Love Lucy (based on the great old show) on April 10, Phantom of the Opera (May 16), and Wicked (August 7). Information: Connie Ozyjowski, ozyjowsk@up.edu. ¶ The Garaventa Center for Catholic Life will host Saint Mary’s College professor Anita Houck on ‘The Religion of Laughter: God, Humor, and Humanity from The Iliad to The Onion’ on April 9 at the Center, in Franz Hall, free as air. ¶ Also in the Garaventa Center, in April 16: photographer Mary Lyn Rusmore-Villaume on the mystical beauty of seashells.

THE FACULTY Returning to The Bluff this summer, as director of campus ministry: Father Jim Gallagher, C.S.C., who has been the Congregation of Holy Cross’ vocation czar since 2009. Jim was Shipstad Hall’s director in 2006-2007.

A cheerful affable bright dude; we are glad to have him home again. ¶ Retiring in 2015, after long and lovely service: ebullient nursing dean Joanne Warner, a terrific dean, which is a hard art. ¶ Retiring this fall, after 34 years as the

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University’s water czar, brilliant and tart-tongued resident political conservative, and generally blunt honest standup guy: the physical plant’s Carvel Cook. Secondsmartest guy on campus, we always thought, behind only the physicist Mark Utlaut. ¶ Retiring this spring: the alert curious energetic music professor Ken Klesynski (28 years), the legendary epically-bearded chemist Ray Bard (29 years), deft nursing professor Susan Decker (44 years!!), the elegant gentle communication studies professor Elayne Shapiro (24 years). The new nursing dean is professor Joane Moceri.

FROM THE PAST April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King speaking in Memphis: “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop…Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place.

But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain.

And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land.

I may not get there with you.

But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” ¶ Born May 9, 1877, in southern France, one of 24 children: Aristide Pierre Maurin, better known as Peter Maurin, who co-founded the Catholic Worker movement with his friend Dorothy Day. “Peter was a revelation to me,” wrote Day. “I do know this, that when people come into contact with Peter, they change, they awaken, they begin to see…”

PHOTO BY ADAM GUGGENHEIM

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Among the many estimable guests on The Bluff for our annual Veterans’ Day Celebration: former Army Spec 5 Rex Smith, now Oregon’s VFW state chaplain. Vietnam vet: “Chu Lai, 1969-1970. I repaired radios and teletype equipment and gathered intelligence. The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Vietnam? The heat, and the beauty.”

Earned a Bronze Star for his service — he flew out to firebases to repair radios and teletype equipment, under fire, sitting by the door gunner in helicopters. His base was subject to rocket and mortar fire many times, “but I believe their munitions were of poor quality, as was their accuracy,” he says politely. Became a pastor at various churches after the war. “When I came back from Vietnam I had a whole different take on things, and I set about growing up,” he says, gently. An honor to have you with us on campus, Reverend.

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Celebrating 125 years of serving orphaned broken bruised hammered frightened holy boys in Oregon: Saint Mary’s Home for Boys in Beaverton, to which countless alumni, regents, students, staff, faculty, and friends of the University have devoted time and talent and cash over the years, as mentors, counselors, and donors. Among recent counselors: all-WCC basketball star Sarah Green ’00 and University president emeritus Fr. Bill Beauchamp. Among recent mentors: University regents Mary Boyle and Karl Smith. The beaming shining nun here is the late Sister Mary Clarice, of the Order of Saint Francis, who took the boys to the circus. You know, once in a while there is a photo of such patent joy and delight that you could stare at it for an hour. This is one of those. Our prayers and best wishes for the courageous people at Saint Mary’s who try to heal the Christ in every child’s heart.

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From a recent campus show of the works of the remarkable painter Alfredo Arreguín. Born in Mexico, Alfredo came to Seattle in his twenties, and has lived a colorful life: Korean War veteran, designer of the White House Easter Egg in 1988, winner of Mexico’s highest award for culture, an artist with paintings in both the National Museum of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery, and the man who recently told school children in an interview that his work is much influenced by animals, films, doodling, water, stars, and Tarzan movies.

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MY HOME TOWN From Tidal Grace: Fishing, Family, and Faith on Oregon’s Yaquina River,

by Eric Chambers ’03, now government affairs director for Gresham, Oregon.

The book was just published by Amato Publications, run by Frank Amato ’64.

Toledo, Oregon, is my hometown, and I love it passionately, with romance and nostalgia and longing. Toledo was my first love. Toledo, population 3,540, with one stoplight and a quintessential American Main Street and one smokestack down at the pulp mill, along the Yaquina River, which carves the town’s southern boundary. Toledo is today exactly what you would imagine if you were told to imagine it fifty years ago, which is to say that it is still perfect. I miss Toledo like crazy.

A while ago my wife and I enjoyed a classic Portland evening of fine dining and theater. The finest food in the city, good company, cloth napkins, followed by a stage adaptation of Ken Kesey’s classic Oregon novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. Many argue that Sometimes a Great Notion is the great American novel because it strikes to the core of what we value: rugged individualism, grit, independence, hard work, and being tougher than most. It is a story about loggers, calked boots, dozen-egg breakfasts, colorful language, and taming the land.

In those ways, it is a story about Toledo.

A delicious meal in my stomach, a wonderful date by my side, and all I could think about was how much I miss my hometown. A whole theater full of people gathered to see what life is like on the Oregon coast, fifty years ago, where people are still real, where our relationship to the land is intimate, where there is no room for phoniness and airs.

Oh, how I longed for Mickey’s Diner on Main Street, for the Toledo Summer Festival, for long days spent fishing for salmon on the Yaquina River, for bumping into Old Man Whoever on the river, and gloating in my success, or envying of his…

A couple of years after the start of the Second Iraq War, I was representing my boss at the time, a congressman from Portland, at a ceremony to cele-

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brate the first group of Oregon National Guard soldiers who were returning from battle. At the ceremony, the top brass went on at length to describe the accolades and attention that these men and women had earned in the war. As a group, they made a tremendous impact on the field generals in the theater of battle.

I got to talking with one of the generals, and asked him what it was that made the National Guard soldiers from Oregon so effective. “They’re farm kids, loggers, and fishermen,” he responded. “If they have a vehicle break down in the convoy, they don’t fall back and request a new vehicle like the rest of the Guard units. They get out the tools, improvise, and fix the damn thing.”

That’s why small towns are important, and are worth protecting. A number of years ago, a Walmart entered

the Newport market, a dozen or so miles away from Toledo. The Walmart gobbled up much of the local economic activity, as big-box stores tend to do. It was a sign of a shifting economy, of society valuing thrift, convenience, and efficiency more than it values the presence of a local merchant economy. The Walmart effect has been widely discussed, and while not yet universally decried, I think people generally view it as a negative net impact.

Yet young families from broken rural economies migrate to more efficient urban economies ever faster.

But at what cost?

The story of American ruggedness, community values, risk, and connection to the land is not a story of big cities, interstate highways, smog advisories, traffic jams, and density.

It’s a story about the values that were carved out by the pilgrims and pioneers and explorers, and those seeking a new life through westward expansion on the Oregon Trail. It’s also Portland 6

a story about the community model that American tribal peoples had, before we destroyed their cultures.

Those rural communities became not only vital exporters of natural resources like trees, fish, and minerals, but also vital exporters of values, neighborly culture, individual ingenuity, and a sense that we could take care of ourselves, and take care of our own.

Not only have we now industrialized those economies, but we’ve industrialized the ways in which we help people. When I was in high school, there was a house fire up the road from where we lived, which burned the entire structure to the ground, and critically wounded the dad as he tried to save his daughter from the fire. Unfortunately, she didn’t make it. Devastated by the loss of their daughter, and unable to produce income while the father was healing from his own wounds, the family was supported by the community. There were instantly dozens of benefit dinners held at local restaurants, fund drives on local radio stations, donations from businesses, an endless chain of homemade meals for the family. Within weeks, enough funds had been raised to purchase the family a new manufactured home, along with the necessities to fill it.

Contrast that with the industrialized way in which we now distribute food stamps and other forms of social welfare. Though taxes have become the primary vehicle through which many Americans now conduct their charitable activity, they probably never directly connect with those they are helping. They won’t be burdened by seeing people in need and thinking to themselves that perhaps they could do something to help them.

Instead, they will complain about the tax bill, and when confronted by need in the community, their first instinct will be to ask what “the government” can do to help.

When I first came to the city, I remember suggesting that direct person-to-person charity was more rewarding for the giver, and more motivating for the recipient. My urban friends pushed back, asking what would happen to the people who did not have a social network or know people who could help. I was puzzled, briefly, before realizing that, unlike small towns, in the city there actually are people who neither know, nor are known by others.

How sad is that?

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Ladies and gentlemen, the brilliant accounting professor Ellen Lippman, who (a) is especially expert in accountants’ culpability and accountability, and has written rivetingly of Nazi accounting in the Holocaust; (b) is absorbed by biblical traditions and lending habits in modern economies; (c) is fascinated by how accounting provides critical information for the future; (d) is particularly interested in the ethics of how colleges burden students with debt; (e) was a terrific dancer who contemplated a professional career in the theater; and (f) is the surpassingly excellent advisor to student accounting teams, which (g) won the national American Institute of CPAs Accounting Competition last year (you heard that right, the Pilots won the national college accounting title), and (h) went right back to the finals in another national accounting competition this year. Not to mention that the University has the best CPA pass rate among its peers in the Northwest and is in the top 5% nationally. Energetic soul, Ellen Lippman.

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One crucial aspect in the making of a fine magazine is a relentless energetic intelligence behind it; and in the case of this magazine, that driving unsleeping force was the estimable Sue Säfve, who retired in March after a whopping 44 years as the University’s meticulous typesetter. A small word for such a gargantuan job — Sue composed and often designed millions of pages of brochures, booklets, books, posters, prints, tickets, advertisements, and flyers — and 90 consecutive issues of the University’s Portland Magazine. Testy, brilliant, funny, witty, patiently impatient, absolutely trustworthy, she was the sort of colleague who pretended to grumble and then did far more than you could have imagined possible. She started on The Bluff at age 21, working the print-shop addressograph with the legendary Father John Hooyboer, C.S.C.; since then she figured out dozens of machines and computing systems, earned the University’s employee of the year award, endured 23 years of the obstreperous fool editor of this magazine, stayed so long because she liked the people (“especially the entire marketing staff, the folks in development, the print shop, mailing services, and Laurie Kelley, and Maureen Briare, and Jamie Powell, and Mary Scroggins, and Jamie Strohecker, and Father Ed Obermiller, C.S.C., and Bill Reed, and Carol Welch, and Jim Covert, and Louis Masson, and John Soisson, and Tom Greene, and John Goldrick, and Bob Boehmer, and Doris Gillis, and Marlene Whitehead, and Father Dick Rutherford, C.S.C., and Dan Reilly, and even the fool editor of this magazine”), and now is happily sailing the world with her husband Ulf, before happily diving into her vast gardens this summer. Thank you for all the hard and sweet work, Susy. We tried to make the best magazine there ever was, and if we came close to that wild ambition it was because of you.

Travel in beauty.

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PHOTO BY JERRY HART

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The University, you may not know, has a terrific theater program, with productions that are moving, funny, peculiar, hilarious, and of startling quality — like the recent musical The 1940s Radio Hour, set in a small radio station at Christmastime 1942.

Boy, was it good.

Our thanks to Adam Guggenheim for the photos. Want to throw profligate gifts at the theater program so they can jazz and delight thousands more patrons? Call Dwain Fullerton at 503.943.8875.

He’ll help.

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WHAT IS QUANTUM MECHANICS?

By University physics professor Max Schlosshauer, when we asked: what is quantum mechanics, and can you explain it clearly to our readers?

I became a physicist because of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics tells us that the world is nothing like what we thought it would be. It breaks with every intuition we may have had, not only about nature but also about what science is ultimately about. It’s like philosophy on steroids: you get all those mind-boggling, puzzling ideas, but unlike with philosophy, I can go up to my lab in Shiley Hall and do an experiment that proves that nature behaves in ways much weirder than the craziest philosopher could have ever dreamed of.

The theory of quantum mechanics, now a hundred years old, turned physics upside down. It tells us that every object in the world is like a box with many numbered doors. Each door represents a different kind of question you can ask about the box.

So if you open a particular door — if you ask a particular question—you’ll get an answer. But here’s where things get funny. First, it is fundamentally impossible to predict what answer you will get. I don’t mean that the answer is already contained in the box but you just haven’t seen it yet; rather, the answer is genuinely not determined until you open the door. Second, it is fundamentally impossible to know what would have happened if you

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had opened a different door.

Now, in our familiar understanding of the world, we could just open door after door and get answers to more and more questions and thereby learn more and more about the box, just like asking your professor more and more questions. But quantum mechanics shows that learning the answer to a new question will typically force us to relinquish the answer to a previous question. We can never simultaneously know the answers to all the experimental questions we could pose to nature. This is a hard fact of our world. Of course, the idea that our knowledge of this world may be fundamentally limited is not new.

But the point here is that the limitation is not in us; it is in nature itself.

Here’s another strange feature.

I’ll give you one of those boxes with doors, and I’ll get another box with doors numbered the same. Whenever you open a door with the same number as my door, we get the same answer. Magic? Not really, you may be tempted to say: after all, those answers could have already been in the box, like a pair of matching gloves.

But I can prove that this explanation contradicts experimental data. (Come to my lab and I’ll show you.) So your answers and mine are created on the fly just when we open the door, at places that may be solar systems apart, and yet they always match. How is this possible? No one knows.

What I’ve said so far makes it sound as if quantum mechanics is a nuisance, a road block on our path to knowledge of nature. But here’s where things take another beautiful twist. It turns out that quantum mechanics actually gives us a much richer picture of reality. It does away with the clockwork picture

From a series of paintings of Salzburg, Austria, by Father Mark Ghyselinck, C.S.C.

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of a universe in which everything plays out according to a script written at the time of the Big Bang. It replaces it with a universe full of possibility and with a genuinely open future. And on top of that, it is precisely those strange features of quantum mechanics I’ve described that have made possible everything we take for granted today.

If quantum mechanics suddenly stopped working, there would be no computers, no cell phones, no CD players. The world would grind to a halt. In fact, today we are in the midst of a new technological revolution fueled by quantum mechanics. Socalled quantum computers will be able to solve problems inaccessible to ordinary computers. Quantum mechanics also ensures that any eavesdropper on a communication will invariably be detected; banks and the military already use such quantum technology. Yet quantum mechanics was never developed with these applications in mind; they came only later, as a byproduct.

You may wonder why you never see any of this weirdness I’ve talked about, why the world around you looks and feels so normal, when quantum mechanics tells us it shouldn’t.

This is one of the areas of my research. The short answer is that for the weirdness to appear, things must be quite small, like atoms. When things get bigger, the weirdness becomes very difficult to observe. But because everything is made of atoms, the weirdness, in a sense, is still there.

It’s just that we need very refined experiments to see it.

You thought physics was about balls rolling down inclined planes? That’s what I thought so too, until I met quantum mechanics. It changed my life and decided my career. I’m fortunate to be able to work on it with my students here at UP, and I’ll sneak a little quantum mechanics teaser into every class I teach. Quantum mechanics also made me a humble scientist, because it tells me that while nature may at some point be fully describable, nature will never be fully knowable. But quantum mechanics is also empowering, for it tells us that our interaction with the world — our choice of which door to open, which question to ask—brings forth genuinely new events that were in no way determined by anything that has gone before. And thus every one of our actions helps write nature’s eternally unfinished story. Me, personally, I draw great inspiration from such a participatory universe.

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MUSICA CONSCIENTE

By Amanda Munro, who will finish her degree in environmental ethics and policy next year. She just re-enrolled at the University after a year traveling the world; for her account (and lovely photographs and music) of her hejira, see thiswaywardsoul.wordpress.com.

The University of Portland was not my first choice of colleges, when I was a high school senior; because my mother teaches and my sister studies there, it always felt too safe, the most boring choice I could possibly make. I imagined a fresh start, a clean break from my old life and turbulent adolescence.

I dreamed of a huge university out-ofstate, maybe Ivy League, with a rigorous theater program that would prepare me for Broadway, groups of friends who shared my values, breathtaking nights on the town, and a whole new world of art, community, events and mind-expanding classes. When a school in New York offered me a huge scholarship, I didn’t bother to apply anywhere else. I leapt out of the nest to fly as fast and as far as I could to the novel world that awaited me.

Unfortunately, the experience didn’t measure up to my expectations. I felt lost and lonely, surrounded by people I couldn’t relate to, struggling to survive in a hostile world, pursuing a major I didn’t enjoy. After one miserable semester I crawled home, ashamed and disillusioned. I had one option left: the dreaded, safe, boring University of Portland. My mother tried to put as bright a spin on it as possible, but I was bitter.

By my fourth semester on The Bluff, I had changed my major several times, but still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Each time I delved deeper into a subject I found it hollow and pointless, my passion for learning gone. Unmotivated to do homework or go to class, I started to think I was wasting my own time in college and maybe I should give up and do something else.

As my fifth semester steadily crept up like a rising tide, I felt chained to a reef; any minute my head would be below water again and I would drown.

I began to panic, a deep part of me struggling with all its might against the straight path, the easy course, what everyone has always told me is the right way and the best way. When the waves reached my mouth, I squeezed

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my eyes shut, took a chance and cut myself free; I bought a one-way plane ticket to Mexico and dove in, with no intention of ever coming back.

The relief was instant. Suddenly my life was my decision: where I went, what I did and how I did it. I was free as a bird and fully independent, realizing for the first time I really can do anything I set my mind to. I lived on two hundred dollars a month, volunteered my labor in exchange for food and lodging, worked in an incredibly diverse range of places with equally diverse and incredible people. In Belize, I wrote articles for an environmental NGO, lived in an isolated tribal community, and built my own djembe drum. In Guatemala, I planted trees in a re-forestation project and worked for a chocolate factory. I worked on a farm in Nicaragua, shoveling cow dung into buckets that I carried on my shoulder up hill in the rain, slipping and sliding on rivers of mud. In Costa Rica, I worked at a restaurant on the coast. In Panama I crossed the Darien Gap in a tiny sailboat — four days of open sea and non-stop illness and battering by waves, all under the questionable care of a drunken Austrian captain. A pod of dolphins leapt out of those same torturous swells, slippery silver moonbeams dancing with our boat in the most incredible ballet I’ve ever seen.

In South America I trekked into the Andes and lived in a forest preserve.

I explored caves and lakes, rivers and oceans, cities and jungles, meeting people from many different microcultures with their infinite dialects and accents, belief-systems, and ideas.

I went months without speaking English, practicing and perfecting my Spanish in ways I never thought possible. In Colombia I taught at a school and met the love of my life — the guitar.

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I carried my new love to the rainforest where I lived on a farm with a native healer and his family. He taught me to play musica consciente, conscious music: music that heals, music of love, music that connects our souls to God. And yes, the music healed me. I felt as if I had been holding my breath my entire life and suddenly, finally, in an Andean symphony, I gave myself permission to exhale. I let go of the darkness and made room for the light.

Slowly I realized that all life is sacred, that God resides within me and every other person, tree, animal, plant, insect, and molecule. I realized my deepest passion is conserving the natural world I cherished as a child, forgot about in adolescence, and came to revere more deeply than ever over the course of my trip. I realized I wanted to go back to school and major in environmental science so I could be equipped to protect this impossibly beautiful gift: our planet that is so rapidly disintegrating.

So my search led me right back to where I started: the University of Portland’s environmental ethics and policy program, and to my family, to heal the wounds I had inflicted by the emotional and physical distance I had maintained for so long. Now, as I sit in the new Clark Library writing these notes, I see the University as a hub connecting me to my family, to a community, to teachers and mentors who know me, support me, believe in me, want me to succeed. I realize now that I have everything I need inside of me; if I can maintain my center within, it doesn’t matter where I am in the world. I have all the tools I need to glow in light and love. I have no idea what the future holds; but I can feel myself bursting into a new season. My journey, after all my journeys, is only just beginning.

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S P O R T S Cross Country! “It’s been a long journey,” said a grinning coach Rob Conner after the Pilots mounted the national award podium for the first time ever, after they finished third in the NCAA championships, behind only defending champ Colorado and Stanford. (The vaunted Oregon Ducks were sixth.) “Took us 25 years to get to this podium. It feels great.” Pilots Scott Fauble (12th) and Reid Buchanan (26th) earned All-American status.

The team was seventh at the 8000meter mark, 4/5 of the way through, and surged to the finish with a tremendous collective kick, without two of their best runners able to finish. An incredible tale. The men have been in the national top 14 for eight years in a row, with a budget of about twenty cents a year and no campus track facilities. Conner, was, of course, named the NCAA’s coach of the year in the West. A stunning 23 male and female Pilot runners were named WCC all-academic, too. We give up.

Pilot cc is the coolest sports story there is. ¶ And it includes the Pilot women; senior Tansey Lystad finished 15th in the national championships (the highest finish ever for a Pilot woman), earning All-American honors, and the Pilots finished seventh in the West. Whew.

All-American crosscountryist Tansey Lystad, also the WCC champion.

Men’s Basketball The Pilots were 12-8 at presstime. Highlights: not one but two game-winning three-point shots at the buzzer for electric point guard Alex Wintering, and the steady rise of new faces like D’Marques Tyson. Lowlight: Senior center Riley Barker breaking his leg against Santa Clara, which ended his Pilot career.

Twice named to the WCC all-academic team (he is a business major), he finished third among career shotblockers, behind only Tim Frost ’01 and teammate Thomas van der Mars. ¶ Among the high school stars to commit to the Pilots for next year: all-Oregon guard Jazz Johnson from Lake Oswego, and all-Australian wing Chiir Maker, who emigrated to the Lucky Country from South Sudan as a child.

Women’s Basketball Tough season for the Pilots, 4-16 at presstime. Highlight: Jasmine Wooton reaching 1,000 points to join teammates Cassandra Brown and Kari Luttinen in the millennium club; it’s the first time three Pilots ever hit the mark in the same season. First on the list, seemingly forever, is Lorena Legarde ’85, who scored 2,568 points (20.2 per game).

Tennis The men got off to a fine spring start, winning their first two matches and making the Intercollegiate Tennis Association national top 75 for the second year. WCC Coach of the Year Aaron Gross has six freshmen this season, but, as he says, “the reason I love sports is that no one else determines your fate…you do…” ¶ For the women, Lucia Butkovska (from Slovenia) and Maja Mladenovic (Serbia) are both nationally ranked, and the experienced Pilots will make a serious run at the WCC title. One highlight of the team’s web page: alumni notes.

Former players Lacey Pfibsen ’11 (now a med student at Creighton) and Andrea Swick ’96 (head of global tennis marketing for Adidas) are among the first profiles.

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Volleyball The women finished 7-23, and senior Katie Mardesich earned all-academic honors from the WCC. Assistant coach Nate Ngo left The Bluff for USA Volleyball, but former All-American, USA national team player, and pro Dan Mathews took his place.

Rowing The women will be in San Diego, Seattle, and Dexter Lake, Oregon this spring (the annual Covered Bridge Regatta, April 11, be there) before, they hope, making the WCC title race in Sacramento in May. Baseball On campus speaking at the team’s annual Diamond Dinner fundraiser: ten-time All-Star Steve Garvey, the National League’s 1974 MVP. Previous speakers include Bill Buckner, Tommy Lasorda, Dave Stewart, Dusty Baker, and Dave Winfield. Wow. ¶ The big change this season: artificial turf, which lets the men practice in all weathers. Coming next: new seating, new lights, and a new scoreboard. ¶ New faces: Beau Brundage from Georgia, whose dad manages the Phillies’ AAA team; Michael Forgione from Chehalis, where he helped win two state titles for the West High Bearcats; all-Washington Cody Hawken from Union High in Vancouver, where he had a .654 slugging rate; and All-American pitcher Cameron Richman from Walla Walla, where he posted a startling 0.33 earned-run average.

Good heavens.

Soccer The women and men open their seasons in August. Back for the women are all-WCC mid Allison Wetherington and fellow league all-stars Haylee DeGrood, Noelle La Prevotte, Ellie Boon, and keeper Hanna de Haan from Germany; back for the men are all-WCC mid Eddie Sanchez, defender Hugo Rhoads, and scorers Erik Edwardson and Brandon Zambrano.

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O N B R I E F L Y Best Value For the fifth consecutive year, the University ranked first among Oregon school in Kiplinger’s Personal Finance annual ranking of best values in private colleges and universities; the University was also ranked 65th nationwide among all private schools. Kiplinger’s assesses admission rates, retention, graduation rates, average debt, faculty-student ratios, and financial aid. ¶ The University was also named (for the seventh time) to the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll by the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency for volunteer service. Honorees are chosen for the scope and innovation of projects, percentage of student participation, and academic servicelearning courses.

Best Entrepreneur(s) Fedele Bauccio ’64, CEO of Bon Appétit, was named Ernst & Young’s 2014 retail entrepreneur of the year. Fedele, who started his career in the food business as a dishwasher in the Commons, now supervises a company that serves 150 million meals in 500 corporate venues; he is internationally lauded, and rightly so, for redefining the institutional food industry and being a forceful and eloquent pioneer in environmental and local sourcing policy. ¶ Another notable alumnus entrepreneur: Tommy Pham ’09, whose science research company, Nzumbe, just earned a $225,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health. Nzumbe focuses on ‘silenced’ genes as a means of fighting cancer; the company began as an idea when Pham was an entrepreneurship student on The Bluff.

Gifts & Grants Among recent generosities: $150,000 from Rich Baek ’93 for pews in the Chapel of Christ the Teacher; a $15,000 grant from the Oregon Community Foundation and others for a student solar-thermal heating project; $15,000 from Mario and Donna Giordano for nursing laboratories (their daughter Amber ’11 is a current nursing doctoral student on The Bluff); two gifts of $54,000 from Jim Murphy ’91, one for the new Pilot House and one to help renovate the baseball field; and not one but two sprawls of timberland from Mike and Joan Concannon:47 acres of Doug fir in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, and 40 acres in Oregon’s Siskyou Mountains. You can donate land, trees, boats, cars, coats, airplanes,

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houses, cabins, cottages, bonds, barrels of wine….

Gracious Guests Among recent visitors to campus: National Defense University professor Hassan Abbas, author of The Taliban Revival, talking about the idea of justice in Islam, as the annual Bill Mazzocco ’37 Lecture in Justice; the lecture honors a man who had a long career in military intelligence and helped shape the Marshall Plan (and was, we remember with affection, a wonderfully garrulous soul); Second World War veteran and eloquent anti-war speaker Dale Bowlin, captured by the Nazis during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, who said “…war is horrible…to train people to destroy property, to kill other human beings…there has to be a better way…”; and Stanford professor Adam Bonica ’06, exploring why democracy has not been able to fend off inequality.

Faculty Feats Among recent research grants awarded by the University to its faculty were monies to study industrial mathematics, the world of St. Francis of Assisi, LED lighting, undocumented immigrant women, nursing ethics, debt covenants, maternal diets, and flat-flame burners.

The New Pilot House drew $2.2 million in gifts in what seemed like minutes, including $25,000 from Kyle Bunch ’09, a welcome young-alumni

gift. The renovated space will have a pub (with a stage for concerts) and many more food options, while retaining the bookstore. Work begins this spring and should be finished by fall.

The New Rec Center, named for president emeritus Father Bill Beauchamp, is on schedule to be finished

by June; you would not believe how big and imposing and there it is, in the space that once was the public safety building and parking lot. Three gyms and basketball courts, a rockclimbing wall, a ‘spin studio,’ and more. Whew.

The Kate Regan Film Festival is a sweet funny creative honest genuine heartfelt communal prayer for our beloved late Spanish professor and energetic filmmaker. It will be held in Bauccio Commons on March 26, and there’ll be all sorts of film, video, and phone footage shaped and screened by students, faculty, staff, and friends.

Kate finished films on the Sephardic musician Judy Frankel, the Sephardic legacy in Segovia, and Don Quixote; she had at least five other works in process when she died suddenly this past summer. Can you make a profligately generous gift to the Kate Regan Fund, which will keep her wild energy alive on The Bluff? Sure you can. Call Amy Eaton, 503.943.8551, eaton@up.edu.

Sculpture by Shannon Hotchkiss '15, from a recent show of student art in the campus gallery.The wry brilliant Patricia Bognar runs the gallery with dash and brio.

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Flying The single best essay on running you will ever read.

By Dave Devine ’97

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wo boys barrel down a hill. A pair of lads, four and five years old, in a weathered black-and-white photograph. Bodies blurred by the camera’s inability to capture their speed. The image itself, creased and smoothed again to flatness, yellowed with the seep of album paste.

And a terse note scribbled in the border: Pat & John — 1949 Ireland.

My father and his brother, running.

They are side by side, giggling and dodging ruts, sprinting home for supper. Or they’re mucking around after Mass, crisp white shirts still buttoned to the neck, newly rumpled at the waist. Sunday shoes now dulled and spattered with the sod. Or they’re singing. Belting out remembered bedtime lullabies, something from their Ma in the kitchen, a snatch of a song heard round the hearth.

They are a song.

A pair of verses and the chorus all at once, rising and crashing through the genuflecting grass. Feet barely touching earth, bodies weighing nothing at all. They are racing, because when you’re four and five and it’s your brother, you race. You beat that eejit every chance you get. You run because there’s no point in walking. And because the dog runs, and you must keep up with that daft dog.

And you run because your father — and the men who work alongside your father — are harvesting peat in a distant bog, and they require their lunch by noon and it’s your job to hurry it there. You run and race and chase the dog all the way to the field where your father labors, and then you turn around and straggle home again. It’s more downhill than uphill on the way back, so you run again.

Because you can. And because you’re four and five and fast. And because of the liberating, astonishing joy—the sheer craic — of rapid, unhindered descent.

I’ve been sent off to run my lap.

The other seven year-olds — my twin brother among them — glance up from their soccer drills like startled egrets, eyeing the deflected ball, sensing the gravity of my offence. My hands are still stinging, red and useless. I wish they were gone. Or I pray for different hands, ones that are better listeners. These hands have let me down.

It’s the opening day of Second Grade Soccer — my first organized sport of any kind. We’ve been exchanging errant passes and nicking the turf with our Keds for less than an hour, but the whole thing already reeks of limitation. Rules about han-

dling the ball, where it should be kicked, who should receive it, prescribed zones and assigned positions.

I’m a child of alleys and creeks, scaled backyard fences and hopped hedges; this is a ligature of chalked lines and colored cones.

Our coach, a squinty well-meaning man named Mister Chester, had started with a pep talk, a rundown of the rules, and this simple admonition: Any boy who touches the ball with his hands earns a lap around the field. A sweep of his clipboard illustrated the punishment’s reach: two overlapping baseball diamonds with borderless outfields, a vaguely rectangular soccer pitch and a spit of hardscrabble grass stitching it all together. To run a lap here was to pack for a trip. To be adrift at sea, hugging fence for one long and decidedly forlorn circuit.

It doesn’t matter that my crime was instinctual, a spastic swat at a ball lifting unexpectedly faceward. It doesn’t matter that this is my first day.

Mister Chester freezes us with his whistle and levels me with withering, disappointed eyes. Here, surely, is a teachable moment, an opportunity to revisit the fundamentals with an audience of rapt second-graders. Mister Chester doesn’t see it that way. He winces and dispatches me on my lap.

I trudge alone toward the left-field fence, praying for a reprieve. Or expecting to see my friends setting off in solidarity. My brother, defiant and sprinting. Someone. But they’re busy again with their drills, busy again between the lines and cones, heads down and focused. So I run on, afraid to walk, hot tears rendering the horizon uncertain, making a mess of the navigation. When I curl at last through the far backstop, still only halfway around, I pause to wipe my snotsmeared face. Across the green expanse, a muted practice swirls on without me. I am a forgotten teammate, sent off and extraneous.

A boy adrift.

Setting off again, I take the four-foot fence in stride, my feet already knowing the chain link gaps, already possessing this skill. I plant a hand, because hands are legal, and in a single slick motion I’m over, running now outside the fence-line. The footing here is more rugged, but also more familiar. The running on the other side of the fence belongs to Mister Chester; he’s made it a corrective measure, something punitive and joyless. Thrill of movement bent toward retribution.

But the running on this side is mine.

The running of alleys and creekbeds, train tracks and abandoned lots.

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mapping out a route home. Eschewing streets for shortcuts. Shortcuts for longcuts. Leaving behind soccer practice, the playground, the lines and cones.

Ignoring the voices hailing me back.

We listen, past the rasp of our own breathing, for the runners. My brother is ahead of me, not far, cutting through the woods. Two boys bending lanky, ten year-old strides, not toward peat bogs, but mile markers. Starting lines and finish lines. Navigating our way through the interior of a sprawling Philadelphia park called Belmont Plateau—the place our father labors.

Cheering the high school runners he coaches, roaring the names we hear him use: Fitz! Gallagher! Obie! Mac! Irish immigrant names, like ours.

Tough Philly kids.

We crash through the underbrush like fawns, spindly and exuberant.

Decoding the geography of this landscape with our legs. Inventing our own geography — our own geometry —etching new and unexpected angles through the trees. Catching sapling trunks like banister rails in our hands, redirecting on the fly. Weaving and ducking branches, hoping to reach The Hill ahead of the runners, knowing races are decided there, figuring our reedy voices will somehow lift our father’s team, somehow urge them to victory in this race.

But we’re racing each other, too, surging and elbowing through the decaying November leaf-mash. Because when you’re ten years old and twins, that’s what you do. You beat your brother every chance you get.

You bundle up every schoolyard slight and ancient soccer field betrayal, all the unsettled business and unfinished fistfights, and you distill that into something swift and cruel, the sort of speed that only siblings turn against each other. The taut, tender velocity of brothers.

And so we race and chase and rustle through the brush until at last the hilltop looms, crowded already with a gauntlet of fans. The pack is approaching on the trail below; we can hear the contested breathing, the dirt-muffled patter of spikes. And as the leaders curve into the climb — knees lifting, arms driving — we spot the familiar yellow singlets. The pale thin boys we revere. The ones who tease and tolerate us, listen to our stories, endure our questions. The boys who wedge us into the team van, balance us on duffle-bags, seatbelts be damned — Up you go, Frick and Frack. Or Goofus and Gallant. Wedgies and headlocks, dead-

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arms when our dad isn’t looking.

Winking and sharing jokes and punch lines they forbid us to repeat. The ones who allow us to lope at their heels on warm-up jogs across the park flats, stretch in their circle, sit nearby as they lace their spikes. These boys, the sinewy heroic teenagers we adore, they’re running well.

They started strong and measured the pace and kept it close on The Hill and they’ll emerge from the woods in contention and grind the outside mile and kick from the old oak tree and reach the final turn with something left and sprint home untouched. And when the official scores are calculated and announced, when all the tro-

phies have been awarded, these pale thin boys will sweep our father skyward with startling ease. And our father, he will seem like a boy himself then, a lad, again, weightless and weeping on the narrow shoulders of his runners. And they’ll march him around the field, the whole mad mob, laughing and reeling and astonished by the joy.

The banter burbles up from the back of the van. Pitchy laughter and adolescent smack talk: How do you say, ‘Eat my dust,’ in sign language? Mocked deaf kid conversations and stage-whispered questions, meant for me: Hey Coach, how these dudes even gonna hear the

gun? I scowl into a cracked rearview mirror, attempting to ignore it.

One month into my first year of teaching at a Catholic high school in Baton Rouge, and I’m driving our ragtag cross country team to the third meet of the season, a small invitational hosted by the Louisiana School for the Deaf. It’s a year-round boarding school for hearing-impaired students, located on several hundred acres outside the city. The school’s runners train here every day, know every tight turn and twisted root. And yet, in a callow attempt at sensitivity, I’ve instructed my squad to treat the race as a workout. Settle in at the front, go with the leaders, wait until the last mile to

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One August evening, I lift my children over a fence.

I slip my hands into their armpit hollows, dodge wheeling legs and frantic elbows, and deposit a pair of pups— four-year-old son and three-year-old daughter — into an empty field at the edge of the college campus where I work. We’ve been passing the field on nightly walks all summer, this neat rectangle of artificial grass the kids covet for the bounce and tickle of the rubbery turf. Most nights we’ve found it occupied, even at dusk. Or the children have been tired, whiny and dragging. Or they’ve needed baths. Or they’ve been bickering like badgers, and my wife and I have had to quiet their mewling protests with promises to return another night.

This is the night.

The sun is already retreating behind the serrated hilltops to the west, leaving us shaded under pine boughs at the Spring 2015 17

fence line. Sodium bulbs flicker to life above an adjacent parking lot. But the field — the field is illuminated.

Lustrous and fulgent in the fading light. In a week the grass will teem again with returning college students, soccer practice, pick-up frisbee. In a week, the thin window will close and the field will be lost to another arriving semester. But tonight, in this gloaming moment, the field is ours, empty and inviting.

Immediately, the children are shoeless. The wide lawn angles to receive them, catching every barefoot stride as they sprint toward the sunset. My wife and I watch them careen away, all legs and laughter. They glance back once, inhaling the light, sucking it between their teeth, falling down for the joy of falling. And when our daughter inevitably lags behind, shoulders dropping in dejection even as her feet continue to churn, I cup my hands and shout, half-joking, a line my dad used to holler during races, the same thing I shouted as a coach: Use your arms! And because my daughter is three, and has no idea what I’m talking about, she spreads her arms and flaps them twice, curving like a kestrel at her brother’s calves.

My wife smiles at this, tries to catch my eye, but I’m no longer there.

I’m on a grassy hillside in Ireland.

Or I’m at park in Philadelphia, cutting through the trees. Or I’m weeping in the shadow of a playground backstop, a distant soccer practice swirling on without me. Or I am standing, stunned, at a school for deaf children in southern Louisiana.

My children circle close once more, and then loop away again. Their suddenly lanky legs carrying them toward a parking lot, a bell tower, a distant brick building they recognize. The place their father labors.

Elbows on the fence, I mouth a pair of words, press nearly-forgotten signs into my quivering palm.

Run, little ones.

Run, fly.n Dave Devine, who earned his master’s in teaching in 1997 on The Bluff, is the director of the University’s Pacific Alliance for Catholic Education, which sends young people to Catholic schools in Oregon, Washington, Utah, Alaska, and California, to teach as they earn their master’s degrees. More than 100 graduates of the program continued into careers as teachers or administrators in Catholic schools. Great program.

Want to help support it? Call Dave: 503.943.7344, devine@up.edu. Ask him about when he was a senior editor at ESPN.

©DANA TYNAN/CORBIS

I’m nearly apoplectic: Use your arms, Jeff — KICK! Jeff kicks. He drives his arms and lifts his tired knees. And the two deaf runners glance at their coach, nod, and stream past Jeff into the bannered chute, nailing the top two places and relegating my guy to third. It happens again and again. One of my runners comes off the far turn with a slight lead, I scream and the other coach signs, and his athletes discover in those emphatic gestures the necessary strength to mow us down. Eventually, I stop coaching altogether. I abandon the yelling and the windmilling and the useless finish line-pointing, and focus instead on my colleague’s hands, absorbing the power and poetry of that unfamiliar language.

After the race I seek him out, curious about the signs. It’s actually two signs, he tells me, forming them in the space between us. The first is Run. He demonstrates it again — slowly — has me attempt it with my own feckless hands. The second, he says, is Fly. I imitate that one, too, and then combine them. Not particularly well.

Run…fly.

Later, alone in my apartment, I jab out the signs in the bathroom mirror.

Trying to make my hands remember: Run… fly...run, fly…runfly. Watching the play of light on my knuckles, the way it slips to shadow on trembling, turning fingers. Still mulling the difference between my silence in the van and the other man’s silence on the course. The weight of that distinction.

Still unable to shake the way his runners drew strength from his hands.

The way they lifted and accelerated, flat-out flying at the end.

PHOTO:

accelerate. In essence, take it easy on the deaf kids.

I should have known better.

Late in the race, our top guy rounds the final turn with two runners from the host school glued to his shoulder.

I lean into the narrow homestretch, shouting encouragement. C’mon, Jeff, kick! Drop these guys! I’m yelling myself hoarse, windmilling my arms and gesturing at the finish line: Hundred yards to go! Fifteen feet away, the other coach is silent. Weathered cap tugged to the rim of his glasses, he neither raises his voice nor leaps for emphasis. He simply trains his eyes on his runners and slices the air with purposeful, patient fingers.

No More!

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We asked the University’s health center director to pour out his heart about why America is a rape culture.

He did so with an articulate rage that will make you weep.

By Paul Myers

A

hall director answers the latenight knock at her door. A young woman is standing there barefoot, wearing sweatpants and a hoody. She is staring at the floor. The hall director senses trouble and steps out and gently scoops this holy child out of the hallway and into the room. The girl slowly tells her director that she has been raped. She was at a party the night before, and she doesn’t remember anything after a certain point, but this morning she noticed and felt certain things, and found evidence on her body, and she has spent the whole day weeping and vomiting and falling asleep exhausted and waking up only to cry again.

Help me, she says to the hall director.

Help me.

She says she is furious at the young man who tricked and drugged and raped her, and she is furious at herself for trusting him, and she feels guilty and ashamed, and she’s confused and exhausted and so, so sad—not just for herself but for her poor parents, my poor parents! She feels violated and exploited and stupid and a failure and she cries and cries and cries.

Help me.

And the hall director helps her.

She listens and believes. She gently walks the young woman through her options for medical evaluation, safety, protection, and if she wants, the pursuit of justice.

Most rapes are inflicted on children under the age of 18. The second-most rapes are inflicted upon girls and young women from ages 18 to 26. The source for these numbers? The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In The Beacon student newspaper’s third issue of the 2014-2015 academic year, a brave student named Malika Andrews, wrote an essay about being

raped at the age of twelve. “One in six,” began her essay. “One in six.

That’s the number of women who will be raped. One in six. I was twelve years old when I became that one. Was it my fault? Absolutely not, but that did not stop me from stewing in selfhatred. I fell into silence for years.

Years. Here at the University the administration does a good job of rape awareness and prevention, but where is the student voice? Rape occurs everywhere. Rape occurs here. Who are we to be ignorant of an epidemic that plagues the nation and the world?

Who are we not to stand up and take responsibility for the safety of the students on the campus we call home?

Did you think rape doesn’t happen here? That’s a lie. Rape is real and rape is everywhere. Silence is the enemy. Silence allows horrific acts to continue. Silence is what causes survivors to feel alone. I am here to tell you, my friend, that you are not alone. Speak up!”

Most of us simply cannot comprehend that there are boys and men among us who become angry enough, insecure enough, detached enough, entitled enough, that they convert holy human life into a target to be dominated, and wounded, and humiliated in the most powerfully intimate manner: rape.

Rape is murder of humanity; rape is power and control; rape refuses to admit that a girl, a woman, a boy, or another man is a human being, an aspect of God, breathed into life by that which we call God. Rape is dehumanization. Another tool of dehumanization is a word that reduces a person to a thing, an idea, a non-entity.

Think about that when you hear someone say that someone else is a monster, a slut, a tramp, a whore, a loser, a dolt, a pig. The Nazis knew this well; it’s much easier to rape and Portland 18

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murder people if you can convince yourself they are not people at all.

In the course of my career as a psychologist I have worked in counseling and health centers at two Catholic universities. I have also worked in jails, community mental health centers, psychiatric hospitals, and private practices. Across all those settings I have worked with sex offenders, child and adult survivors of sexual assault or abuse, parents who have lost their children due to selling their children for sex in exchange for drugs, single mothers whose boyfriends have used the children for prostitution and rape. I have provided mental health counseling for strippers, pimps, and prostitutes. I have worked with the Title IX system for the University of Portland. I have supervised multiple revisions of our sexual assault advocate networks on The Bluff. I have heard stories that would give you nightmares for the rest of your life; some of them have done so to me. It’s a hazard of my vocation. When truly present with someone in his or her painful, scorching story, you get burned, too, a little.

You can just begin to imagine the awful dreams of millions of people who have survived rapes and molestations. You can just begin to imagine their nightmares. Imagine living the rest of your life afraid to sleep, for fear of the horrors that await you there.

I had given a presentation about rates of sexual violence at the University to a group of student affairs professionals.

At lunch a fellow administrator asked me what I had been doing that morning. I said that I had been talking about sexual assaults among our students. The man who had asked me the question leaned toward me in clear distress and said “We don’t have sexual violence in our community, do we?” I had to lean toward him and say sadly, “Yes, yes we do, far more often than anyone wishes to talk about or realize.” It seemed to me that he was angry with me, the messenger; or maybe he was outraged that those in our care have been subject to harm.

I should have asked him, but I didn’t.

I met a woman once who told me she was attacked at a student party in the 1950s. She was twenty years old then.

She started therapy finally decades later, after her husband, standing behind her, surprised her with a hug, and she grabbed a knife and brandished it at him. Slowly it came out that she had lived with fear and darkness for decades not only because of

the rape, but because she had never reported it to the police, and was racked with guilt that her rapist probably attacked many more women.

She could not forgive herself for not protecting those women. She died unable to forgive herself for that.

It is commonly thought that a rape involves a random stranger, an attack in a dark alley, a shrouded jogging path, a bad part of town, rather than a noisy house party or a quiet dorm room. If you stay away from strangers, you are safe. If you always have a jogging buddy, you are safe. If you are male, you are safe.

Our culture is blasé about prostitution.

Our culture eagerly buys and sells music that celebrates rape. Our culture is twisted with pornography, the largest money tree on the Internet.

Our culture adores domination. Our culture doesn’t stare at this and weep in shame.

But those rapes are a fraction of total rapes. Most rapes are perpetrated by known and trusted family members, boyfriends, in-laws, neighbors, and acquaintances. And they also are sometimes perpetrated by women against women, and women against boys, and women against men. Less common but true, and the key variable is the power difference between two human beings.

A student brags to his buddies that he makes his girlfriend do what he wants. His friends snicker. But a guy from Corrado Hall says, “Hey, man, if Portland 20

you say anything like that again, I am going to tell your girlfriend, and if I see anything like that, I am going to tell everyone there is. You hear me?”

Silence.

A little thing, isn’t it? A little moment, a stray moment. One remark and then another, so easily forgotten.

But that student told me, and I tell you, and the more people who stand up suddenly like the young man from Corrado, who knows?

We are truly, I say to you, steeped in a rape culture. Our culture overtly depicts and celebrates the act of forcing sexual will upon another person. Our culture is blasé about prostitution.

Mothers complain about the difficulty in finding clothes for their little girls that are not sexually suggestive. Our culture buys and sells and casually discusses music lyrics that celebrate rape, and advertising that objectifies women. Our culture is twisted up with pornography, the largest money tree on the Internet. Our culture adores macho men who take what they want, be it land or money or sex. Our culture adores power and domination. It appears our culture cannot be bothered to be honest about rape, or prosecute it without exposing the victim to abuse, or even admit that one in four women will face rape, and one in six college girls, and one in ten boys. Our culture doesn’t stare at the previous sentence and weep in shame.

Our culture is also confused because young people hear that they should be free to “hook up” with people they don’t know, and feel free, or even be expected, to drink alcohol to the point of poisoning. When I was assisting with psychological evaluations of inmates in jail I learned that many referred to colleges as ‘candy stores’ for exactly this combination of expectations and alcohol. They thought of drunk girls and young women stumbling along the streets of college towns as easy pickings.

In recent years, girls and women, on average, drink alcohol more heavily than they did in the past. Women suffer much more physiological and cognitive incapacitation with alcohol than do men. (It’s a biological thing). This creates more vulnerable targets for predators. This is not victim-blaming; this is me telling you coldly that many times women in a sufficient drunken state are legally unable to give consent to any action, and unable to defend themselves. Sexual intercourse without consent is defined by most laws as rape. So drunken sexual intercourse

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becomes, arguably, rape. Even if there is no evidence of coercion or manipulation or force or threat, it is rape by virtue of sex with an incapacitated person. But what if the partner was impaired also, and cannot accurately judge the level of impairment?

So colleges are left to sort out, in investigations, timelines for how many drinks, and who offered them to whom, and how was sex discussed, if at all, and whether they even knew each other’s names, and what was done to whom, in what order, initiated by whom. If you think this sort of thing is rare you are mistaken. And no matter what the conclusion of the investigation, the damage to self-images, to friend networks, to memories of the college years, is permanently already done.

We fight rape here at the University as hard and thoroughly and energetically and creatively as we possibly can. I believe that with all my heart.

We do everything we can think of to make people aware, to be tender and sensitive to victims, to bring justice against criminals, to foment awareness and the courage to intervene. But there’s that cute guy she just met, who seems so sweet, and there are those guys who are just so friendly, and there are parties, Halloween parties, spring break parties, end-of-year parties, proms, taverns, bars at home and abroad, weekend camping trips, parties everywhere and anywhere.

And almost always present, before and during a rape: alcohol.

I can give you numbers but I won’t.

I don’t want a single soul to be tempted to say that we are not as bad as elsewhere. I will tell you that our number is not zero, which means there are far far far too many rapes here. One is too many. The only acceptable number is zero. I get furious about this. Many people here get furious about this.

Male and female, staff and faculty, students and regents, alumni and friends. One is too many. One is a girl, a child, a boy, a child. Want me to make it real, right here in this sentence? A while ago a dad came to campus to pack up his daughter’s dorm room because she was raped and can’t stand to be on our campus.

His little daughter, the kid he has loved with his whole heart and soul all her life. His baby girl. Your baby girl. Mine. Ours.

On dark days, I remember that hundreds of people here have stepped forward in hundreds of ways to try to prevent rape. Hundreds. Hundreds of

people are trying to create an environment here that does not allow perpetrators to hide, or deflect, or plot, or isolate their targets. Hundreds of people keeping our eyes and ears open, and recruiting more eyes and ears, and trying to bend the public conversation toward honesty about rape and power and greed and cynicism and money and lies and justice and mercy.

Four years ago we started our Green Dot program here at the University.

We joined a lot of other campuses who have Green Dot programs. Green Dot is essentially a ferocious effort to get everyone on campus to pay attention to the possibilities of rape and to stand up and stop it. The principle comes from crime maps, where red dots mark bad events. On our maps green dots mark spots on campus where bad events are prevented. To cover the campus with green dots we train students and faculty and staff to be aware, to recognize, and to disrupt possible scenarios for rape, possible rapes, jokes about rape, slurs about rape, everything about rape. In the years since we have installed the program, our campus map is covered with green dots, which is good; but it’s not awash with green dots, yet.

This sounds like officious nonsense but it isn’t. Here’s a Green Dot story.

Before a male student went to a party, he donned a Green Dot wristband to remind himself to be alert to anyone who might become vulnerable, become a target for a predator. Later that evening he’s having a great time but also casually keeping track of who is the most vulnerable partygoer due to drink. Late in the evening he notices a man at the party who seems quite sober and focused. This man doesn’t seem to know anyone at the party but he scans the attendees and soon befriends the most inebriated young woman; indeed he seems to be leading her out of the party. Our student with the wristband slides over and makes an excuse and separates the girl from the stranger and escorts her to female friends who take her home and put her to bed. Our male student didn’t figure someone else would take care of it. He didn’t sneer at the girl for getting drunk. He took care of what he saw might be a serious problem. No confrontation, no fanfare, no reward. Did his actions prevent a rape? Perhaps, perhaps not. Did he reduce the possibility with a quiet, brave act? Yes, he did. That’s Green Dot. I set out to write about rape at the University of Portland and I found Spring 2015 21

myself writing about a country of rape, a culture of rape, distortions and delusions everywhere. But every time I came close to despair over its insidious prevalence I remembered how many people I know who are not in denial, who hate this crime, who are fighting it with all their might. It is a crime of violence and leering power and control and if we root it out, when we root it out, we will be a better university and better country and a better people.

I know so many men and women who are so graceful and brave and vivacious and tenacious in their public lives, and you would never imagine that they had been drugged, or bribed, or tricked, or overpowered, or beaten, and then raped, sometimes for years.

So many. Whenever I hear the word grace I think of them first. How can people survive such horrors? Yet some do, with what we can only call amazing grace.

But so many do not, and they fall into drugs and alcohol and crime and disease and early death, and it was not their fault, it was never their fault, their lives were stolen from them by rapists.

My son works with the homeless in downtown Portland. He gives them a shot at housing and job-training and medication. So many of the folks he serves every day are souls blasted apart by rape. At Saint Andre Bessette Parish downtown, near where my son works, where so very many University students and alumni and Holy Cross priests and brothers have served the poor and homeless, the pastor told me once that 75% of the men and 100% of the women who came there for meals and respite had been sexually assaulted.Every single woman who walked through the lunchroom door.

When I worked at the Delaunay Mental Health Center, named for the legendary University professor Father John Delaunay, C.S.C., we found that 70% of our clients had been raped or assaulted, or seen rape and assault as children.

What stays in my mind is the realization that those atrocities created diagnoses that could be traced to their terrible struggles to cope: depression, anxiety, stress disorders, compulsive behaviors, dissociative disorders.

These afflictions were not natural, not genetic, not accidents: they were the result of inhumanity perpetrated by one being against a helpless other.

Each being is sacred! Each being is God’s own child! We have a duty to

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protect and support and care for God’s children! We say we will do this in so many ways, in so many venues, in so many aspects of our lives, but as a community we do not do it as thoroughly and furiously as we could.

We don’t. Can we?

It is the great Oregon visionary Barry Lopez, to whom the University of Portland gave an honorary doctorate celebrating his reverence and work for others, who has said repeatedly that ours is a rape culture, and we should weep for shame. He’s right. Rape is woven into video games and pop music, in movies and in advertising.

She really wanted it. Her no really meant yes. She enjoyed it. He needs to just take what he wants because he’s a man’s man. Boys will be boys, no one made her drink, she led him on…Lies! Lies! Lies!

Stare at the horrifying numbers with me again—most rapes are committed against children and girls. Children and girls! I weep for shame.

PHOTO:

©PIA ULIN/JOHNÉR IMAGES/CORBIS

Even as I wrote this piece I remembered so many stories from friends, classmates, neighbors, and parishioners about boys molested on Scout campouts, and by priests from my own parish as a boy, and by a local high school teacher, and by a grade school teacher, and by babysitters on their young charges, and on and on.

What I also recall is we kids knew about this in some odd way, and we did nothing. I did nothing. I was ignorant and powerless then, and later I thought I should not speak because it was not my life to speak of. But it is part of my life. I knew them and knew the story and I said nothing.

How many of you have been in the same quandary?

As a psychologist I have conducted psychological evaluations of sex offenders, and evaluated child, adolescent, and adult survivors of rape and inexplicable forms of sexual, emotional, and physical abuse and assault. I have read police reports and listened to first-hand accounts that still give me nightmares. So many of the sex offenders I interviewed or tested blamed the child, or blamed the teenager for being seductive, or claimed that the victim controlled the act—if they admitted that anything happened at all. Their version of the events was a complete reversal from what the documented facts were for each situation. A four-year-old seductress? Your son or daughter wanted to be sold for sex? I saw such rigid denial that they would not even engage or entertain the evidence.

But there was always, always, rational and calculating planning and anticipation and manipu-lation, which would then be split off and dissociated in an act of self-protection when the perpetrator was actually witnessed or reported. The lesson I never forgot: we need to create a community in which threats that no one will believe you have no power because we will believe. Can we do that?

There are a number of reasons to admire the University’s soccer teams, but here’s one: both the men’s and the women’s teams have made videos promoting Green Dot, and many players in the past have trained to be campus Green Dot leaders, and this year all the players on both teams trained to be Green Dot leaders. Now that is a reason to be a Pilot soccer fan.

Want to never get raped? Want to be sure your children never get raped?

Tell yourself this, tell them this: Don’t trust anyone, particularly those held in high esteem by those you trust. Don’t be alone with anyone. Don’t ever be intoxicated. Be as unapproachable as you can. Don’t be a child. Don’t be nice or shy or appear vulnerable.

And don’t expect justice or fairness.

This is the world we live in. Is this the world we want to live in?

I was on a morning walk the other day and I noticed my aged neighbor carried a rape whistle when she walks in our gorgeous Portland neighborhood.

My own mother kept a can of mace on her key chain. Growing up I took it for granted that my mom kept a can of mace in her purse in case of a rapist in a parking lot. That’s just what people did and do, I figured.

How sad is that? How sad is that?

I once had a client in my private practice who spoke to me for months before she disclosed that her father sold her as a sex slave for several years, beginning when she was twelve years old. When I spoke to her she was sixty years old and had spent her life alone and in terrible darkness.

But she was a woman of remarkable spirit, and she was finally clean and sober, and she finally began to date, for the first time in her whole life, in the last year before she died. There’s always hope.

I think of all the people who have worked so hard, so passionately, and so ferociously against rape on our campus. A philosophy professor.

A chef. A shy priest. A soccer coach.

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A sociology professor. Two mathematics professors. An athletics advisor.

An attorney. A campus policeman.

A poetry professor. A former Army colonel. A campus ministry staffer.

All over the map. Every corner of the campus. Residence hall staff. Student affairs staff. The brave student who wrote about her own rape in the pages of The Beacon. So many more. So very many people. Not just the official people, the ones who are assigned the task, but everyone, from all over.

That makes me happy.

In the Constitutions of the Congregation of Holy Cross, the Catholic order of priests and brothers who have been part of the University since the morning it opened, they proclaim: “The mission is not simple, for the impoverishments we would relieve are not simple. There are networks of privilege, prejudice, and power so commonplace that often neither oppressor nor victims are aware of them. We must be aware and also understanding by reason of fellowship with the impoverished and by reason of patient learning. For the kingdom to come in this world, disciples must have the competence to see and the courage to act.” Amen to that.

What form of relationship would have a chance to be so transformative that sexual assault is not an option for the broken and angry among us? What sort of relationship would steal the distorted motives and worldviews of rapists, so that no one could fail to recognize another being’s sacredness?

Isn’t love the only answer here? A loving relationship that is honest and direct, that sees the whole person, not a caricature; evil has no chance when faced with a whole person. What an extraordinary charge, to bring that love to bear...and isn’t that what the University of Portland is about, down deep? Bringing love to bear?

I don’t have a great ending for this essay. I don’t have any rage and tears left in me here at the end. I am begging you to help save our children.

I am begging you. Help save our girls and young women and boys, and yes our men. Help save every fourth female you meet and every seventh male. Help me. Please, help me. Let us join together and increase our ability to see; and let us pray for courage to act. n Dr. Paul Myers is the director of the University’s health and counseling center, and the author of several searing essays about grace in these pages.

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The Angle of Mursey Ward M, U.S. Naval Hospital, Philadelphia, 1968: One hundred wounded soldiers, one young Navy nurse.

By Brian Doyle

M

any of the men were so badly wounded they were flown directly from the battlefield in Vietnam to the hospital, and the nurse would clean battlefield dirt from their wounds. The men were Marines. Many of the men had lost hands and feet and legs and arms. The men would ask the nurse to scratch their missing limbs and she would do so, her fingers scrabbling in the hollow air, and they would lean back pleased and grateful.

She was 22 years old. She had just graduated from the University of Portland with her nursing degree, and passed her nursing boards, and gone through Officers School, and earned her rank, and been assigned to the Naval Hospital. She is the beaming child on the next page. Sometimes all 120 beds in the ward were filled and she would be the only nurse on night duty with a few Navy corpsmen as assistants.

Did they give you grief sometimes, you being the only woman, and so young?

No, she says, smiling but firm. I was their officer. They called me ma’am or they called me Miss Randles.

Did you ever break down and cry and despair at such carnage among such tall children?

There were days I sobbed, sure, she says, not smiling, but that was more fatigue than despair. The shifts were long. There were hard hours but they were proud men and I was proud of them and we were too busy to despair.

I wanted to treat them like the strong, handsome Marines they were. You’re not just your arms and legs. You’re not just your injuries, your missing parts.

People recover. People heal. People are people, not just parts. I was always fascinated by recovery. I loved working in stroke units and with amputees.

I thought about being a surgeon but nursing seemed more fun, more intimate.

Infection was the great enemy, she continues. You get blown up,

you’re in dirt, you’re easily infected — that’s the enemy. We watched like hawks for necrotic tissue. We fought temperatures all night long. The men were fitted with prosthetics and we would help them get used to their new parts. I heard a lot of swearing.

Mostly I heard banter and byplay and jokes and humor and teasing. A lot of music. Not many visitors — none of the men were in their hometowns there. They got mail and cookies and blankets from home. There would be a celebration when a guy left for home.

They’d all go outside and see him off.

Wheelchair guys would all roll outside too. It was pretty much one in and one out every day. A lot of guys came in during the Tet Offensive.

None of my men died, she says. Not one. We cared for maybe two thousand men in two years. I can still see most of their faces. I can still smell vinegar and bleach and infection. Infection has a sickly sweet smell. I got paid $300 a month. Sometimes my car ran out of gas because I was too tired to remember to fill the tank. We never talked politics. They did talk about where they had been, and where they’d been blown up, and about their Portland 24

buddies back in the war. Remember that these were volunteers, not draftees. They were proud of their service. They were proud that they didn’t let their buddies down. Part of them was still in the war: a bedpan fell off a bed with a crash, and they’d all dive for cover. They were heroes to me, she says. Heroes, do you understand? They were so brave, so tough, so cheerful, so enduring. They deserved respect, and I did my very best to deliver them respect.

She doesn’t say anything for a while and then she opens her scrapbook and shows me a letter. Summer, 1969.

Handwritten, painstakingly, by the man at left, whose right hand and both legs are still in Vietnam.

“All Wounded Marines,” wrote the corporal, “dig Ward M, for here we have an Angle of Mursey. She has a Smile for you and me, and no wonder we are all Doing so well. Here is Truly Heaven’s Greatest Angle of Mursey, so Please Angle, never leave us, for we couldn’t live without you. You see, we built our whole World around your smile, Miss Randles, and We all love You.” Right about here a normal magazine article would go on to explain how Ensign Susan Randles was going to rotate to a hospital ship, but instead she fell in love (with the officer who ran the brig!) and got married, and earned her doctorate, and returned to The Bluff to be a beloved professor and dean, but let’s not go there today.

Let’s stop right here with Susan Randles Moscato holding her friend Tony’s letter in her hand, and her hand is shaking a little, and no one says anything for a while, and then she says, quietly, fiercely, heroes, do you understand?

Yes. Yes, we do. n Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine, and the author most recently of A Book of Uncommon Prayer (Ave Maria Press).

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I

Francis

March, two years ago: a new pope, a new hope.

by Elisabetta Pique

The young Jorge Bergoglio (left) and his brother Oscar, 1942

t’s pouring rain. He wakes up very early, as usual. Today is March 12; it’s four o’clock in the morning and still dark outside. Kneeling with his eyes closed, concentrating, he prays silently. He asks Saint Joseph and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux to enlighten him. He asks God to forgive him his sins. He asks Jesus to allow him to be his instrument.

It’s a special day. This afternoon the conclave that is to elect a successor to Pope Benedict XVI is to start. And he is one of the 115 electors who will be locked in the Sistine Chapel to carry out this mission.

It’s cold. From his big room in the Casa Internazionale del Clero Paolo VI, a Vatican guesthouse for priests, on Via della Scrofa, where he usually stays when he is in Rome, he can hear the rain falling on the cobblestones.

The people here know him; he has been here several times during the past ten years, and they always book the same room for him, No. 203.

Although he doesn’t like coming to the Vatican—where one risks losing one’s faith with all that intrigue, pomp, and circumstance—he feels at ease in this room, with its high ceilings and period furniture and damask upholstery.

He’s an organized man, careful, methodical—he “doesn’t take a step without thinking about it first,” as the people who know him say—and the night before he had prepared a small suitcase. He won’t take much with him to the Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican guesthouse where he is to lodge with the other cardinals for the duration of the conclave. A conclave that will not last long, he hopes. As in 2005, when he took part in the election to choose John Paul II’s successor, he is convinced that a long election, one lasting more than two days, would give the impression of a divided Church.

That is why, at the 2005 conclave, when he happened to be the second most-voted-for Cardinal after Joseph Ratzinger, he took a step back, so as not to impede Ratzinger’s election. After John Paul II’s nearly 27 years as pontiff, it was not easy to replace a giant like him, charismatic until the end. The candidacy of Ratzinger, the former right-hand man of the pope, had been the easiest card to play.

That time, the conclave had been not only a new experience—the first time in Jorge Bergoglio’s life that he had entered the Sistine Chapel to elect the successor of St. Peter—but also a somewhat traumatic one. A conclave is a very secret event, but messages, emotions, and even information always leak out, and the cardinals Portland 26

who had taken part in the 2005 election had seen, during the first vote count, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, age sixty-eight at the time, nearly distraught as he gradually gained vote after vote. He had even surpassed Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, like hima Jesuit and very papabile, the candidate of the progressives but no longer a possibility because of illness.

Padre Jorge, as he prefers being called, finishes putting away his things in his room on Via della Scrofa. Eight years have passed since that first conclave, when, thanks be to God, “he had got off,” as he said.

Because of the rain and his suitcase, he won’t be able to walk to the Vatican, as he usually does when in Rome. It’s a walk that relaxes him; as he walks, he prays and admires the beautiful little alleys of the Eternal City, passing through Via dei Coronari with its antique shops. Further on he never fails to stop and pray to the Madonna dell’Archetto in an old passageway that leads to the Via dell’Arco dei Banchi.

Here this splendid fresco of the Virgin is painted on the wall, a special image among the thousands to be found in Rome. After praying there, Padre Jorge, like any passerby (he doesn’t like showing off his scarlet cardinal’s robes, which he hides under a black coat) crosses the Vittorio Emanuele II bridge over the Tiber River and presses on toward the Vatican.

He has taken this walk many times, peaceably, alone, because, even though he has thousands of friends, he is essentially a solitary man. Every step thinking and praying, thinking and praying, something he never stops doing.

He goes down to the reception desk.

There he greets the people behind the counter with a shy smile. It’s a quarter to seven in the morning. “Good luck, Your Eminence,” they wish him very courteously, escorting him to his taxi with an umbrella. “See you soon,” the Argentine Cardinal salutes them.

His room at the Casa di Santa Marta is 207. It was assigned to him by lot the day before, during the last general congregation of cardinals before the conclave. It is a small, simple room, furnished only with what is strictly necessary — a bed, a chest of drawers, a desk, a crucifix on the wall, a bathroom—the way he likes it. It’s eight o’clock in the morning. Although strictly speaking the seclusion cum clave (with a key) has not yet begun, isolation has already started. No more phone calls, no more reading of the daily papers, no more contact with the outside

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As laid down by ancient ritual, the cardinals move in procession from the Pauline Chapel to the Sistine Chapel.

With their scarlet vestments, in an atmosphere of great solemnity, they advance singing “Veni Creator Spiritus,” the hymn that invokes the help of the Holy Spirit for the crucial election. They take their places behind the long tables under the awesome images of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. And then, one by one, readinga Latin text, their right hands resting on the Gospels placed on a lectern in the middle of the chapel, they swear to maintain absolute secrecy with respect to everything regarding the election of the pope.

At 34 minutes past five, the master of pontifical liturgical ceremonies, Monsignor Guido Marini, announces in an almost shy voice the extra omnes — “everyone out” — which decrees the departure from the Sistine Chapel of everybody who is not taking part in this most secret election. Under the frescoes the silence is interrupted by the sound of the pens now touching the elegant sheet of paper that every cardinal has in front of him. For the first time, the 115 cardinals write on their sheets of paper the name of the person they believe to be the right one to succeed Benedict XVI. They write on the line beneath the words: Eligo in Summum Pontificem (“I elect as Supreme Pontiff ”).

As the Cardinal scrutineer reads out, one by one, the written names, expectation in the Sistine Chapel is overwhelming. The acoustics are not good, but as he hears his first and last name over and over again, Jorge Mario Bergoglio — serious, his eyes attentive — begins to realize that the intuition he has never taken seriously is being fulfilled. It is true; he is in danger of being elected pope.

7:41 in the evening. From the chimney of the Sistine Chapel— fitful spurts of black smoke. None of the 115 cardinalelectors has obtained the seventyseven required votes, equal to a twothirds majority, to be elected successor to Benedict XVI and the 266th head of the Catholic Church.

More than ten names came up in this scattered first round of voting.

Bergoglio is second only to the Italian Cardinal Angelo Scola. Bergoglio: 25 to 30 votes. Perceived as one of the great intellectuals of the Catholic Church, Scola is the son of a socialist truck driver, a member of the Communion and Liberation movement (a lay Catholic movement founded by an Italian priest, don Luigi Giussani after the Second Vatican Council), and has been friends with Joseph Ratzinger since 1971, when they helped start the high-profile theological journal Communio. He was formerly the rector of the Pontifical Lateran University and in 2004 started the Oasis International Foundation, which seeks to foster understanding between Christians and Muslims. He was the patriarch of Venice for several years before Benedict XVI designated him Archbishop of Milan, the largest dioPortland 28

cese in Europe. This was a signal, experts said, that Scola was Benedict’s chosen successor.

I interviewed Scola once, at the spectacular Patriarchal Palace in Venice, next to St. Mark’s Basilica, and he said “Anyone who has inside experience of a conclave, will realize that predictions melt into thin air when you’re actually in the room.

It’s true that the pope is chosen by the Holy Spirit. I really think that the Holy Spirit guides the Church and puts human pettiness — I mean the cordate and controcordate [ factions and counterfactions] — to good use.

At the end of the day, the Church’s wisdom stretches back two thousand years. So many factors have to come together for a pope to be elected that no one can appreciate them all in advance. That’s where the Holy Spirit steps in and makes the choice.”

Two other firm favorites, the Brazilian Odilo Pedro Scherer and the Canadian Marc Ouellet, also reap votes, but so does the American Cardinal Seán O’Malley. The atmosphere is tense. The cardinals acting as scrutineers are sitting at a table in front of the altar. After the vote, the first thing they do is shuffle the ballots.

They go on to count them, to check if there are as many votes as cardinals present. Then the first scrutineer draws a ballot, unfolds it, looks at the name written on it, and passes it to the second scrutineer. That Cardinal verifies the name and passes it to the third, who reads it aloud so that the cardinal-electors can note down the results themselves.

When all the ballots have been counted, the scrutineers add up the

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world — only with the other 114 cardinals from the five continents, who have the tremendous responsibility of electing the new pope at a truly turbulent time in the history of the Catholic Church.

©MAX ROSSI/REUTERS/CORBIS

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votes for each candidate and make note of them on a separate piece of paper. As the last of the scrutineers reads each ballot, he makes a small hole in each by punching through the word Eligo with a needle and threads them together to keep them safe.

When all the names have been read out, the two ends of the thread are tied together, and the ballots, thus joined, are placed in an empty container on one side of the table. This is followed by the third and final stage, also known as post-scrutiny, which includes recounting the votes, checking them, and burning the ballots. The scrutineers tally the votes for each candidate, and if no candidate has reached a twothirds majority, there is no new pope.

After being checked, all the ballots are burned by the scrutineers. Two furnaces are used: one for the fire and the other for the chemicals that are used to color the smoke black or white, depending on the result. Some of the smoke during the 2005 conclave was a confusing grayish color, but this time they use an electronic cartridge containing five nontoxic chemicals, harmless to both Michelangelo’s frescoes and the cardinals themselves, while leaving no doubt as to the outcome.

That first count is the only one held that afternoon. Once the first vote is over, the 115 cardinals say vespers.

On Wednesday, March 13, the cardinals celebrate Mass in the Pauline Chapel. Half an hour later the second vote begins. The cardinals write the names of their chosen candidates on their ballots before getting up from their tables in the order assigned to them in the College of Cardinals.

Catching one another’s eyes, ballots in hand, they make their way toward a ballot box standing opposite the altar, beneath the Last Judgment. The suspense is enormous.

After two counts, at 11:39 a.m., black smoke billows from the chimney for the second time. No one has reached the magic number of 77 votes.

Bergoglio, however, has taken the lead. In both the second and third ballots of voting that morning, he has received more votes than any of the other papabili—more than fifty in the third ballot. It’s clear that Scola is no longer a likely candidate. Nor are the chances picking up for the Canadian Ouellet, the American O’Malley, or the Brazilian Scherer, whom Vatican insiders indicated was the favorite of the anti-reform block.

The fourth round of voting begins at 4:50 p.m. Bergoglio remembers a friend reminding him of John Paul II’s Universi Dominici Gregis, which ad-

dresses the vacancy of the Apostolic See and the election of a new Roman pontiff: “I also ask the one who is elected not to refuse, for fear of its weight, the office to which he has been called, but to submit humbly to the design of the divine will. God who imposes the burden will sustain him with his hand, so that he will be able to bear it. In conferring the heavy task upon him, God will also help him to accomplish it and, in giving him the dignity, he will grant him the strength not to be overwhelmed by the weight of his office.”

The first man to embrace Padre Jorge when his vote count goes over 77 is the friend sitting next to him, Brazilian Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, who whispers Don’t forget the poor.

As required by ritual, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re asks him: “Do you accept your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff?”

“I am a great sinner, but trusting in the mercy and patience of God, with suffering, I accept,” Padre Jorge replies.

“What name do you take?”

“Francis.”

The acoustics in the Sistine Chapel are not very good. Some cardinals have not heard the name. “Did he say Francis?” others ask. The faces of many of the cardinals reveal more than many words would. No one had ever dared to pick a name like that, a name containing a firm, clear, and direct message, a plan of government even.

Although some think the name is a homage to Francis Xavier, a Jesuit missionary who traveled to Asia, those who really know Bergoglio — the priest who always visited Argentina’s slums, who has always been on the side of the poor, and who renounced all luxuries—realize that he is thinking of Francis of Assisi, known as Il Poverello, the poor friar who dared to criticize the luxuries of the Roman Church during the Middle Ages.

Accompanied by the master of ceremonies, Bergoglio shuts himself away in the “Room of Tears” (stanza delle lacrime), the small sacristy of the Sistine Chapel. The famous papal tailor, Gammarelli, has made three full-length habits in different sizes. Bergoglio chooses the medium one. When he emerges dressed as pope, all in white, the cardinals are once again astonished because he’s wearing his usual cross and silver ring and has turned down the gold papal pectoral cross. Nor does he put on the red mozzetta that his predecessors have used to greet the world for the first time. “No, thank you,” Bergoglio says to the assistant who Spring 2015 29

is helping him dress. Nor does he let them take off his black shoes.

The first thing the new pope does is go straight to talk to a Cardinal who is in very bad health, confined to a wheelchair, and who has taken part in the conclave with some difficulty: Ivan Dias, Archbishop Emeritus of Bombay/Mumbai. The cardinals then file by, one by one, to offer Francis their obedience. When the cardinals from Vietnam and China, seventy-nine- year-old Jean-Baptiste Pham Minh Man and seventy-twoyear-old John Tong Hon, try to kiss his ring, he stops them, and he, Francis, kisses their hands. Tong presents him a gift: a small bronze statue of Our Lady of Sheshan, whose shrine is on the outskirts of Shanghai.

Then the cardinals sing the “Te Deum,” a hymn of thanks. Francis steps alone into the Pauline Chapel to pray.

It is 8:12 p.m. The Cardinal in charge of protocol, the Frenchman Jean-Louis Tauran, appears on the balcony. He reads a Latin phrase that will go down in history for the faithful the world over, and particularly for Argentines: Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum; habemus papam: eminentissimum ac reverendissimum Dominum, Dominum Georgium Marium Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Bergoglio qui sibi nomen imposuit Franciscum.

Ten minutes later, Padre Jorge, dressed in white, comes out onto the balcony. He looks astonished.

“Brothers and sisters,” he says, in Italian, “buona sera. You know that the duty of the conclave was to provide Rome with a Bishop. It seems my brother cardinals went to the end of the world to fetch him! But here we are!”

He pays eloquent homage to his predecessor, and then he leads the crowd in praying the Our Father and the Hail Mary, and then he talks for a moment about how “…we set off on this journey together, a journey of brotherhood, love, and trust…”

And then, before he offers his first blessing to the world as pope, he does a beautifully Bergoglio thing, a classic Padre Jorge thing, an astonishing thing, a humble thing: he bows his head and asks the crowd to pray for him. n From Francis: Life and Revolution, a biography of Jorge Bergoglio, by Elisabetta Piqué, from Loyola Press.

Piqué is the Italy and Vatican correspondent for the Argentine newspaper La Nación.

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UnderWater Deeper water: a note.

By Anne Fadiman

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was an impatient child who disliked obstructions: traffic jams, clogged bathtub drains, catsup bottles you had to bang. I liked to drop twigs into the stream that ran through our backyard and watch them float downstream, coaxed around rocks and branches by the distant pull of the ocean. If they hit a snag, I freed them.

When I was eighteen, rushing through life as fast as I could, I was a student on a month-long wilderness program in western Wyoming. On the third day of the course we went canoeing on the Green River, a tributary of the Colorado that begins in the glaciers of the Wind River range that flows south across the sagebrush plains. Swollen by warm-weather runoff from an unusually deep snowpack, the Green was higher and swifter that month—June of 1972— than it had been in forty years. A river at flood stage can have strange currents. There is not enough room in the channel for the water to move

downstream in an orderly fashion, so it collides with itself and forms whirlpools and boils and souse-holes. Our instructors decided to stick to their itinerary nevertheless, but they put in at a relatively easy section of the Green, one that the flood had merely upgraded, in the international system of whitewater classification, from Class I to Class II. There are six levels of difficulty, and Class II was not an unreasonable challenge for novice paddlers.

The Green River did not seem dangerous to me. It seemed magnificently unobstructed. Impediments to progress—the rocks and stranded trees that under normal conditions would protrude above the surface— were mostly submerged. The river carried our aluminum canoe high and lightly, like a child on a pair of broad shoulders. We could rest our paddles on the gunwales and let the water do our work. The sun was bright and hot. Every few minutes I dipped Portland 30

my bandanna in the river, draped it over my head, and let an ounce or two of melted glacier run down my neck.

I was in the bow of the third canoe. We rounded a bend and saw, fifty feet ahead, a standing wave in the wake of a large black boulder.

The students in the lead canoe were attempting to avoid the boulder by back-ferrying, slipping crabwise across the current by angling their boat diagonally and stroking backward.

Done right, back-ferrying allows paddlers to hover midstream and carefully plan their course instead of surrendering to the water’s impetuous pace. But if they lean upstream— a natural inclination, as few people choose to lean toward the difficulties that lie ahead—the current can overflow the lowered gunwale and flip the boat. And that is what happened to the lead canoe.

I wasn’t worried when I saw it go over. Knowing that we might capsize in the fast water, our instructors had

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arranged to have our gear trucked to our next campsite. The packs were safe. The water was little more than waist-deep, and the paddlers were both wearing life jackets. They would be fine. One was already scrambling onto the right-hand bank.

But where was the second paddler?

Gary, a local boy from Rawlins a year or two younger than I, seemed to be hung up on something. He was standing at a strange angle in the middle of the river, just downstream from the boulder. Gary was the only student on the course who had not brought sneakers, and one of his mountaineering boots had become wedged between two rocks. The instructors would come around the bend in a moment and pluck him out, like a twig from a snag.

But they didn’t come. The second canoe pulled over to the bank and ours followed. Thirty seconds passed, maybe a minute. Then we saw the standing wave bend Gary’s body for-

ward at the waist, push his face underwater, stretch his arms in front of him, and slip his orange life jacket off his shoulders. The life jacket lingered for a moment at his wrists before it floated downstream, its long white straps twisting in the current. His shirtless torso was pale and undulating, and it changed shape as hills and valleys of water flowed over him, altering the curve of the liquid lens through which we watched him. I thought: He looks like the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel. As soon as I had the thought, I knew that it was dishonorable. To think about anything outside the moment, outside Gary, was a crime of inattention. I swallowed a small, sour piece of self-knowledge: I was the sort of person who, instead of weeping or shouting or praying during a crisis, thought about something from a textbook (H. W. Janson’s History of Art, page 360).

Once the flayed man had come, I could not stop the stream of images: Gary looked like a piece of seaweed. Gary looked like a waving handkerchief, Gary looked like a hula dancer. Each simile was a way to avoid thinking about what Gary was, a drowning boy. To remember these things is dishonorable, too, for I have long since forgotten Gary’s last name and the color of his hair and the sound of his voice.

I do not remember a single word that anyone said. Somehow we got into one of the canoes, all five of us and tried to ferry the twenty feet or so to the middle of the river. The current was so strong, and we were so incompetent, that we never even got close. Then we tried it on foot, linking arms to form a chain. The water was so cold that it stung. And it was noisy, not the roar and crash of whitewater but a groan, a terrible bass grumble, from the stones that were rolling and leaping down the riverbed. When we got close to Gary, we couldn’t see him. All we could see was the reflection of the sky. A couple of times, groping blindly, one of us touched him, but he was slippery as soap. Then our knees buckled, and our elbows unlocked, and we rolled downstream, like the stones.

The river’s rocky load, moving invisibly beneath its smooth surface, pounded and scraped us. Eventually the current heaved us, blue-lipped and panting, onto the bank. In that other world above the water, the only sounds were the buzzing of bees and flies. Our wet sneakers kicked up red dust. The air smelled of sage and rabbitbrush and sunbaked earth.

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We tried again and again, back and forth between the worlds. Wet, dry, cold, hot, turbulent, still.

At first I assumed that we would save him. He would lie on the bank and the sun would warm him while we administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. If we couldn’t get him out, we would hold him upright in the river; maybe he could still breathe.

But the Green River was flowing at nearly three thousand cubic feet— about ninety tons—per second. At that rate, water can wrap a canoe around a boulder like tinfoil. Water can uproot a tree. Water can squeeze the air out of a boy’s lungs, undo knots, drag off a life jacket, lever a boot so tightly into the riverbed that even if we had had ropes—the ropes that were in the packs that were in the trucks— we never could have budged him.

We kept going in, not because we had any hope of saving Gary after the first ten minutes but because we needed to save face. It would have been humiliating if the instructors had come around the bend and found us sitting in the sagebrush, a docile row of five with no hypothermia and no skinned knees. Eventually, they did come. The boats had been delayed because one of them had nearly capsized, and the instructors had made the students stop and practice backferrying until they learned not to lean upstream. Even though Gary had already drowned, the instructors did all the same things we had done, more competently but no more effectively, because they, too, would have been humiliated if they hadn’t skinned their knees. Men in wetsuits, belayed with ropes, pried the body out the next morning.

Twenty-seven years have passed.

My life seems too fast now, so obstructions bother me less than they once did. I am no longer in a hurry to see what is around the next bend. I find myself wanting to back-ferry, to hover midstream, suspended. If I could do that, I might avoid many things: harsh words, foolish decisions, moments of inattention, regrets that wash over me, like water. n Anne Fadiman, who will receive an honorary doctorate from the University in May for her extraordinary career as writer, editor, and witness to grace and courage, teaches writing at Yale University. She is the author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, about Hmong people in America, and of the essay collections Ex Libris and At Large and At Small, from which latter this essay is drawn. Our thanks to Anne for the loan.

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Unconditional Surrender A West Point professor musing on her hero: Ulysses Grant.

By Elizabeth Samet

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he routines and habits of celebrated writers provide a subject of perpetual fascination. Readers hunger for the preferably wretched details of artistic creation. If idiosyncrasy is good (John Cheever typing in his underwear, Vladimir Nabokov standing up to shuffle a deck of index cards into Lolita, Truman Capote lying down with coffee and a cigarette), stamina, duress, and deprivation are better (Jean-Paul Marat scratching out revolution atop a box beside the bathtub in which he cooled his scorching psoriasis, the visually impaired James Joyce wearing a white jacket better to illuminate the page, Mavis Gallant pawning her typewriter and starving in Madrid while her agent hoarded her New Yorker checks).

Perhaps what we admire most in writers is their ability to vanquish the noise of life—from the low hum of the quotidian to the high whine of crisis—by achieving a state of deep concentration that seals them, in the most extreme cases from physical or emotional pain, but more often simply from the insistent, contrary rhythms of responsibility. Consider the case of the prolific novelist Anthony Trollope, who arose at 5:30 every morning to write steadily for three hours before breakfasting and heading off to a day’s work as a postal surveyor.

A world that celebrates the hyperattention technology abets tends to regard the sort of deep attention still required for not just the writing life and but all those lives that demand the solving of difficult problems as rather antiquated and unfashionable.

Despite the warnings of cognitive scientists about important limitations Grant at work on his memoirs on his porch, in June of 1885; he died a month later, only 63 years old.

to our multitasking capacity, and about the overconfidence multitasking breeds, our commitment to it seems only to grow. Perhaps there is no better test of deep attention than the ability to write while the bombs are falling; and the most persuasive exemplar of such determined focus I know is Ulysses S. Grant.

Grant earned his nickname— “Unconditional Surrender” Grant— from his refusal to offer any concessions to the Confederates at Tennessee’s Fort Donelson, which he attacked in 1862. “No terms,” Grant informed his adversary and old acquaintance, Simon Bolivar Buckner, “except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.”

Unconditional surrender might equally well describe Grant’s approach to writing, an enterprise to which he gave himself over with single-minded focus.

Horace Porter, a member of the general’s staff, offers a portrait of his commander at work: His powers of concentration … were often shown by the circumstances under which he wrote. Nothing that went on around him, upon the field or in his quarters, could distract his attention or interrupt him.

Sometimes, when his tent was filled with officers, talking and laughing at the top of their voices, he would turn to his table and write the most important communications. There would then be an immediate “Hush!” and abundant excuses offered by the company; but he always insisted upon the conversation going on, and after a while his officers came … to learn that noise was apparently Spring 2015 33

a stimulus rather than a check to his flow of ideas, and to realize that nothing sort of a general attack along the whole line could divert his thoughts from the subject upon which his mind was concentrated.

On the road Grant never liked to retrace his steps. When lost, he would carry right on rather than turning around. He seemed to have had the same superstition about his prose, which he crafted, as Porter documents, with relentless efficiency: His work was performed swiftly and uninterruptedly, but without any marked display of nervous energy. His thoughts flowed as freely from his mind as the ink from his pen; he was never at a loss for an expression, and seldom interlined a word or made a material correction. He sat with his head bent low over the table, and when he had occasion to step to another table or desk to get a paper he wanted, he would glide rapidly across the room without straightening him-self, and return to his seat with his body still bent over at about the same angle at which he had been sitting when he left his chair.

Fastidious about language, Grant was indifferent to tools and surroundings alike. Nothing could distract him.

In the field “he wrote with the first pen he happened to pick up,” sharp or blunt, “good or bad” His desk “was always in a delirious state of confusion” —a “literary geography,” Porter tells us, that baffled everyone except Grant, who could find a document he wanted “even in the dark.” The unshakeable concentration that Grant exhibited in

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the field also enabled him to complete his memoirs as he was dying of throat cancer two decades later, all the while convinced that each word he wrote hammered “another nail” in his coffin.

The style of the memoirs, like that of the wartime writings, is distinguished by economy and precision.

Our current discourse about war veers from euphemism—kinetic operations, persistent low-intensity conflict, hearts and minds—to a deeply romanticized, unreflective rhetoric about heroes and values, to the equally and paradoxically romantic language of knowingness, cynicism, and disaffection inherited from pop-culture depictions of Vietnam (“Apocalypse Now speak,” one might call this last cate-

gory). It is all or nothing; there is no room for ambiguity.

Caught between gauzy nostalgia for a “good war” and the current realities of a dubious one, today’s discussions are too often muddied by a reluctance to acknowledge that the deaths of good people in bankrupt causes do nothing to ameliorate those causes, or that armies serving just ends comprise soldiers with a wild variety of motives.

Americans seem constitutionally incapable of accepting that even a “good war” is never fought for a single good cause alone nor ever won without brutal methods.

Grant fought in two wars, the Mexican War and the Civil War. The latter

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he believed a war of principle, the former “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” But he never allowed the fact that brave men died in Mexico to distort his opinion of its politics, nor did he permit his belief in the cause of union to gild the waste of human life that secured it. More than a century has passed since Grant’s death, and we are at war again, or still. His writing reveals another way to talk about war.

To his wife on his first battle: There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in evry direction but I find they have much less horror when among them than when in anticipation.

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Ulysses Grant (seated at left) with his family, date unknown; Grant absorbing the news, circa 1880.

ing it back, this and much more that has been said about it is the purest romance.

Now that the war has commenced with such vengence I am in hopes my Dear Julia that we will soon be able to end it.

Perhaps Grant’s philosophy of composition is best expressed in his description of the letter he sent to Lee accepting the latter’s surrender: “When I put my pen to the paper I did not know the first word that I should make use of in writing the terms. I only knew what was in my mind, and I wished to express it clearly, so that there could be no mistaking it.” Grant loves that final phrase. He repeats it several times in the Memoirs to describe both his own prose style and that of his hero Taylor.

On his second: [T]he battle of Resaca de la Palma would have been won, just as it was, if I had not been there.

On his first mission in command during the Civil War: I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to call a halt and consider what to do; I kept right on.

On the character of Zachary Taylor: No soldier could face either danger or responsibility more calmly than he. These are qualities more rarely found than genius or physical courage.

On the surrender of Robert E. Lee: That much talked of surrendering of Lee’s sword and my hand-

A friend likes to tease me that there is no conversation into which I cannot smuggle a mention of Grant.

When it happens—when my mind works itself around from an apparently unrelated subject to the Civil War general—she’ll say, “Ah, Grant!” as if he’s a mutual acquaintance she hasn’t heard news of in a while: “There he is. It was only a matter of time.” She’s right, of course: Grant is my idée fixe. (How many people can say that?) I’ll drop his name at what may seem the most unlikely moment.

It just seems to me the right connection to make in so many circumstances, especially in recent years, Spring 2015 35

when we have taken to talking about war in ways that differ profoundly from the clear-sighted, plain-speaking mode that was second nature to him.

Not infrequently, on a Sunday afternoon, as the church bells sound through Morningside Heights, I make my way uptown for a visit to the General Grant National Memorial, a.k.a.

“Grant’s Tomb.” Dedicated in 1897, this massive granite pile was modeled after Mausolus’s at Halicarnassus.

Groucho Marx long ago turned the tomb into a joke by asking who was buried there, and the memorial’s neglect has periodically provoked Grant’s relatives to threaten to remove his remains to Ohio. On a recent trip I overheard one tourist say to another: “I didn’t even know we had a president named Grant, did you?” When I visit, I think chiefly of Grant the writer rather than of the president or even the general. He would have found the place far too quiet: no bombs falling, nothing more than the occasional whispered conversation to stimulate his deep attention.n Elizabeth Samet is a professor of literature at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and the author of the books Soldier’s Heart and Willing Obedience. Her most recent book is No Man’s Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America.

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memory that makes Mehling a part of your story? E-mail your stories and photos to reunion@up.edu and don’t forget to mark your calendars for June 25-28.

ALUMNI AWARDS PRESENTED AT STATE OF UP LUNCHEON The annual State of the University and Alumni Awards luncheon is set for Tuesday, March 17, at 11:30 a.m., at the Sentinel Hotel (formerly the Governor). University president Rev. Mark L. Poorman, C.S.C., will share the latest campus news and talk about how the University is making a dramatic difference in the lives of students as well as local, national, and world communities. We will also honor our 2015 Alumni Award winners and recognize the student recipient of this year’s Gerhardt Award. RSVP online at up.edu/rsvp/stateofup.

WHAT’S YOUR MEHLING MOMENT? In the 50 years since it welcomed its first residents, Mehling Hall has been, to the thousands of women who have lived on its eight floors, more than just a place to sleep, snack, and study. From the earliest residents to its latterday dwellers, the women of Mehling all have one thing in common: they know that what makes Mehling special are those surprising, silly, or special moments that make it more than eight floors of doors, more than the tallest building in North Portland, more than just a place to live for a semester or a year or two or four. It’s those moments that make Mehling a community. It’s those moments that make Mehling a home.

This summer at Reunion, we’re celebrating Mehling and the moments that make it special. Mehling alumnae, we’re looking for you. What are your Mehling Moments? What’s the

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more meaningful alumni engagement, please e-mail alumni@up.edu.

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early dinner and a poker tournament hosted by Fr. Pat Hannon, C.S.C. ’82. Spouses and significant others are welcome to join in on the fun.

RSVP to Christie Hall director Joe Burke at 503-943-7575 or burke@up.edu.

CYRANO AT PORTLAND CENTER STAGE, APRIL 9 SAVE THE DATE FOR REUNION 2015, JUNE 25-28 Join us back on The Bluff this summer for a weekend of celebration and renewal at Reunion 2015! We’ll celebrate the 80th anniversary of the School of Nursing on Saturday afternoon and the 50th birthday of Mehling Hall all weekend long. Alumni of the Entrepreneur Scholars program will have a networking social overlooking the St. Johns Bridge on Friday night, and will host a panel discussion and social on Saturday. We’ll induct the Class of 1965 into the 50 Year Club, gather the Class of 1990 for their 25th, and celebrate milestone anniversaries for all classes that graduated in 0s and 5s. The UP cross country women and men will be running around all weekend celebrating the tremendous success of the program over the years. Visit reunion.up.edu to see the full schedule and to register. Reunion 2015 will be a weekend to remember, and we hope to see you here!

Set in 17th century France, Cyrano tells the story of a great swordsman with a beautiful soul, who is handicapped by a huge nose that makes him believe he is incapable of being loved. Filled with swordplay and wordplay, Cyrano is beloved for it affirmation of love, friendship, and the power of humor. Set for Thursday, April 9, at 7:30 p.m. at Portland Center Stage, the $36 price includes show ticket and preshow gathering at Nossa Familia Coffee. RSVP to alumni relations at 503943-7328 or alumni@up.edu.

This spring, alumni representatives will host volunteer opportunities across the country as well as in Portland. Please check the Alumni Website at up.edu/alumni for updated information on your area’s plans.

YOUNG ALUMNI WINE TASTING, APRIL 11

CHEF’S TABLE DINNERS Seats at Bon Appétit’s multicourse Chef’s Table Dinners have become some of the most sought-after tickets on campus. Reserve your seat at one of our upcoming dinners

by RSVPing to alumni relations at 503-943-7328 or alumni@up.edu. Chef Kirk Mustain and his colleagues never fail to dazzle lucky diners at this popular event. Dinners are scheduled for Saturday, April 18, and Saturday, May 9.

Graduates of the last decade (GOLD) are invited to catch up with fellow young alumni at ENSO Tasting Room on Saturday, April 11, at 3 p.m.

The $25 ticket includes a wine flight with a charcuterie, cheese, and bread pairing led by the winemaker. RSVP to alumni relations at 503-9437328 or alumni@up.edu.

NATIONAL ALUMNI BOARD TALKS STRATEGY Members of UP’s National Alumni Board converged on the Bluff in January for a strategic planning session with management consultant Matthew McTigue ’07. The biggest takeaway from the session? The board is raring to go, but its members also need your help! If you’re interested in volunteering your time or talent to help the board achieve its goals of wider,

2015 ALUMNI DAY OF SERVICE

COFFEE TASTING AT NOSSA FAMILIA CHRISTIE ALUMNI MASS AND POKER TOURNEY The men of Christie Hall are hosting alumni on Saturday, April 18, for an afternoon of stories, food, and fellowship.

A 3 p.m. Mass in the Christie Chapel will be followed by an

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If you’re a coffee lover, join us on Saturday, May 16, at 10:30 a.m., for a cupping (tasting) session with Nossa Familia Coffee to learn more about fine coffees and how to brew them at home. Tickets are $25 and include a pound of your favorite Nossa Familia coffee. RSVP to alumni relations at 503-9437328 or alumni@up.edu.

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Among the many letters we received for the Autumn 2014 Football Issue of this magazine was one from Terri Fraser about her dad, the late Joe Enzler ’40, who was a remarkable soul for all sorts of reasons, and we will sing and celebrate him right here, as a sort of prayer. Tillamook native. All-American football fullback and defensive lineman on The Bluff in 1940 — the only Oregon player on the national all-star team. Track star also for the Pilots: held the school shot put record (and the Washington state high school record, too, when he was at Woodland High). Graduated magna cum laude in pre-med, wow. Played two years of pro football for the Portland Boilermakers before serving as an officer in the Navy during the war. Taught and coached at Cleveland High (then called Commerce), where one of his runners was a skinny brilliant Phil Knight and one of his best students was a skinny brilliant Don Romanaggi ’56. Spent almost 30 years working hard for the Portland School District, doing his best to elevate the lives of kids. But all these feats pale compared to his accomplishments as a husband and a dad and grandfather: gentle, patient, loving, tender, selfless, gracious, humorous, attentive, a rock of a man with a heart like an ocean. One of the greatest athletes ever at the University? Sure. But even more we honor the wonderful man. That the University of Portland had something to do with shaping a man like that is a compliment beyond measure to the University. Of such great souls are we composed. Rest in peace, Joe. Spring 2015 37

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C L A S S Carl Deiz ’49, one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, died on December 1, 2014, at the age of 94. The Tuskegee Airmen were a group of African American fighter pilots who helped break the color barrier in the Army Air Force by proving they could not only fly fighters but engage in air combat—the group shot down 111 enemy aircraft, destroyed another 150 on the ground, and earned 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses. Allied bomber pilots breathed a sigh of relief when they saw the red tails of the Tuskegee Airmen fighters coming to escort them home. Carl went through flight school at Tuskegee but a depth perception problem kept him from being part of the action; his older brother and fellow Tuskegee Airman, Bob Deiz, shot down at least two German fighters.

After the war he spent most of his career with the Bonneville Power Administration, and kept up his interest in flying, especially with his brother Bob, who passed away in 1992. Carl was married to Mercedes Deiz, a former Circuit Court judge who was the first black woman admitted to the Oregon bar. She died in 2005. Survivors include two sons, Bill Deiz and Gilbert Carl Deiz; and seven grandchildren; his daughter, Karen Deiz, died in 2008. Carl had recently taken part in the inauguration of University president Rev. Mark L. Poorman, C.S.C., as an honored guest and representative of the Class of 1949, and was pictured in our Winter 2014 issue.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

50 YEAR CLUB Hazel Neiger ’39 passed away on October 18, 2014, at the age of 97. She was married for 67 years to Bill Neiger, and worked in surgery at St. Vincent Hospital and later at Physicians and Surgeons Hospital. Survivors include children, Kathy Leslie ; Ron Neiger; daughter-in-law, Shirley; sister-in-law, Marcella Smith; grandchildren; greatgrandchildren; and nieces and nephews. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Thomas Patrick Volk ’41 passed away on November 13, 2014. He met his future wife, Mary Dorothy Wright, in second grade. Tom graduated from Columbia Preparatory

School and was inducted into the U.S. Army in 1943, serving with the U.S. Army’s 10th Armored Division, earning the Purple Heart and Bronze Star.

He became an optician in Portland for more than 40 years.

Survivors include his wife of 68 years, Mary Dorothy; children, Marylin Shaw, Thomas Volk Jr., Diane VolkReeves, Patricia Volk, Anne Runde, Mary Volk, and Stephen Volk; and grandchildren, Shari Metsker, Matthew

N O T E S Shaw, Elizabeth Runde, Joseph Runde, Danny Volk, and Alec Volk. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Verna Armstrong ’44 passed away on January 13, 2014, at the age of 93. After earning her nursing degree at UP she enjoyed a long career of taking care of others.

Survivors include her son, David Armstrong (Sue); daughter, Diane Boyte (Howard); and granddaughters Chelsea, Katherine, and Amanda. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Manda (Brajcich) Gates ’44 died on August 16, 2014, in San Antonio, Texas. After earning her nursing degree at UP she was commissioned as an Ensign in the U.S. Navy Nurses Corps in 1945.

She spent the majority of her time, energy, and efforts lovingly raising her seven children. Preceding her in death were her husband of 66 years, Doyle Gates; and brothers, Prosper Brajcich and Jack Brajcich.

She is survived by Stephen and Barbara Gates, Barbara and Joseph Smith, Robert Gates, Gary and Rae Gates, Susan and Dwayne Clay, Thomas and Martha Gates, Patrick and Shirley Gates; fourteen grandchildren; and eleven great-grandchildren.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Martin W. Schmidt ’47 died on December 10, 2014, in Portland, Ore. He was a veteran of World War II, serving as a Navy officer. He married Nancy Teufel in September of 1950, and soon after began developing their family cut greenery and cut flower business, Martin Schmidt & Sons. Survivors include Nancy; sons, Karl, Peter, and Steve; five grandchildren; and four greatgrandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Alvin Schwerdt ’48 passed away on October 31, 2014. He was a Korean War veteran, serving in the “FECOM” 24th Infantry Division until 1953, and received the Silver Star,

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Bronze Star, and four Purple Hearts. In 1953, he married Jeannine Fahlman, the love of his life. They were married 61 years. A dedicated outdoorsman, Alvin caught an 83pound King salmon on the Kenai River in Alaska, which at the time was the largest ever recorded. It is proudly displayed at his Hammond home along with heads, skins, and racks from his guided hunting expeditions. Survivors include his wife, Jeannine; daughters, Susan Nicoletti and Jeannine Buskuhl; sons-inlaw, Robert Nicoletti and Steven Johnson; grandchildren, Kimberly Bower, Stacy Morin, Nick, Drew and Shelby Johnson and Paige Nicoletti; and great-grandchildren, Kadence Bower, Blakely Morin, Samuel Johnson and Jacob and William Johnson.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Ann Marie Dombrovski ’47 passed away on September 28, 2012, in Gresham, Ore. Survivors include her brothers, Alfonse Baresh, Henry Baresh, and Joseph Baresh; and sister, Pearl. Her husband, Sergejs, preceded her in death. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Louis Bride ’48 passed away on November 22, 2014. He served in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific in WWII and spent most of his career as an engineer with Tektronix. He is survived by his wife of 31 years, Adelina; daughters,

Here we have the estimable John Beckman ’42, in 1943, striking his theatrical pose.

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C L A S S Eileen Bride, Andrea Bride, and Cecelia Marrs; seven grandchildren; and one greatgrandson. He was predeceased by his first wife, Bernadine; and son, Bill. The family suggests donations to the University of Portland in lieu of flowers. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Benedictine Abbot Joseph Wood ’49, who led Mount Angel Abbey from 1997 to 2001, died at the age of 91 on December 17, 2014. A veteran of World War II, Wood was one of a flood of GI Bill veterans who came to UP after the war’s end. He entered Mount Angel Seminary after graduating in 1949. He made his monastic vows in 1952 and was ordained in 1956. Wood taught sociology, economics, anthropology, Catholic social doctrine, and a host of other subjects in the seminary until 1975, when he was assigned as assistant pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Tillamook. He worked for the Archdiocese of Portland and St. Paul Parish in Eugene before returning to monastic life at the Monastery of the Ascension in Jerome, Idaho, in 1991. It was then that God surprised him with a new assignment as Abbot of Mount Angel Abbey at the age of 74. By all accounts a personable, dedicated, cheerful, and spiritual man, Abbot Joe Wood will be missed. Our prayers and condolences to the family and his religious order.

Please remember Nick Cassinelli ’49 and his family in your prayers after the loss of his wife, Dolores Cassinelli,

on January 12, 2015. She was a homemaker, and went to work as a secretary at Bridlemile, Normandale, and Laurelhurst grade schools after her children were grown. Survivors include Nick; sister, Bernice Pluchos; children, James, David, Richard, Robert, and Ann; 15 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Emil Nemarnik ’50 passed away on January 10, 2015, surrounded by family. Emil was a produce man by trade, starting in the produce section in a small, neighborhood grocery store while attending Central Catholic High School. He eventually developed Pacific Coast Fruit Company in 1977, a thriving business to this day. Survivors include his wife, Kathleen (Spada) ’51; children, Nancy, Dave, MaryAnn, John and Diane; six grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; brother, Evo; sister, Angela; and many friends. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Prayers, please, for Don Dorres ’51, who lost his wife, Suzanne, on April 9, 2014, when she passed away peacefully after a great game of golf. Survivors include Don, her husband of 61 years; children, Bob Dorres, Peggy Ashworth, Nancy Nuerenberg, Bill Dorres, Kathy Grogan, and Trish Keaton; brother, Mike Meaney; and grandchildren, Michaela, Daniel, Jamie,

Al Goldsmith ’50 was an active soul while a student on The Bluff—he was secretary of his class, he wrote a regular column for The Beacon (“Gold Dust”), and he was, bless our souls, the University band’s drum major, along with his classmate Al Witty.

You know, not every day do we have the glorious chance to print a photograph as alluring as this one, but today is the day. Our thanks to Al’s son Peter Goldsmith.

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N O T E S Here’s a photo of the late Commander Jack Bahlman ’42, finishing Navy flight school in Florida before he went off to war against empires that sought to enslave the world. He served on the U.S.S. Essex as flight squadron skipper; made an emergency landing on the U.S.S. Hornet during the Battle of Midway, because his home ship the Yorktown had been hit; served again in Korea; flight instructor and pilot and real estate man after the wars. Like so many men of that time, he didn’t think what he had done was especially notable; it was what any decent fellow would do, standing up against murderous bullies. His son Ron tells this story: when his dad’s memory was fading, at the end of his life, Ron would read from this magazine to his dad, which set the Commander to remembering his childhood, and his days at UP, and the first years of his marriage, and many other “aspects of my father’s life I had never known,” says Ron. This magazine helped a son know his dad better, and helped a dad walk back into bright memories of a life he loved as a youth. We love when the magazine matters deeply like that. A prayer for the Commander, and for all the men and women who stood up against bloody bullies, and still do.

—Editors Jeanne, Jenny, Nolan, Bridget, Sarah, and Joe. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Joseph Brugato ’51 passed away on December 20, 2014.

A three-year letterman in baseball at Portland’s Washington High School, Joe was 1st Team All-PIL as catcher and member of the state championship baseball team. He coached at Cascade Locks and Central Catholic High School in Portland, where he took both the basketball and baseball teams to the state playoffs each year he coached from 1955 to 1957. He was inducted into the PIL Hall of Fame in 2010. Joe was a mathematics teacher for over 20 years at Madison and Wilson high schools, and later established Brugato and Sons Realty

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in Newberg. Survivors include his wife of 62 years, Marita Brugato; sons, Gary ’77 and Greg Brugato; daughters, Mary Jo Wagner, Debbie Brugato, Karen Lamb, Cathy Brugato, Theresa Brugato, and Angela Davis; 19 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. His daughter, LaDonna Brugato, preceded him in death. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

John Waite ’52 died peacefully on January 7, 2015, in Portland, Ore. His wife of 60 years, Janet, preceded him in death just five weeks earlier. Following his high school teaching career, John was a college professor for 30 years. John, Janet and their four children enjoyed many adventures while living in Oregon, Virginia, Guam, Colorado, and Washington. Survivors include their children, David, Richard, Nanci, and Karen; six grand-

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C L A S S We received word that David Ernest Mazzocco ’50, a Portland native and longtime resident, died on January 8, 2015. He was 92. Dave and his brother, the late William Mazzocco ’37 (the boys are pictured at left), were born to Italian immigrants, and grew up in a working class SE Portland neighborhood of duplexes with vegetable gardens. Despite their meager income, Dave’s parents prioritized a good education for their two children. Dave attended local parochial schools and, after completing high school, he joined the Army Air Corps.

He served as an Air Force pilot in World War II, then followed his older brother into the Foreign Service, with brief assignments as an accountant in Greece and Iceland. He then returned to Portland where he settled down with his bride, Carmen, the love of his life, and eventually established a successful real estate business. Dave supported causes such as the YMCA and ASPCA, and was known as an eternal joker who lived by the mantra, “I just try to have a little fun along the way.” One version of his business card included only his name in the center, with a phrase in each corner specifying, “No office, No time, No phone, No problem.”

After Carmen’s untimely death in 1990, Dave moved to California, but always considered Portland his home. He frequently returned to manage his properties and maintain his roots, and especially to spend time with his beloved big brother Bill, who passed away on August 4, 2004. Now Dave and Carmen are reunited in their final resting place, at home in Portland.

Survivors include Bill’s five children. children; and three greatgrandchildren, with one more on the way. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

We heard recently from Tony Isaia ’53, whose generous gift to the University was accompanied by this message: “By

making this contribution I’m honoring two teachers that made a significant impact on my life. The two are Brother Godfrey Vassallo and Father John Delaunay. These two both affected my spiritual and professional career. In terms

N O T E S of ‘my story,’ I am a WWII veteran whose service was in the Pacific Theater. I was separated in Seattle, Wash., and entered UP with the Class of 1949. I was on the baseball team for four years. I’m probably the first UP student from Brooklyn, NY, but more meaningfully perhaps, I am probably the first graduate to enter the computing field—before there was a computing field.”

Thanks for writing, Tony, and also for your generosity in the name of two of our finest.

Richard Doumitt ’54 passed away on October 22, 2014, after a long illness. He dedicated his life to serving his country, state, and community, completing two tours of duty in the U.S. Navy in Japan and later in the Korean War. He worked for the Oregon State Department of Revenue for 35 years, ending his career as the head of the fiduciary department. Survivors include his wife, Alice Joyce; sons, Casey and Rhett; and sisters, Minnette and Leanore.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Howard M. “Mark” Budlong ’54 died on December 28, 2014, with his family by his side. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy before finishing at UP and served valiantly on the

U.S.S. Kenneth Whiting during the Korean War. After the war, Mark worked for Pacific Northwest Bell and later took over as owner of Bill’s Steakhouse for 30 years. After his first marriage he wed his sweetheart, Charmion (Biehn) Golden, in 1999. Survivors include Charmion; his sons, Brian, Bradley, and James Budlong; daughter, Elaine Budlong; stepsons, Daniel and James Golden; four grandsons; and a niece and nephew.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

William “Bill” Kneeland ’54 passed away on June 20, 2014, in San Diego, Calif. Born in Seattle, he was the older of twin boys. Bill served as a hospital corpsman in the Navy

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from 1955 to 1960. He was active in San Diego Mission Lions, the Squibob Chapter of E Clampus Vitus, American Legion Post 201, and the San Diego Mystery Club. He is survived by his wife of 43 years, Marilyn; and numerous nieces and nephews. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Kathryn L. Scott ’54 passed away on January 19, 2015. She met the love of her life, the late Edward Scott, on a double date; little did Kathy know that the “Ed” on the double date would be her University of Portland logic professor, Edward M. Scott.

Ed swept her off her feet and they were married on February 20, 1954. She was the first woman to sit on the Tigard School Board, a position she held from 1974 to 1981, and became the Oregon School Board Association President in 1981. She also worked with Ed on The International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, where she was the managing editor and editorial assistant.

Survivors include her children, Kathleen Hollingsworth, Mike Scott, Maureen Miller, Tim Scott, and Molly Leithold; 13 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Jerry Funk ’56 passed away on November 16, 2014, in Helena, Montana. He joined the U.S. Navy during the Korean War and enrolled at the University of Portland on his return. He went to work for the CIA in 1961, serving as an intelligence analyst and operations officer.

Jerry was senior staff member for African affairs on the National Security Council during the Carter Administration. He and his wife, Moffie, started their own political and economic consulting company, and worked for years in Africa, serving for a time as an informal adviser to President Nujoma of Namibia. The Funks moved back to Montana when Jerry retired in 1995. Survivors include his wife, Moffie Funk; his children, Mark, Melanie (and Josh) Friedman, Matthew (and Julie) Payne-Funk,

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C L A S S Megan (and Kenny) Brisbane, Rebkah (and Desmond) Howard, Robert and Laura; stepchildren Prize Funk, Holy Funk, Gabriella (and Ababu) Tedessa; adopted daughter/ niece Theresa Hamrick; second wife, Meaza Simenehe Funk; his 19 lively grandchildren and step-grandchildren; and 12 always individualistic nieces and nephews. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Ann Scheuring ’58 passed away on October 20, 2014, after a valiant struggle with cancer. She was named Mary Ann Foley, but throughout most of her life she was called Ann. She was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to pursue a graduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley, and traveled to Germany in 1959-60 as a Fulbright student and teaching assistant. At Berkeley she completed most of the requirements for a doctorate before starting her family. Ann was an editor and writer at UC Davis for more than 20 years, producing a number of books in conjunction with others and several on her own. In 2010 she published her last book, Valley Empires: Hugh Glenn and Henry Miller in the Shaping of California. Survivors include her husband of 53 years, David; children, Chris, Rachel, and Paul; and seven grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Robert Keyes ’58 passed away on October 6, 2012, after a lengthy illness. He was an Army veteran, serving as a radio man in the Signal Corps, from 1944 through 1946. Bob owned and operated SavAt Cleaners in Ventura, Calif., for 18 years before his retirement. He was a lover of the Big Bands, and was also an avid ballroom dancer. Survivors include his wife of 61 years, Doris; sons and daughters-in-law, Robert and Sherry Keyes and Ralph and Ann Keyes; daughter and son-inlaw, Nancy and Mark Wipf; five grandchildren; one greatgranddaughter; and his brother Frank Keyes and sister Helen O’Reilly. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Lillian Manning, wife of Arden Manning ’59, passed away on the evening of Thanksgiving, November 27, 2014, after spending time with

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her family. Survivors include husband, Arden; son, Richard, twins Susan and David; and grandchildren, Katie, Nina and Trevor. “The light and loving presence, quick wit, and wicked sense of humor she brought to her family and friends will be deeply missed.”

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Albertina Kerr. Please pray for Arden and his family in this sad time.

Dennis “Ace” McCormack ’60 passed away on January 15, 2015, in his favorite chair, at the age of 91. He joined the

Now this, dear readers, is a family photo, shared with us

by John Bordes ’63. “I guess I’ll have to get releases from all of their agents,” he kids. “Some who knew me may think it’s a miracle.”

U.S Navy during World War II, and later served in the U.S. Air Force. He married Carol Adelaide Anderson in 1946, and opened Ace Typewriter & Equipment in St. Johns in 1961, a place that has come to be one of the last (and bestknown) full service typewriter repair shops in the nation.

Dennis worked in his shop right up until his passing.

Survivors include his children, William, Susan Morton (William), Melissa, Mary Therese, Anne, Christopher (Karen), Patrick (Kari), Matthew (Mo) and Maria McCormack; grandchildren, Phillip, Catherine and Carol Morton, Paul and Richard McCormack and Chris and Greg Blomquist; several greatgrandchildren; and dear friend, Darlene Thayer. He was preceded in death by his wife; and children, Kathleen, Steven, and Joseph McCormack. By all accounts a gentleman and friend to all, he will be missed.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Francis Stohosky ’61 passed away on October 15, 2014, at the age of 74. After earning degrees in engineering he joined the Air Force through the ROTC program.

After returning to Portland, he began selling lumber in the 1970s; at the time of his death, he was president of F&L Lumber, a business he helped build. Survivors in-

clude his wife, Lydia; sisters, Linda Kochmar and Sister Rita Rose “Margaret”; sons, Francis and Stephen; daughters, Ann Scheehean and Renee Linley; stepchildren, Paige and Aaron Jackson; five grandchildren; and a nephew and niece.

Memorial contributions may be made to Queen of Peace School or the Blanchet House in Portland. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Sue Ann Galipeau ’63 passed away on November 29, 2014, in Stanwood, Wash. Survivors include her husband of fifty years; four children and their spouses; eight grandchildren; two sisters; and her faithful dog.

In lieu of flowers, Susie requested donations in her name to be made to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, credited to Frankie Galipeau. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

University of Portland alumnus Fedele Bauccio ’64, ’66, cofounder and CEO of Bon Appétit Management Company, received the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2014 Retail and Consumer Products Award.

Bauccio was recognized for redefining the institutional food service industry and being a pioneer in environmental and local sourcing policies. Those who got their daily three squares in the University Commons in the 1960s may recall that Bauccio got his start in food services as a dishwasher during his freshman year at UP. Midway through his junior year he was managing the

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University’s food service program in the dining hall that now bears his name. After graduation, he worked for 20 years in the industry, but always dreamed of starting his own enterprise. In 1987, he launched Bon Appétit Management Company, an on-site restaurant company that now operates more than 500 highly customized onsite restaurants at corporations, private universities, museums, and sports venues, including the University of Portland. Think about the word “redefining.”

Fedele Bauccio redefined an industry that touches the lives of virtually every person in the country, or for that matter the world. It is an honor well deserved.

’66 A VOTE OF CONFIDENCE Gery Schirado has been elected to serve another term on the city council of Durham, Oregon. He has been on the council since 1993 and served as mayor since 1997. Gery is retired from his career in medical equipment sales and has lived in Durham since 1975.

’68 A LIFELONG TEACHER Sister Joeine Darrington, OSB, ’68, passed away on February 3, 2015, just a few months shy of her 100th birthday.

She joined the Benedictine Sisters at Mt. Angel in 1934 and made her first profession on February 11, 1937. Sister Joeine will be remembered for her long and

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C L A S S We learned recently that the Qatari ambassador to the United States is an alumnus of UP: Mohammed Jaham Al Kuwari ’80 has held the position since 2013. He received a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Madrid.

Fluent in English, Spanish, French and Arabic, Al Kuwari served for a decade as Qatar’s Ambassador to France and accredited to Switzerland and the Holy See; he was first posted in Washington, D.C., from 1981 to 1986, and in Madrid from 1986-1990, along with a host of other diplomatic and governmental posts. His honors include the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in France, 1998; Medal of friendly cooperation from the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1998; Grand Cross of the Order of St. Gregory the Great from the Holy See, 2006; and Grand Cross of the Order of Merit from Portugal, 2012. In 2007, the President of France presented him with an officer badge of the Legion of Honor, the highest decoration in France. fruitful life as a teacher. She began teaching elementary grades, then high school in Mt. Angel Academy. Later she taught at North Catholic in Portland and Kennedy High School in Mt. Angel. Her last teaching assignment was in the public elementary school in Molalla, Oregon. After retirement from teaching, Sister Joeine served on the Benedictine Foundation Board, and as alumni director. She ministered to prison inmates, and regularly attended weddings, birthday parties, and funerals of anyone she had known.

Her last years were spent in the monastery health care center, where she continued to celebrate birthdays, reunions, and life in general with her Benedictine Sisters and friends. Our prayers and condolences.

’70 A WONDERFUL LIFE We heard sad news recently from Lynette Rogers (Guerrero): “It is with a heavy heart that I tell you that my husband Terry Rogers passed away suddenly on December 18, 2014.

Terry retired in July of 2013 from a great career as a commercial insurance expert, and spent the rest of his life enjoy-

ing our family, especially our two granddaughters, sevenyear-old Makani and threeyear-old ’Alohi. Our only child Malia was her dad’s pride and joy. Terry and I had a wonderful life together, and December 19 would have been our 44th wedding anniversary. I will love and miss him always!”

Our prayers and condolences, Lynette, to you and your family at this difficult time.

’71 PRAYERS FOR ROBERT Robert Marshall died on November 7, 2014. A native Portlander, Robert graduated from North Catholic High School, earned an engineering degree from the University of Portland, and a M.B.A. from the University of Washington. He lived in Seattle and enjoyed eastern philosophies, marksmanship, and repairing muscle cars. His ashes will be released to sea honoring his happy memories of vacations spent with his family.

Condolences may be sent to 723 N. 180th St., Shoreline, WA 98133.

’75 GEORGE LOVES PONIES Little did we know that George Dill is a major player in the local, national, and interna-

N O T E S tional polo scenes. George serves as a former circuit governor of the United States Polo Association, current governor of the Pacific Northwest Polo Association, honorary director of the Polo Training Foundation, and as host to countless tournaments and lessons on his farm in La Conner, Washington. He started playing polo in 1995, so he has almost 20 years of experience now, and shows no sign of slowing down when it comes to his beloved sport. See more about George at the La Conner Polo Club Facebook page or in the August 19, 2014 Vancouver Courier at http://tinyurl.com/ q6uhllt.

’76 REST IN PEACE, T-FORD Timothy Bracy passed away on December 19, 2014, from early onset Alzheimer’s disease. “T Ford” as he was known in police work, was a lieutenant when he left the Portland Police Bureau after a decade of service. Public safety, mentoring, and coaching were themes throughout his careers with Lifespring, Portland General Electric, and the City of Portland. Survivors include his wife, Mary CayLiebig; brothers, Craig Bracy and Dale Bracy; nieces, Lizette Bracy and Nicole ChiravollatiHammer; nephew, Michael Bracy; and cousins, Beverly Hofshulte and Robert Batdorf.

He was a good man who enriched the lives of many and who will be missed by all.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

John M. Bernard, former Beacon editor and student regent, writes to tell us his second book, Government That Works: The Results Revolution in the United States, came out in February. It includes forewords by the governors of Michigan and Maryland, and additional endorsements by the governors of Colorado and Oregon. John launched the book at the National Governors Association meeting in February in Washington D.C., and is often introduced as the nation’s leading authority on

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the transformation of state government. John’s Portlandbased company, Mass Ingenuity, works with governors and agency leaders across the county implementing resultsfocused government. John has eight-year-old twins and three grown daughters, and resides in Vancouver, Wash.

’77 REMEMBERING MARJORIE Marjorie Day, wife of Jack Everett Day, passed away on December 27, 2014, at the age of 90. Margie was born in Athens, Texas, to A.B. and Irene (Henrici) McReynolds.

In Portland, she attended Beaumont and Grant High School. She met Jack, the love of her life, on December 14, 1941, and they married on November 1, 1942. Marjorie taught in the Beaverton School District for 20 years. Survivors include Jack; children, Nancy Day Adams and Peter Breed Day; five grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; sister, Barbara Greene; and in-laws, nieces, and nephews. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’78 A FAMILY MAN George Edens, father of Sarah Fisher ’78 and husband of Kathryn Edens ’85, passed away on January 25, 2015, in his home, surrounded by family. He was 92. He will be dearly missed by his wife of 68 years, Kathryn Lahey Edens; children, Kathleen Alberque, Fr. William Edens, Jonathan Edens, Sarah Fisher, Martha Schmidt, Anne Bell, Gregory Edens, Monica Eischen, and Thaddeus Edens; 21 grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and extended family and friends.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’82 REMEMBERING PAUL Paul King Thompson passed away on December 2, 2014, in Happy Valley, Ore. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1946, and in the Navy Reserves from 1950 to 1952. Paul spent most of his career as a technical sales engineer for Tektronix. He lived a life full of adventure, visiting every state and every continent. He was preceded in death by his first wife, Helen Tims; and son, Phillip. Survivors include his children, Kathryn and Michael; and ex-wives/friends, Ruth Kelly, Lila Dodd, and Gail Upton. Our prayers and

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C L A S S condolences to the family.

’83 ONE WHO SERVED Carl J. Tercek, father of John Tercek, passed away on December 19, 2014, from complications due to diabetes. He entered the Merchant Marines before graduating from Central Catholic High School, and finished his high school education at Jefferson. Carl was a Portland police officer from 1950 to 1967, when he was promoted to homicide detective until retiring in 1975 for health reasons. Survivors include his loving, devoted wife, Marjorie; their children, Mary Kay Tercek, Jim Tercek, Teresa Hancock, and John; sister, Anna Braun; seven grandchildren; and his first great-grandchild, Halle Jane Tercek, who was born a week after Carl’s passing. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’86 A KIND AND GENTLE SOUL Kathleen (Hunt) Bocci reports with great sadness that her husband, Ben, passed away from metastatic melanoma on November 14, 2014. Ben and Kat had just renewed their wedding vows in Las Vegas a month earlier on their 27th wedding anniversary at the Graceland Wedding Chapel with Elvis officiating. That was one of the many things the couple did in the last year, including spurof-the-moment trips to antique car shows and drag races just for fun. Ben’s diagnosis and treatment were hard for his countless friends, coworkers, and family, who rallied behind him in any way they could. To see how much Ben meant to so many, see “Ready, Set, Drag! Ben Bocci's Camaro Overhaul” at http://tinyurl. com/qdsqjfn. “The story behind the Camaro is such a great one,” says Kat. “It was such an incredible gift by his coworkers at Food Services of America. He worked for them for 24 years and they have yet to replace him since he had to leave due to his illness last April. His shoes are too big!”

Ben has two older children and Ben and Kat have four

children together. He was a very kind and gentle man who will be missed by many. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’88 PRAYERS FOR DAN Daniel McCormick passed away on January 13, 2015, surrounded by his family and friends. He was a mechanical engineer and worked for the past seven years at Apollo Mechanical in Richland, Wash., as director of business development. Dan’s true love was his family, and he loved to share his interests with them as well as his many friends. Survivors include Mary Hillenkamp McCormick, his wife of 25 years; children, Kayla, Keegan, Kira and Keely; mother, Pat McCormick; sisters, Cyndie Sutherland and Mary Beth McCormick; and brother, Paul McCormick. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

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N O T E S Catherine (Bigelow) Gullickson ’82 passed away on November 17, 2014, after an 11-year battle with breast cancer. She was surrounded by her immediate family and fought to the end. She was a four-year tennis player at UP and graduated Magna Cum Laude in nursing. Catherine is survived by her husband Jeff; children Anna, Ben, Peter, and Conrad; new sonin-law Scott; parents Jim and Maureen; and sisters Susan and Anne. She also leaves behind numerous aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, sisters-, brothers-, and parents-in-law. In lieu of a public funeral service, Catherine’s family has set up a nursing scholarship in her name at the University of Portland. Please visit www.up.edu/catherinescholarship for more information. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’89 PRAYERS, PLEASE Patricia Delplanche, mother of Remy Delplanche and Michelle Delplanche Sherpa ’01, passed away on December 31, 2014. Survivors also include her son, Curtis Delplanche; 11 grandchildren; siblings, Janice Kreilich, Maureen “Mo” Polich, Gary Bride, Jaqueline “Jackie” Hanson, Phillip Bride; many nieces and nephews; and former husband, Marv Delplanche. She was predeceased by her son, Douglas Delplanche; and daughter, René Bales. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Sharon Capron passed away on July 13, 2011. She was a teacher of swimming, math, and the Bible.

Survivors include her husband, Jerry Savage; her children, Alan Capron and Kristi and Tom Straight; and grandchildren Annie and TJ Straight. She was loved by many and had “extra kids” too numerous to count, including Bobby Wren, Karen Pullar, Tammy Matson, Wayne Forguy, and James Fuson.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’96 A SMART HIRE Carmen (Kwong) Gaston has been named as the new chief

development and strategic planning officer for Catholic Charities of Oregon, the official social service arm of the Catholic Church in western Oregon.

Richard Lee Mobley, father of Christine Mobley Camara, passed away on December 6, 2014, at his home, surrounded by family. A 27-year Air Force veteran, he spent 25 years working as a pipefitter on nuclear submarines. After moving back to Oregon he worked at Blue Heron Paper Company before retiring for good in 2011. Survivors include his wife of 43 years, Ladrina; daughters, Shannon Small and Dayna Blake; five grandsons; five sisters; two brothers; and numerous nieces and nephews. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’99 AMANDA’S UPDATE If you’ve been wondering what’s up with Amanda Calnan Vowels these days, here’s your answer: “A long-overdue update on my family from the far off reaches of exotic SW Portland. The past decade has been exciting and travel-filled for our little brood. Ironically, my husband, Derik (a Concordia Portland boy) and I spent our first eight newlywed/ newly-parent years living just a stone’s-throw from UP, where we tracked seasons and time of day by student migration, dorm signage, and the

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comforting roar of autumn soccer games. We walked our babies (Clark, now 10, and Francis, 6) almost nightly along The Bluff. In 2009, we sold our University District charmer, and moved to the other side of the Willamette River. Then, in 2011, an opportunity with my husband’s job took us to balmy Brisbane, Australia, where we spent two years working, living, and sending the kids to school slathered in sunscreen—an opportunity we’ll never regret. We’ve also carved out a few trips to visit my sister, Mindy (Calnan) Broster ’03, who married a South African farmer and settled in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, where she and her husband are raising two darling children and hundreds of merino sheep and beef cattle on a large farm. I kid you not, her life literally reads like a vintage African novel. I miss her terribly, but technology and her visits home make my heart ache slightly less sometimes. These days, we’re settled back in our home in SW Portland and, professionally, I've run my own boutique PR firm for over 10 years. We still wander The Bluff with the kids every now and then, and even spent one recent reunion weekend with my old UP roomies and our combined brood for a sleepover in the newer campus dorms, a high-

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N O T E S Polich, Gary Bride, Jaqueline “Jackie” Hanson, Phillip Bride; many nieces and nephews; and former husband, Marv Delplanche. She was predeceased by her son, Douglas Delplanche; and daughter, René Bales. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’03 MASON MAKES “FORTY UNDER 40” LIST

UPSILON FLASHMOB STRIKES AGAIN Generations of brothers from UP spirit fraternity Upsilon Omega Pi had such a great time at the 2014 Reunion they returned to The Bluff in force for the Pilot baskeball game versus Oregon State on December 6. “It was disappointing the Pilots did not beat the Beavers, but it was great fun to get together,” says Doug Edwards ’76. “Back in the day almost all of the Upsilon brothers donned the Wally/SPU head at one time or another.”

Pictured above are (front row) Scott Ford ’83, (second row, l-r) Matt Waite ’84, Wally Pilot, Doug Edwards ’67, Mike Covert ’86 (back row, l-r) Jim Ford ’60, John Linde ’64, Don Schaefer ’65, Herm Buchholz ’64, Mike Kane ’64, Paul Penziol ’85, and Albert Cook ’95.

Rumor has it the T-Room has finally replenished its supply of beer and Grogan’s Little Smokies.

Mason Walker, president of Audigy Group, has been named to the Portland Business Journal’s annual “Forty Under 40” list, which recognizes forty up-andcoming business leaders in the Portland area who are both professionally accomplished and civically engaged.

Audigy Group, headquartered in Vancouver, Wash., has received national recognition six times as one of the fastestgrowing companies in America. Walker joined Audigy Group as founders Brandon and Tammy Dawson’s first employee in 2004, and was appointed president in 2011; the company has grown from $600,000 in revenue in 2005 to approximately $32 million in 2014. Audigy Group assists private, independent hearing care professionals in consistently delivering the highestquality hearing care to their communities.

’04 PROTECT AND PRESERVE ly recommended experience.

The kids thought it was the most novel night ever!”

Thanks Amanda, who says you can’t be settled and a globetrotter, too?

Angie Slifer, who attended the School of Nursing in 1999, passed away on October 20, 2014. The joy of her life, Hannah Marie, was born on June 7, 1998; they were inseparable and shared many interests, especially their avid devotion to the Portland Trailblazers. Survivors include her parents, Randy and Jeanette Slifer; brother, Ryan Slifer; and daughter, Hannah Marie Pike.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Chris Demianew believes in spreading the word about his beloved alma mater, as evidenced by his video at http:// youtu.be/MN8ngdmF8pM. Chris is a teacher at Hermiston High School, where the teachers have a college door decorating contest every year, and this year he outdid him-

self. Way to show your purple pride, Chris!

’00 PRAYERS, PLEASE Delight Cushman passed away on January 7, 2015. She taught for 29 years at Floyd Light Middle School, and earned her master’s in education at the University of Portland.

Survivors include her husband, Lloyd; daughters, Hayley and Megan; mother, Ramola; sister, Faith; and brother, Dan. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’01 OUR CONDOLENCES Patricia Delplanche, mother of Michelle Delplanche Sherpa and Remy Delplanche ’89, passed away on December 31, 2014. Survivors also include her son, Curtis Delplanche; 11 grandchildren; siblings, Janice Kreilich, Maureen “Mo”

Gavin Clark has been named as philanthropy manager for what will soon become America’s largest wildlife preserve, the American Prairie Preserve, located near Yellowstone Park. We note that Gavin was one of UP’s first environmental policy and ethics majors with Steve Kolmes, and he got his start in development work as a TOP (Telephone Outreach Program) caller.

’05 ANDY’S NEW JOB The Oregon Chapter of the Sierra Club hired Andy Maggi as chapter director starting January 12, 2015. Andy most recently worked on Senator Jeff Merkley’s re-election campaign.

Before that, he spent several years with the Oregon

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League of Conservation Voters, where he was the architect of several of OLCV’s key political victories. Larry Pennington, board chair of the Oregon Chapter, said, “Andy’s experience within the environmental and political communities will be invaluable to what we want to accomplish as a chapter. We are honored to add him to our team as we pursue conservation victories for Oregon.”

Here’s more good news: On November 25, 2014, Scott Ostrow and Anne (Wagner) Ostrow ’04 welcomed their son, Emerson Steele Ostrow, into their lives. Congratulations, Scott and Anne!

And now a word from Stephanie Morbeck, who writes: “Hello from the Windy City! I have been here in Chicago for the last four years completing my OBGYN residency. After graduating in 2005, I completed medical school in Las Vegas, and finished an internship in Corvallis. I will finally be done and licensed in June, whew! My fiance, Al, and I will then be moving to Yakima, Wash., right before we get married in August in my beautiful hometown of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. After a quick honeymoon, I will begin working as an OBGYN at Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic. I hope to mentor students from the osteopathic medical school in Yakima also, as I have been teaching for Midwestern University, Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine for the past three years.

I am looking forward to being back in the Northwest, hopefully for good this time, and I hope to get reconnected with the University of Portland! Al is already becoming well versed in the antics of Wally Pilot, and he is very excited to sport purple and white!”

Thanks for the update, Stephanie, and we’re sure Al will be even more versed after one or two Pilots soccer games.

’06 AND THE WINNER IS...

Joe Buck was successful in his bid to serve on the Lake Oswego city council. Buck, a third-generation restaurateur and Lake Oswego native, was endorsed by former Lake Oswego mayors Judie Hammerstad and Jack Hoffman, and current councilors Jon Gustafson, Donna Jordan, and Skip O’Neill. He serves on the Chamber of Commerce board and its governmental affairs

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C L A S S committee, as well as the board of the Lake Grove Business Association.

Meredith (Horgan) Roy writes with the best news there is: “I have an alumni update and picture if you have room in an upcoming Portland Magazine.

My husband, Micah, and I welcomed our second future

Pilot this past summer. Liam Degernas Roy was born on July 6, 2014. He was 20 inches long and weighed 7 pounds 13 ounces. He joined big brother, Xander Horgan Roy, who is now two. Liam already looks up to his brother, who loves to tell him stories and sweetly shares all of his toys. We are very blessed!” Thanks so much for sharing, Meredith, what a charmer he is.

’08 WELCOME, THEODORE! Exciting news from Kelly Callahan and her husband Daniel Mero ’07: “Our family has grown by one! Theodore Bayard Mero was born on December 28, just about two weeks early, weighing 7 lbs. 14 oz. We are so in love with our little guy!” Congratulations, Kelly and Dan, we can sure see why.

’09 THE LIFE AND LOVE OF KAREN We heard recently from former Moreau Center director Tom Frieberg, who writes: “I don’t know if you all follow the exploits of Karen Bortvedt, class of 2009; if not, I recommend it. Karen is a Maryknoll lay missioner in Cambodia and blogs about her experiences at The Life and Love of Karen (http://thelifeandlove ofkar en.blogspot.com). The nice thing is, you can check out all

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“All of a sudden I got clubbed over the head with an idea,” says Doug Naimo ’88, founder of Triggerfinger Software, a firm that markets an innovative approach to communicating with electronic devices. In the early 2000s Naimo had become exasperated with the most common method for transferring ideas to computer screens, cell phones, and other communication tools—the ubiquitous QWERTY keyboard. From the beginning, QWERTY has suffered from the design and functional limitations of the typewriter that spawned it, as Naimo notes. With frequently used letters scattered across the keyboard—a compromise introduced to prevent the nineteenth-century typewriter’s mechanical arms from jamming—it lacks a clear connection to the motor activity needed for tapping the letters. It is ergonomically unsound, inaccessible to many, and perhaps most importantly, it’s just not fun. In 2002, after an especially frustrating encounter with his electronic planner, Naimo realized that button-operated game controllers—like the one he played with nearly every day—might be the answer to his frustrations. Game controllers were simple, requiring far fewer movements than the keypad. They were accessible to many with disabilities or minimal manual dexterity. And unlike the tedious QWERTY or a cumbersome stylus, they were playful. Application of this technology to nongame devices, realized Naimo, could transform how humans share ideas with others, reshaping our communications future.

Propelled by “entrepreneurship and faith,” as he says, Naimo has worked relentlessly to turn his inspiration into reality. Triggerfinger Software currently markets a Handheld Advanced Technology System (HATS) that allows users to operate nearly any computer system with a game controller or other simple handheld device, and the technology has a growing array of applications. In addition to many educational and recreational uses, it helps amputees and others with disabilities to run computers more easily. It provides a simplified, flexible user interface for tanks and other vehicles operated in stressful, turbulent conditions, and it works well commanding unmanned vehicles and other robotic devices.

But as the serious, pragmatic uses for his product mushroom, Naimo is careful not to stray too far from the technology’s playful origins. Using Triggerfinger software, he gleefully sends e-mails with his PlayStation Rock Band guitar and scans the Internet with a Dance Pad and Drum Set. “Let’s face it,” he grins when asked do describe the essence of his brainchild. “It’s a play experience.”

Author Rich Christen is an education professor at the University and a noted scholar of handwriting.

of her archived posts,going back to the start of her training months at Maryknoll.”

Thanks Tom, it looks like Karen (pictured, center) is taking her commitment to service to the next level.

A start-up company created

by Tommy Pham and his colleague James Stafford received a Small Business Technology Transfer grant of $225,000 to assist in cancer research from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Insti-

tutes of Health. Pham earned his MBA and technology entrepreneurship certificate after participating in a joint program between the University of Portland and Oregon Health & Sciences University.

The program involved analyzing several OHSU technologies for commercial feasibility, one of

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which resulted in his start-up company, Nzumbe, which focuses on research designed to accelerate the discovery of breakthrough therapies in challenging diseases such as cancer.

The intrepid (and newly hired full-time UP Graduate School employee) Allison Able wants to be sure people know what her fellow Class of 2009 grads are up to: “Below is a link to Danielle (Jolicoeur) and Dane Conroy’s blog, which they started because Danielle

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N O T E S ing. Ben served as ASUP treasurer during his senior year.

We now live in Vancouver with our dog, Henry. I attached a picture from our

wedding—check out our UP alumni toasting glasses!” A very nice touch, Ellany and Ben. Congratulations and best wishes from The Bluff.

Married in Bend recently: Kelsey Jensen and Ryan Siebert, now Mrs. and Mr. Siebert. The estimable Mrs. Siebert, a nurse at Seattle Childrens Hospital, adored her late grandfather, Dick Hayward of Eugene, and tells us that she carried a grinning hint of him with her during her wedding—he loved two-dollar

Senior chemistry major Kelly Ramzy ’15 sent us the following: “I am one of the students who dressed up as the chemistry department’s beloved professor, Ray Bard, for Halloween 2014. Here is a photo of how we began the day. My fellow Bardfans and myself, left to right: me, Brian Carter, Alex Erickson, Matt Baer, Rea Cochran, Ben Damewood, and the one and only Dr. Ray Bard.” Thanks Kelly, up to that day Ray had his look all to himself. We’ll sure miss him when he retires at the end of the spring 2015 semester. accepted a position through Mercy Corps in Niger, Africa.

Dane left his teaching job and decided to join his wife on this two-year adventure, and they wanted to document their experiences. They have only been there a few months, but I thought I would share because it is truly fascinating. I particularly recommend reading Danielle's piece, “Five Sounds of Niger.” Additionally, there are pictures posted in a few of the entries. You can keep up on their adventures at http:// www. travelpod.com/travel-blog/ daneconroy/1/tpod.html.”

And about that new job we mentioned for Allison Able: she is now working as Coordinator of Graduate Admissions/Programs and Special Projects in the University of Portland Graduate School. She served with distinction on a temporary basis in the UP marketing and communications office before taking on her new assignment, and we here take some consolation in the fact that her new office is literally on the other side of our wall. Congratulations!

“Birds of Neptune,” a movie made in Portland on a budget of less than $1 million with a local cast and crew, premiered at the Slamdance film festival (it purposely runs concurrently with the betterknown Sundance) in January

2015. One of its lead actors is none other than Britt Harris.

She and castmate Molly Elizabeth Parker play sisters “who live in the spooky house where they grew up (lots of doll heads in the yard and old photos in the house) and cope with their memories and changing circumstances and the arrival of a bearded outsider played by Kurt Conroyd.

It doesn’t go smoothly for them,” according to a review in The Oregonian. See the trailer at http://vimeo.com/89514344 (photo by Stevie Nelson).

Maryanne Kraeger (formerly Berger) has great news to share: “On September 13, 2014, I married my best friend Adam Kraeger. My husband is hard working (he’s in school full time while working 40 hours a week on night shift), he has a big heart (he is always thinking of others before himself), and most importantly he has deepened my faith and brought me closer to Jesus. I am very happy and am thoroughly enjoying this new chapter in our lives. My maid of honor was Sarah Lytle.” Congratulations, Maryanne, sounds like you married one of the good ones.

’11 WEDDING BELLS Ellany (Saxton) Thompson writes: “I am happy to report that Ben Thompson and I were married on August 2, 2014, in Sherwood, Oregon! Ben and I met at UP, where he studied business and I studied nurs-

bills, and carried them in his wallet, and the mysterious universe presented Kelsey with a two-dollar bill the day before her wedding. It walked with her up and down the aisle, wrapped in her bouquet.

There are all sorts of prayers and gifts and miracles, you know, and who’s to say a twodollar bill is not a way for a great man to whisper to his granddaughter that he loves her and wishes her the best?

On campus recently for the annual basketball alumni game: former center Kramer Knutson and former lightning-

quick point guard T.J. Campbell ’10, both of whom went on to play pro ball abroad after graduation, as do most of the Pilot lettermen these days.

Most excellent news from Russell Seidelman, husband of Rachel Seidelman: “I guess I should tell the UP community about the birth of our son.

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Atlas Royal Seidelman was born at Portland Providence Medical Center on Friday, January 23, at 5:16 a.m. He was 8 lbs., 6 oz.; 21 inches.

The same nurse who attended to Atlas was there for our daughter, Madrid, and she is a UP nursing graduate. All are doing well.” Russell is assistant director of financial aid and official crusader for bicycling and sustainability here on The Bluff.

’13 FINDING GOOD STORIES Laura Frazier was hired by The Oregonian as the new K-12 Classroom Instruction beat reporter for its Learning and Family team. Her goal is “to find good stories analyzing and profiling what’s working and what’s not in classrooms and districts in the Metro region. I’ll also focus on early childhood education and alternatives to public education, including private schools and online programs.” Laura was both a reporter and editor for The Beacon in her days on The Bluff, and she also was an intern through the Charles Snowden Program for Excellence in Journalism, covering everything from environmental issues to crime. “I can’t wait to see what stories come my way on this new beat,” she says. “Got a tip or idea? Please feel free to reach out via e-mail at lfrazier@oregonian.com.

I’m also on Facebook and twitter at @frazier_laura.”

David Austin has his opinion piece, “An ‘Interview’ Worth Skipping,” published in USA Today on December 17, 2014.

His editorial is about negative consequences suffered by citizens and aid workers in North Korea in the wake of the movie “The Interview,” and the North Korea/Sony hacking scandal.

See the article at http://tinyurl. com/pqffzc7.

Daniel Seymour recently moved and started a new job at Stanford University, where he works in the department of statistics.

DID YOU HEAR THE NEWS? University of Portland alumni Brie Brown ’12, Spencer Degerstedt ’12, Miriam Hakim ’12, Jordan Young ’12, Wyatt

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C L A S S Rodan ’13, Daniel Rodriguez ’13, and Anthony Nguyen ’14 make up the largest group of UP students to enter OHSU’s medical school in a single semester.

Credit and kudos are due to Kyle Flann, who advises UP biology students, and a host of faculty members who taught these students.

MYSTERY SOLVED! In the winter 2014 issue of this magazine we asked readers if they could shed any light on the original copyright owner of the name “University of Portland,” a man named Mark Paulson. Heidi E. K. Senior, reference and instruction librarian in the University’s Clark Library, found the answer in the September 4, 1932 edition of The Oregonian. Paulson, a noted educator in his day, founded “a new educational enterprise in Portland, to be known as the University of Portland,” with a junior college, school of music, college of commerce, and law school.

The music school had been established and was located in the Wheeldon Annex Ballroom on Tenth and Salmon Streets. Paulson planned to open the junior college himself, beginning with temporary space in the Guardian Building at Third and Alder streets. According to the article, he held degrees (A.M., J.D., LL.D.) from Minnesota, Chicago, and Oregon. What exactly ever became of the fledgling University of Portland remains unclear; Paulson himself was a business professor here on The Bluff in 1935 and 1936, after relinquishing all rights to the name “University of Portland.”

FACULTY, STAFF, FRIENDS Quite a coup for UP English professor John Orr: his article, “Back to the Future: The Continuing Appeal of The Education of Henry Adams” in the Kenyon Review Weekend Reads on November 14, 2014. The Kenyon Review, we are quick to add, published the works of Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Saul Bellow, and many other fine writers. See the article at http://tinyurl.com/m44slv8.

Sister Maureen Kalsch, SSMO, passed away on January 5, 2015, at the Sisters of Saint Mary of Oregon motherhouse in Beaverton, Ore. After graduating from St. Mary of the Valley in 1973, she began stud-

ies at Oregon State University, and entered the novitiate of the Sisters of St. Mary of Oregon in 1975. She began her teaching career at her alma mater before being assigned to Regis High School (198084), after which she returned to St. Mary of the Valley as a teacher, director of student activities, public relations coordinator, and director of admissions. In 2000, Sr. Maureen became the first woman in the role of associate principal of academics at Central Catholic High School. In 2008, she was the first woman to serve as the interim principal of Central Catholic High School. Sr. Maureen was elected by the Sisters to serve two terms on the Council of the Superior General (2000-2010).

Our prayers and condolences.

You could hear the excitement when UP staff members Mike and Jessica Wode brought their new baby boy, Gregory, home to Corrado Hall on January 15, 2015. “Dorm baby!

“Dorm baby!” echoed through the halls, bringing a veritable stampede of oohing and ahhing young men and women to behold the awesomeness of Gregory Wode, Dorm Baby. Mom and Pop and Gregory are doing just fine, with no lack of babysitters in the near future. See more in the Beacon article at http://tinyurl.com/mwp8bq.

DEATHS Hazel Neiger ’39, October 18, 2014.

Thomas Patrick Volk ’41, November 13, 2014.

Verna Armstrong ’44, January 13, 2014.

Manda ( Brajcich) Gates ’44, August 16, 2014.

Martin W. Schmidt ’47, December 10, 2014, Portland, Ore. Alvin Schwerdt ’48, October 31, 2014.

Ann Marie Dombrovski ’47, September 28, 2012.

Louis Bride ’48, November 22, 2014.

Benedictine Abbot Joseph Wood ’49, December 17, 2014.

Carl Deiz ’49, December 1, 2014.

Dolores Cassinelli, wife of Nick Cassinelli ’49, January 12, 2015.

David Ernest Mazzocco ’50,

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N O T E S University of Portland life regent Larry Rockwood passed away peacefully at home, surrounded by family, on November 26, 2014. Where to begin describing this man?

Native of Los Angeles, World War II Navy veteran, top honors Caltech alumnus, entrepreneur, avid traveler, high school sweetheart and husband of 65 years to the late Vera Jane Bedwell Rockwood, devoted father, grandfather, and greatgrandfather; lifelong hiker, birder, camper, and photographer— he was all that and so much more to those who were lucky enough to share in his genuine love of life and the world around him. His children, Caren, Jeri, and David; six grandchildren; eight great-grandchildren; and many friends will miss him, to say the very least. Our prayers and codolences.

January 8, 2015.

Emil Nemarnik ’50, January 10, 2015.

Suzanne Dorres, wife of Don Dorres ’51, April 9, 2014.

Joseph Brugato ’51, December 20, 2014.

John Waite ’52, January 7, 2015, Portland, Ore. Richard Doumitt ’54, October 22, 2014.

Howard M. “Mark” Budlong ’54, December 28, 2014.

William “Bill” Kneeland ’54, June 20, 2014.

Kathryn L. Scott ’54, January 19, 2015.

Jerry Funk ’56, November 16, 2014, Helena, Mont.

Ann Scheuring ’58, October 20, 2014.

Robert Keyes ’58, October 6, 2012.

Lillian Manning, wife of Arden Manning ’59, November 27, 2014.

Dennis “Ace” McCormack ’60, January 15, 2015.

Francis Stohosky ’61, October 15, 2014.

Sue Ann Galipeau ’63, November 29, 2014, Stanwood, Wash.

Sister Joeine Darrington, OSB ’68, February 3, 2015.

Terry Rogers ’70, husband of Lynette Rogers ’70, December 18, 2014.

Robert Marshall ’71, November

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7, 2014.

Timothy Bracy ’76, December 19, 2014.

Marjorie Day, wife of Jack Everett Day ’77, December 27, 2014.

Paul King Thompson ’82, December 2, 2014.

Catherine (Bigelow) Gullickson ’82, November 17, 2014.

Carl J. Tercek, father of John Tercek ’83, December 19, 2014.

George Edens, husband of Kathryn Edens ’85, father of Sarah Fisher ’78, January 25, 2015.

Ben Bocci, husband of Kathleen (Hunt) Bocci ’86, November 14, 2014.

Daniel McCormick ’88, January 13, 2015.

Patricia Delplanche, mother of Remy ’89 and Michelle Delplanche Sherpa ’01, December 31, 2014.

Sharon Capron ’89, July 13, 2011.

Richard Lee Mobley, father of Christine Mobley Camara ’96, December 6, 2014.

Angie Slifer ’99, October 20, 2014.

Delight Cashman ’00, January 7, 2015.

Sister Maureen Kalsch, SSMO, January 5, 2015.

Larry Rockwood, November 26, 2014.

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We can never sing nuns enough. They are almost always brave and honest and sinewy and gentle and brilliant and grace in action.

Maybe they are, like mothers and teachers and nurses, almost always the best of us.

Here’s an example:the late Dolores Baxter, who became Sister Veronica Ann of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. Remarkable being, this one; teacher (Saint Aloysius and Saint Patrick’s in Spokane, Saint Mary Star of the Sea in Astoria, Saint Thomas More in Portland), principal (Saint Frederic’s in St. Helens), director of the Christie School at Marylhurst, president of what is now Marylhurst University, college professor (Gonzaga, Portland State, and the University of Portland), and finally chief fundraiser and goodwill magnet at the very school where she had been educated as a child, Holy Redeemer, a (heroic) stone’s throw from The Bluff.

Marylhurst, sensibly, made her a trustee for life, and named Baxter Hall for her; the University of Portland, sensibly, conferred its highest honors on her, using the exact right word: “selfless service.”

She was brilliant and engaging and sweet and holy and we will miss her. She died in October, at age 86. Our prayers.

COURTESY OF CHRIS BAXTER AND SARAH CANTOR OF THE SNJM ARCHIVES, OREGON

L E S S

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This photo, of a girl in Cuba, is by Marilyn McDonald ’77, and something about it set us ruminating about how many alumni bring their talents and their open hearts into the world to witness such holy wonder as this child’s face. Then we started trying to count how many alumni were in the Peace Corps, and Vista, and the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and served as ambassadors and with all sorts of agencies like the United Nations and Mercy Corps and Catholic Relief Services. Then we started trying to add up all the alumni soldiers and sailors and nurses and doctors who served in uniform and fought against famines and massacres and droughts and avalanches and floods. Then we tried to remember all the regents and faculty and staff who have brought their talents and open hearts to bear in service to the holiness in each and every one of the children of the Coherent Mercy. By then we were addled with numbers, but we realized that this was exactly and finally and essentially what the University of Portland was about: bringing your gifts to bear in service to the holiness in each and every being. Find out what you gifts are, as the late great heartvalve inventor Donald Shiley ’51 said, and then hone and shape and learn how to use them, and then go and use them!

Pithy mission statement, that. If you would like to make a ridiculously and profligately generous gift toward our crucial work, we would be honored and delighted. Call Dwain Fullerton at 503.943.9975, fullerton@up.edu. Mention that a sweet holy quizzical child’s face sent you. That will make him laugh.

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Non-Profit Organization U.S. Postage PAID Portland, OR Permit No. 188

University of Portland Portland Magazine 5000 N. Willamette Blvd Portland, OR 97203-5798 Change service requested

UNDEFEATED SINCE 1949

PILOT FOOTBALL… ...officially ended on February 11, 1950, when University president Father Theodore Mehling, C.S.C., noted that the University was “lacking in sufficient funds to finance first-class football without seriously curtailing other programs.... To its students and its thousands of alumni and friends [we] express honest and sincere regret. We believe that good football is an asset to the community. We wish that we could afford it.”

An admirably blunt statement, that. The Pilots finished 48 seasons with 150 wins, 136 losses, and 34 ties (34 ties!). Among the very best players we ever had was All-American Joe Enzler (see page 37); and happily Pilots fans can still delight in what the rest of the world calls football, which is to say soccer, at which we are terrific. The Pilot men and women’s teams begin play in August; see portlandpilots.com for details, or call 503.943.7525 and ask the agreeable deft Dave Taylor to help you snag season tickets.