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Recently I met a quiet young woman who didn’t say much but what she said was wry and pithy and direct, and after a while I asked if I could take notes as she talked, and she said okay, and this is most of what she said. My name is Jacqueline. You can call me Jackie. Until recently you could call me Lieutenant. I am now retired from the service. I will be twentyseven years old on Sunday, at fourteen hundred hours. I have a dog named Gus. I live near the beach. I was a nurse. I am in good health, considering. I drink tea. I learned to love tea in Kirkuk. Some days we had tea ten times a day. We found a samovar and learned how to use it. There was a man among us who could play that thing like a guitar. It got so we couldn’t drink anything other than the tea he summoned from the samovar. It was the most remarkable tea. He vanished one day when his truck was hit by bad guys. Another man took his place. He vanished too. I took his place. After a while I forgot everyone’s names. For a while I called people by their numbers but after a while I didn’t call them anything. That’s when I knew I had the war sickness big time. I never got hit by fire but pretty much everyone I knew did. For a while there I thought it was me, that as soon as I said hello to someone or shook hands or learned their names they were doomed, so I stopped touching people and learning names. You would think wigging out in the middle of the war would be bad but it’s just normal. No one talks about what happens to the people nothing happens to, but something happens to them, and no one talks about it. Probably because we don’t have any words for what happens. The fact is wars kill words, but no one talks about that. Wars kill everything. Some of it you see get killed, like kids and towns and schools and Saturdays. But some of it you don’t, like birds. Birds don’t nest in wars, you know, so pretty soon there are no birds, and where are you without birds? What kind of world is that? You notice things little by little and then after a while you stop noticing things altogether. You just get by. By the end all I cared about was my shoes. You want really really good shoes in a war. Trust me on this one. I had the best boots you could ever imagine and I kept those suckers clean and oiled and ready for anything. When I got out of the war I kept wearing my boots for the longest time. I wore them with pajamas and with the bathrobe and with shorts in summer. It’s only the last few weeks I go anywhere without those boots. Those are really good boots. When I am in those boots nothing can happen to me. Trust me on this one. You want to know something real and true and honest and deep about wars, every war that ever was, every war that ever will be? I have one word for you. Boots. g Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine and the author most recently of Mink River, a novel.
ILLUSTRATION BY MARY MILLER DOYLE
BOOTS
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F E A T U R E S 16 / When I Was Blind, by Edward Hoagland One of the world’s great essayists, on sudden sight. 18 / The Children We Did Not Think We Had Room for in Our Hearts, by Karen Eifler A University professor’s notes on teaching as joy, pain, prayer, thrill, comedy, glee, grandeur, magic, hauntedness, surliness, roaring, fear, amazement, desperation, hilarity, and miracles. And much else.
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24 / Autumn in Paris, by Brad Myers ’03 Notes and photographs from a young alumnus living in a bookstore in the Fourth Arrondissment...
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28 / Emancipation, by Barry Lopez ’94 hon. Reconciliation, reverence, salvation: a note. 30 / Why Do We Say One Thing About Children But Do Another? by Brian Doyle Why is that? Why do we utter fatuous phrases like family values and let children starve and sicken and wither and be terrified? Why is that? 32 / What She Wanted, by Carolyn Kurtz A sacrament in the sand, and a roaring new University energy. 34 / A Sower of Beads in the Bible Belt, by Stephen Martin Praying in the dark: a note.
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4 / Paris, luminous rain, generosity, and the Rise Campaign 5 / The late grinning bowtied basketballish gentleman Mauro Potestio ’50 6 / Father Charlie Gordon, C.S.C.: who are Holy Cross men? 7 / Brother Fulgence Dougherty, C.S.C., at Crater Lake, Oregon 8 / Actress and filmmaker Holly Lynn Ellis at Sundance! 9 / The vilified and dedicated John Goldrick changes hats 10 / The University’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: a note 11 / All-American goalie Cori Alexander ’07, photographer 12 / Biologist Marlene Moore’s last class, by Jeff Kerssen-Griep 13 / Farewell to the brave and graceful Gabe Twining, Class of 2011 14 / Sports, starring the University’s unreal track team 15 / Briefly, starring startling Campaign gifts and student feats 37 / The effervescent Eugene Jeter ’06, NBA Sacramento King 48 / ’05 graduates Mark Driessen and Gabe Lucy beneath Hawaii, sort of 49 / Marie and Jim Riopelle ’50 and their remarkable Campaign gift
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THE UNIVERSITY OF PORTLAND MAGAZINE
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Cover: Young Mr. Adam Sageman, photographed by his dad Dan at the Cambridge Butterfly Conservatory in Ontario. Thanks to Dan and to Beth Bohnert at the University of Waterloo.
Summer 2011: Vol. 30, No. 2 President: Rev. E. William Beauchamp, C.S.C. Founding Editor: John Soisson Editor: Brian Doyle Wine Steward and Designer: Joseph Erceg ’55 Associate Editors: Marc Covert ’93 & Amy Shelly Harrington ’95 Contributing Editors: Louis Masson, Sue Säfve, Terry Favero, Mary Beebe Portland is published quarterly by the University of Portland. Copyright ©2011 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) 943-7202, 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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L E T T E R S STAY TOGETHER I really enjoyed the spring issue, particularly “Stay Together” by Father John Donato, C.S.C., and “Women at War” by nursing professor Diane Vines. I am an Army brat and I often heard my dad say to me, as we grew up in far-off lands, Stay together. Take care of your brothers and sister. We are the only family we have out here. It’s funny how his directive was forgotten over the years until I read the quote by Father Donato’s father. Over the years, we have had the difficult experience of watching our parents and relatives care for our aging grandparents. I am fortunate to have active parents but have seen my friends handling the affairs of their parents touched by dementia or Alzheimer’s. I am grateful for the experience, regardless of how helpless I felt, because I learned to be tender with the elderly. And “Women at War”— wow. Thank you for the re-
minder that war is hell. My husband is retired Air Force and was deployed during Deserts Shield and Storm. I don’t think I had a clue what he may have experienced back then. I certainly can’t begin to know what our men and women are dealing with today. We live and work in a military town flanked by Joint Base Lewis and McChord, formerly Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base. I have clients who have been deployed, are deployed, and are preparing to be deployed. We hear stories of loss and are joyous when our community members come home safely. In fact, one of my employees welcomed her husband home from Afghanistan on Sunday evening. I applaud her for standing tall at the home front, alone. Her family lives half a continent away. That, my friend, takes courage. I even made my 12-year-
Ah, letters come in all forms. Here’s physics professor emeritus Paul Wack circa 1925. Cool haircut.
old read the articles tonight. It gave me the opportunity to remind her to continue to respect our parishioners, our friends, our family, our clients, and others for they were once young, vibrant, and able-bodied. It gave me the opportunity to share with her that everyone has “a story” and their experience can impact how they interact with us. But, no matter how they treat us, treat others with compassion and seek understanding. I have often thought to send a note about the magazine’s quality, and this time I have. Angie Roarty ’83 Lakewood, Washington The Congregation of Holy Cross’s Constitution VIII (paragraph 118) reminds us, “It remains only for us to find how even the cross can be borne as a gift.” It is not easy for many to find this gift. After reading Father John Donato’s piece on his mom, I know John has found it. Reverend David Tyson, C.S.C. Notre Dame, Indiana We note with a grin that this Tyson fellow, now Superior of the Congregation of Holy Cross in the United States, was this University’s excellent president from 1990 to 2003.
LETTERS POLICY We are delighted by testy or tender letters. Send them to Portland Magazine, University of Portland, 5000 N. Willamette Boulevard, Portland, OR 97203-5798; or bdoyle@up.edu. her all the magic and grace the University radiates, one of them being your magazine. “And you will have amazing professors much like the retiring Dr. Masson who put their heart and soul into their classes! and see the people this school attracts? An Ethi opian track star who inspires faith, cultural acceptance, and perseverance in all of us. And by the way, can I come visit you in the fall so I too can hear the new bells?...” Please send me another copy, because when she returns the issue, I’ll have to say, “No, no, you keep it,” as the first article has already made her cry (the one about Father John Donato caring for his aging mother). And when I offer it back, I’ll have to really mean it. Please hurry! Sally Drendel ’89 Hokinson High School Vancouver, Washington
MAGIC & GRACE Help! I just gave away my Spring issue before basking in the light of each page. It was nothing short of giving up breathing, but was for the best of causes (I wouldn't part with it otherwise). I teach high school, and a student of mine has been offered a wonderful scholarship to attend the University of Portland. Her name is Natacia — you will meet her soon. She is an aspiring writer who will change the world. As an alumna myself, I danced with her in the middle of the commons when she told me. I'm sharing with
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Just read through the Spring issue. One of the best. I found Eileen Garvin’s “How to be a sister,” about autism, very moving. I was struck by Eileen Garvin’s final comment: “But I’ve come to understand that you are making an effort to let me into your life, just as I am creating a place for you in mine...” This and the preceding few paragraphs are a beautiful discovery and made me stop and think of my own relationships. Garry Eastman John Garratt Publishing Melbourne, Australia
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Late summer 1961: five teenagers calling themselves The Pendletones have their first audition, in Hollywood. The group’s first record was released that fall: “Surfin,’’ by the renamed Beach Boys. ¶ Summer is sports camp season on The Bluff — basketball, baseball, soccer, volleyball, and day camps crammed with art and swimming and stuff run from June into August. See portlandpilots.com. ¶ “I don't know exactly what a prayer is,” says the wild tiny American poet Mary Oliver in her poem ‘The Summer Day.’ “I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields…Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” O man. Is that the greatest line ever?
THE FACULTY Arriving July first, to take over as dean of the Shiley School of Engineering: civil engineer Sharon Jones, a specialist in geotechnical and waste water engineering, and recently head of engineering at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania (see page 15). We note that Doctor Jones is not the wild genius soul singer Sharon Jones of the Dap Kings. We think. Our Doctor Jones succeeds the brilliant Afghan gentleman and scholar Zia Yamayee, terrific dean for fifteen years. Thank you, Zia. ¶ Retiring in June: financial veep Dennis Ransmeier, after some 35 years of caring for us, Seattle U., and Georgetown. Thank you, Dennis. ¶ Away to Chile this summer, on a grant to teach and study health: nursing professor Karen Cameron. ¶ The Culligan
THE UNIVERSITY On campus September 22, talking about his work as the Vatican’s astronomer for many years: the ebullient Father George Coyne, SJ, also a professor at the University of Arizona. Riveting guy, George; he’s a scholar of young stars and cosmic dust, and has an asteroid named for him: 14429 Coyne. He is the guest of the energetic Garaventa Center for Catholic Life, an excellent target for Campaign gifts, hint hint. ¶ The University has cool tickets for Broadway shows in Portland this summer: Les Misérables, on August 4, and Mamma Mia, on August 27: $100 per ducat, call 503.943.8607 for les details. ¶ The University’s cheerful Father Gerry Olinger, C.S.C., will lead a gaggle of students and alumni to see His Holiness the Pope at World Youth Day in Madrid, Spain, August 1524. Want to go? Call the alumni office at 503.943.7328. ¶ And did you know alumni can rent rooms in the University’s Salzburg Center every August? True story. Call 503.943.7328.
STUDENT LIFE The University received 12,000 admission applications for the second year; about 42% of those applicants were accepted (down from 65% in 2006), and some 850 will start
classes August 29. Average high school GPA: 3.69. SAT: 1230. Trends: more applications from Colorado, Arizona, and Idaho; the usual high numbers from California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Montana, Utah and Texas. Approximately 58% of all applications came from outside Oregon and Washington. ¶ Among summer session courses offered through August 4: the biology of food, crime and justice in film, Shakespeare in Ashland, Shakespearean metaphysics (whoa), sports psychology, and lots of languages. See www.up.edu/summer. ¶
ARTS & LETTERS The annual Gilbert & Sullivan light opera on The Bluff this summer: Yeomen of the Guard, through June 26, the last day of Reunion. Tickets: 503.943.7287. Info: 503.943.7228. We note with prayers that this year’s run is dedicated to the spirit and verve of Roger Doyle, who invented the tradition and was the life and soul of it. Roger’s very ill. Send him a note and say hey: doylekr@comcast.net. ¶ On campus September 27: National Book Award winner Tim Egan, as the University’s fall Schoenfeldt Series Visiting Writer, reading from his work; his The Worst Hard Time is a searing book about the Dust Bowl years in mid-America from 1930 to 1940. ¶ On campus February 27 as the spring Schoenfeldt Series guest: Pulitzer Prize winner Jeff Eugenides, author of the terrific novel Middlesex. The Series’ guests visit classes, lunch with students, do a reading, and generally enjoy themselves more than they ever expected. Great idea. Excellent target for Campaign gifts in memory of its late founders, brother and sister Father Art Schoenfeldt and Sue Fields. Info: bdoyle@ up.edu, 503.943.8225. ¶ On stage in Hunt Theater later this year: Shaw’s Arms and the
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Man (November), Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (February), and Billy Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s Night’s Dream (April).
FROM THE PAST August 23, 1939: Stalin divvies up Europe with Hitler. Stalin would murder perhaps twenty million people before being poisoned himself. Sic simper tyrannis. ¶ July 27, 1794: French deputies, weary of executing their fellow citizens for no reason, arrest Robespierre and his fellow thugs on the “Committee of Public Safety,” and execute them instead of innocent souls. Peace breaks out in France. ¶ Past University summer highlights: August 1, Shannon MacMillan and Tiffeny Milbrett score the goals that earn an Olympic gold medal in soccer for the American women in 1996… August 6, Thearn Gavin earns the first MBA degree on The Bluff, 1960…August 11, George W. Bush, angling for a Catholic photo op after speaking at anti-Catholic Bob Jones University, delivers a speech in the Chiles Center, 2000… August 16, 1986, Brother David Martin, C.S.C., dies at age 85, after a whopping 56 years of working for the University, creating the library and archives, among other feats…August 18, 1899, Pietro Belluschi is born in Ancona, Italy, and begins life as the genius who will eventually dream the University’s lovely Chapel of Christ the Teacher into being…August 30, 1964, the first Salzburg Program students leave The Bluff for Austria, beginning the oldest and biggest of the University’s foreign study programs, now in some thirty countries. Terrific Campaign gift target? O dear yes. See rise.up.edu. ¶ For more of this sort of sweet arcana, see literature professor Father David Sherrer’s terrific www.up.edu/almanac.
ART BY MARY MILLER DOYLE
THE SEASON
Medal winner in May, the University’s highest faculty honor: theology’s grinning mustachioed bespectacled gruff Matt Baasten. Teacher of the Year: comm studies’ Renee Heath. Scholar(s) of the Year: business’s John Schouten and Diane Martin. Dean’s Award for General Excellent Coolness: the library’s Caroline Mann.
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Now here’s a cool Rise Campaign story: Jerome and Laurel Oziel of Portland quietly give the University two paintings worth some $100,000 from their extraordinary art collection — one of them being this song to Paris’s Place du Chatelet by “Le Poete Parisien de la Peinture,” Édouard Leon Cortès. Born in 1882, Cortès was a remarkable soul — an ardent pacifist, he was furious at German attacks on his beloved village, and enlisted, earning the Croix de Guerre. Are we open to gifts of any and every kind for the Campaign that seeks to elevate thousands of lives? O dear yes: paintings, boats, houses, trusts, islands, small nations… See rise.up.edu. Portland 4
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GO PILOTS! From Pilot baseball coach Chris Sperry’s eulogy for Pilot basketball fan extraordinaire Mauro Potestio ’50, who died in February at age 86. Mauro was a school principal, the Pilots’ golf coach, and most famously the bow-tied fan who attended 898 consecutive men’s basketball games, from 1949 through this year. As a freshman baseball player at the University of Portland in 1984, I soon met Mauro, then the sports information director. We sat in his office and talked; his job was to gather information to be used, I suppose, with local newspapers, on the off chance that I might play well some day. But what I left with was a deep belief that I was an important and valued member of the University family. That was Mauro’s great gift: he made you feel that you mattered. He made you feel that you were a genuine part of his life. He would stop you on campus to chat between classes. He would come to practice and take photos, hanging around and chatting while you waited your turn in the batting cage, oohing and ahhing when someone got a hold of one. Fourteen years after that first meeting, in 1998, I returned to The Bluff to coach the baseball team. In the intervening years Mauro had become the men’s golf coach, so we worked together as coaches until his retirement. Whenever our paths crossed, it was the same: a hearty handshake, a hug, or what I remember as his trademark gesture, a gentle pat to your cheek. Mauro’s love of people, the Pilots, and life in general ran deep. His devotion to the basketball program was legendary, and it is truly remarkable to think that he did not miss a men’s game on campus for more than 60 years. And yet it wasn’t enough for him to simply attend the game. He dressed immaculately, always wearing one of his signature bow ties. For Mauro, it wasn’t enough to show up. What was important was to bring your best, and let people know that you love this thing enough to show it the respect it deserves. We live in a world where businesses spend millions of dollars to build a brand, to build an identity for their products, and to use symbols or catch-phrases to get people to recognize who they are. Yet it is people who leave the most lasting impres-
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sion on us. When you think of a burly broadcaster in Chicago with oversized spectacles and a beer in each hand, you instantly think of Harry Caray and the Cubs. When you think of a chubby Italian guy in an ill-fitting uniform boasting of the blue blood running through his veins, Tommy Lasorda and his beloved Dodgers instantly come to mind. And when you think of the fellow in the bow tie whose warm personality and affection was worn on his sleeve, you think of the Portland Pilots. You simply could not think of Mauro and not immediately think of his passion for this University. As a man with three daughters, one of the virtues that I wish for most in my children is passion. I want them to love something so deeply that they are willing to work hard for it. I want them to learn how to struggle through difficult times, rather than quitting, because they believe in something, whatever it may be. And Mauro’s passions ranged far beyond sports, as we all know very well. He loved Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, he loved his Italian heritage, and his fascination with films and Academy Awards was simply amazing. We talked a lot about Mauro in our house this week, as probably everyone here did, and my wife Andrea, also a former Pilot student athlete and a dear friend of Mauro’s, said something I’ll never forget: the memory that she will cherish most is the
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way Mauro always greeted her with a warm smile, greeted her by name no matter how much time had passed, greeted her with those gentle hands on her face. “I loved him,” she said. “No matter how bad your day was, you always felt better after seeing him. You couldn’t help it.” What a classy man. How thankful, how proud, how much better we are for his devotion to us. There will never be anyone like him. Recently a friend of mine took the time to talk to my baseball players. “Don’t walk through life without people knowing you’re here,” he said, and he wasn’t talking about bravado or grand gestures in the hope of getting noticed. He was talking about being a good teammate and living a life that brings out the best in others. It is our job as teammates, coaches, husbands, wives, friends, and neighbors to touch as many lives in a positive way as possible. Mauro did that. It is simply remarkable to think of how many lives he touched during his own long life. Our pain and loss today is softened by our faith, by knowing that Mauro is now reunited with his beloved wife Ann, and by the excellent chance that he and Ann are sharing laughs and a drink with Frank Sinatra. We’ll miss Mauro terribly on The Bluff, but his spirit lives inside each and every one of us who ever utters the words Go Pilots! n
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THEY ARE WE From a lovely and funny homily by Father Charlie Gordon, C.S.C., on the feast day of Blessed Basil Moreau, founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross, the University’s Catholic order. During the Mass the order’s annual Spirit of Holy Cross Award was presented to John Soisson, who founded this magazine. He wept. It was great. This occasion leads me to reflect on what it must be like to be a lay collaborator with Holy Cross in this place, which was founded by the Congregation more than a century ago, and which continues to be served by one of the largest communities of Holy Cross priests and brothers in the country, and perhaps in the world. One of the first challenges facing someone who wishes to collaborate with the Congregation of Holy Cross must be to figure out who we are, and how we do things. This task is complicated by the fact that much about our way of life has never been systematized or written down. You see, Father Moreau founded our congregation in 1837 to serve the traumatized church of post-revolutionary France. It was a church in crisis. It wasn’t a time to compose mission statements or set out formal spiritualities or philosophies. There were ruined parishes to be restored and countless children to be taught. Moreau’s first followers were thrown in the deep end, with little formal training, and told to get to work. And armed with little more than faith, hope, and zeal they did a great deal of good work. Little wonder, then, that faith, hope, and zeal became the hallmarks of Holy Cross. Much else about who we are as a congregation had to be worked out on the fly as we responded to one crisis after another in one new culture after another. In a sense, that atmosphere of crisis has never really gone away. There’ve never seemed to be enough of us to accomplish the great missions that Christ has set out for us. One consequence of this been an impatience with process. We start to squirm whenever conversation about the mission seems to go on too long. Something inside us wants to shout oh, shut up and go do some work! Another consequence has been that from the beginning, sharing our
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mission with lay collaborators has been, not an act of generosity on our part, but a stone-cold necessity. We’ve never imagined that the mission could be accomplished any other way. So we’ve always taken our lay collaborators to our hearts, and to the heart of our work. In a very real way, they are we. And perhaps, at times, in the great Holy Cross tradition, our collaborators too are dropped in at the deep end and expected to succeed by force of faith, hope, and zeal. It may not seem like much of a method, but look at what has been accomplished as a result!
We don’t hold our lay collaborators at arm’s length. We don’t pretend with them to be something we’re not. We don’t put up a front. We learned at some point in our history that we don’t have to stand on our dignity in order to have dignity. Consequently, no one can work with us for long without noticing our flaws and foibles. I imagine that at the point when our various quirks become obvious, there is a danger of becoming disillusioned with us. Perhaps the danger is made greater by the position of privilege we appear to be in here. The universal church testifies that there have been members of the Congregation of Holy Cross whose lives were characterized by heroic sanctity. Right now, in other places, Holy Cross priests and brothers act heroically in circumstances of deprivation and danger for peace and justice— for Christ. Do we just happen to have the bad luck to have all the soft and pampered Holy Cross guys here? Our lay collaborators must sometimes Portland 6
have to work at seeing the good in us, often giving us the benefit of the doubt. And in time they may learn that the fellow complaining loudly that there’s too much fennel in his crab cakes has in fact done some remarkable things for the Kingdom of God. Because they work so closely with us, our collaborators will often need to forgive our clumsiness and the hurts we heedlessly inflict. We have to do this with each other. This is what comes of our having to undertake missions that are so much bigger than we are. We can’t manage them by deploying just a “Sunday best” version of ourselves. They demand that we invest everything we have, everything that we are — even the annoying bits. We’ll probably assume that you will do the same. We can take the extraordinary efforts of our collaborators for granted in much the same way as we take each other for granted. Of course you’re working fourteen hours a day; it’s what we do. Actually, failing to get credit for what you have accomplished may be the ultimate sign of being part of the mission of Holy Cross. After all, half the world seems to think that the Universities of Portland and Notre Dame are great Jesuit universities. In sum, when Jesus says, “Take up your cross and follow me,” it may mean for our lay collaborators, “Take up your Holy Cross and follow me.” What do they receive in return? Well, for one thing, to borrow the words of Saint Paul, they are given ample opportunity to “live in a manner worthy of the call you have received, with all humility and gentleness and patience, bearing with one another through love.” For another, the Gospels make it clear that our lives and talents are to be invested someplace where they will bear great fruit. This is such a place. History has shown that this university and the other great missions of Holy Cross are places where, by the grace of God, talents are multiplied many times over, so that astonishing things are achieved for Christ and his Church. The constitutions of our congregation assure us that while our predecessors in Holy Cross were heavily burdened, they did not walk, they strode. But if they strode, perhaps it was in order to keep up with the wonderful lay people who have collaborated with us from the beginning. Thank you, John, for walking with us. We’ll try to keep up. n
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Turning 89 in May: one of the University’s great quiet gentlemen ever, Brother Fulgence Dougherty, C.S.C., painted here by his Holy Cross confrere Father Mark Ghyselinck. Fulgence joined the Cross in 1942, spent 25 years in Bangladesh (surviving the civil war), 2 years in Liberia, 4 years in Ghana, and 32 years at the University, working with students from all over the world. Gracious, witty, egoless, gentle, extraordinary, he is the kind of man you think of first when you think of how great Holy Cross men can be. Tell him yourself if you admired him: fdougherty9378@gmail.com. Or, hey, make a Campaign gift celebrating the man: longm@up.edu.
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SUNDANCE DIARY Young alumna filmmaker Holly Lynn Ellis brings her new movie to Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival! Keeps notes! Tears! Laughter! 11/22: I’m sick and it’s late and the stupid cell phone rings and I mean to hit ignore but my stupid thumb hits the stupid answer button. Hi, Holly, this is I miss his name from the Sundance Film Festival, and we love your film Prairie Love and can't wait to include it in the festival and I am crying and I need champagne. I call the director, Dusty. I’m thinking we should plan a reunion for the team, I say. In Utah. They got a festival there. We got in…. 11/ 23: Party's over. Get to work. Movie not done. No music. Sound editing a mess. Need PR rep, sales agent, how to get everyone to Utah? Move move move! 12/17: Meeting with Britney Spears' attorney. He loves our movie. He wants to represent our movie. How did we get here? 12/24: No one likes our poster. 12/25: Dusty refuses to hear another word about poster.
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12/26: Complete redesign of poster. 1/5: Test screening of film. New score and color correction. Enormous success. 1/8: Spend whole day getting hair done and spending too much money on makeup. Girly pre-requisites for Leading Lady achieved. Ready to get back into camo-cargo pants and act like a producer again. A friend accurately pointed out that me getting a make-over is like a kid getting dragged to the doctor's for a shot. 1/19: Arrive in Park City, Utah. Immediately take the bus to the State Liquor Store. Grocery and retail stores do not sell beverages with substantive alcohol content in Utah, but State Liquor Stores do. Did I research this detail in advance of the trip? Yes. Yes, I did. 1/21: Invited to dinner party hosted by Washington State Film Commission, Seattle Film Commission, W Seattle Hotel, and The Warren Report, a Seattle film promotion company. All of the food was prepared before our eyes by the hotel’s sous chef, and the wines were poured by the young woman who planted the vines. The conversation was inspiring and wide-ranging. I am giddy to be one of the ten filmmakers invited. 1/22: Interview with Dusty and the cast, followed by photo shoot. Funny
women Rachael Harris and Cheryl Hines had to wait while we went first. 1/23: Premiere Day! The Director of Programming opens his introduction by calling Prairie Love “a film that reminds him why he does what he does.” Hey, look, James Franco is here. James Franco is here! He loved our movie! Two days later he gets nominated for an Oscar. At the party later I note that the University of Portland is one of four alma maters sponsoring the party. Thanks. 1/25: SWAG BOMB! It’s amazing what people will give you if you look like you assume you deserve it. It was fun nabbing some winter boots for my sister while watching John McFee of the Doobie Brothers jam. Live. Because this kind of thing happens here. 1/27: Am standing on street corner with Mom when a SUV passes with the window rolled down, "I love your mooooviiieeee!" screams a woman in the passenger seat. All hail the driveby critic. 1/27: Variety pans our movie. Typos in their review, not to mention they mix up North Dakota and North Carolina. It’s ok, Variety editors, I think: fourth grade was hard. 1/28: Had our third screening tonight: Nathan Dinsdale ’01 is there! Go Pilots! 1/29: I was one of about 15 filmmakers who spoke at a roundtable for the film students attending the festival. Each of us was to sit at our own table and we’d be joined by the students as they came in. I am repeatedly mistaken for a student. 1/30: Near the end now. I am crying all the time. Last meal with team. Start packing. Finished as quickly as possible so that we could have one more night in the hot tub. It was snowing tonight. Snow falling on your face while you sit in a hot tub is a simply miraculous feeling. I'm not going to cry. I am not going to cry. 1/31: Arrive at home in New York City. My cats do not recognize me. Back to the old day job tomorrow. I will not complain. I have actually and truly lived the dream. Ten thousand film teams wanted to be at Sundance this year, and 118 made it, and we were one of them. I couldn't be happier or more blessed — or more determined to make sure it happens again. n To see more of Holly’s film, see www.prairielove.com. To help the Rise Campaign raise money for the University’s theater programs and students, see rise.up.edu.
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Changing hats this summer, after fifteen years as, basically, vice president for students: John Goldrick, who will essentially be in charge of recruiting Campaign gifts from donors abroad, especially in his beloved Asia, where he served in the Peace Corps as a youth. Goldrick wore a lot of hats, too: de facto dean of discipline, enrollment czar, admissions guru, student life supervisor...often vilified by students, annually parodied in the student newspaper, he also quietly helped many hundreds of students grow up, straighten out, and get a sense of what really matters; for which, all teasing aside, the University thanks him and his graceful wife Jackie for years of commitment and care. Summer 2011 9
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I’ve been gathering with eleven students once every two weeks or so for four years now. We share stories. Like the brotherly philosophizing that happens after two or three beers, or around a campfire in the woods, or on a ski-lift between runs. One man came to a moment of truth as a senior in high school when he realized that he wanted honesty with his parents more than he wanted to drink beer with his friends. He hopes his younger sister also seeks integrity over secrets. One seeks integrity as he balances his responsibility to his family in Hawaii, and their traditional expectations, and his responsibility to himself and his gifts, which may mean that he doesn’t return to the islands after graduation. One discovered that his responsibility to himself and his gifts includes overcoming the obsessive compulsive disorder diagnosis he received as a junior. He talks about the challenge of training his mind to ignore itself. One has trained his mind for a career in the Army, but remains amazed and nervous that he will make decisions that could hold people’s lives in the balance. One helps his mother make deci-
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sions about plumbers three states away because he is an only child and his father died a year ago. He wants more than anything to use his engineering knowledge to improve people’s lives and has already designed a tool to help amputees train their new limbs. One began at the University with the desire to use his engineering knowledge in the foreign missions with fellow Mennonites. He changed his mind about the missions, and now wonders if that change means engineering was a mistake. He has decided to persevere — to do the best he can with hope that God will make it right. One is not sure about hope in God, but left engineering for hope in math. He finds in math the highest and most beautiful form of truth that we can grasp with certainty. One wrestles with a call to the priesthood when the only certainty he grasps is that he finds joy in partial differential equations. He grew up in the country and misses the Milky Way. One took his Boy Scout background to a new level, spending six months gazing at the Milky Way while exploring the Australian outback on foot Portland 10
and a canoe. He learned early on that if he feels pressure to change who he is to maintain a relationship for no good reason, either the relationship is harmful or his approach to it is. One suffered a life-threatening car accident before starting at UP, and found that he was friends with some people for no good reason; he learned which of his high school buddies he could lean on during his year-long recovery. One sang lead in a band with some buddies who didn’t finish high school. The band was a lifeboat for his friends, and he left when he realized he could swim. They’re all seniors now, these men. Four years ago they founded the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which now gathers more than 85 men — students, faculty, and staff — to share stories. These eleven men graduate in May; but the League is their legacy. n Josh Noem (in the green sweater) is a faith formation director for the University’s campus ministry office; the League he counseled won a national award for innovative programming in April. To help the Rise Campaign jazz creative efforts like the League, see rise.up.edu.
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Graduating this past spring, and leaving behind many who admired him for his sinewy courage and endless patience: Gabe Twining ’11, who suffered a terrible accident as a freshman and has been in a wheelchair since. He refused to quit the University, though, and nursing students helped him, and alumnus Bob Kessi designed and built a house for him, and his teachers and friends and family poured love into his continuing efforts to rise and walk again. A young man of grace and guts who elevated the campus with his grin. Travel in the light, Gabe Twining.
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LAST CLASS University biology professor Marlene Moore taught her last class recently, after 34 years on The Bluff as teacher, scholar, and dean of arts and sciences. Communication studies professor Jeff Kerssen-Griep took notes. Marlene’s now liberal arts dean at Willamette University. We miss her. Our leader today is friendly but matter-of-fact, knowing her students are attentive, even rapt, but not liable to much humor here at the tail end of the term. They show no sense of the moment, that they’re embarked on Professor Moore’s final class, after a third of century. Nor does she point it out for them. She is straightforward and unsentimental to a fault, posture erect, resources at the ready, eyes on student faces. Serious business this, translating what’s knowable about our sacred physiologies. “Another day at the office,” she had said to me. Maybe a holy office, I think. Her posture is deceptively casual. She’s quietly alert like an owl, or maybe an osprey with young — invested, warm, fierce, and calm, calm, calm. These students are her brood, not her prey, and they’re going to thrive beyond this nest, by God. During certain ritual moments students’ responses are instant, quiet, solemnly near-whispered unison chants: “What do I carry?” (“An epipen”) “What does it contain?” (“epinephrine”) “Why should that work?” (they chant their knowing) “Perhaps you’re ready to finish physiology…” (silent amens) This is no more done for show than is a Mass. She’s attentive to their chanted replies – a little squint, then “Ok…”, then another liturgical prompt, the next responsive chant. Submerging in call and response builds self-efficacy as students’ eyes turn inward and voices match volume and cadence. Students’ self-testing is plain to see at this late date; so is the assurance that subtly lights most faces as each chanted utterance nears its close; attentions return outward as each turns away from watering yet another key memory patch. As in other sacred settings, the comfort comes in knowing how it’s done; there’s sublime merit in everyone chanting what they know to be true of the learnable holy.
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“We answer more questions of how it works than why in physiology,” she says, leading them through metaphoric lands (“great stuff, these macrophages — reach out, pull in those little hot dogs, digest ’em, and spit out the parts…”) and B cells zapping lymphocytes only from a distance (“think of ‘B’ as in ‘Barracks’: ‘barracks shoot bullets.’”), and that “T cells must touch” to work, like deadly masseuse counterspies entrapping creepy lymphfiltrators. And later, “getting antibodies is like copying an exam — no memory cells form like in vaccination.” Which is a guide for living, isn’t it? She carries her authority seamlessly, her influence given by her students rather than taken at their expense. Her web of subtle communication choices constantly signals how to think about the day’s work — where to start?
¶ Shared sardonic knowingness edges her delivery (“What about those viruses, eh? Whooo!”), with students in on the joke after all this time together — those crazy rogue pathogens — tsk tsk — world’s full of ’em. Bodies have to be resolute. ¶ Easy interpersonal contact throughout — looking into individual faces while talking with ‘the group’; there’s no rock-star eye scan of the air above their heads. Nor an ounce of ‘look at me’ attitude. ¶ Everything about Marlene in the classroom starts with her eyes, then that half-grin. Like an athlete in her sport, her head on a smooth line leads the rest of her toward what’s next — a student, or a measured stride to a projector, arm and wrist graceful with the pen (the handwriting not so much). Her spoken interludes pull students back to her humanity and Summer 2011 13
their earned wisdom before the next illumination or another question. Her students trust her. ¶ Her voice, that Bonnie Raitt twang minus the blues, is warm, sometimes sliding sociably into companionable low-key laughter, keeping things focused and humane. ¶ She reveals much of what’s ‘behind the curtain’ throughout, telling us which teaching tactics she’ll use and why, being candid about her interests like any good negotiator. ¶ And she offhandedly narrates each of a few short computer animations with the synchrony of a silent movie house organist, smoothly pumping up the key insights to be savored from each. “Antigens can’t attack a red circle or a red rectangle, they can only attack the red triangle…” ¶ Lots of reassuring reminders about where these learnings already await to serve us (“…the notes, your CD, our website…”). She refers to some slides as “old friends.” And there’s sharing of the peace: occasional questions for the group to buzz about with neighbors, as when she asks everyone to map the lymph system onto the immune system she’d been weaving with words and animations and reassurances and drawings and you name it. “Talk to someone near you about that.” She sidles — head on a smooth line — to visit a pair during this five-minute task (to their cautious delight), says that between them they got it right; they all beam a bit. These students are engaged entities here at the end of the term. Students around me feel relaxed and prepped to be curious and serious-minded, to not worry about showing off, kissing up, or wasting brain energy to protect or repair self-identity as they’d have to when taught by an interpersonal oaf; Marlene saves face for everyone and herself as a matter of course, like breathing. Being here clearly is about the learning, not about keeping up appearances. One student asks Moore to talk about three other immune system components. “You know me — I’m always willing to let you know more!” Her final utterance: “Any questions?” How apt, how fitting an exit line. It’s what the world keeps asking anyone with ears to hear. To Help the Rise Campaign hone terrific teachers, to help students enroll and awaken here, see rise.up.edu.
ART BY KATIE CHAPMAN ’11
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O N S P O R T S National All-Academic Teams The Pilot men’s cross country team finished 13th in the nation, won their 32nd straight West Coast Conference title, collectively earned a 3.19 in school, and earned national AllAcademic honors, led by individual All-Academic Lars Erik Malde (3.7 in engineering management). Wow. ¶ But the women were even better; the Pilots had a collective 3.47, were also named national All-Academic, and were second in the WCC. Men’s Basketball The Pilots finished 20-10, the first time in fifty years with back-to-back twenty-win seasons, and averaged a healthy 3,200 fans. Forward Luke Sikma and guard Nemanja Mitrovic were named first team all-WCC, and sharpshootist Jared Stohl also earned league honors. Great year. Highlight: huge home win over #21 Saint Mary’s, and the student body rushing the floor in glee. Lowlight: the death of cheerful hoop nut Mauro Potestio ’50, who hadn’t missed a home game since 1949. See page 5. ¶ And Kramer Knutson, we note with pride, was league all-academic for the third time, with a 3.7 in philosophy. Women’s Basketball Four players earned league honors for the 16-15 Pilots: forward Natalie Day was first team all-WCC, Alexis Byrd made the all-freshman team, and Tara Cronin and ReZina TecleMariam also earned league honors. ¶ Cronin (3.7 in engineering) and Sarah Kliewer (3.5 in psych) were also named to the league’s all-academic team. Baseball Terrific start for the Pilots,
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who won six in a row opening the season, including a win in Eugene against the nationally ranked Ducks; but then they struggled, and were 1725 at presstime. Turner Gill was hitting .324, and All-American closer Chris Dennis had a 1.24 e.r.a. Coach Chris Sperry, by the way, delivered a glorious eulogy for campus sports legend Mauro Potestio — see page 5. Women’s Soccer On the USA World Cup team in Germany this summer: alumnae Stephanie Lopez Cox and Megan Rapinoe. On the pitch for Canada: Christine Sinclair and Sophie Schmidt. ¶ Training with the US National Team this summer: defender Cloee Colohan. ¶ On The Bluff, the Pilots open play in August; see portlandpilots.com for tickets and schedule. ¶ This year’s rookies: AllAmerican forward Kaila Cameli from Glendale, Arizona, the first juco transfer ever for the Pilots; AllAmerican mid Rebekah Kurle from Renton, Washington, where she was state player of the year; defender Malloy Leahy from Snohomish; defender Lorielle McCluskie from Scottsdale; and mid Emily Sippel from Westview High in Beaverton, where she earned a 4.0 and ran track. Men’s Soccer New faces for the Pilots: all-Utah mid Derek Boggs from Alta, mid Michael Escobar from Bellarmine Prep in Washington, allOregon goalie Kyle Foster from South Salem High, defender Matt Liberator from Oregon state champ Jesuit High, and U.S. National Team defender Mitchell Lurie from Chattahoochee High in Georgia. ¶ The men’s team shaved their heads this spring for the St. Baldrick’s Day Foundation, raising more than $8,000 for childhood can-
Graduated in May: backup center Jasonn Hannibal, center Kramer Knutson (who set the Pilot record for starts, 118), forward Luke Sikma (who set the record for rebounds, 987), and Jared Stohl, who led the nation in three-point shooting. The four together led the Pilots to 69 wins in their four years. Thank you, gentlemen.
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cer research. Good men. Cross Country New man this fall: Colorado state champ Woody Kincaid from Columbine High. He joins two other Colorado state champs on the Pilots: Scott Fauble in 2009, and David Perry in 2010. ¶ David Perry ran for Team USA this spring, in a 6k race in Trinidad; he was tenth, in 19:06, as the Yanks finished second to Canada. Track One spring highlight: Pilot AllAmerican Trevor Dunbar ’13 just missing a four-minute mile in his native Alaska. Led by Pilot rabbits Chase Caulkins and Cody Wells in front of a roaring crowd in the Anchorage Dome, he ran 4:02.88. The Alaska state record is 4:00.58, held by… Trevor’s dad, Marcus, the former US champ in the mile. ¶ New University records this spring: Cori Moore in the 800 (2:06.61), Natalie Hemphill in the 3000m steeplechase (10:44.81), and Dunbar in the 5000, running 13:42.53…minutes before teammate Alfred Kipchumba ran a 13:40.98. Wow. Golf The final season ever for the golf teams (replaced by the women’s rowing team) ended on a rise: senior Justin Smithhisler was all-WCC, the men were ranked as high as 27th nationally, and Nick Chianello ’13 rose to 15th in the nation. For the women, Sara Banke ’14 was All-WCC and scored an eagle in her final match, at the WCC championships. Rowing The new team will have 62 members, many from the extant successful Pilot club team, and a famous coach as of June: Bill Zack, president of the Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association, assistant coach at UCLA, and coach at the Olympic Games, Pan-American Games, and World Rowing Championships. He rowed himself for the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and was a Coast Guard lieutenant commander. Volleyball Danielle Dupar (3.56 in finance), Rachel Femling (3.77 in accounting), and Kate Bostwick all were named WCC all-academic; Dupar was also the league’s defensive player of the year. Tennis Lacey Pflibsen and Valeska Hoath were named to the WCC all-star team. Hoath, from Queensland, Australia, had a perfect March, 6-0 in singles; for the men, Alex Ferrero was all-WCC, and Nick Wales won his final match (with partner Geoff Hernandez) with panache; the Pilot duo was down 6-1 and roared to a 9-7 win. PORTLAND PILOTS.COM
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O N B R I E F L Y Rise! Okay, here’s a great Campaign story: the University’s students donated $70,000 for the new recreation center. “What better proof of our mission,” observed University president Father Bill Beauchamp, “than our students sacrificing their own money to help the University rise?” Colin Dorwart, the student body president, was also direct: “This campaign is bold and we believe in it. We believe in what the University stands for. This is the strongest message we can send. How can we expect others to donate to the University if we don’t?” ¶ This on the heels of the Class of 2010 raising $100,000 for their Molly Hightower Scholarship, named for the 2009 alumna killed in Haiti’s earthquake in Haiti while working with orphans. Wow. Bang for the Buck The top school in Oregon for “return on investment,” says Bloomberg Businessweek: the University of Portland. BB estimates that the 30-year net return on investment for graduates of University of Portland is $779,600. ¶ A rush of national honors lately; the University was ranked first among its peers in producing Peace Corps volunteers, first in producing Fulbright scholars, top ten in the West for overall quality (by U.S. News & World Report, the 16th consecutive year), and our nursing and business programs were ranked among the national top 25 by Parade magazine. Neat. Student Feats Remarkable young energies this spring: the film Blood, Sweat, and Berries, about migrant workers in Washington’s Skagit Valley, by Scott Hines ’12, who proudly screened his movie on campus; a heck of a line, that. ¶ Nursing students were with faculty and alumni in Narasaraopet, India, this spring, volunteering health care at an orphanage. ¶ Students Kenny King and Kurt Berning raised $20,000 for education in Cambodia through their non-profit company Global Alliance for Developing Education. Wow. ¶ Fifth in America in the 2011 Boulder ing Youth Nationals, and thus now a member of the U.S. National Team in that rockclimbish sport: Lisa Chulich ’14. ¶ The new student body president: theology major Zach Imfeld ’12, from Burbank. Hobbies: barbecue and Cincinnati Reds games. Whoa. ¶ The Beacon won four first-place awards from the Oregon Newspaper
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Publishers Association, and finished second in the entire Northwest among non-daily student newspapers. Excellent year. ¶ 130 business students suddenly painted not one but two North Portland schools this spring: Holy Cross and Ockley Green. Hilarious. Huge kick for the neighborhood. We love stuff like that. Alumni Awards Honored in April with the University’s four annual alumni awards: attorney and judge Bob Maloney ’64, who adopted a whole third grade in Portland; Army Major Paul Staeheli ’98, who has already served two tours in Iraq and won a Bronze Star; Tamara Faris ’00, whose work with kids now extends to India, Mexico, and all around Africa; and Katie Scally, who won the annual Tom Gerhardt ’54 award for a selfless and creative senior. Garrulous Guests Among recent speakers, performers, silver intelligences on campus: Securities and Exchange Commission economist Scott Bauguess, talking about the financial market crisis of 2008 and future regulation; author Michael Pollan, keynoting the University’s epic Food for Thought conference with a funny and revelatory talk about real food v. the “food-like substances that scream for our attention”; and theologian Peter Kreeft, on the fine Christian writers Walker Percy and C.S. Lewis. The Valedictorian of the Class of 2011 was Sean Frederick, a remarkable lad: he earned two full degrees (engineering and Spanish studies), never got a B, earned a Fulbright grant to study lasers at the University of Liverpool next year, and then will head, as an Air Force lieutenant, to the Air Force Research Laboratory in Ohio. Whew. Engineering Dean Zia Yamayee, at his retirement ceremony, confessed his rules for being on committees: never arrive on time, never speak until the meeting is half over, be as vague as possible, and be the first to move for adjournment. “Also, the best classroom in the world is at the feet of the elderly, ignoring facts do not change facts, if you are not yourself you are nobody, being kind is more important than being right, and pray steadily.” Zia will be back on campus in 2013 as the Brother Godfrey Vassallo, C.S.C., Professor of Engineering (Campaign target! Hint! Rise.up.edu!). The McNerney-Hanson Chair in Ethics has its second occupant this Summer 2011 15
summer: philosophy professor Michael Andrews, most recently at Seattle U. Andrews is particularly interested in health care and bioethics. Interesting guy: two doctorates, one from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. The $100K Challenge, the University’s annual competition among creative students for best business idea, was won this year by a delighted Sarah Klemze ’12, inventor of an online business for connecting high school students with vocational programs and scholarships. What began as the Center for Entrepreneurship’s $16K Challenge in 1999 drew 24 fledgling businesses this year. Campaign target, you ask? Why, yes. Great one, too — new small businesses… rise.up.edu… Rise! And speaking of the Campaign, some cool gifts: $250,000 from Don Galarneau ’49 for a new automated manufacturing lab; $250,000 from Diane and Dick VanGrunsven ’61 for an experimental mechanics lab; $1.2 million from the Colatorti family in memory of their son Roger ’61, for a scholarship for Central Catholic grads majoring in English; and $4 from a reader of this magazine, age 93, who wrote Your magazine staggers my heart and soul. Bless you. Amen. Our new engineering dean as of July: civil engineer Sharon Jones, most recently head of engineering at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Among her scholarly expertises: rural water and sanitation infrastructure and salmon management in the Pacific Northwest. She succeeds the wonderful Zia Yamayee, who after 15 deanly years returns happily to the faculty.
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When I Was Blind “Blindness was full of second sight...” By Edward Hoagland was blind for a while, and walking in the woods was an adventure. The white bark of birch trees beckoned to me. I would stroll through cushiony dead poplar leaves or fountaining ferns like ostrich plumes as high as my chest. I could hear squirrels quarreling and veerys veerying. Wood sorrel grew underfoot, the leaves tart when you taste them. Bears fattened on beechnuts in the fall up here and pitcher plants and orchids could be found in a kind of suspended bog.
When I was blind I listened to the radio scanner chatter softly, pulling in transmissions from the State Police, the Sheriff’s Department, the Border Patrol, the town Rescue Squad, and the hospital at the county seat. You could also hear several fire departments, the Fish and Game frequency that wardens called in on, the Civil Air Patrol, railroad dispatchers, and various ham channels that lonely civilians talked on. You might hear EMT personnel resuscitate a heart patient, panting over him on air; or a fire in progress, actually even crackling; or a cop chasing a car thief through the woods, but mostly highway crews gabbing with headquarters interminably. My neighbor trapped fisher, fox, and beaver in the swamp in season, shot venison, caught catfish, logged pulpwood, knew where the otters denned and the herons nested, where snappers could be dug out for a turtle stew, where a patch of lady’s-slippers flourished where any girl might pick a moccasin-flower for her prom. But he had medical bills, and no money laid aside till his social security kicked in, so he was a junkyard watchman for money. The man who owned the junkyard was a war veteran too and both men knew the old bootlegger paths through the swamp. The swamp was eight miles wide, and you could make a living limbing cedar trees and dragging them out for post-and-rail fencing or patio furniture, or from saw-log cherry wood or yellow birch and bird’s-eye maple in the higher spots. Japanese businessmen owned the swamp now, having bought it from Wall Street investors, who had bought it from the logging company who had worked it over when everybody
was young. The logging company had employed the county’s jailbirds to cut tamaracks for telephone poles, plus any local who wanted to slug it out with the trees, hauling with horses as often as not, because of the braided streams. It was a good life until you broke a leg or got a rupture, and the logging led you into necks of the woods where nobody had trapped lately and you might nab a sixty-dollar bobcat overnight, half a month’s pay. When you are blind you can hear people smile — there’s a soft click when their lips part. Once I went to see a healer in the woods. “Ease up on milk and Tums. Are you centered with the Lord? Do you tithe? Are you asking Him for guidance? Is your daughter in trouble? I have patients who fall out of bed every night, their dreams are so bad. Smoke much? Lemme see your nails. Chew your nails? You pray? Farm paid for? Be tremulous before the Lord! I’ll pray for you, if you wish. But you wouldn’t want me spitting into your eyes, like Jesus did with the blind man. Am I right? Praise the Lord. Eat less. Unquietness eats at you. Stand underneath God. Get under His spotlight. No charge.” It used to be that the way you milked cows was you strapped a milking stool to your butt and wore it like a stiff set of bug’s legs sticking out for half the day. No more. In the old days here, before the economics of farming forced you to trundle each cow off to be ground into hamburger once her most productive years were past, you’d become friends with your cows, and you felt an intimacy with the personalities of each, milking by hand, not machine. Although you shot every hawk or owl you saw, you treated your cows better then. When I was blind I loved to ride trains, to sit in the Observation Car and chat with strangers, or in the dining car, the club car. When you can’t see, age is less of a factor, no skin tone or paunchy posture to go by. Voices wrinkle later than faces, and, emanating from inside, seem truer to the nature residing there, harder to educate in concealment or deceit. Voices register compassion, disdain, apprehension, Portland 16
confidence, or surprise more directly, if you’ve learned to listen. Rain squalls wet the spiders’ webs just enough to glisten so that I could see them, though trees remained a bit of a puzzle, like shapes viewed underwater. But I could hear better — the giggle of the flying loons, rattle of a kingfisher, a hermit thrush seeking an answer from distant softwoods, the passage of a large milk snake through the stone wall where it ate chipmunks. Another neighbor, who worked at the sawmill, had taught his dog to snatch food scraps out of the air when he, the neighbor, was having lunch and tossed them. But one day two of his fingers were sliced off by the saw and flew through the air and the dog caught and ate them. So I’m a part of him now for as long as he lives, said the guy. When your sight evaporates, your forehead seems to lower incrementally, appropriating the area formerly occupied by the eyes. Thus more brain space is created — as well as more time to think. You hope. Offered for auction today in town: cows, a llama, a guitar, a hare, a truck tire, a wheelchair. Who died? Play it safe, says the auctioneer, you’ll never get one cheaper when you need it. Afterwards the cashier puts a bottle of whiskey on the counter, signaling the end of the auction and a drink for everyone with money for a poker game. Blindness was full of second sight. I saw how the money economy had failed my neighbors after a lifetime of busy days, a web of energetic routines. Their house insurance had lapsed, the property tax bill was a yearly or-deal, but social security hadn’t yet kicked in. So fragile, though surges of mercy in other people did bubble up. n Edward Hoagland, the University’s Schoenfeldt Series Visiting Writer in 1994, is the author of twenty books of essays, travel, and fiction, among them the Northwest classic Notes from the Century Before. These notes are drawn from a book in progress called Ten Mile.
PAINTING BY RENÉ MAGRITTE, ART RESOURCE, ©2011 C. HERSCOVICI, LONDON / ARTIST RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK
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THE CHILDREN WE DID NOT THINK WE HAD ROOM FOR IN OUR HEARTS Notes on teaching as joy, pain, prayer, thrill, comedy, glee, grandeur, magic, hauntedness, surliness, roaring, fear, amazement, desperation, hilarity, and miracles. And much else.
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aw meat: that’s how eighth-graders usually see a new teacher, especially one with no experience, like me on that Monday when I took on my very first class. I’d gotten the job offer a week earlier from the interim principal, who was only hours into her own new role. Miss Wood had been the eighth-grade teacher there since the earth was cooling, and enjoyed the respect and trust of the school and parish community. She was going to need both, as word trickled out that the old principal was suddenly gone, and why, and that Miss Wood was now in charge. Like many parochial schools, tuition only paid part of the bills; students and their parents were constantly selling wrapping paper and cupcakes and doodads to pay for frills such as current textbooks. The most recent fundraiser had been wildly successful. Even two weeks after it was over, classroom closets housed the lingering aroma of the mountains of chocolate bars students had hustled, netting over ten thousand dollars. Now, ten thousand dollars, stacked in mounds of mostly singles, is a lot of money. Enough, as it turned out, to finance a one-way plane ticket to Mexico and plush accommodations for the previous principal, who took the candy money, along with an assumed name, and set up a new life for himself on a sunny beach south of the border, creating an immediate job vacancy. God speaks to people in a multitude of ways: a burning bush, a rainbow,
a rushing wind, the gentlest of breezes. Or, in my case, through grand larceny. Because it turns out that teaching is exactly what I am supposed to be doing, and I got to start doing it because Miss Wood became principal over the weekend and needed someone to take over her eighth graders on very short notice. She knew of me because I had conducted a one-day Confirmation retreat for her class, and she had been impressed that they could not make me cry in the course of our eight hours together. Not crying was apparently the main thing she was looking for in a candidate to finish out the school year in this toughish Los Angeles Catholic elementary school. That I could also play six chords on the guitar meant the new principal had also just gained a liturgical music leader for the school, and when she found out I had once purchased my college roommate’s calculus book back from her as a favor, I obviously had the credentials to teach math for grades six through eight. (Catholic schools are notorious for drawing out gifts and talents that people don’t know they have.) The pedagogical literature in those days was adamant that teachers had to project exactly who was boss from their initial contact with their students. Dressing professionally was key, according to the books, and I agonized in selecting clothes that communicated authority and business tempered by just the tiniest dash of approachability. In the mirror I practiced the withering Teacher Look I would evenPortland 18
PAINTING BY P.J. CROOK, GETTY IMAGES
By Karen Eifler
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tually patent. I put The Trouble with Angels movie on infinite loop and prayed to channel Rosalind Russell’s Mother Superior from that film. Same with Sidney Poitier’s Mr. Thackeray in To Sir, With Love. I made my list of non-negotiable rules. The bulletin boards were masterpieces. I was ready; bring it on, Monday! Monday brought it on, all right. I was the first person on the premises, radiating the loftiest of expectations in my pacing up and down the playground on high heels I had to force not to wobble. I could feel the eyes of hundreds of children burning into me, and I was pretty sure I saw several of the older boys rubbing their hands together in anticipatory glee at the torture they would soon be inflicting on the new teacher. But I almost felt sorry for them; I was that ready. The girls were subtler, as they always are. Most of the action came from their eyes, a slow up and down as they took my measure. I was ready for them too. The morning bell rang; time to commence my teaching career. I had also been working on my Teacher Voice, so it was loud and clear as these, the first words I ever spoke in public as a professional educator, roared out of my mouth on the playground: “Boys, grab your balls and line up now! I mean it!” One day my class was reminiscing about how magical life had been in kindergarten and how, at their ripe old age of thirteen or fourteen, they really missed believing in Santa Claus. Those with little brothers and sisters expressed a sweet concern that their siblings were somehow missing out on the sparkly holiday fantasy of believing that Santa would listen to whatever a five-year-old said, as long as it was sincere. Richard had the most magical idea of all. Yes, this was the same Richard who shot lentils at Becca and Julianne through a hollowed-out Bic pen casing, and slam-dunked the Baby Jesus through a basketball rim during the school Christmas pageant rehearsal. But he came up with the idea that we all write letters from Santa to the kindergartners. We wouldn’t just write on any old paper, he suggested, but on ice blue paper, the color of the Arctic Circle. And we’d use special ink. In a flash, like a playful twist on the story of the wedding at Cana, hidden stores of glitter pens, along with a surprising assortment of stickers and rubber stamps, appeared from eighthgrade backpacks, enhancing the
stodgy blue and black pens ordinarily demanded in my formal writing assignments. Richard procured a class list from Mrs. Bigelow and matched each of his classmates with one of her students. He even ran a brainstorming session, a genuine pre-writing sequence that covered the most reluctant writers. I had never seen Richard like this before, and I liked what I saw. Suddenly, visions of my students meeting their state creative writing proficiency requirements danced in my head. Students who were usually surly about revising their assignments developed multiple drafts and started over, not
Among the already-established funds for University students who want to be teachers are the Ernest Hayes Scholarship (named for a sweet professor) and the Margaret Mary Galati Memorial Scholarship, started by lifelong teacher George Galati in memory of his beloved daughter. There are about a thousand ways to help the Campaign shape and help young teachers, though; see rise.up.edu, or call Diane Dickey at 503.943.8130. just changing a word here and there, but coming up with new (and mostly better) concepts. They checked out thesauruses, labored over their spelling and penmanship on this one (because, duh, of course elves would write in their own hands and not leave such a precious task to the cold impersonality of a computer). These were writers with an authentic audience, and they did not want to let their little buddies down. Richard’s next stroke of genius was to spritz each paper with a misting tool and put them in the faculty lounge freezer until ice formed (which of course it would on any letters fresh from the North Pole). On the afternoon the letters were to arrive at the kindergarten, Richard first took a string of jingle bells and made some surreptitious passes by the classroom, shaking the bells gently each time. On his final lap, he knocked on Mrs. Bigelow’s door and turned on the Full Richard Charm. He presented Mrs. Bigelow with a big pile of frosty ice blue letters wrapped in a red satin bow with the tiniest of Portland 20
icicles formed on the borders. Mrs. Bigelow played her role wonderfully, telling Richard she would need some help making sure the letters got to the right people and could he think of anyone who could assist her young readers in making sense of all the words contained in the letters? And that is how it came to pass, on this last hour of the Friday before Christmas break commenced, that thirty-one willing helpers from the eighth grade, waiting in the stairwell to Upstairs, where no kindergartners ever tread, suddenly materialized to read letters from Santa out loud to a gaggle of true believers. In what could only be acknowledged as a Genuine Christmas Miracle, each teenager also had two cups of hot chocolate (with marshmallows!) and two gingerbread cookies that needed to be shared with someone. Did anybody in Mrs. Bigelow’s room like hot chocolate and gingerbread cookies? They did. And Richard, the least likely prophet in my small mind, led them. There is no miracle God cannot work. With memories of Operation Christmas Magic still fresh in their hearts, my new eighth-grade authors meandered further down Memory Lane, this time recalling their favorite books from their first years in school. I had just been to an in-service presentation about working with “disenchanted learners.” The speaker had reminded me that dis-enchanted literally means “away from the magic.” So, part of our charge as educators is to re-connect students with the stunning joy they once found in breaking open stories and mastering new skills in the “classics” they had read ages ago — as far back as six or seven years, or even longer. Robert, who couldn’t be bothered to crack the spine of The Pearl in our literature class, was, I found out, the same little boy who’d eagerly listened to Ferdinand the Bull so many times as a five-year-old that, I was told, long before he could read anything for himself he knew when his tired dad tried to skip a word to hasten bedtime. He could love stories, just not the ones I was foisting on him. Julianne kept earning zeroes from me due to her inability to develop a retrievable homework filing system. But as a little girl she had spent hours seeking and finding that guy in the hornrimmed glasses and red and white striped shirt, wearing out three different volumes in the Where’s Waldo? series. She could focus. Just not on what I wanted her to.
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Once upon a time, it seemed, every one of my eighth graders couldn’t get enough of certain books. Finally, it dawned on me to quit fighting this and use it. So I began encouraging my students to talk about the stories that had turned them from “decoders” into “readers.” As they talked with one another, they got increasingly invested in the idea of helping their newly found kindergarten buddies fall in love with reading. And I began to realize that helping them do so might bring them back to the magic of learning they would need as they headed to high school and beyond. First, they decided, they would like to read some of their own favorite stories out loud for the little ones. Copies of Mike Mulligan’s Steam Shovel, Where the Wild Things Are, and Madeline, their duct-taped bindings bearing witness to how wellloved they’d been, trickled in from homes to our classroom, and a delegation was formed to meet with Mrs. Bigelow to see if she could possibly find thirty minutes one day to let the big kids pair up with the little ones to read aloud. The group finally prevailed on the wise Mrs. Bigelow to find thirty precious minutes a week for Reading Buddies. That is how one morning her classroom on the first floor became a controlled riot of gangly tweens who had even thought to bring in cushy pillows and blankets, the better to make Reading Forts with the buzzing kinders. The little ones could not believe that their heroes from the mysterious world of Upstairs were choosing to spend time with them again. Mrs. Bigelow’s reading loft groaned with all the pairs of students who wanted to curl up there for this event. She and I realized we would need to rotate people in and out so that they all got a chance in the prime reading real estate in their world. We loved the “problem” of eighth graders arguing over the best place to share a great story. Those who didn’t make the initial loft cut were undeterred and told their charges they could make magic anywhere: That was the glory of books. I had to marvel that these were the same students who mumbled their way through verbal proficiency exercises in my own reading class. But then, what did I know? I’m only a teacher. Our first half hour evaporated, and on the way Upstairs my kids teemed with ideas. Next time just plain old reading out loud would not
be good enough; now they would create sound effects and special voices and bring the stories their Buddies had told them they loved to uproarious life. And couldn’t they record them so that Mrs. Bigelow could use them later at her listening stations because wouldn’t it be a shame, Miz Eifler, to put in all this effort and have it disappear like dry ice at room temperature? Okay, I agreed with feigned reluctance, but only on your own time... Yes, yes, they agreed too quickly. At recess or after school when it’s quiet in our room. It’ll take some technology I don’t have in the room... We’ll bring all the equipment from home! We’ll recruit our parents to help! That’s when I knew that we were entering uncharted waters. Maybe it’s the melamine trays and tiny milk cartons, but it’s weird. One minute I am briskly, confidently managing a herd of unruly eighth graders down the hall to the cafeteria for lunch, making sure there are at least eight people between Richard and
Their exasperating, captivating, hilarious, fragile, resilient thirteenyear-old selves are gone forever. But I will fall in love with the next ones... Amanda, aiming a wickedly effective Teacher Look at Jesse so he doesn’t even think about tormenting Jessica, and making sure Julianne, our new girl, has someone to sit with. The next minute, however, the crushable high school sophomore I once was, who somehow still lives within me, quakes at facing the tables of my teaching colleagues wolfing down their lunches in the twelve minutes they have until recess duty. They’re all such nice people and have proven that to me time and again. Heck, I’m a nice person too. But there’s something about carrying a food tray and hoping to be invited for a place at table that brings roaring back to life an insecurity in me that should have faded away a long time ago. But here’s another weird thing. At Summer 2011 21
other times, a similarly unexpected flash of sensation brings back for a glimmer of a visit an earlier version of me that I’ve really missed. Like when I’m directing the students on the Social Committee to hold the cups sideways when they pour the root beers out for the class party and my Grandpa Quinn, buried these past forty years, taps me on the shoulder and says, “That’s my girl; just like I told you.” Suddenly I am my five-yearold self again as Grandpa shows me how to keep his Miller’s beer from foaming over by tilting the glass as we pour. Or a cursive “g” comes out especially lovely as I am writing out the day’s homework tasks on the board and Sister Mary Therese Anne nods her approval at the ascenders and descenders she labored to help all fifty (fifty!) second graders in her care master during our Palmer Method handwriting lessons each afternoon at St. Joan of Arc School. Or putting down my Agatha Christie mystery on a blissfully booky rainy Saturday and momentarily feeling the room graced by Sister Mary Reynette, who helped me and forty-nine (forty-nine!) other first graders crack the code that turned squiggles into letters and letters into words. Or I am shaking hands with each of my students as they leave for the day, making sure that they have each heard themselves called by name and acknowledged by an adult, and for a moment my dear friend Tom is there on my shoulder, for it was his example of gentle courtliness that inspired this daily ritual. I love that even though my students will never know Grandpa or the good Sisters, they can feel their influence through the best of my actions as I channel what I learned from them and savor their occasional drive-bys into my consciousness. I had a student once named Jaime who started wearing dress shoes to school each day, the kind with heels that clicked loudly every time he walked even the shortest of distances on our school’s linoleum floors. And with the new shoes came increasing trips out of his desk: to sharpen his pencil (click, click), get his friends tissues (click, click), wander around looking at the walls (click, click), or ask if I needed anything taken to the office (about two hundred yards, roundtrip, of really loud clicking). Jaime especially loved his trips alone down the school corridor, for the echo his shoes could produce in all that empty space. The rest of us did not see it that way, and it was not too long before Jaime’s clicking made it hard for us to concentrate. It was time for a chat.
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How grand to be able to witness grandeur that is always harboring in the cells of our students; I think of Margaret, who exemplified all the “gray children” who slip unheralded through classrooms. She never made trouble. She completed her work, but in unremarkable style. I don’t remember her asking questions or raising her hand to offer anything. Until one day, when Margaret dazzled. As the eighth graders filed in for math, there was an uneasy crackling of energy climaxing with two girls brawling. Juanita was one of them. Her opponent — and best friend— Teresa, ran out of the room sobbing furiously as Juanita retreated to her desk and collapsed. Max related what had happened near the end of their previous class: Teresa had passed out notes to several people, taunting them to go back to Uganda...or China...or whatever country their parents had come from. When Juanita received hers, telling her to go back to Mexico, something had snapped and she had attacked Teresa in the hallway between periods. No one had a clue what had provoked the notes, but everyone seethed. The principal, Miss Wood, strode into the room, announcing that the two girls would be suspended for the rest of the week. They both gathered their things in sullen silence and left with-
out a word. Miss Wood expected me to deal with the complicity of the entire class in the fighting. As the class speculated about why Teresa had passed out the notes and why Juanita had reacted so violently, mousy little Margaret quietly offered the class her own thoughts. She had noticed a lot of bruises on both Juanita’s and Teresa’s arms and legs in the past few weeks. Maybe one or both of them were being physically abused at home. “When you are being hit by the people who are supposed to take care of you,” Margaret murmured, “you feel like lashing out at someone else. I know, because that is how it was for me a few years ago until my mom Portland 22
made my dad move out. I think Teresa and Juanita must be in a lot of pain to be taking it out on each other and the rest of us so badly. I think when they come back from suspension we should try to make them feel as safe and loved as we can at school, because it might be scary as hell for them at home. I know it was for me.” Every single person in the class could all hear the clock tick in the silence that met this searing, brave confession. Finally Derrick suggested a “Welcome Back” party for Juanita’s and Teresa’s return from suspension the next week. Assignments for food and drink were quickly negotiated. The two girls returned to class the next week, their posture, gait, and
PHOTO BY YELLOW DOG PRODUCTIONS, GETTY IMAGES
“Yes, I know these shoes make noise, Miz Eifler,” he said. “That’s why I bought them. On Saturdays when I was a real little boy, my father would take my mom for dinner and sometimes dancing. He would get all dressed up and put on his special ‘going out shoes’ and sometimes they would dance down our hallway and into the living room and his shoes clicked all the way on the hardwood floors. He and my mom looked so beautiful together as they swirled and clicked. I was four when Papa died of a heart attack. It’s just my mom and my three brothers and me in the house now and nobody dances anymore. But when I wear these shoes, and they click, click, click down the hallway like his did, I always think of my father and he is here with me for a while, even though I can barely remember what he looked like.” Dear God. Another teacher learning moment. Thank you, Jaime, for letting me know the communion of saints isn’t just words in the last line of our creed but a lived reality. Those we loved and who loved us back return constantly to tap us on the shoulder and remind us we’ve got people in our corner. Yes, we do.
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downcast eyes telling us they expected a rocky re-entry. When they saw the “We Love You” banner and the treats gradually appearing, however, they both loosened up. Quiet, brave Margaret enveloped each of them in a hug, which they received haltingly at first and then collapsed into with clear relief. The celebration that our class enjoyed that hour was not the usual eighth-grade raucous, but gentle and heartfelt. Jesus was on to something when he used the startling present tense in each of his beatitudes. “Blessed are those who mourn...” Right now, in the heart of our fragility. Chris was definitely high energy, innnnteresting, and had his own way of doing things. He had a restless, seeking mind that devoured books, footnotes, and even nutrition labels on cereal boxes. Chris understood instinctively that the syllogisms and logic exercises he worked on in his geometry class made him write more effective expository essays in my English class. He correctly worked “adumbrate” into a casual class conversation one day. I know this, because I immediately looked the word up. Chris was the kind of pistol who was usually assigned a position in the far outfield during phys ed class to accommodate his endless reveries. He was so voraciously inquisitive that, if we stumbled across something new or unknown to him, he’d immediately look it up — not just the meaning of whatever it was but the history, current status, and future implications of the entire subject. We teachers say we treasure curiosity, and most of the time I think we mean it. But it can be hard on our ego to have a student know bookloads of facts beyond the day’s lesson plans. I have to confess — to you, my brothers and sisters — that there were days I found myself hoping Chris came down with chicken pox or some such. Nothing serious or health threatening, mind you, just enough to keep him out of school for a few days while I caught my breath. But Chris, of course, had perfect attendance. All this ran through my mind in a few microseconds of neuroprocessing when I literally ran into Chris’ mom in the school office one afternoon. I was so deep in my own thoughts that I greeted her with the lamest of all teacher greetings: “Oh, you’re Chris’ mom, aren’t you?” The mother’s look was so apprehensive that I feared I had dislocated her shoulder or crushed her foot in our collision. “Oh no,” she groaned,
“what has he done this time?” For just as speedily as I could list all the ways Chris wore me out, it turns out his mom could recollect the dozens of parent-teacher conferences gone badly over the years, all the times teachers had launched into a list of what was wrong with her precocious son. And this is how I know there is a Holy Spirit who breathes life and love and wisdom into us teachers, just when we need it. I looked Chris’ mom in those desperate eyes of hers and heard these true words come out of my mouth: “You are raising a young man with an amazing mind that astonishes me every day with its agility and boundless energy. And you must have done something we should all bottle and drink greedily from in the way you taught him to revere learning and books and never to settle for easy answers. What a gift you are sharing with the world.” To this the mother answered in a whisper, “Thank you so much, Miss Eifler. Do you know that this is the first time in ten years of schooling that a teacher ever started a conversation by telling me something nice about my son? I am never going to forget this. Thank you.” And then she gave me a Mama Bear hug that squeezed forever into me this message: Every student in my classroom, even the “pistols,” is someone’s cherished son or daughter. Thirteen-year-old girls swampled in graduation gowns and teetering on their first high heels down the aisle of a cafegymatorium are so beautiful. So are their male classmates, flaunting their gaudy first ties and nursing blisters in dress shoes encasing feet that have mostly only known sneakers. What makes our students especially lovely is the look on each face as they search the audience for the dearest faces in their worlds — those of their parents, grandparents, and siblings — faces that, for the moment and for the same reason, are just as beautiful as theirs. If someone could bottle pure in-spite-of-everythingfamilial-love, they would have the best cosmetic ever invented. It’s no wonder, then, that “Pomp and Circumstance” is the soundtrack for so many commercials aimed right at our hearts. There is something about graduation ceremonies, even in eighth grade, that can crack open the stoniest teacher heart and keep an exhausted teacher signing on for another year. Here is why I think we all go through so many tissues each June. Every parent falls in love with an infant and then has to say goodbye to that infant in order to fall in love Summer 2011 23
with a one-year-old, only to have that baby turn into a two-year-old, who gives way to a three-year-old, and so on and so forth. The same thing happens with teachers. At the end of every school year, and especially at the end of the “big” years, like the first and third and fifth and eighth and twelfth and sixteenth — every teacher dies a little. We have to “let the dead bury the dead” and fall in love again with a whole new group of children. Luckily, we are able to do so, but there are an awful lot of goodbyes that have to take place first. Whether we teach elementary school or middle school or high school or college, it doesn’t really matter — we have to say goodbye to that chubby little guy we grew to love or that awkward, dreamy little girl who always made us smile or the gangly kid who just barely passed our class. All of these students leave, although if we are lucky we will catch glimpses of them throughout their lives. But their exasperating, captivating, hilarious, fragile, resilient thirteen-year-old selves are gone forever. So when they leave us, although we know we will fall in love with the next group, first we must brace for the sorrow of another necessary goodbye to those precious persons we had only recently (and in some cases only finally) begun figuring out. That might explain the many lumps surprising our collective throats and the slight tingling on the corners of so many of our eyes at the end of each school year, which we never would have expected because we have been waiting for months for this particular class to graduate so we can shake their dust from our sandals. It’s not hard to understand why many female veterans of annual graduations know not to wear mascara (it will run) and remember to stock up on Kleenex before the procession begins. Graduation ceremonies afford us all a chance to stop what we are doing, treasure precious memories, mourn a real loss, and prepare to fall in love with a brand new group of young people we didn’t think we had room for in our hearts. But we do. n Karen Eifler is a professor of education on The Bluff, and the Carnegie Foundation’s Oregon Professor of the Year in 2006. This essay is drawn from her new book of essays, A Month of Mondays: Spiritual Lessons from the Catholic Classroom (ACTA Publications, Chicago). Our thanks to Karen and to her publisher Greg Pierce.
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AUTUMN In PARIS The peripatetic young alumnus Brad Myers ’03, already a veteran of El Camino de Santiago, the several-hundred-mile pilgrimage through northern Spain called the Way of Saint James, recently spent some months living not only in Paris but actually in the legendary Shakespeare and Company bookstore in that ancient city; here are some notes and images from those unusual days.
Ă&#x; In 1951 a man named George Whitman opened a bookstore in Paris, and with the blessing of Sylvia Beach, he named it after her famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop. Today George is 97 and lives upstairs above the books. His vibrant daughter Sylvia runs the shop, and it is Sylvia who says yes, I can be one of the five residents in the store for a while. We five help open the shop at ten in the morning, close it at eleven, and work two hours a day shelving books and helping customers lost in the vast and confusing wilderness of shelves. I wake up every morning and see Notre Dame from my window. The weather is increasingly gray. I discover the joy of roasted chestnuts in the Jardin du Luxembourg, fresh hot crepes cooking on burners along Boulevard Saint Michel. So many tiny hidden streets. I pass the plaque where Hemingway pounded away at his books. The feeling of books in my hands every day, their smell, their heft. Never have I felt so poorly read. Free public showers.
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There is no space to call your own at the bookstore. You collect your things and shove them in an old water closet for the day. No place to relax in peace. It’s friendly and warm there but always populated. One day I fall asleep on a bench near Notre Dame, in the last of the autumn sun shining through gaps between the elms. But my trusted place of solace is the house of the Lord. There is a small church near the bookstore where I can sit in the back and lean forward and start to pray and then fall asleep, just as I did in the library in college.
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The real beauty of my story is that I don’t know what chapter I am on in the novel that surrounds me.
ß Hemingway to his friend A.E. Hotchner: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast...”
Want to help the Rise Campaign send our students to be illuminated and epiphanized and graced and awakened in Paris (and nearly thirty other countries)? Call Diane Dickey, 503.943.8130, dickey@up.edu.
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Emancipation Reconciliation, reverence, salvation: a note. By Barry Lopez
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Thailand Buddist Monks encircle a threatened forest to protect against its destruction.
Land as serf. In the nineteenthcentury New World terms, the land as Negro. In the long line of emancipations that have unfolded in the West since the Enlightenment — the abolition of slavery; one man/one woman, one vote; independence thrown up in the face of colonialism — environmentalism has emerged as a movement for the emancipation of land. Wild land — “nature without an audience,” as the writer Jay Griffiths calls it — is without equal as a symbol of unhindered life. Those who seek its manumission are the same women and men who once drafted the most eloquent of arguments against slavery, colonial subjugation, and corporate exploitation and thievery. Global climate change is the great leveler in the environmental debate. Leaving our own fate out of it for the moment, it is now instructive to wonder how wild land will respond. Beautifully, one has to think. Adapta tion is its history, its legacy. No matter the stress — bolide impact, monocultured forests, rerouted rivers — adaptation is its eternal answer. Wild land exists without regret, has no plan for improvement, no goal outside its own integrity. It is attractive to us partly because it has no defense against the laceration of road building, the penetration of mines, the scarifying of machinery. It is also attractive to us, strangely, because we intuit wild land is apt to meet global climate change with more equanimity than our labyrinthine cities, our droughtstricken fields. Wild lands, or course, can give some empire builders pause. If he or she sees fresh land as more than a warehouse of goods or a mean wall between himself and other riches, the pause will do us all good. Wilderness is a warning to those who dream of controlling nature: short-term triumphs — bumper crops, fire suppressions, brimming reservoirs — are no more than that. Good in the short term only. Further, untrampled land, its innate worth defended by conservationists, offers yet another sort of warning to the would-be plunderer: when strongly tempted by the promise of profit, some people will still choose to hold such ground for the next generation. If the question remains why preserve these areas?, the answer can’t any longer be for tourism or the promise of new medicines, or for the sake of scientific discoveries, or even to preserve minerals or timber for future Summer 2011 29
use. Not if we have in mind the sense of integrity we claim the work of conservation implies. It has to be for emancipation. It has to be because every pleader for preservation knows somewhere deep in his or her psyche that the effort to protect undisturbed lands is an effort to break the stranglehold industrial man has put on the Earth. It is an effort to reduce the reach of corporate muscle, an effort to staunch the bleeding of the brutalized oceans and their continents. It’s a plea to reconcile. It’s a call for principles that take us beyond the adolescent urge to plunder, to overpower, to win. In defending wild lands, we reclaim our dignity. The real work of preservation, then, is our own salvation. It is not to save nature. Nature will save itself, no matter what climatic or nuclear hell we plunge ourselves into. One spring I took the Indian Pacific Railroad across Australia, from Sydney to Perth. Most of the way I was able to ride in the locomotive’s cab with the engineers, and so take in the full sweep of the countryside. Crossing the Nullarbor Plain one morning we ran into a violent storm, sheets of rain so dense there was no view forward through the windscreen and but pale views to either side. I reveled in the fury and insouciance of the storm. And then it was gone. Ahead and to the south the span of a double rainbow materialized in the mist, an entity the breadth of Perth itself. The ionized air tore through open windows on either side of us. Neither the engineers nor I spoke a word. We nodded confidently to one another. Yes, we were in it now, an apparition of the wild that lay outside any human control or language. To the north, kangaroos bounded as if in fright or glee, radiating across the Nullarbor in streaks, and the three of us in the cab knew we could sail on like this for days, with no thought of sleep or nourishment. We were feeding on the food of our ancestors, those who had not abandoned nature in order to discover man but who had gone deep into nature to discover the Eden of which man is a part. We felt emancipated. n Barry Lopez, who received an honorary doctorate from the University in 1994 for the passion and vision of his work, is the author of many books, among them The Rediscovery of North America and Winter Count. He has often written of courage and reverence in these pages and we are honored to publish the lad.
PHOTO BY BOONSIRI, PHOTOLIBRARY
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ho can say how the break between nature and cultural man came about? Or when. Historians of the West might trace it back to the rise of agriculture among early Sumerians, seven thousand years ago, in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. Anthropolo gists tell us, though, that the breach is no neat rift, that it has no single cause; central to the separation, however, wherever and whenever it occurs, is a shift in humanity’s attitude toward its place. When one’s home landscape — its animals, waters, plants, and earths — comes to be regarded as a servant, a producer of wealth and surfeit, the divide has opened. When the man who once plucked a few wild berries while traveling across a landscape he belonged to, a specific place which occupied the heart of his daily prayer, evolves into a strategist for profit, the split has occurred. In essence, one’s home land, once included like a member of a family in the reciprocities of life, has become a thing, an object no longer part of the owner’s moral universe. Once a part of the face of God, it is now chattel. These breaks, of course, occurred long ago in the West. In corners of Australia and Brazil, however, in Greenland, Mongolia, and other aboriginum refugia, we believe the mutual obligations and courtesies that historically obtained in the human relationship with place have not been completely abrogated. We imagine we can still inquire hopefully here about our prospects. Time is short, though. If there is wisdom to serve the billions of us in Sydney, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, and Los Angeles, if the outline of a different moral practice is to be had by listening to Navajo, Pitjantjatjara, Hadza, or Inuit tradition keepers, we need to be at it quickly. In the meantime, we find ourselves in the Visa, CNN, AK-47 present, slightly alarmed by the weather, wondering how to ensure that the last few buttons of undisturbed land remain free of their putative new owners’ social and economic scheming. We must somehow counter the entrenched philosophy of the contemporary investor (corporate, individual, or governmental): the belief that every parcel of land must pay its way. If it cannot provide something marketable, they say, what’s to be gained by keeping it inviolate? If it can’t serve, why care for it?
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Why Do We Say One Thing About Children But Do Another? W
hy is that? Because, as you know and I know, they are really and truly, no exaggeration and hyperbole whatsoever, The Future of the Planet. Because soon enough we will be in their grubby gentle hands and they will be making all the crucial decisions about clean water and wars and health care for decrepit ancient gaggles of Us. Because we swore and vowed to every god we ever imagined or invented or dimly sensed that we would care for them with every iota of our energy when they came to us miraculously from the sea of the stars. Because they are the very definition of innocent, and every single blow and shout and shiver of fear that rains down upon them is utterly undeserved and unfair and unwarranted. Because we used to be them, and we remember, dimly, what it was like to be small and frightened and confused. We say one thing about children as a nation and a people and a species and we do another. We say they are the holy heart of our society and culture and we lie. We say the words family values like a cool slogan on a warm flag that wraps protectively around the smallest and newest of us but we let them starve and wither and be raped and live in the snarling streets. Why is that?
Because even the best of us, the mothers and fathers and teachers and nurses and doctors and counselors and nuns and coaches and other sweet patient souls who listen to children with their all their open hearts, cannot hope to reach more than a few of them, and so many of them go unheard, unwitnessed, unmoored, unmourned. What could we possibly do worse than that? Because even the most cynical and weary of us in our iciest darkest moments has to laugh when we see a cheerful toddler trying to cram a peach up his nose, or an infant chatting amiably with a dog, or a tiny kid leaping over a tiny wave at the beach and being pretty proud that she showed that old ocean who was boss, yes she did! Because if we are any shard or shred of the people we want to be as Americans and human beings we have got to take care of them before we do anything else at all, we have to coddle and teach them, and feed and clothe them, and nurse and doctor them, and house and hold them, and be patient as they thrash toward who they might be if they get enough light and water and song, even if, as they stumble through their teenage construction zones, they thrash mostly
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against those who love them most. But you know and I know that for every two we raise decently, another is lost, that in Oregon alone there are thousands of them who did not eat today, who cannot go to the doctor, who have no bedroom, who hear no parent moaning about the dishes or growling about homework, who have no glimmering hopes, who have no gleaming dreams, and we sit in our offices and dens and legislative chambers and dicker and debate and issue proclamations and promises and meanwhile they starve and wither and are raped and live in the streets. I know how incredibly hard most of us work on behalf of every kid we know. I know more brave and weary people breaking their backs for kids than I can count. But there are a lot of kids we don’t know, lost kids, scared kids, kids who are headed to an ocean of blood and despair. How can we catch them on the beach? How can we bend the bruised and blessed world and save them? Because they’re all our kids. And all they want, all they ever wanted, is us. n Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine. To make a Rise Campaign gift of any size to help the University’s hundred efforts to help and heal kids, see rise.up.edu.
PHOTO BY JAIME MONFORT, GETTY IMAGES
By Brian Doyle
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WHAT SHE WANTED A sacrament in the dust. By Caroline Kurtz
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omen all over Nile Province wanted sewing machines. Only men had sewing machines in the old Sudan. In the new Sudan it was going to be different. I was the new women’s development advisor so I was the source of sewing machines. Or sugar, tea leaves, thermoses, and cups, so they could run tea shops on market days. Never mind that they didn’t have fabric for sewing machines, or that tea leaves and sugar had to be flown in on charters at three thousand dollars a flight, or that all these women had was what grew out of the ground, mostly the sorghum they ate year round if warlords didn’t burn it in scorchedearth fighting. But that’s what the women wanted, sewing machines, so when Sudanese pastors chartered a flight to Waat I told them to throw on a couple of sewing machines and I’d go along. Two weeks on the ground, my first trip in country. Men filled the C-47 cargo plane with bundles of blankets and used clothing. Fighting had broken out between Dinkas and Nuers on either side of Waat over a year before, and no one who couldn’t walk there had been to Waat since. Refugees said the village was destroyed. The pastors wanted to help the people of Waat rebuild their church, and to pay for poles and thatch and labor with what people needed most: clothes and blankets. Now, on a hot afternoon, sunlight blazed between gaps in the walls of a meeting room the size of a closet. The oldest deaconess leaned forward,
resting her hand on my knee. Her hair was gray and wrinkles channeled down to her lips. She was probably about forty-five, like me, but she had carried water on her head since she was four years old. She has spent decades hoeing sorghum with fire-hardened sticks, harvesting it by hand and grinding it between two rocks. Her body was worn out. Four other Sudanese women sat with us in a small sweaty circle on the floor. Guy Lual, the only man, sat beside me to translate. “We hear you are a teacher,” the deaconess said. “Stay here and teach us to read.” I thought I was just bringing them what they wanted, sewing machines. It took me a long time to answer. Men had unloaded the sewing machines from the plane when we landed on the dry grass in Waat, and they had ducked with the machines, bristling with jute tied every-which-way to hold the cardboard packaging, through the door of a storage hut next to the charred half-walls of what was the church. I never saw the sewing machines again. This meeting room, where we had officially given and received the vanished sewing machines, was a lean-to made of sorghum stalks pushed into the dry soil and bound together with strips of bark. Beside me, a young mother shifted her squirming baby and pulled her breast out the top of her blouse to nurse. We sat, as we always did in chairless Waat, on the ground, with nothing to rest against. And we sat like polite Sudanese women sit, with our legs straight out in front. The backs of my knees burned. “Stay with us,” the deaconess said. I shifted, trying to get comfortable. The two sewing machines were an embarrassing gift, now that I saw for myself how people lived, but the deaconess had graciously bowed as I gave her the packet standing in for the machines: scissors, brown paper for patterns, thread, pins, bobbins. “We want to make school uniforms, because our boys will go to school naked,” Guy Lual had translated. “Girls will stay home.” Dust had left ashy gray splotches on the women’s ankles and calloused bare feet. “Maybe the United Nations will donate fabric,” said a pregnant woman, her belly pulling tight the pink nylon nightgown she wore as a dress. “Maybe the UN will buy the uniforms back from us and we can help the poor women. Women whose men are lost.” “Teach us English,” said the deaconess. I was still scrambling to find a polite and respectful no. Guy Lual had Portland 32
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sons to bring him immortality. By age eight Nuer boys can chant their father’s names back fifteen generations, because a man lives on as long as someone remembers his name. So who was she kidding? “I would give up my husband, I would give up my children, to learn English,” she said. Beside the deaconess a young woman in a plaid blouse and floral skirt fell over sideways, giggling. The deaconess just looked at me, her face crinkled around her eyes. “When peace comes,” I said. When peace comes there would be currency in south Sudan again. There would be trade. Fabric. Tea leaves. Sewing machines. Schools. I cleared my throat, but it was closing. I could barely whisper. “When peace comes, even old women will learn English.” Everyone clicked agreement in the backs of their throats. When peace comes. A puff of hot air blew dust through the wall. n Caroline Kurtz, raised in Ethiopia by missionary parents, returned there in 1989 with her husband and children to teach English. They then worked in the Sudan for years before returning to Oregon where she is a writer and teacher in Salem.
Among the Rise Campaign’s targets for the University’s efforts in Africa: n The Moreau Center’s new East Africa internship (two students for nine weeks in Kenya, studying economics and culture); n The Congregation of Holy Cross mission centers in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Ghana, where our students volunteer; n Student research funds like the one that helped archeologist Kendra Chritz ’09 earn a National Science Foundation fellowship to Kenya; n Volunteer work support like that which helped nurse Jen Kuker ’06 join the Peace Corps in Zambia. Kuker is one of 20 alumni in the Peace Corps today; the University is fourth nationally in producing Corps volunteers. To make a gift: rise.up.edu, or call Diane Dickey, 503.943.8130, dickey@up.edu.
PHOTO BY J. SCHYTTE, PHOTOLIBRARY
taught me how to say no in Nuer: caing bin nhok, it wouldn’t please me. Everywhere I went in Waat, people demanded my pen, my notebook, my clothes, my shoes, my tent. And honestly, it would not have pleased me to give away my second-hand silk blouses, fading on the shoulders in tropical sunlight like a dusting of powdered sugar, or my Indian skirt with the busy pattern that didn’t show dirt. I needed them when I traveled so I’d have room in my duffle bag for a tent, sleeping mat, and flannel sheet. It would not have pleased me to be left, as the Sudanese are, with nothing for writing. I wanted notes and vocabulary lists. I also wanted to be the kind of personal hero who would be pleased to settle down in one small village and do one concrete thing to make a few people suffer less. But really, it would not please me to stay in Waat. And if I lived in Waat, every night I would lie awake and stare at the darkness gathered in the conical top of my thatched tukel, worrying about all the other women in all the other villages in all those vast plains. Teaching in Waat wouldn’t be enough. In Africa it’s never enough. To work there we have to find ways to survive despair. When I was a child in Ethiopia, missionaries had started a leprosarium. They treated active cases and taught people handiwork skills. They built housing, but they couldn’t build enough for all the lepers. All I wanted at that moment in the sorghum lean-to in Sudan, the best I could hope for, was some way to get rid of my guilt with I’m sorry. Guy Lual had taught me that in Nuer it had to be in my tone of voice. “I have spoken to teacher Nyang,” I said. I stroked the mat I was sitting on, a gray food bag from some famine aid drop. “He knows a literacy teacher. I will send materials.” It was a lame offer. Maybe I’m sorry was in the way I winced when I said it. The deaconess pounded on her knee. “When I was a girl my brothers went to school,” she said. “My father said why does a girl need education? After my husband paid the bride price I bore him three daughters and two sons. Now I know that my father was wrong. I would give up everything for an education.” Guy Lual covered a smile with four fingers. The lean-to rustled as all the women, including me, shifted, taking in such an outburst. A Nuer woman doesn’t have anything to give up. She’s a beast of burden who farms and cooks and bears children, daughters to bring her husband cattle wealth and
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A Sower Of Beads In the Bible Belt Praying in the dark: a note. By Stephen Martin
he first rosary I lost was my all-time favorite. I bought it in the gift shop of St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe. It was a simple affair of polished, olive wood beads strung along a snippet of brown yarn. I admired it from time to time, but mostly it sat untouched in my dresser. One day I realized I thought a lot about prayer but almost never prayed. I stuffed the rosary in my pocket as a tangible reminder to try harder, and suddenly it went everywhere with me — along New York City streets, on a plane to Singapore, to the grocery store down the street. Then came the dreary October night when I knew this experiment was really working. Back at the airport after a trip, I got into my car and started home. The trip should have taken just an hour. Thanks to a massive traffic jam, it took four. I did many things as I inched along through that foul night. I got lost looking for a short cut. I cursed my luck. I punched the steering wheel. I was screamed at by a cop directing traffic in the middle of the road. I fiddled with the radio. I searched in vain for something to read. It was only then that I remembered. I reached deep into my pants pocket and dredged out my tangled rosary. It had been there the whole trip, but it was like I was seeing it for the first time in the glare of the oncoming headlights. Here, finally, was something to do, something I hadn’t done in a long time. With one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the beads, I crawled on through the dark counting off Hail Marys one by one. That rosary was a good friend, but it lived dangerously. Every time I reached into my pocket or leaned back in a chair or hung up my pants, it could come tumbling out. Once I found it on the floor of my office, another time in a twisted heap in my neighbor’s yard. Eventually, of course, I lost the rosary for good. I have no idea where except that it was someplace in my town of 225,000 people — most of them Baptists, Methodists, or otherwise non-Catholic. I called on my back-up rosary. It was a considerably less attractive piece of black plastic beads and chintzy metal, so I wasn’t disappointed when I lost that one, too. My supply now depleted, I visited a Catholic gift shop where I bought another cheap plastic rosary for ten bucks and a more artistic, hand-carved one from Italy for $18.95. It only took me a week to lose the cheap one. And the spiffier, Italian version proved awkward from the start. It was oversized and constantly looping into complicated knots. It wasn’t Summer 2011 35
long before I jammed my keys into my pocket and severed the crucifix from the rest of the rosary. I wound up carrying the crucifix around by itself until I lost that, too. I’ve stopped counting how many rosaries I’ve squandered by now, and I take a certain pride in this recklessness. Here in North Carolina, just four percent of the state’s population is Catholic. So it’s a near certainty that those who find my lost rosaries are of another faith, or none at all. Do they leave my beads alone or kick them to the curb? Do they toss them in the trash or pick them up and take them home? I fancy myself an accidental missionary of sorts, a sower of beads in the Bible Belt. The rosaries I spread across the landscape hint of a strange faith in these parts and of the bumpy nature of my own journey. No matter how many graces I’m shown moment to moment, I’m fully capable of losing them moment to moment as well. St. Therese of Lisieux said she couldn’t recall ever going more than a few minutes without thinking of God. I wish I could say the same. The truth is I’m more like the twelve disciples, stumbling through my days with rare moments of insight but mostly just oblivious. I used to wonder how Jesus could have charged a group of guys so thoroughly distracted and uncomprehending with carrying on his work. Still, after he was gone, the disciples wandered from village to village, cradling their fragile faith, preaching it and practicing it and seeing it bloom somehow in the dust and the heat. I didn’t think of them as I sat in my car in the cold rain that October night and rolled the wooden rosary beads between my fingers, but I do now. I think of them more and more as brothers, calling us to discover God the way they did, maybe the only way we can, finding him and losing him and finding him again. When the call came one winter afternoon that my father-in-law was dying, I rushed my wife to the airport. She was seven months pregnant, tired and rattled. In the parking lot, I fished a rosary out of my pants. “Do you want this?” I asked. She took it and pocketed it in her jeans. She made it to her father’s bedside in the middle of the night and within hours he was gone, his courageous two-year battle with cancer finally over. When she arrived home, she asked if I wanted the rosary back. But I knew I’d lost that one, too. n Stephen Martin has written for America, Commonweal, and washingtonpost.com. He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.
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Live itUP Reunion June 2011
JUNE 23-26, 2011 Reunion is the largest alumni event of the year, annually drawing over a thousand alumni and friends back to campus for a weekend of reconnection and reminiscing. This year, we celebrate 100 years of life on The Bluff, highlighting the founding of Christie Hall in 1911, as well as the milestone classes of 1961 (50 years) and 1986 (25 years). With more than 40 events spread over four days, there’s something for everyone at Reunion 2011. For more information or to register online visit us on the web at alumni.up.edu/reunion. n Thursday, June 23: Farm to Fork Dinner Enjoy a gourmet multi-course dinner composed of the freshest local fruits, vegetables, fish, meats, wines, and beverages. Throughout the meal Bon Appétit's culinary wizards will prepare and describe each course in full view of the crowd, paired with speciallychosen wines. Reserve your seat for this delicious feast on the Bluff. n Friday, June 24: National Alumni Board Golf Tournament This year’s tournament reconvenes at Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club, ranked by Golf Digest as one of the Top 100 places to play golf. Registration cost includes green fees, golf cart, continental breakfast, tee prizes, individual and team awards, buffet lunch, and a donation to the NAB student scholarship. Lewis & Clark Trail Bus Tour In the winter of 1805-06, Lewis and Clark spent a blustery three months near present-day Astoria, making salt and trading with the Clatsop tribe. Join history professor Mark Eifler on a much more comfortable trip as he gives insight into the international importance of the Corps of Discovery. Lunch will be a la
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carte at the Rogue Pub on the Columbia River. Purple Flamingo Happy Hour Reconnect with classmates and friends and get a chance to chat with the coaches as you enjoy the atmosphere of the Purple Flamingo Happy Hour in the newlyrenovated Bauccio Commons. Settle down on a couch in a cozy conversation corner and catch up. Enjoy the delicious hors d’oeuvres and grab a quenching adult beverage from the Purple Flamingo Bar. You can even kick back and savor a cigar outside on the edge of The Bluff. Meet the Coaches Several Portland Pilots coaches will join us for the Purple Flamingo Happy Hour. As a special welcome, this will be your first chance to meet Bill Zack, the head coach of the brand-new Pilot Women's rowing team. Christie Pub Homegrown talent has always been the hallmark of Christie Pub, where residents have entertained the casual crowd over a pint of root beer. Recapture the spirit of your late-night college days as we invite alumni to play, sing, or entertain, in their own unique fashion, in the Pilot House. Interesting performers should contact the alumni office by June 17 to get on the play list. n Saturday, June 25: Farmer’s Market Field Trip Enjoy an outing to the Hollywood Farmers' Market with Bon Appetit general manager Kirk Mustain. Learn how to select the freshest fruits and veggies and finest cheeses that will later be served as part of the dinner menu. Alumni Nature Walk in Forest Park Join Rob Conner '86, cross country coach and local trail guide, for a leisurely stroll along Leif Erickson Drive in Forest Park. Silver and Gold Mass All alumni are invited to Mass in the Chapel of Christ the Teacher. This Mass celebrates the important 50-year and 25year milestones for the classes of 1961 and 1986. Mass begins at 11 a.m. Christie Hall Lunch In 1911, Christie Hall opened as the first residence hall on The Bluff, establishing a campus life tradition that now extends
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to 10 residence halls housing over 1,750 students. Former Christie Hall Gentlemen and their families are invited to an informal lunch on the quad in front of the building beginning at noon. 50-Year Club Luncheon Alumni from the class of 1961 and earlier are invited to dine in the Bauccio Commons Board Room following Mass. A brief ceremony welcomes new members and presents them with a special pin. 50Year Club members from years past who were not present to receive their pins are also honored. Spouses and guests are encouraged to attend. Luncheon begins at noon. Alumni Bike Tour Join avid cyclists Mark Hansen ’82 and NAB Representative Jayme Fisher ’90 for a two-wheeled tour of North Portland and environs. A short tour to Pier Park and a longer tour to Portland Airport will be offered. A limited number of bikes will be available for complimentary rental if preregistered by June 17. A Lifetime of Stories with Brian Doyle Portland Maga zine editor and campus raconteur Brian Doyle will read from his novel, Mink River, and most likely veer wildly and cheerfully from his planned subjects of basketball, the Dalai Lama, children, excellent shoes, the virtues of ales, herons, bison, University presidents and other suspect characters, and quietly stunning moments on The Bluff. Armed Forces Alumni Reception Hosted by members of the Mitchell Rifles drill team that won the 1962 Western Region ROTC Drill Competition. All alumni who were part of the Mitchell Rifles, the Arnold Air Society, the Angel Flight, and all alumni that have served in the U.S. Armed Forces are welcome to gather and swap stories about how they honored the University of Portland, America, and its Armed Forces veterans. Recovered video of the trophywinning Mitchell Rifles team will be shown. Honored Year Class Receptions Celebrating special anniversary milestones, members of the classes of 1961, 1966, 1971, 1976, 1981, 1986,
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1991, 1996, 2001, and 2006 are invited to meet and reminisce before the Welcome Home BBQ on The Bluff. Kiddie Funland Located on the Quad, this play park is open to children aged four and up (younger children are welcome with a parent). Kiddie Funland includes a bounce house, a basketball toss game, your own souvenir spin art, a professional face painter, and best of all, a huge blow-up slide. You can check your children in for supervised play or stay and play with them. Welcome Home BBQ on The Bluff In summer 2010, the University Commons completed a transformative renovation and expansion, the first since its original construction in 1951. Dedicated in September 2010, the newly-renamed Bauccio Commons is the premier community space on The Bluff, presenting oncampus dining like you’ve never seen before. Select your buffet meal from the various gourmet stations including pizzas, salads, carving board, burgers, and sandwiches. Wine and beer will be available for purchase. Professional photos will be taken outside on The Bluff throughout the afternoon for all honored year classes. Welcome Home Dance on The Bluff As the BBQ winds down, the music cranks up. Enjoy live music by Cover Story, with drummer and UP alumna Susan (Perri) Lucht '86, blending rock and roll, pop, swing, and country—a little something for everyone. n Sunday, June 26: All Alumni Mass All alumni are invited to join in the celebration of Mass in the Chapel of Christ the Teacher. University president Rev. E. William Beauchamp, C.S.C., presides and the alumni choir leads us in song. Mass begins at 10:30 a.m. All Alumni Brunch As the final gathering of Reunion Weekend, this is your chance to say farewell to friends over a buffet style brunch in the Bauccio Commons following Mass. Enjoy a slide show with photos of Reunion weekend. Please join us as we relive cherished memories one more time. Brunch begins at 11:45 a.m.
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C H A P T E R Back on The Bluff recently, now as the pro basketball player he always thought he could be: Eugene Jeter ’06, finally a National Basketball Association man with the Sacramento Kings, after five years playing in Israel, the Ukraine, and Spain. Jeter, averaging 15 minutes a game in the world’s best league, sat for a moment with his old dorm mate Ben McCarty of The Hood River News. “I still pinch myself when I wake up to see if I’m dreaming,” said Jeter, cheerful as always. “Never give up on your dreams, and enjoy the moment you’re in, that’s the key. God gave me endurance and energy, and I have great family and friends. I am so blessed.”
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What more can we say than this? Mauro Potestio, ’50, ’54, we always said your name oughtta be in lights, old friend. Rest in peace. 50 YEAR CLUB Mary Theresa Allaire ’39 passed away on December 10, 2010, in Portland, Ore. She is survived by her brother, Peter Petros; and sister, May T. Allaire. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Theresa Marie Scarfone Berta ’42 passed away on February 4, 2011, in her own home with her family at her side. After graduating from the University of Portland School of Nursing, she joined the Navy as a Lieutenant (junior grade) and was stationed on a military sea transport during the Korean War. It was there that she met the love of her life, Lieutenant Commander Albert Berta. The Berta's raised five children: Dr. Annalisa Berta, San Diego, California, Dr. Theresa Berta, Shoreline, Washington, Albert Berta Jr., Boulder, Colorado, Jessica Berta, Edmonds, Washington, and Alexander Berta, Broomfield, Colorado. She leaves behind loving grandchildren Alissa, Alexandria, Albert, Francesca, and Whitney. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Joseph J. Cholick ’42 passed away on March 21, 2011, in Scappoose, Ore. Survivors include his wife, Edith; son, Jerome; and daughter, Anne. Our prayers and condolences. John McKenna “Mack” Bosch ’43 passed away on February 26, 2011, in Bend, Ore. He was a standout athlete in his years at Columbia Prep, and during World War II he served in the 10th Mountain Division fighting on the Italian front. He worked in Portland for several years for PB John, Gerber Knives, and the PAM Co. In 1966, the family moved to Bend where Mack managed
Willamette Industries KorPine Division. “Everybody loved Mack,” according to his obituary. Survivors include children Leslie Hutchinson, Susan Porter, Elizabeth Porter, and John Jr., as well as six grandchildren, Alex, McKenna, Erica, Vanessa, Nicolas and Blake. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Margaret Mary Fromherz ’44 died on March 23, 2011. She was 93. Upon graduation from the School of Nursing she went to Yakima as the director of the Cadet Student Nursing Program of St. Elizabeth Hospital. In 1949, she married Albert Fromherz Sr. in St. Paul. They made their home in Yakima. She was preceded in death by Albert; son, John; her brother, Norbert; and her sisters, Marcella Zielinski and Annie Van Keulen. Survivors include her son Bill Fromherz; daughters Sue Fromherz and Marylen Robinson,; sisters Dorothy Duyck and Bea Peters; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences. We received a letter from Bob Craviotto ’46 CP, ’50 recently, with sad news: “With great sorrow I report the loss of my wife of 60 years. Marie O’Reilly was a first-year student at UP’s nursing school when I was a sophomore at UP. We met at a joint picnic at Blue Lake Park. We have four sons. She is sorely missed.” Our prayers and condolences to you and your family, Bob, at this difficult time. Sr. Mary Martin Bush, OP, ’47, passed away on July 2, 2010, in Fremont, Calif. She devoted more than 64 years to education, serving at schools in Oakland, Calif., as well as Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles, Anaheim,
N O T E S Los Altos, and San Jose. Our prayers and condolences. Virginia Francine DeLong Tannler ’47 passed away peacefully on October 25, 2010, in her home in Lake Oswego, Ore. A great joy in her life was traveling to 39 countries with her husband, Alphonse ’46, always returning with wonderful stories, photos, and souvenirs. Al only survived Virginia by one month; he passed away on December 30, 2010. Virginia and Al are survived by their children and their spouses, Michael and Sandi Tannler, Nancy and Ted Tannler Brewer, Mary and Joe Tannler Worley, and Thomas Tannler; grandchildren, Sarah, Mary, Sofya, Joseph, and Claire; and great-grandchild, Silas. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Jerry Studley ’47 passed away on September 17, 2010. Survivors include his wife of 56 years, Marilyn; children, Dan (Dolly) Studley, Sharon Studley, John Studley, Teresa (Gary) Bell, Meg Studley, Debora (Steve) Butcher, Stephen (Heidi) Studley; 15 grandchildren; 7 great-grandchildren; his sister Mary Beal, and many nieces, nephews, and friends. He loved to spend time with his family, and to golf; in fact he was golfing when the Lord called him home. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Nancy Goodnow Hoagland ’47 passed away on January 22, 2011, in Shoreline, Wash. Survivors include her children: Catherine Hoagland, Nancy Hughes, Sally Hoagland, Mary Hoagland, and Tom Hoagland; grandchildren, Heather Hansen, Jessica Hughes, Molly Kutsick, Alexa Hughes, and Lucas Kutsick; and great granddaughter, Mackenzie Hansen. She was preceded in death by her daughter, Ann Hoagland, and husband, Floyd Van Fleet Hoagland. Our prayers and condolences. Lewis Hamlin Coe ’48 passed away on March 29, 2011. He enrolled at the University after serving in World War II, graduating on the day of the Vanport flood, and was given the honor of presenting the 1948 class gift to the school: The Praying Hands Memorial, which remains on campus to this day. He is survived by his wife of 66 years, Betty; son, Douglas; daughter, Cindy; son, Craig; and grandchildren, Jennifer and David. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Rodney Howard Smith ’49 passed away on October 11, 2010. Our prayers and condo-
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lences to the family. Robert A. Brown ’50 passed away on March 23, 2011. After serving in World War II, he married Carolyn Erickson in 1948; she passed away in 2002. Survivors include sons, David R., Gerald R., and Charles S.; and four grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences . Wilbert “Bill” Fischer ’50 passed away at the Veterans Hospital in Vancouver, Wash., on February 15, 2009. A veteran of World War II, Bill was a man of many talents including carpentry and bricklaying. He also spent many years working in the Portland shipyards building ocean-going vessels. He was predeceased by his twin brother Walter and his other brothers: Alois, Gilbert, and Alvin. Bill will be dearly missed by his four surviving nephews: Wayne, Richard, John and Mark Fischer. Special thanks to Bob Hilger of Portland for helping Bill in his final days and also coordinating the funeral service arrangements. Edward E. Bettey ’50 passed away on January 29, 2011. He worked for International Harvester for 30 years and is survived by his wife, Gloria; and sons, Ronald P. and Jerry. Our prayers and condolences. Alvin Leveton ’50 passed away on February 22, 2011. He was a retired educator. Survivors include his children, Charlene, Dennis, Bruce and Larry. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Joseph Renner ’50 passed away on July 12, 2010. A veteran of World War II, Joe graduated from the University of Portland with a degree in business and economics. His entire career was spent in the banking and financial industry, retiring in 1985 after 30 years of employment with Salem Federal/American Federal Savings and Loan as senior vice president and controller. Joe is survived by his wife Bernie, children Judy Cutright, Carol Pollard, Bob Renner, Cathi Agard, and Sue Ruddock; nine grandchildren; eight great-grandchildren; brothers Ollie and Tom; and Bernie’s children, Dennis, Donald, Doug, Diane and their families. Joe was preceded in death by his first wife Mary, his parents, and 8 brothers and sisters. Our prayers and condolences. Allen G. Vuylsteke ’50 passed away on November 9, 2010, at a care center in Boise, Idaho. Our prayers and condolences. Thomas Edward Busch Sr. ’51 passed away on April 11, 2011. Our prayers and condolences
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Dick Bradley ’50 enrolled on The Bluff in 1940, but soon was flying B-26 bombers, crash-landed in the Sahara Desert, bombed German submarines, flew more than fifty missions, married Army nurse Patricia Bradley ’44, helped the Japanese Air Force build their F104J planes during the 1960s, “flew on forest fires in Oregon for years,” started the Rogue Air Freight Company, built two planes himself, and “had a good run,” as he says cheerfully. For all your guts and grace, Colonel – thank you. —Editors
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A Note From The Editor Dear Folks: For the wild ambitious December 2011 issue of the University’s Portland Magazine on music, we are collecting music from every corner of the University’s far-flung community — students, faculty, staff, alumni, visitors, friends. Can I ask four favors? One, your own music. Anything you have written, composed, recorded, on your own or with a band, for any purpose whatsoever — can I hear that? Just email it to me so I can listen — if we would like to use it I’ll be back in touch with you about permissions and copyrights and such. Or send CDs or DVDs to me in campus mail. Film clips, snippets, anything and everything welcome. Two, music you think we should hear and know about — by your roommates, colleagues, friends, teachers, parents, anyone with anything to do with the University at all. The thinnest of tethers is good enough at the moment, as we cast widely for all sorts of music. Three, music stories, essays, tales, tips, advice, counsel — anything you think might help us make an amazing issue about music — the joy and power of it, its holiness and verve and immediacy, its doors and windows to the soul…. Four, paintings, photographs, charts, graphs, signs, anything visual at all having to do with music. No screaming rush, but I’d sure like to have a pile of astounding things on my desk by the end of July. Thanks much, —Brian Doyle (bdoyle@up.edu) to the family. Thurston Gates ’51 passed away on December 1, 2010, at his home in Tigard, Ore. He was retired from a 40-year career in banking. He initially got the attention of his wife of 58 years, Adair, by shooting rubber bands at the back of her head, according to his obituary. Despite this, he and Adair married and raised a family, including sons Ted, Gary, and Doug, all of whom survive him along with three grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Patricia (Harmon) DeSimio ’51 has passed away, according to a message we received from her husband, Peter DeSimio ’51. Our prayers and condolences. Francis J. Lang ’52 passed away on February 26, 2011. Survivors include his former spouse, Elsie Lang. Our
prayers and condolences to the family. Leo Greenstein ’52 passed away on January 6, 2011, in Portland, Ore. He is survived by his sons, David and Alan. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Larry A. Dusenberry ’56 passed away on December 9, 2010, in Woodburn, Ore. He worked as an insurance agent. Survivors include his son, Brian; and daughter, Denise Zahradnik. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Thomas Edward Hulme ’57 passed away on February 13, 2011. He was a veteran of the U.S. Army; honorably discharged in 1960, and was a sales manufacturer's representative. Thomas is survived by his sons, Ajay, Amit, and Anil Hulme; and grandsons, Caleb and Alexander Hulme.
N O T E S Our prayers and condolences. Robert “Bob” Charles Rengo ’57 passed away on February 16, 2011, in Tiburon, Calif. He founded Telephone Management Co. and was the president at his death. Mr. Rengo was very active in his church and helped those less fortunate through the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Survivors include his beloved wife, Janet Roberts Rengo; son, Bobby; sister, Gail Accuardi; one niece; and four nephews. Remembrances to St. Vincent de Paul Society. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’62 PRAYERS, PLEASE Rita Anne Cleary-Bloom passed away on November 3, 2010, with her two children at her side. As a single mother she was able to rise through the ranks of a number of pharmaceutical companies; after her second husband, Bob Bloom, died in 2001 she threw herself into helping with her grandson and other family-centric activities. Survivors include her two children, Macie Cleary and Christopher Cleary and his partner Mike Langston; grandchildren, Zachary and Jana Milan; Rita's sister and brother-in-law, Carol and Mick Johnson; their children and spouses, Kevin and Teri-Kay Johnson and children Max and Carter; daughter and sonin-law, Amy and Michael Spanik; and youngest son, Kyle Johnson. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’63 A GENEROUS MAN Dennis Patrick Hays passed away on January 22, 2011. Survivors include siblings, Diane, Patty, Tom, Tim, Marie, Bridget, Barney and their families; his loving wife of 47 years, Sharon; daughters and their spouses, Jean and Kyle Mishler, Julie and Guy Anderson and Jill and Josh Habrich; and seven grandchildren: Austin, Brandon, William, Sarah, Sophia, Garrett and Jill’s baby on the way. A generous civic leader, Dennis served on the board of many organizations including Right to Life, Catholic Charities, Birthright, Valley Catholic High School, Southwest Communities and the Knights of Columbus. Our prayers and condolences.
’64 REMEMBERING TED We heard recently from Mary Jo Peterschmidt Levy regarding the death of her brother, Ted Peterschmidt ’51 CP, ’55 UP. Mary Jo writes: “I believe that the University is already
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aware that my oldest brother, Ted, died in October 2010 somewhat unexpectedly. Our family of four children grew up across the street from UP, as our dad [Arnold Peterschmidt] was on the business faculty and then held a position in the administration. As children, we roamed the bluff and grounds, and played on the open spaces now filled with soccer fields and dormitories. All of Ted’s adult life was spent in Washington state, after his stint in the Air Force, and his work involved much travel on Navy business. From a family point of view, perhaps his most valuable legacy is the effort he made to keep all the grandparents, children, grandchildren, aunts, siblings, and close friends linked via a weekly Monday newsletter for the last twenty or so years. It was first sent by U.S. mail and then by e-mails with photo attachments. As kids went off to college or new jobs, the letter followed them. It contained news from all parts of the family as we got in the habit of passing on photos, events, plans, accomplishments, illnesses, etc. The last issue arrived in our mailbox the Monday before his Friday death. Many of us have kept copies of these letters—mine are in binders and comprise a pretty good family history. The alumni files probably show all these links, but just in case: Ted’s three daughters all attended UP—Caroline Peterschmidt ’82, Teresa P. Grompe, and Alice P. Bell ’87— as did his wife, Joanne ’57. As a friend wisely said to me while offering condolences, losing those who knew us from the beginning seems like a death of a part of ourselves too. We are so sad. May he rest in peace.” Thank you for sharing with us, Mary Jo, and know that we offer our prayers and condolences. Jeanne Bernhard passed away on January 18, 2011, according to a message we received from her daughter, Carol Lowman. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Dr. William J. “Bill” Angelos passed away on December 17, 2010, in Portland, Ore. When his first wife, Alice Angelos, passed away in 1981, Bill dedicated a personal and financial commitment to what was later to become Camp Angelos located on the Sandy River. In 1990, “Doc” Angelos married Geraldine Christensen, and they worked together in the Gateway area until he retired in 1997. After retirement, Camp Angelos became Bill's
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C L A S S key focus, and the camp has much benefited from his generosity. Dr. Angelos is survived by his wife, Geraldine; sister, Marge Challis; daughters, Emily Barbarino, Marcia Angelos, Gaylene Angelos and Joyce Johnson; grandchildren, Cassy Johnson, Erica Johnson, Angelo Harris and Clayton O'Donnel; stepchildren, Theresa Arnold, Steven Christensen and Katherine Christensen; and step-grandchildren, Stacey Arnold and Jason Arnold. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’66 A VOICE FOR THE POOR Edward Mosey was honored for his years of service to Portland’s Macdonald Center at a reception on April 26, 2011, at the Arlington Club. The event marked the end of his term on the Board of Directors of the Macdonald Center, an assisted living facility for people on Medicaid in downtown Portland. Opened in 1999, the Macdonald Center now serves over 350 people per week, 54 of whom live at the center. In addition to honoring Edward, members of the board also shared a new initiative and engaged in a discussion about the plight of Portland’s forgotten poor.
’67 HONORING MOTHER FRANCINE CARDEW
District. Survivors include her sons, Greg, Glenn, and Bruce. Our prayers and condolences.
’69 AROUND THE WORLD Julia Shovein has embarked on the adventure of a lifetime: “I have retired from my career as a professor of nursing at California State University, Chico, and my husband, Horst Wolff, and I began a circumnavigation of the globe in a 37foot sailboat with the Baja HaHa Rally leaving San Francisco in 2007. In 2010 we safely navigated across the Indian Ocean, Pirate Alley, and the Red Sea. We will winter at St. Katherine’s Dock in London in 2011-2012 and should be home in another three years. Seeing the world at 5 miles per hour takes some time!” We can only imagine, Julia. Look for updates and photos from Julia and Horst’s great adventure in future issues of Class Notes.
’70 ELLEN’S HOLDING DOWN THE FORT Ellen Magee Weeks writes: “My husband Keith and I are finishing up an eight-year stay in Nebraska, where Keith has been on the interventional cardiology faculty, performing and teaching invasive procedures. Lately, in my retirement from the nursing profession, I have holding down the fort. We are now building our retirement home on Flathead Lake in Montana, as we plan to move closer to our children upon Keith’s retirement. We hope to make it to Portland for frequent visits after that; our four adult children are in the Seattle and Portland areas.”
’72 PRAYERS, PLEASE Virginia Powell passed away on November 9, 2010, in Tigard, Ore. Survivors include her son, Lynn; and daughters, Bobbie Carr and Dona McCall. Our prayers and condolences.
’75 SAD NEWS Receiving an honorary doctorate at our May 2011 commencement: 1967 alumna Mother Francine Cardew, of the Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist (an order she helped found), here (on left) as a new nun in 1960 or so. Mother Francine started the Franciscan Montessori Earth School in Portland, among other feats; also celebrated with doctorates were Dennis Keenan ’69 and Dr. Don Romanaggi ’56. Jeanne Ann (Baird) Williams passed away on January 23, 2011. She was a school teacher for the Vancouver School
Please remember Ann Lynch and her family in your prayers after the loss of their mother, Theresa Hemmen, on February 24, 2011.
’77 A LIFETIME OF TRAVEL Marilyn Catherine McDonald (Smith) '77 is the author of Snowbirds Unlimited: Tales from the Restless Traveler, her fourth self-published, printon-demand book. Her others are Little Girl Lost, Mother of Eight Survives Population Explosion, and Alert the Media: How the American Indian Movement Used the Mass Media. This most recent book
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N O T E S We heard from Ralph Johnson ’69, living in Valencia, Spain, where he chatted with University Spanish professor Kate Regan about why the University’s booming efforts in international business, politics, and languages is a terrific idea. “English may be the universal language, yet gaining a client’s confidence and closing a sale requires a business discussion in the customer’s own language,” he says. “This is particularly so in Spain, France, and Italy. U.S. companies must adjust their advertising, brand identification, and promotional strategies to the local market. In Spain, Google offers its services in Spanish, Basque, and Gallego. I work for a large American public company with European headquarters in Amsterdam, satellite facilities in Belgium and Germany, and I live in Spain, on the Mediterranean. My major challenges are dealing with clients in a cross-cultural environment, using technology to match a customer’s imagination and expectations, and being mindful of environmental regulations. So a well-rounded education in foreign language skills, computer technologies, graphic arts software, and sociology and psychology is required, at least in my industry, and the undergraduate who has studied abroad, learning other cultures and languages, is at an advantage.” focuses on a lifetime of travel, at home and abroad, based on Marilyn’s hundreds of travel columns and articles published over the past 10 years. It is available on Amazon.com and Createspace.com. Colette Piceau (Nancy Pigott) writes: “My company, It Ain’t Shakespeare, Inc., is in its 11th year of ‘putting dreams into words,’ developing and writing story lines and scripting for rides, attractions, and shows for theme parks all over the world. Our clients include Walt Disney Imagineering, SeaWorld, Busch Gardens, and Universal Studios. I have collaborated on award-winning entertainment projects from China and Australia to Dubai and even the ships of Disney Cruise Lines. This past year, my services expanded to include directing and producing with shows, attractions and media projects for the Georgia
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Aquarium, the Louisville Zoo, Walt Disney World, SeaWorld Orlando, and SeaWorld San Diego. Every day brings new challenges and adventures.” Barry R. West passed away on January 31, 2011. He was a teacher at Damascus Middle and Highland Elementary schools. Survivors include his wife, Lynn; daughter, Jennifer Kresek; son, James; and parents, Ray and Marie. Our prayers and condolences. Prayers, please, for Nancy Koerner, whose mother, Virginia DiTommaso, passed away on December 2, 2010. Survivors include her husband, Andy; and daughters, Diane Shannon, Nancy Koerner, Kathy DiTommasoOwen, and Susie VanDerZanden. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Norma Jean (Bradbury) Lloyd passed away on January 7, 2011, at age 61. She earned a
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We featured Danny Keagbine (seated, above), son of Jenni and Gerry Keagbine ’83, in our Winter 2010 issue (“What’s the proper last note for an issue devoted to rising dreams and vaulting hope and telling despair to scram?”). Danny and his family did indeed spend two years telling despair to scram, waging a determined, often harrowing, at all times courageous and fiercely positive battle with Ewing’s sarcoma, but it finally was just too much for even an undaunted young man like Danny, who passed away in his home, surrounded by his family, on the afternoon of March 11, 2011. He was 20 years old. Survivors include Jenni and Gerry; brothers, Jeff ’10, Eric, and Trevor; sisters Emily, Kelsey and Megan; grandparents, James ’59 and Sally ’86 Covert and grandmother, Frances Keagbine; and uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends too numerous to even begin to list here. Our hearts are broken, of course, but that always seemed to cause Danny more pain than any physical torment he had to endure, and since he was positive and hopeful and filled with faith and love and holiness to the very end, Danny’s family and friends stand determined to do the same. Prayers on their behalf will be much needed and appreciated. More, much more, about Danny’s life can be found at http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/dannykeagbine1. e sure and watch “Danny Keagbine: The Man Behind the Hair” at http://youtu.be/i_dRAZQEwvw. nursing degree at UP and served as a critical care nurse in the U.S. Army for 20 years; she then assumed duties at Madican Army Medical Center, retiring after 19 years in July 2010. Survivors include her sister Carly Reise, brother Joe Bradbury, nephew Jared Bradbury, fiance Leon (Chappy) Chapman, cousins Susan and Tom Rodgers, and many friends. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’78 PRAYERS, CONDOLENCES Prayers, please, for Helen Libonati, whose husband, Carmen Saracco, passed away on November 29, 2010. Survivors include Helen; son, Nick; daughter, Gina; stepsons, Dana and Glenn Libonati; seven grandchildren; and one greatgrandchild. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’79 A HI-TECH GUY Albert Lin sends a quick up-
N O T E S date: “I married Maria Chen in 1995, and have an only son, Roy, who is 13 years old. I worked in San Francisco’s Silicon Valley starting in 1979 and am now a contractor with Pace/2Wires. Over the course of my career I worked with Cisco, 3Com, Motorola, Qualcomm, Brocade, EMC...you name it.” Prayers,please, for the family of John Pliska on the loss of Therese Pliska, who passed away on January 10, 2011. Survivors also include Carolyn Pliska Criteser ’68, Bernard Pliska ’84, and grandchild Vince Masog ’03. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’80 REMEMBERING KAY Katy Edna Ruby passed away on February 9, 2011. Kay was born in St. Helens and was a public school teacher. Survivors include her husband, Harold; daughter, Debbie Eisenzimmer; and sons, Eddie and Steve. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’82 PRAYERS FOR ROSALIE We heard recently from Fabian Ramirez, who writes: “It’s with a sad heart that I pass along news that my mother, Rosalie Prado Ramirez, passed away on September 28, 2010. If you could please publish a note on her passing in an upcoming publication of the Portland magazine, it would be appreciated.” Of course, Fabian, and our prayers and condolences to you and yours in this sad time. We heard from Shirley Serrano (formerly Hartzog) in April: “Shirley Serrano became a first-time Grams, thanks to her oldest, Nicole. The adorable new addition, Elena, is four months old already. How did that happen?” Congratulations Shirley, they do grow up fast, don’t they?
’84 HAVE TIME, WILL TRAVEL Dave Schultze lives in Milwaukie, Ore., and has retired from the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office after 24 years. “I plan to travel in retirement,” he writes. “I just returned from a week-long tour to North Korea, a beautiful country.”
’85 PRAYERS, PLEASE James Joseph “Jimmie” DeLoretto passed away on February 4, 2011. After moving back to his native Oregon after a career in law enforcement in Florida, Jimmie began his long career in crowd management. His first company, founded in 1979, was named Crown Management Services (CMS),
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and provided security at concerts, fairs, festivals, and sporting events around the state. Survivors include his wife, Mary West; his children, Meghan and Luke Keysboe; mother, Virginia DeLoretto; brother, Chip DeLoretto; sisters, Joan DeLoretto, Sue (Tom) Rabe and Charli DeLoretto; and many nieces and nephews and extended family. Our prayers and condolences.
’87 STEVE’S BIG NEWS Presiding Judge Douglas L. Blankenship has appointed Steve Brady as magistrate for the Alaska Court System in Chevak, Alaska. After working as a legal clerk in the U.S. Army, Brady received a bachelor's degree in society and justice from the University of Portland. He has practiced civil and criminal law in Alaska, Oregon, and Tennessee. He was an assistant district attorney with the Department of Law in Bethel prior to being appointed magistrate. He looks forward to working with the Alaska Court System and being part of the community of Chevak. Karen Lantz Fornshell and Laurie Kelley, both with connections to the University of Portland, are among 25 women named as Portland Business Journal’s 2011 Women of Influence. An awards ceremony was held Thursday, April 7 at the downtown Hilton Hotel to honor the women for their achievements in business and community. Fornshell, CEO and president of Northwest Bank, serves on the Pamplin School of Business Advisory Board. She started working for West One Bank while a senior at the University of Portland and eventually worked for nine years at the bank, gaining valuable experience in the banking industry. She has worked with the Mt. Angel Abbey Board of Trustees and served on the board of Metropolitan Family Services for six years, including two years as chair. Congratulations, Karen!
’88 QUITE A SCARE Peter Wanner and his family had quite a scare when the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami hit the nation of Japan: Peter and his wife, Fumiko, and children Theresa, 14, John, 12, and Jessie, 20, lived in the hard-hit Sendai area, but they are safe and relocated temporarily to the Philippines after the quake and tsunami. According to an article in Portland’s
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C L A S S Catholic Sentinel: “As the earthquake rocked the country, Peter’s office began falling down around him. He ran out of the building, and ran all the way to his home without even bothering to put his shoes on. The door was jammed shut and his wife and children were nowhere to be found. Miraculously, Peter, Fumiko, and their three children found each other, forced their way into their apartment, packed their bags, then headed for shelter at a local gymnasium.” The Wanners plan to return to Japan as soon as possible.
’90 HEY! I KNOW HER! Debbie Best O’Connor recognized our spring 2011 mystery photo subject: “Maureen Kuffner is my bet for the saxophone player. I was a year ahead of her at UP and was in the pep band with her.” You are absolutely right, Debbie, that’s the effervescent Maureen (Kuffner) Briare ’92, who graces our campus still. Her dad Jim and little bro Joe ’05 work here too. Thanks for guessing!
’89 MIKE & KATHY’S GUESS A note from Mike and Cathy (Padilla) Wanner: “Our guess for the mystery photo in the spring 2011 issue is...Maureen Kuffner, who is now Maureen Briare and works as music director for the University’s campus ministry office!” They’re right, of course, Maureen has been brightening the campus with her talents for many years now, as anyone who is moved to tears by her music at services in the Chapel of Christ the Teacher can attest.
’91 MATT LOOOVES KIDS We heard recently from Matt Sabo, who writes: “Blessings to you from the Old Dominion on Good Friday. I thought I would drop a note after perusing the latest issue of Portland magazine. Thanks for your dedication and to keeping us motley assembly of UP grads informed about all things Pilots. We are expecting the no. 13 Sabo shortly, within weeks or maybe even days. I’m shooting for Judah Benjamin Sabo to enter this world on May 1, a date that two other wee Sabos joined our party. For one thing, it's a lot easier remembering birthdays that way. Last Saturday night we had an EF3 tornado pass through Gloucester and a neighboring county, about four miles from our house as the crow flies. I've covered forest and range fires, floods and now tornadoes and the power and fury that’s unleashed by a
fire out of control, a raging river and 165-mile-per-hour winds is terrifyingly awesome. Yet we know it's nothing to the power contained in simply a breath of God. As a native Left Coaster (see St. Charles Hospital, Bend, Ore., circa Jan. 1969) these tornadoes and hurricanes and such are a novelty.” Thanks Matt, when you take a break from storm chasing be sure and let us know the latest on Sabo no. 13. We would like to offer our prayers and condolences to Melissa Tenorio after learning of the death of her father, Frank Minier, on November 9, 2010. Frank was born in Whitehall, Mont., and was a tax consultant. Survivors include his wife, Jocelyn; and daughters, Michelle Roseborough and Melissa Tenorio.
’92 TO TRAVEL AND SERVE Heather Ward writes: “My husband, Chuck, and I both recently started new jobs with the State Department, he as an economics officer and I as an information resource officer. After we finish several months of Arabic training, we’ll be moving to Abu Dhabi, UAE in summer 2011. I will travel to other U.S. embassies in the region and help them reach out to local communities through their libraries or information resource centers. We’re both very excited about this new opportunity to travel and to serve.” We were delighted to get an update from Brenda Hubbard, who writes: “I graduated with an M.F.A. in theatre in 1992 under the wonderful doctors Bowen, Hoddick, Badraun, and Lasswell. Since then I continue to work in the professional theatre and am in my 19th year as a professor of theatre and head of performance at Central Washington University. My son, Zach Nause, appeared in my thesis production at U of P and is now considering a nursing degree at my alma mater. I could not be happier. I got a first rate education and learned so much from my professors, and I hope the family tradition continues. Thanks U of P!” You’re welcome, Brenda, and we sure hope Zach will be joining us on The Bluff soon.
’93 FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT We heard recently from Elizabeth Ross Potter, who wrote the following to bring us up to date with her efforts on behalf of the fight against pancreatic cancer: “My husband Mike and I both graduated with BAs in psychology in
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Reunion is the largest alumni event of the year, annually drawing over a thousand alumni and friends back to campus for a weekend of reconnection and reminiscing. This year, we celebrate 100 years of life on The Bluff, highlighting the founding of Christie Hall in 1911 (groundbreaking done in 1910 courtesy of Archbishop Alexander Christie, pictured above, shovel in hand), as well as celebrating the milestone classes of 1961 (50 years) and 1986 (25 years). With more than 40 events spread over four days, there’s something for everyone at Reunion 2011. For more information or to register online visit us on the web at alumni.up.edu/reunion or call (503) 943-7328. 1993. Mike went back to UP in 1998 and received his master of arts in teaching. I work at the Clerk’s Office for the U.S. District Court in Portland, and Mike is an elementary school principal for the North Clackamas School District. We met during our junior year at UP and got married in 1996. We have two daughters: Delaney, age 8, and Grayce, age 5, and we live in Damascus, Ore. I lost my father in 2002, he was 63 and he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just over seven weeks before. I was pregnant with his first granddaughter, and she was just over two weeks old when he passed. I started the Oregon Affiliate for the Pancreatic Action Cancer Network in 2003 to help spread awareness of this disease and to provide a place for others to go when they, a loved one, or a friend are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is the 4th leading cancer killer and continues to be the least funded among the top five cancer killers. It is the 10th most commly diagnosed type of cancer. For more information about the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, go to pancan.org. For more about the annual PurpleStride fundrais-
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ing event in Portland go to http://tinyurl.com/3sq855r.”
’94 PRAYERS, PLEASE We note with great sadness the death of Brian William McGinty, who passed away unexpectedly at his home in Ellensburg, Wash., on
February 27, 2011. Brian’s sister, Katie Tokarczyk ’95, sent us the following note: “I wanted to inform the University of my brother's passing. I was hoping you could list it in the next issue of the magazine to inform those who may not have heard the sad news. Brian graduated in ’94 from the business program. He had fond memories of UP, as do I.
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lbs. 8 oz. and 21 inches long. He is a true native of Washington, DC and already has dual citizenship with his mother’s maiden Canada, though his French is lacking. We already are saving for his year as a Salzburger in 2032.” Congratulations, Ryan and Tina!
It didn’t take long for alumni and coworkers and friends and family to recognize our spring 2011 mystery staff member as Maureen (Kuffner) Briare ’92, who brightens our campus each day through the power of her vivacious personality, quiet holy dedication, and astounding talents as musical director of campus ministry. Thanks to everyone for writing in and gushing about our Maureen. Our next mystery photo shows a faculty member quite recently retired, one of four who have moved on to new pursuits as of May 2011 in fact, after a 23-year career on The Bluff. “We will miss ___’s calming presence in our day-to-day lives,” reads his certificate of appreciation, “but even more we will miss his commitment to social justice, his innate ability to make colleagues, students, alumni, and let’s just say it, everyone feel like part of his spiritual and literal family, and his unflagging, heartfelt advocacy for people and families in need of help, of every sort and stripe.” Best guesses to mcovert@up.edu. Sadly he passed away in his sleep. He leaves behind his wife Sarah and children Emma and Jack (pictured).” We are so sorry, Katie, and offer our prayers and condolences to you and your family.
’96 ELIZABETH’S UPDATE We heard recently from Elizabeth Howe, who writes: “I'm up in Alaska now (and have been for the past 7 years). I just passed my PHR (Professional in Human Resources) certification and am currently the vice president for a small IT consulting firm that serves non-profit and health and human services organizations throughout South Central Alaska. Other than that I don't have much of an update—life gets a little slow in Alaska in the winter time.” That’s what we hear, Elizabeth, hopefully by now things have thawed out just a bit.
’97 WONDERFUL NEWS Lori Cunningham Andrews has wonderful news to share, if a bit belatedly: “I know I should
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’99 CONGRATS, BECKY! Becky Ellsworth has been promoted to associate principal by Interface Engineering, a mechanical and electrical consulting engineering firm. Her twelve-year career includes such notable projects as the award-winning University of Oregon John E. Jaqua Academic Center for Student Athletes, the LEED Platinum East Portland Community Aquatic Center, and the University of Oregon Ford Alumni Center which is pending LEED Gold certification.
’00 LIVING IN LONDON TOWN
have sent this in much sooner, but, in November of 2008, I married the most wonderful man—James Andrews (unfortunately, not an alumnus). We are residing in Tualatin and are very happy.” Congratulations on your marriage, Lori, and it’s not too late to fix that not-an-alumnus thing—just have James give our admissions office a call. “Congrats on keeping the Portland magazine a wonderful read,” writes MaKessi, otherwise known as “Mother of All Kessis.” MaKessi has news to share about one of her brood: “For your information, the Oregon Big Brother of the Year award was just won by Bob Kessi.”
’98 A FUTURE SALZBURGER Ryan Douglas writes: “Finally, after 5 months, I have been able to scrape together enough time to write. My wife Tina and I welcomed Eamonn Andersen Douglas into the world on October 20, 2010. All went well with Eamonn and his mother: vital stats are 9
Ryan Sayre writes: “Seems like this might be news-worthy: apparently I am the first UP alumnus to be a part of the prestigious London Business School. I’m doing an executive M.B.A. program. I have been living in London with my wife for 2.5 years and am working as a strategic advisor for a global technology company. The Financial Times recognized LBS as the Number One B-School in the world for the third straight year, so I am very fortunate.” Indeed, Ryan, but we suspect your hard work and talent played a big part as well.
’01 TEACHING SUITS HER We heard from Jennifer Cournia back in December, when she was on campus for the gala marking the beginning of the University’s RISE Campaign. Jennifer writes: “I’m not sure what my future plans will hold. I’ve already been at Jesuit High School for seven years, teaching physics the entire time. I’ve toyed with the idea of getting my Ph.D., but am not entirely sure if there is any one subject area I love enough to warrant spending that much time and money back in school. I am fascinated by German culture and the German language, and do enjoy the field of mathematics education, which is
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what Craig Swinyard got his doctorate in from PSU. High school teaching does offer many travel opportunities with various programs, and that I do enjoy. Two years ago, I was one of 30 U.S. teachers out of 1,000 selected to participate in the Toyota International Teacher Program to the Galapagos Islands. We visited the islands, learned about sustainability efforts there, and collaborated with Galapagueño teachers. In summer of 2009, I traveled to Costa Rica with Earthwatch as a teacher fellow. We helped researchers collect data on coffee farms, met with the farmers and learned about Fair Trade Coffee and about some of the issues coffee farmers face.” Thanks for sharing, Jennifer, it sounds like the life of a high school teacher is a good fit. Amazing, just amazing, the work being done by our own Leif Coorlim, editorial director of the CNN Freedom Project, who writes: “While in school, I wrote for The Log and The Beacon and even filed a report for Portland Magazine about my experiences visiting a concentration camp while part of the Salzburg exchange program. I’ve stayed in the news biz, going from Portland to Washington, DC to Atlanta, where I ended up as a producer at CNN International. Recently we launched an unprecedented campaign aimed at combating the horrors of human trafficking, called the CNN Freedom Project. It’s already paying dividends. We’ve uncovered entire villages stuck in bonded labor in India, father-son run trafficking rings across Europe, and areas of Africa where captured tribesman are literally branded as slaves. I’m the editorial director of the initiative as it was, in part, kicked off by a documentary I did last year in Cambodia concerning children made to work in brothels. It’s a tough subject to tackle, but an important one. And the way we’re approaching it is by creating an optimistic, solution-oriented feel to our coverage of the topic. Here’s a link to our press site: http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/07/the-cnnfreedom-project/.”
’02 WELL-DESERVED HONOR Bryan Dearinger, a trial attorney with the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., was recently awarded the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of General Counsel 2010 Bronze Medal for Commendable Service.
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C L A S S Bryan earned the award for the results obtained as lead counsel for EPA in two cases involving the City and County of Honolulu’s wastewater treatment plants. He has also been notified that he is one of a handful of attorneys to receive the Department of Justice Civil Division Outstanding Mentor Award for 2010.
’03 HE’S ON HIS WAY Sean Wlodarczyk writes: “This May I graduated from law school at Vanderbilt University. After the bar exam I will start a one-year term as a judicial clerk here in Nashville.” Kevin Damore passed away on March 22, 2011, at the age of 30. His sister, Elizabeth Damore, contacted our development office at the end of March to let the University community know her brother passed away and that the family were directing donations to UP. Remembrances in Kevin’s name will be directed to the Student Activities fund. Our prayers and condolences.
’04 ALEXANDRA’S UPDATE We heard recently from Alexandra (Edmondson) Westover, who writes: “Firstly, I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed the spring 2011 edition of Portland Magazine. I always look forward to reading the magazine, but this issue, in particular, was so wonderful. I especially loved “Things Seen and Unseen: Highlights from a great theologian’s time of note-taking” (I was one of three theology majors the year I graduated; looks like I’m still drawn to the subject!). Fr.John Donato’s “Stay Together” was so beautiful and touching and nearly had me in tears. As I read his story, I imagined my almost-two-yearold son perhaps caring for me in the same loving manner years from now. Of course, that didn’t help quell the teary eyes much. In all, a really great magazine with so many lovely stories and articles. Thank you so much for continually producing such a fantastic magazine for us all to enjoy. Secondly, the mystery photo must be Maureen Briare. I spent a year in Salzburg with her brother, Joe. Once you know one Kuffner, the rest of them are pretty easy to recognize. Talk about a great family! And lastly, I wanted to let everyone know about the birth of my niece! Stella May Manning was born on April 1st, weighing in at 7 lbs., and 21 inches long. Parents Zack Manning and
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Among the recipients of the University’s annual Alumni Awards in April: Patricia Kleinke Staeheli ’70 and her husband, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Staeheli ’69 (pictured, top) who accepted the Contemporary Alumni Award for their riveting son Paul, a 1998 graduate who has already served twice in the Iraq war, is soon to be promoted by the U.S. Army to his father’s rank, and is adamant and eloquent about his work for peace, for “a world where war is merely memory”; and Tamara Faris ‘00, who received the Father Tom Oddo, C.S.C., Award for Service, for her “extraordinary Memory Book project, which now has blossomed in India, Mexico, and all over Africa. Starting as a simple scrapbook idea for a South African orphanage six years ago, the project now supplies 22,000 memory books to children in nine countries.” Wow. Find more info at http://www.up.edu/alumni/. Photos by Bob Kerns Christine Edmondson Manning ’05 are doing great and adjusting to life with three little ones. I am sending a photo I took of Zack the first time he held his daughter in his arms. I kinda thought you'd appreciate his choice of wardrobe for the occasion. I'm also sending a photo of our brood all together. Tony Westover ’03 and I are parents to the two on the left (Charlie
and Gwyneth) and my sister Christine and Zack have Luke, Zoë, and Stella. By the way, do you know how hard it is to get a decent photo of five kids who are all under the age of four?” Thanks so much for writing Alexandra, that can’t be an easy task. And that is indeed Maureen (Kuffner) Briare in our spring mystery photo. You are too kind in your praise of our humble editorial efforts. Jessica Fritts writes: “I have started a new position with US Bank Home Mortgage working as a mortgage representative for downtown Portland. With over nine years experience my official title is Senior Loan Officer and I am here to help consumers with their mortgage needs. Classmates and fellow alums are welcome to come by or contact me at jessica.fritts@ usbank.com. Thanks!” Wanda Rozwadowska writes: Just a note to update my address and mention that Andrew Wrisley ’06, ’07 and I just bought our first home and are getting married in May 2012 in the Bahamas! I’d like to be sure we keep getting the Portland Magazine and alumni updates. All the best,Wanda.”
’06 HELPING LIZ Former Pilot volleyball standout Liz Lord is in need of help after being diagnosed with a
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brain tumor. Her co-workers and friends at CIP Marketing and Adidas rallied to put together an auction to raise funds to help her meet expenses as she goes through treatment; a barbecue and silent auction took place on Friday, May 13. Those who would like to help can buy shirts, sweatshirts, tank tops, and find out more about Liz’s battle at http://dwbhsh irts.com/meet-dwbhshirtsnew-warrior-liz-lord/. You can also chip in online for her medical bills at http://lfcgive.chipin.com/liz-lord. For more information contact Trish Miller, Pilot athletics, at (503) 943-7117 or millerp@up.edu. Joe Greene is now living in Redondo Beach, Calif.
’07 SHE’S A JOY, YES SHE IS Julie (Furey) Stuber and her husband Brandon welcomed their first child, Clara Joy, into
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The couple met while studying abroad at Gonzaga-in-Florence in 2006-07. The ceremony was witnessed by both University of Portland and Gonzaga alumni. The couple is currently living in Spokane, Wash., while Ben attends Gonzaga University School of Law. High school sweethearts Mario Renato Aviado and Janine Patricia Lequire of Kent, Wash., were wed on May 14 at Saint Vincent de Paul Church in Federal Way. The bride is the daughter of Steve and Patti Lequire of Burien and Auburn and a 2008 graduate of the University’s School of Nursing.
Note the willowy lass at far right: that would be Ellie Dir, who earned her M.B.A. on The Bluff last year, but some years ago was a Lakeridge High grad. Go Pacers! the world at 5:55 a.m. on December 16, 2010, weighing in at 6 pounds, 9 ounces. Julie has been working at the Portland VA Medical Center for four years, working on a medical oncology floor, while Brandon works as a civil litigation attorney in Portland. “I always knew I wanted children but never realized how much joy one human being could bring to my life,” says Julie. To better understand the depth of her joy, check out a video clip Julie produced shortly before Clara Joy’s 5-month birthday: http:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v=LUSFNmGOF1M. Melissa Newcombe writes: “We just bought our first house a few blocks from UP! We couldn’t get away from the University. We would love to receive any alumni newsletters or events brochures at our new address. Thanks!” Thank you for the update, Melissa, congratulations on your new home, and welcome to the neighborhood!
’08 FASHION, FUNDRAISING We heard recently from Andrea Fretwell, who serves as co-director of Modified Style Portland: “Fashion and fundraising: it’s a great way to raise awareness as well as build designing skills. It’s sort of like a beginner set— you don’t need to have design skills to participate, and you don’t need to know how to donate to charities to, well, donate to charities. Modified Style Portland is an annual fashion show fundraiser approaching its third year in Portland. Our mission is to raise awareness of local non-profit organizations by featuring unique and wearable fashion created using sustainable practices by participants of all skill levels. Basically, you have fun and design or attend, we raise funds and awareness for awesome non-profits.
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’10 THANKS, E-SCHOLARS!
Children are welcome to participate—we strive to find allages venues each year so families can participate. We’ve had children models in the past and are having several more this year. Additionally, we’re currently working with the Youth Progress Service to arrange a youth in need as a model for one of our designers. And we’re working with Children’s Healing Art Project (CHAP) to find ways to include these children in the show (as well as being one of our three beneficiaries this year).” You can learn more at www.modifiedstyle.org/. Colby Jager married Katie Larsen on September 5, 2010, at the Greenbriar Inn in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Katie is a graduate student in statistics at Oregon State University, and she and Colby own Beyond Fitness Northwest in Corvallis, where both work as personal trainers. He is an assistant tennis director of Timberhill Tennis Club in Corvallis. Following a honeymoon in Costa Rica, the couple is at home in Corvallis. Kathleen Mary Lynch married Gonzaga grad Benjamin James
We heard recently from Stefanie Doolittle, who writes: “I just had to write to thank the E-Scholars program for all the times we had to write detailed business plans (an assignment that might have felt annoying at the time). The NGO I was originally suppose to volunteer with in India fell apart, but it turned out to be a good thing because the other intern and I have now started our own micro-lending NGO in India, which means I am able to put the skills I learned in E-Scholars to use in the developing world! We have already formed six lending groups comprised of ten women each and we are hoping to approach the bank next week to open savings accounts for these women and soon they will take out group loans. The organization is very fragile still, but I now understand how exciting it is to be part of an actual startup. Thanks again to E-Scholars and for all the support and training! I used the same template for this business plan as I did for my E-Scholars project and it was very helpful; organization can be a big problem here in the rural parts of India!” Thanks for sharing, Stefanie, and good luck in your good works. Keep us posted. Prayers, please, for the family of Benjamin Fitch, whose mother, Roslyn Fitch, passed away on April 9, 2011, at her home in Las Vegas, surrounded by her family. Survivors include her husband, Edward; son, Benjamin; sister, Marcella Henkels; brother, Barry Dupler; several nieces and nephews; and Mango. Our prayers and condolences.
’11 PRAYERS FOR EMILY
McDonnell in a ceremony at St. Aloysius Church in Spokane, Wash., on September 4, 2010.
Prayers, please, for recent graduate Emily Hooper, who lost her father, Peter Franklin Morse, on January 24, 2011. He was a cement sales representative and survivors in-
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clude Emily as well as his wife, Mary K.; and sons, Jason and Eric. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR Dear Folks: For the wild ambitious December 2011 issue of the University’s Portland Magazine on music, we are collecting music from every corner of the University’s farflung community—students, faculty, staff, alumni, visitors, friends. Can I ask four favors? One, your own music. Anything you have written, composed, recorded, on your own or with a band, for any purpose whatsoever —can I hear that? Just e-mail it to me so I can listen —if we would like to use it I’ll be back in touch with you about permissions and copyrights and such. Or send CDs or DVDs to me in campus mail. Film clips, snippets, anything and everything welcome. Two, music you think we should hear and know about — by your roommates, colleagues, friends, teachers, parents, anyone with anything to do with the University at all. The thinnest of tethers is good enough at the moment, as we cast widely for all sorts of music. Three, music stories, essays, tales, tips, advice, counsel — anything you think might help us make an amazing issue about music —the joy and power of it, its holiness and verve and immediacy, its doors and windows to the soul…. Four, paintings, photographs, charts, graphs, signs, anything visual at all having to do with music. No screaming rush, but I’d sure like to have a pile of astounding things on my desk by the end of July. Thanks much, Brian Doyle (bdoyle@up.edu).
FACULTY, STAFF, FRIENDS Roger Alan Crabbs, a faculty member in the Pamplin School of Business from 1972 to 1979, passed away at his home on Sunday, May 2, 2011. Roger and his wife were active in recent years in the Retired Faculty Group, which meets regularly here on campus. His memorial service took place in the University’s Chapel of Christ the Teacher on May 6. Condolences may be sent to his wife and family at 17516 N.W. Shadyfir Loop, Portland, OR 97006. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Elna LaVern Metzger passed away on February 28, 2011, in Tigard, Ore. Elna worked as a secretary at the University. Survivors include her daughter, Linda; son, David; and step-
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C L A S S sons, Mark, Matt, and Mike. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Linda K. Birenbaum passed away on December 16, 2010, in Hillsboro, Ore. She taught nursing here on The Bluff from January 2000 to May 2007, and had a distinguished career in nursing, with 20 professional publications on topics ranging from family research in pediatric oncology nursing to assessing children's bereavement when a sibling dies from cancer. Her professional experiences included administrative director for Columbia River Oncology Program, Providence Health System, and Walther Cancer Institute; associate scientist at Indiana University School of Nursing; assistant head nurse for Portland Providence and Providence St. Vincent hospitals; adjunct assistant professor for University of Pennsylvania and University of Portland School of Nursing; and assistant professor at Oregon Health Sciences University School of Nursing. Our prayers and condolences. We got the following note from founding Portland Magazine editor John Soisson, who now serves as special assistant to the president here on The Bluff: “On Sunday, January 23, at the Multnomah Athletic Club, the MAC Balladeers performed their 70th anniversary concert at the MAC in honor of Roger O. Doyle’s 35 years as their director. The Balladeers is an allmale chorus that performs far and wide and that currently includes a lot of UP men: Karl Wetzel, Doug Dooley, Joe Baker, and Paul Nelsen, among them. Other UP men who came back for the anniversary tribute were Dan Danner, Will Chisholm, Michael Sagun, and Sam Barbara. The concert played to a standing room only crowd in the MAC ballroom and there were a lot of current and former UP people there. As part of their tribute, the Balladeers contributed $4,000 to the Roger and Kay Doyle Scholarship fund here at the University. Roger conducted two numbers himself and because of his failing health, this was most likely his last public appearance.” Alice Marie (Schleef) Markwalder passed away on February 23, 2011. She married Don Markwalder in 1952, graduated from Illinois State University, and received a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. Alice was a practicing CPA and taught accounting at the University of Portland, retiring in 1996. She was predeceased by Don and her son Alan, and sisters Barbara and Carol.
Survivors include her son Jay and his wife Jeri, grandchildren Conrad and Claire; brothers Art and Harry; numerous nephews, nieces, and extended family members. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations be made to Prairieview Foundation,Danforth,IL (www. prairieviewlutheran. com); or Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation (www.komen.org). Karen Lantz Fornshell ’87 and University of Portland assistant vice president and chief marketing officer Laurie Kelley are among 25 women named as Portland Business Journal’s 2011 Women of Influence. An awards ceremony was held Thursday, April 7 at the downtown Hilton Hotel to honor the women for their achievements in business and community. Kelley oversees the University’s marketing, branding, publications, direct mail, advertising, media relations, communications, social media, key aspects of up.edu, major events, a print shop, mail center and the switchboard. Prior to coming to the UP, Laurie served as vice president of marketing and planning at Oregon Public Broadcasting, and served in leadership roles at Southwest Washington Medical Center and Legacy Health System. She also currently serves on the board of directors for the Children’s Cancer Association and the Blanchet House, and is chair of the Jesuit High School Communications Committee. Oh yes, she is also a devoted wife to Mike and a simply awesome Mom to Ross, Erin, Catherine, and Caroline.
DEATHS Mary Theresa Allaire ’39, December 10, 2010, Portland, Ore. Theresa Marie Scarfone Berta ’42, February 4, 2011. Joseph J. Cholick ’42, March 21, 2011, Scappoose, Ore. John McKenna “Mack” Bosch ’43, February 26, 2011. Marie O’Reilly Craviotto, wife of Bob Craviotto ’46 CP ’50. Sr. Mary Martin Bush, OP, ’47, July 2, 2010, Fremont, Calif. Virginia Francine DeLong Tannler ’47, October 25, 2010, Lake Oswego, Ore. Jerry Studley ’47, September 17, 2010. Nancy Goodnow Hoagland ’47, January 22, 2011. Lewis Hamlin Coe ’48, March 29, 2011. Rodney Howard Smith ’49, October 11, 2010. Robert A. Brown ’50, March 23, 2011. Wilbert “Bill” Fischer ’50, February 15, 2009, Vancouver, Wash. Edward E. Bettey ’50, January
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Reunion is the largest alumni event of the year, annually drawing over a thousand alumni and friends back to campus for a weekend of reconnection and reminiscing. This year, we celebrate 100 years of life on The Bluff, highlighting the founding of Christie Hall in 1911, as well as celebrating the milestone classes of 1961 (50 years) and 1986 (25 years). With more than 40 events spread over four days, there’s something for everyone at Reunion 2011. For more information or to register online visit us on the web at alumni.up.edu/ reunion or call (503) 943-7328. 29, 2011. Alvin Leveton ’50, February 22, 2011. Joseph Renner ’50, July 12, 2010. Allen G. Vuylsteke ’50, November 9, 2010, Boise,Idaho. Thomas Edward Busch Sr. ’51, April 11, 2011. Thurston Gates ’51, December 1, 2010, Tigard, Ore. Patricia (Harmon) DeSimio ’51, wife of Peter DeSimio ’51. Francis J. Lang ’52, February 26, 2011. Leo Greenstein ’52, January 6, 2011, Portland, Ore. Larry A. Dusenberry ’56, December 9, 2010, Woodburn, Ore. Thomas Edward Hulme ’57, February 13, 2011. Robert “Bob” Charles Rengo ’57, February 16, 2011. Rita Anne Cleary-Bloom ’62, November 3, 2010. Dennis Patrick Hays ’63, January 22, 2011. Jeanne Bernhard ’64, January 18, 2011. Dr. William J. “Bill” Angelos ’64, December 17, 2010, Portland, Ore. Jeanne Ann (Baird) Williams ’67, January 23, 2011. Virginia Powell ’72, November 9, 2010, Tigard, Ore. Theresa Hemmen, mother of Ann Lynch ’75, February 24, 2011. Barry R. West ’77, January 31,
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2011. Virginia DiTommaso, mother of Nancy Koerner ’77, December 2, 2010. Norma Jean (Bradbury) Lloyd ’77, January 7, 2011. Carmen Saracco, husband of Helen Libonati ’78, November 29, 2010. Katy Edna Ruby ’80, February 9, 2011. Rosalie Prado Ramirez, mother of Fabian Ramirez ’82, September 28, 2010. Danny Keagbine, son of Jenni and Gerry ’83 Keagbine, March 11, 2011, Portland, Ore. James Joseph “Jimmie” DeLoretto ’85, February 4, 2011. Frank Minier, father of Melissa Tenorio ’91, November 9, 2010. Brian William McGinty ’94, February 27, 2011, Ellensburg, Wash. Roslyn Fitch, mother of Benjamin Fitch ’10, April 9, 2011, Las Vegas, Nev. Peter Franklin Morse, father of Emily Hooper ’11, January 24, 2011. Roger Alan Crabbs, Sunday, May 2, 2011, Portland, Ore. Elna LaVern Metzger, February 28, 2011, Tigard, Ore. Linda K. Birenbaum, December 16, 2010, Hillsboro, Ore. Alice Marie (Schleef) Markwalder, February 23, 2011.
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Mark Driessen and Gabe Lucy, both 2005 graduates, off the Hawaiian island of Maui. Both work for the Trilogy sailing company there, which runs seven catamarans on sailing, snorkeling, diving, and whale-watching cruises. “My experiences on The Bluff really fired my imagination, and this work’s an extension of that energy,” says Driessen. “Tennyson: all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world…”
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PHOTO COURTESY OF TRILOGY SAILING
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PHOTO BY DAVID MORRIS OF CLACKAMAS ORCHIDS
Boy, here’s a great Campaign story: Jim Riopelle, the Oregon state champ in handball in 1939, graduates from the University in 1940. He marries the love of his love, Marie, who goes with him when the Army stations him in Pearl Harbor. They survive the attack, and Jim serves throughout the Pacific, finishing as a colonel (!). He ends up chief of the Portland Fire Bureau and a national leader in fire safety. He and Marie also become internationally beloved and respected and renowned as orchid growers, writers, lecturers, and judges, with many hybrids named for them. Jim dies in 1999, Marie in 2010, and they leave Jim’s beloved University of Portland almost five million dollars for scholarships for students who can’t afford an education on The Bluff. Five million dollars, to help kids get the unique flavor and chance and salt and zest and verve of this place. “Their immense generosity will change lives here for many, many years – a lovely thing to say,” said University president Father Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C., with his usual pith. The Campaign itches to raise $45 million for direct help to kids. Can you help? Changing lives here for years – that’s beautiful.
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University of Portland Portland Magazine 5000 N. Willamette Blvd Portland, OR 97203-5798
Non-Profit Organization U.S. Postage PAID Portland, OR Permit No. 188
Change service requested
‘ONLY YOU AND I,’ 1969; COURTESY OF THE CORITA ART CENTER, IMMACULATE HEART COMMUNITY, LOS ANGELES.
MISS FRANCES KENT OF FORT DODGE, IOWA,
BETTER KNOWN AS SISTER MARY CORITA of The Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, became one of the best-loved artists in America during the 1960s and 1970s; her brilliant colors, pithy and riveting texts, and lovely eye for simple and alluring design made her serigraph prints ubiquitous, especially in Catholic homes. This print is drawn from a recent show of her work on campus, sponsored by the University’s Garaventa Center for American Catholic Life. Do we welcome Campaign gifts to the Garaventa Center for cool stuff like this? Why, yes, we do. See rise.up.edu.