Extra Credit

Last Lap

You all read your class notes; I read all your class notes. For the past twenty-six years that’s been one of my tasks as magazine editor, giving them a proofing, trying to keep out of the way of alumni and class secretaries’ direct voices for the most part. Reading the full class notes always felt like a reverse journey through the arc of life, Benjamin Button UVM alumni style. Memorial tributes to old friends, celebration of grandkids and retirements, career achievements, annual hiking trips with college buddies, babies, weddings packed with Catamount friends, first jobs, a post-grad year waiting tables and skiing in Jackson Hole. It’s all there.

A few weeks ago, I did my final complete read of class notes, as I’m retiring from the university with this issue. Over the years in this job, a few people have expressed surprise that the editor of the University of Vermont magazine is not an alumnus. Full disclosure, I went to college in my hometown at my state school, the University of Illinois. Vermont is my adopted home state; UVM is my adopted alma mater. My wife, Sheila, has taught statistics at UVM since 1985 and has taken enough art, art history, Spanish, and French courses herself to perhaps earn a self-designed bachelor’s degree; our daughters, Grace ’11 and Arline ’14, are true alumni. It’s a family thing.

For me, one of the privileges of working on the magazine all these years has been the opportunity to connect across all of the generations of alumni, beyond that familiarity via class notes. Writing and editing hundreds of profiles, I’ve often found that UVM alumni’s character and life paths are strongly influenced by not just the university but also our home state—its environmental ethos, activist spirit, and sense of place.

Reconnecting our readers with this landscape has always been a high priority for art director Elise Whittemore, who also retires with this issue, and me. On covers, contents pages, throughout the publication, we’ve always aimed to go straight to the heart with striking photography of our campus, our funky little city, our lake, our mountains.

Which brings me to that photo on this page. Yes, that’s me. No, not my horse. Austin belongs to master horseman Tim Hayes ’67, a kind, authentic, very interesting guy I was fortunate to connect with for a story. Well-trained by Tim, Austin had the skills to make me look like I might know my way around a horse, at least in the split-second of a camera shutter. I wanted to share this photo with my farewell because Tim’s story was the sort I most enjoyed reporting, writing, and sharing—a story with unlikely twists of life, personal reinvention, grounded in Vermont. (Not to mention that I’m a sucker for a corny visual metaphor. Be glad there’s no sunset.)

It was a beautiful morning in the hills above Johnson in fall 2019, as ace science-writer/photographer Josh Brown and I visited with Tim and Austin. I’m looking forward to future mornings out and about on trails and back roads—more likely riding a bike than walking a horse—in this rare state, home to our University of the Green Mountains.

—Thomas Weaver, Editor

UVM MAGAZINE

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