ALUMNI ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY SCHOOL WINTER 2014 NEWSLETTER *Naomi (Noni) Reeder Johnston, ‘53 *Ann Caren Greer, ’53 sister of Robert (Chris) Caren and Charlene Caren ‘62 *John (Jack) Davidson, ’56 brother of Nancy Davidson Davies, ‘60 *Joel Barkan, ‘59 *Leonard Shartle, ’62 brother of Alex Shartle, ‘57 *David L. Tolbert, ‘69 *Don Bateman, fac father of Susan Bateman, ’67 and Anne Bateman, ‘68 *Helen Rutherford, par mother of Arch Rutherford ’63 and Lynn Rutherford Harper, ‘66
MEMBERSHIP 2014 Our membership continues to thrive thanks to you dedicated University School enthusiasts. So far we have had 30 yearly renewals, 8 new Life memberships and 8 new yearly memberships. Welcome! Welcome! If you are a 2013 member as indicated on your address label, please renew for 2014 as soon as possible! Send $15 (or $10 for e-mail version) to AAUS, 587 Fox Lane, Worthington, OH 43085.
FAREWELLS
SPECIAL EVENTS
During the past several months, many members of our University School family have passed away including a member of our beloved faculty and brothers and sisters of our classmates. We send our most heartfelt condolences to their families, classmates and friends.
Dearborn couple celebrates 71 Valentine's Days together Author: Lisa Ray, Managing Editor, ClickOnDetroit.com Published On: Feb 11 2014
*Robert C. Bohannan, ’37 brother and brother-in-law of William F. and Mary Jeanne Barricklow Bohannan, ’39 and brother-in-law of Grace Barricklow LeBart, ‘41 *Margaret Cornuelle Ricketts, ’42 sister of Janet Cornuelle Gallant, ‘44 *Janice (Kay) Klages Boyce, ’46 sister of Lorna Klages Loveless, ‘50 *Bruce Kennedy, ’46 brother of Mary Jo Kennedy Bur, ‘49 *John Windnagel, ‘47
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joined Wayne State University as a professor of math education, and their family settled in a house near Oakwood Hospital. Today, the couple's son Eugene Lynn Smith is an attorney in Dearborn, living nearby. The Smiths also have two grandchildren and three great grandchildren. Having traveled over the years to every continent except Antarctica, the Smiths are now content to stay closer to home and keep busy with a variety of social and fitness activities at Oakwood Common. Eugene is prepared for Valentine's Day and with a mischievous smile added, "I've already ordered a box of chocolates for Clara, because she is a 'chocoholic'." Clara agreed and never revealed how many boxes of chocolates Eugene has given her over their 71 Valentine's together.”
"We've always done things together," said Eugene Smith (faculty) when asked about the secret to his happy marriage with wife Clara and their 71 years of Valentine's Day celebrations. The Smiths marked their 71st wedding anniversary on January 31, only a few days before Valentine's. Unlike their 50th anniversary celebration which included a trip to China, this year the Dearborn couple shared cake with their friends and neighbors at Oakwood Common. "I made sure we had a two-tiered cake, because my wife ordered two tiers for our wedding day, and the baker only delivered a sheet cake," said Smith. "I'll always remember how disappointed she was, and I want her to be happy." Sharing her thoughts about their years together, Clara Smith said, "I don't know if there are any secrets to our marriage. It's all about give and take. You try your best to get along together." The couple first met when they were only nine years old and attended the same church in Columbus, Ohio. "It wasn't until I was in the Army and graduated from Officer's Candidate School that I could afford to marry her," said Smith. "It was during World War II, and I was on leave. They opened up the registrar's office on a Saturday so we could get a marriage license." The Smiths' marriage began the first of many travels the couple made together. Because of Eugene's education and teaching experience in math, the Army sent him to advanced training schools throughout the United States. Clara was able to accompany him on all his assignments except the Philippine Islands where he spent eight months teaching at the United States Armed Forces Institute. More than 50 years ago, Eugene Smith
(Many of us have wonderful memories of Gene imparting his great wisdom and sincere kindness to those of us lucky enough to have had him as a teacher. We wish them both continued happiness and health.) Also special Anniversary Wishes and continued health and happiness to *William and Mary Jeanne (Barricklow) Bohannan, ‘39 on their 70th Anniversary last December, *John and Virginia (Merryman) Schlitt ’48 & ’52 on their 56th in January, *Samuel (Skip) Woodruff ’59 and Sudie on their 50th last September.
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precious hours devoted to this community for over 40 years – were given for no other reason than to serve his and our community.
SPECIAL TRIBUTES During the past several months, two local community leaders, both of whom are a part of the University School family have retired from public service. In this issue we will recognize one of these special individuals and the other one in the Spring issue. These two are special individuals who have truly “made a difference” to hundreds of us, especially here in central Ohio. Where ever they go, they reach out and affect your life in a lasting, positive way.
President Lou Goorey was born in Columbus 81 years ago. His father died when he was just 8 years old. When his mother later married he was adopted by his new father – and he has since carried two surnames – Louis Roseberry Goorey – in honor of the two fathers who loved him. He attended University High school in Columbus where he played left guard on the football team and sang with the school’s well known boy choir. He was a precocious student whose education was accelerated – permitting him to be graduated from Ohio State University as a medical doctor at age 25. His specialty was pediatrics and he moved forward with a highly successful practice with hospital staff privileges in virtually every hospital in Columbus. He has also served as medical director for several large insurance organizations in Ohio. His community service and leadership roles have involved a wide range of service organizations: He served as president of both the Ohio and Worthington Jaycees, and as VicePresident of the national Jaycees organization; he was also president of Dublin-Worthington Rotary Club; was a Lodge Grand Master and is a 33rd degree Mason; and served with the Ohio Department of Health, the Central Ohio Lung Association, the Ohio School Employees Health Care Board; and as a professor in the department of pediatrics of Ohio State’s College of Medicine – and Zoning Appeals. That led to his first election to council in 1973. He was reelected for 9 successive 4 year terms.
Louis Roseberry Goorey ‘50 The following excerpts are from a recognition speech delivered before Worthington City Council and read into the record at the retirement celebration for Dr. Lou Goorey, December 16th, 2013 by James Lorimer, Vice-Mayor of Worthington and valued community leader. “We take pride in saying we are from Worthington – a small community with a 210 year history – a New England Village Heritage – and one of the best places in our nation to live and raise a family. But this special feel about our community did and does not happen by accident. It requires community focused citizens – and wise and effective leadership. We are here this evening to recognize one of the most wise and effective leaders this or any community has known. He has served Worthington on its council longer than any other person – 40 years on council – 10 years as President pro tem – and for the past 18 years as President of Worthington City Council. The thousands of his life’s
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And, he has been re-elected President by 9 different City Councils during these past important 18 years – and during which our community has prospered and greatly benefitted from his unmatched experience and special leadership ability.”
KUDOS Ed Violet, ’61 (an active grandparent in Grandview Heights schools) sent us this announcement from the Grandview Heights School Board, of this well deserved honor for another outstanding University School member; Larry Larson, ’61.
Lou Goorey with sister Lyn Goorey Ganz, ’56 at the recognition.
“It is with a great deal of excitement that I share with you news from tonight's school board meeting. On a 5-0 vote, the school board renamed Grandview Heights Middle School as Larry Larson Middle School. The recommendation came from a community based committee. The committee cited Larry's 50 year commitment to the students of Grandview Heights as teacher, coach, athletic director, and camp counselor and the impact he has made on those students as a basis for their recommendation.
The final event in the ceremony was for City Council to enact the resolution which, from now on, Worthington’s City Hall will be called, “The Louis J. R. Goorey Worthington Municipal Building. His name will be engraved in stone to stand in front of the building for ever as our community’s recognition and thanks for all of his devotion, positive leadership and special achievements to the city we all love. The following photo is Lou and wife Nancy receiving the plaque from the city with an artist rendering of the stone work in front of Worthington’s newly named City Hall, presented by City Council president Bonnie Michael.
The building housing students in grades 4-5 will retain the name registered with the state of Ohio as Thomas A. Edison Elementary. The building housing students in grade 6-8 will now be known as Larry Larson Middle School.
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I would like to thank the committee for their thoughtful recommendation and I thank Larry Larson for the dedication he continues to share with the students of Grandview Heights City Schools.”
architectural design and encouraged to pursue it as a career, even though, as his teacher lamented (in the 1934 Depression) many architects were in great economic strife. For my father, education had almost nothing to do with certification. It was a largely individual (and even autodidactic) enterprise. In his view, the best teacher for architecture is doing architecture. It is remarkable that the first house of his design (with assistance from the architectsculptor Tony Smith), the Gunning House in Blacklick, Ohio, was built when he was only 18 years of age.
MEMORIES FROM A SON We have an architecturally important section of the City of Worthington called Rush Creek Village, which was developed using principals of “organic” architecture espoused by Frank Lloyd Wright. The development is nationally known. One of University School’s early graduates was very involved in the architectural design and concept.
My father would not be repressed—and one of the delights of being around him was his unbridled, inspired, opinionated, thoughtprovoking and unconventional enthusiasms. His greatest heroes and models remained Frank Lloyd Wright and Henry David Thoreau. Like them, he lived his ideals, even when this involved personal difficulties. He elected for a life of self-reliance over institutional support. Fortunately, my father was very good at getting along with most people. Almost all of my father’s best friends were clients—the Pepinsky family being prominent. Rush Creek Village, in particular, was built by those in sync with my father’s style and with extraordinary faith in the project of building the world’s largest residential community of organic architecture.
THEODORE VAN FOSSEN, 1936 My father, Theodore van Fossen attended University School and was in the Class of 1936. Looking over his teachers’ comments (that Hal Pepinsky, Class of 1962, obtained and kindly forwarded to me) has led to reflections about how his experiences there influenced his subsequent career. He was the designer of Worthington’s Rush Creek Village, the world’s largest community of organic architecture, as well as other houses in Ohio, California, New Mexico, Virginia, Maryland, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, where he lived for five decades and died on December 9, 2010.
My father contested the authority of the kitsch stylistic code prevalent in “colonial” Worthington, where Rush Creek Village is located, as well as the architectural establishment (whether it was pushing the low modernism of Gropius, Le Corbusier and the international style or, later, postmodernism). The dominance (even the orthodoxy) of the international style and then the postmodern style in universities made him skeptical about the value of formal architectural training.
My first impression in looking at his University School records is that he did not seem to pay undue attention to his teachers’ advice. He maintained his own individual path at a high school that was unusual in encouraging freedom of thought. It appears not to have any of today’s standardized examinations that set such narrowly competitive tracks in measuring achievement and produce incentives to discourage originality, reward conformity and obedience, and infantilize students. At the University School in the 1930s he appears to have enjoyed a far more personally tailored, character building, intellectually vital curriculum than is prevalent today. He was recognized by his Fine Arts teacher, Mary Albright, as having extraordinary talent for
Although his strategy was often to go around, rather than frontally oppose, obstacles, as a student at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, he was one of the leaders of a revolt against the narrow orthodoxies of its director Moholy-Nagy. He often scorned the authority of the teachers of the latest fashions in architecture and art and contended that many of them were charlatans. His architecture exemplifies a different set of standards from the ones ascendant during his lifetime. For my father, architecture and art
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should be spiritual and those who saw them primarily as machines or jokes deserved censure. A remarkable, productive and creative personality, my father was not generally appreciated by the architectural establishment, although this changed in the last decade of his life, when, unfortunately, he felt it was “too late” for him to make much difference. The Honors Award Program of the Columbus Chapter of the American Institute of Architects presented him with a certificate of recognition in 2000. In 2003 the National Park Service placed Rush Creek Village on the National Register of Historic Places. Rush Creek Village was the subject of a long feature article in The New York Times in 2004.
into her own version of a personality cult. My father lamented that Taliesin has not risen to the challenge of teaching and extending a true understanding of the principles and practice of organic architecture. Likewise, in his view, the political meaning of organic architecture had been distorted for millions of people by Ayn Rand’s creation of an extreme libertarian alter ego, Howard Roark, for Frank Lloyd Wright in her ever-popular novel The Fountainhead. My father remarked that Wright actually supported Upton Sinclair’s and William Morris’s Green Left. More generally, he felt that education was extremely important, but that the institutionalized forms of it were mostly deficient. For him the University School represented a significant step along the way to true education—one that was extremely important to him personally.
Rush Creek Village exemplifies my father’s view that architecture should capture or reflect the real form of nature, that architecture is the encyclopedic synthesis of the plastic arts, and that architecture shows most vividly how art shapes and reflects the society in which it exists. Decades ago, he told me that if he had not been so devoted to architecture, he would have wanted to be a social scientist. From him (and others) I got the view that social science should be interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and historical. My father had a great interest in social history. In his eighties he was a guide to history of the surrounding region on white water rafting expeditions near his home in south-western Pennsylvania. He saw architecture and art as grounded in their historical, social, political and economic contexts.
His architectural documents are deposited at the Northwest Architectural Archives of the University of Minnesota. Anthony van Fossen
REMINDERS *Annual Alumni meeting, Ramseyer Hall, 12:30-4:00, Sat. June 21, 2014.
To the end of his life he had faith that architecture would eventually attune people to their environment and help build a proper culture. He welcomed the rise of the environmental movement and such new perspectives as fractal geometry that he saw as helping to move architecture closer to the nonlinear, non-rectangular realities of humanity and nature.
*If you have any publications available for purchase, please send me the information and it will be featured on the web site (www.tosus.org) for other alumni who would be interested in purchasing a copy or checking their local library for availability. Also, we hope to include a section on the web site for anyone who has a hobby or business we could feature. Send the information to jswhaueisen@yahoo.com or Steffanie Haueisen, 587 Fox Lane, Worthington, OH 43085.
For my father, the ideal environment (as opposed to the actual one) can come only through education. True education is inspiring and demystifying—always challenging the conventional. In his view, university architectural schools have generally failed to appreciate organic architecture. He also felt that proper education in its principles has been made more difficult since Mrs. Olgivanna Wright made Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship
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