TOP BANANAS

photography by phyllis graber jensen

A Bates tradition since 1975, this year’s Puddle Jump, on Feb. 10, was among the balmiest in memory (52 degrees), easing the way for these students to pause and pose on the precipice of their jump into Lake Andrews.

A Game of Centimeters

A football running back falls short of a first down by a few links of the chains. “It’s a game of inches!” they say on TV.

But how about a game of centimeters? That sport would be track, at least for sprinter Colby Stakun-Pickering ’23, a math and physics double major.

Last winter, Stakun-Pickering got to thinking about the “minute scale” of his sport after he and a teammate took turns lowering the Bates record in the 60 meters.

Stakun-Pickering went first, sprinting the 60 meters in a record 7:05 seconds on Jan. 13, just one-hundredth of a second faster than the previous record holder, Isaiah Spofford ’15.

Stakun-Pickering did some ciphering, figuring that had they run head to head, he would’ve edged his elder by just 10 centimeters, or half the width of this printed page.

The following week, classmate Derek Shen of Bellevue, Wash., took over the record, running the race three-hundredths of a second faster for a time of 7:02. (But Shen ultimately kept the record, lowering his mark to 6.92 seconds by season’s end.)

Growing up in Wellesley, Mass., Stakun-Pickering didn’t need a stopwatch to tell him he was fast. In fact, he was something of a playground legend.

“We’d be playing tag, and kids get upset when you’re ‘It’ and you can just track them right down.”

In middle school, he got serious about sprinting when the stakes got higher.

“My friend bet me that he was faster. The bet was over some really good pancakes that his grandmother makes.” He signed up for the team, showed up to a practice, and bettered his friend.

“But I never ended up getting my pancakes!”

Besides holding a Bates track record, however briefly, Stakun-Pickering has finished a thesis in physics and a capstone project in math.

His thesis project, with Associate Professor of Physics Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, looks at surprising recent research showing that fewer stars are forming than scientists originally thought. “It’s a lot less,” says Stakun-Pickering.

Stakun-Pickering’s capstone mathematics course, with Professor of Mathematics Peter Wong, involves integrals, which is a way of assigning numbers to functions to describe area

The annual Friends of Bates Athletics Giving Challenge raised a record $636,368.

In May, Jillian Richardson ran the second-fastest women’s outdoor 5K: 16:52.53.

Fall sports kick off at 5 p.m. Sept. 5 with women’s soccer at Bowdoin.

Great Graff

Meghan Graff ’23 of South Portland, Maine, concluded her Bates career as the top scorer in women’s basketball history and one of the program’s most-honored players. Named the Maine Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Player of the Year for 2023, Graff received three All-America honors in her career — two from D3hoops.com and one from the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association — matching Meg Coffin ’08 for the most All-America honors in program history. Her 1,645 career points rank fourth in NESCAC history.

Top Ten

The top 10 career point scorers for women’s basketball got a new No. 1 this year: Meghan Graff ’23.

and other properties. “Pretty fun!” he says.

For an athlete, thinking about time and distance and numbers “can help and hurt you,” says Stakun-Pickering. That’s because great athletes need to achieve a kind of mindless flow as they compete. “You can go into paralysis by analysis, where you can think about it so much that now you’re starting to get in your own head.”

But in a positive sense, most athletes know that visualization is a powerful tool. A sprinter who can visualize what they need to do to get faster can use that to their advantage. “I mean, my phone is just 15 centimeters tall,” says Stakun-Pickering — and visualizing that tiny distance could win a race.

“If I put together a good quality race, anything can happen.”

And perhaps that helped him break another longstanding indoor dash record a few weeks later, in the 200 meters, with a time of 22.19 seconds, beating the previous mark of 22.39 seconds, held for more than two decades by Erik Zwick ’01.

— Lily D’Addario ’23 of Locust Valley, N.Y., asking Curtis Johnson what his track specialty was, not realizing that the youthful-looking Johnson was a Bates track coach, not a fellow student. At the time, D’Addario was a sophomore rehabbing her knee after a ski injury; Johnson invited her to try track (she’d come to Bates to play soccer), and since then she became a top sprinter.

The first Art Walk LA of 2023 featured works by students in “Art and Social Practice.”

The Museum of Art exhibit WhoAreThey?/WhoAmI? features portraits from the collection.

Chekhov Takes the Cake

Though Anton Chekhov never won a Nobel Prize, he now has an Edible Books prize to his credit. After reading The Cherry Orchard, an advanced Russian class paid tribute to the author by creating a chocolate cake with sour cherry compote, decorated with chocolate trees, winning the top prize for artistry at this year’s Edible Books Festival, held in April in Ladd Library. The festival’s recipe is simple: entrants need only create something edible, sweet or savory, that’s inspired by a book, fiction or nonfiction, to be judged in two categories, artistry and flavor.

Christine Murray, a social-science librarian, took inspiration from Karl Ove Knausgård’s six-volume autobiography, My Struggle, to create My Strudel, which won one of two top prizes for flavor. She admits that she did not struggle with her recipe. “I just followed a recipe that said ‘easy strudel,’ so it might not be a canonical interpretation.”

Library Assistant Perrin Lumbert evoked Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray with The Picture of Durian Gray, bringing to mind paintings by Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo. The dish made quite the pungent impression — durian is a divisively popular fruit from Southeast Asia, known for its spiky outer shell and rich odor.

Caitlin Lampman, reference and outreach archivist at Muskie Archives, won a top prize last year for gingerbread men and mice (inspired by Of Mice and Men). This year, she offered a sly entry: cheap store-bought sugar cookies, invoking the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Top: Inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray, this durian-infused fruit-and-cake portrait by Library Assistant Perrin Lumbert brought to mind paintings by Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Left: Topped with glittery chocolate trees and a cookie house, this cake was inspired by The Cherry Orchard, and made by Lecturer in Russian Cheryl Stephenson and her advanced Russian class.

The building is spelled Schaeffer “Theatre.” The academic department is “Theater.”

In a Moment

Studio art major Jordan Wilson ’23 of Medfield, Mass., gazes intently at an image on her computer as she paints a portrait in her Olin Arts Center studio in March.

To create her portraits, which were exhibited at this year’s Senior Thesis Exhibition at the Bates Museum of Art, Wilson worked from snapshots of friends and family members taken on her smartphone, “casual pictures that are not meant to be metaphorical, symbolic, or allegorical,” she explains.

She sought small details, like the fold of a sleeve, or the curve of an eyebrow — a sort of “stillness” that is simultaneously unsettling and comforting. It represents a moment that will never come again, but “without impermanence, time and space and life wouldn’t exist in the first place,” she says.

“I like how pens and pencils feel as they glide across paper and how thick oil paint coats my metal knife when I drag it across glass to mix pigments until

Pursuing honors in music performance requires a 30-minute juried audition.

Hat in Hand

Adelle Welch ’25 of Livingston, Mont., models a fishing hat, festooned with mock fishing lures and flies, that she created in the Bates costume shop for the college production of Much Ado About Nothing, which hit the Schaeffer Theatre stage in March.

True, a bucket hat isn’t a typical costume prop for a Shakespearean play. But this wasn’t a typical production of Much Ado, set as it was in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1945. The hat was worn by a hat-wearing, touristy character dubbed the “Sport,” part of the play’s Watch, a comedic group including constable Dogberry and a few other Maine archetypes: a hunter, farmer, and lobsterman.

Among the 1,800 or so students at Bates, Welch might be the very best person to create a fishing hat. Livingston, the small Montana city along the Yellowstone River where she grew up, is home to the International Fly Fishing Federation museum.

As a child, she learned to tie flies from her grandfather. “I spent a lot of time with him in the summer on the river,” says Welch, recalling his fly-tying setup and “all the fun feathers and stuff. They looked so cool.”

All that experience helped her bring authentic details to the faux flies, such as adding “little eyes to mimic nymph flies, which are the ones that live at the bottom of the river,” she says. Meanwhile, dry flies, which float, are more decorative, made with “feathers and stuff.” they’re just right,” says Wilson. She enjoys returning to the same image “over and over again. In this way, my thesis is also the material byproduct of my time spent looking and thinking about these passing moments and what made them what they were.”

Welch used a range of crafting supplies to create her flies, such as safety pins, string, colored fuzzy pipe cleaners, and ribbons — believable enough from a distance to catch an audience, hook, line, and sinker.

‘Inspired and Intrigued’

As they do each year, the Bates women’s varsity teams opened their arms to youngsters from Lewiston-Auburn to celebrate National Girls and Women in Sports Day, this year on Feb. 11.

In various clinics in the Gray Athletic Building, the youngsters got a chance to learn a little something about many of the 16 women’s varsity sports that Bates offers, including rowing.

Many children often learn sports like soccer or softball at a young age. But rowing? Not so much, said Casey Winter ’23 of Malvern, Pa., a biochemistry major and a captain of the rowing team. Winter and her teammates taught youngsters how to use a rowing machine, also known as an erg, short for “ergometer.” “It was great to watch as many of them became inspired and intrigued,” she said.

What’s in a Name: Pierce

Once famed for its Wednesday night parties and now a theme house, the student residence located at 24 Frye St. is named for a 20th-century Bates College trustee. But the National Park Service has another name for Pierce House altogether.

The House

The Colonial Revival house was built in 1893. It was designed by prolific Lewiston architect George M. Coombs, who designed 14 of the 37 houses in the Frye Street area as well as Hedge Hall and a number of buildings downtown, including the Kora Temple.

Its Other Name

Pierce House sits within the Main Street–Frye Street Historic District of the National Register of Historic Places, administered by the National Park Service. The official district name of the house is the Lyman G. Jordan House, named for its first owner.

The First Owner

Jordan was an 1870 Bates graduate who achieved legendary status as a Bates chemistry professor nicknamed “Foxy.” Jordan was among the Freewill Baptists who founded Ocean Park, the seaside summer Chautauqua community near Old Orchard Beach, in 1881.

Pierce and Pierce

In 1917, Jordan sold the house to Dr. Edwin F. Pierce, Bates Class of 1894, a physician in Lewiston until his death in 1945. Bates acquired the property in 1970 and named it for Carrell Kingsbury Pierce (no apparent relation), a Portland investment banker and longtime Bates trustee.

Pierce Present

Today, Pierce House is one of several theme houses, this year focusing on intercultural diversity.

Pierce House has one name at Bates and another name in the National Register of Historic Places.