Bowdoin Magazine, Vol. 93, No. 1, Fall 2021

FALL 2021 VOL. 93 NO. 1

(P) COV_HED_MREAVESXLMOD_ LIGHT_18PT_ALLCAPS

THE WOMEN BEFORE

(P)COV_Deck_Mr.EavesXLSans_Book_10.5pt

Contents FALL 2021 VOL. 93 NO. 1

“I understand that somewhere—a while back, before the bend in the road—I’ve left my worries like an apple core flung out the window.”

30 A Certain Kind of Bravery

—LUNA SOLEY ’22

Associate Professor of Government Barbara Elias focuses on a complex, thoughtful answer to any question rather than finding the “right” one.

36 The Women Before

22 The Music of What Happens

On a cross-country road trip, Luna Soley ’22 found connections— to Maine, to Bowdoin, to her mother, Jean Hoffman ’79—in unexpected places, in shared experiences, in things that haven’t changed.

Women not only had a presence and an influence at Bowdoin before coeducation began fifty years ago, they were in many ways where the thread began.

46 Q&A

Kaitee Daley ’09, vice president for social media at ESPN, talks about beginning her career in a field that was just beginning itself.

Forward 5

Grace and Hope: Hope Marden on staying active and aging gracefully.

7

Dine: The perfect roast chicken

from chef Missy Corey ’06.

8

Rookie Cards: The Bowdoin Athletic

Hall of Honor Class of 2020 gets its due.

14

By the Numbers: Jared Lynch ’24 folds an intricate thank you.

Column 20 Creating Many Ripples: Tom Putnam ’84 reflects on Leroy Gaines ’02, and the ways teachers affect, and sometimes redirect, the river of lives that passes through their classrooms.

Connect 49 Justin J. Pearson ’17 on environmental and racial justice.

54 Sarah Haggerty ’91 helps Maine to a brighter future.

58 Travis Dagenais ’08 talks communication and movement.

In Every Issue 4

Respond

48 Whispering Pines 64 Here

Behind the Cover Fiber artist Han Cao hand embroiders over elements of paper and photographic prints. For this issue’s cover art (the back of which is shown here), we asked Han to celebrate Kate Douglas Wiggin H’1904 in a historical photograph amid a Commencement procession otherwise full of men. Han has written that her art comes from “an observation of the secondary role women often posed in photographs of the early 1900s. I wanted to create a series of work that celebrates the beauty that is inside all women.

The flowers symbolize growth, youth, and hope in a world that may not always encourage it.” Han’s work can be found at hanwriting.com.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 1

After navigating complicated and constrained conclusions to their high school careers, the newly arrived Class of 2025 sits on a field outside Farley Field House, listening to speakers on August 24, the eve of their Orientation Trips around Maine.

Photo by Andrew Estey

Respond

Seeing Her THANK YOU for the excellent article

in spring/summer 2021 about Sarah Ramey ’03’s odyssey with chronic illness. (Love the photo, too, with The Odyssey over Sarah’s shoulder.) Thank you for inviting Bowdoin Magazine’s readers to learn more about the “journey of hope and resilience” through [Sarah’s] memoir… [and] for the “Manic Monologues” piece so that we might seek out Zach Burton ’14’s digital theater.

Sarah Ramey ’03

GRASPING LOVE Intrigued by the title “Grasping Hate,” I read with interest Linda Kinstler ’13’s well-written article.

If it truly reflects the manner in which academia is attempting to wrestle with the problem of hate, then the glaring omission of one word, “love,” shows that in some endeavors the logic of the heart is far more powerful than what we produce in our heads. The path to wisdom is through

Margaret Keith ’82

love, selfless love. “In Love lives the seed of Truth, / In Truth seek the root of Love: / Thus speaks thy higher Self” —Rudolf Steiner, Verses and Meditations.

William Kelly ’73 COMMUNITY THEATER My husband, Wade Kavanaugh ’01, and I own the independent movie theater The Gem in Bethel, Maine. The Gem’s

facebook.com/bowdoin

mission is to “build community frame by frame,” and we serve as an art and community center for the Bethel area.

After a very difficult year keeping our doors open through the pandemic, I was excited to see your article encouraging the movie experience!... Additionally, in collaboration with a local arts organization, we are installing what we believe is the largest public artwork in Maine—a mural

@BowdoinCollege

4 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

that encompasses all sides of our building— 9,000 square feet.

You can see the progress on Instagram at @thegemtheater.

MAGAZINE STAFF Editor Matt O’Donnell P’24 Consulting Editor Scott Schaiberger ’95 Executive Editor Alison Bennie Associate Editor Leanne Dech Designer and Art Director Melissa Wells Design Consultant 2COMMUNIQUÉ Contributors Ed Beem P’13 Jim Caton Doug Cook Cheryl Della Pietra Rebecca Goldfine Scott Hood Micki Manheimer Tom Porter On the Cover: “Evergrowth,” by fiber artist Han Cao.

Beth Weisberger CORRECTION Class News from Eric v.d. Luft ’74 in our last issue included two errors.

We apologize for the mistakes. Eric’s correct submission can be found in this issue.

@bowdoincollege

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE (ISSN: 0895-2604) is published three times a year by Bowdoin College, 4104 College Station, Brunswick, Maine, 04011. Printed by Penmor Lithographers, Lewiston, Maine. Sent free of charge to all Bowdoin alumni, parents of current and recent undergraduates, members of the senior class, faculty and staff, and members of the Association of Bowdoin Friends.

Opinions expressed in this magazine are those of the authors.

Please send address changes, ideas, or letters to the editor to the address above or by email to bowdoineditor@bowdoin.edu.

Send class news to classnews@bowdoin.edu or to the address above.

PHOTO: JULIUS SCHLOSBURG

Forward FROM BOWDOIN AND BEYOND

HOPE MARDEN MAIL CLERK, CAMPUS SERVICES

GRACE AND HOPE I take a lot of pride in my job, no matter what I do. But the best part about being at Bowdoin is the students. That’s what I’m going to miss most.

Brian and I have been married for thirty years. And we still like each other! We found that out during the pandemic. We’re always doing something together. I also found time to work in the garden and helped some neighbors out. Brian’s uncle is in his nineties, and he can’t be pruning bushes and all that anymore. My neighbor from Florida couldn’t come up, and she hired me to do her lawns. Then, of course, I got a lot of biking time. I did the Trek Across Maine, a virtual ride, and I rode over 2,000 miles on my bike last year. My workouts get me out of bed in the morning. I can’t go without them. If I do, I get very grouchy! Even when I’m tired, if I work out, I feel better mentally.

Biking is my favorite. When you’re out there, you don’t think of anything—it’s just about your surroundings and trying to get up a hill.

I’d like to age gracefully. I want to be able to play with my grandkids when I’m in my nineties.

When my grandson was little and would come over, he already knew that when he got to grandma’s, we were going to be doing push-ups!

I want my kids to be proud I am still doing something. I’m so proud of them. Just the fact that I had them so young and that they got an education that I never did. And they’re good people—kind, thoughtful, and loving.

What more could I ask?

PHOTO: BRIAN BEARD

Hope Marden has been sharing her seemingly limitless energy with the Bowdoin community for the past thirteen years. She got to know students well in her eight years in housekeeping, and for the past six years, she’s been part of the team in the campus mail center.

She’s scheduled to retire in January. For this photo shoot, Hope added 8.2 miles to her annual cycling tally: one-and-a-half miles to and from campus to the bike path along the Androscoggin, and another 2.2 miles during the shoot.

Forward Alumni Life

On View

The Genius of Black Owned Maine Jerry Edwards ’04 (who also goes by the name Genius Black) is codirector of Black Owned Maine, a directory he and a friend launched during last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests.

Jerry Edwards ’04

LAST SUMMER, in the wake of

George Floyd’s murder, Jerry Edwards ’04 took to the streets to add his voice to the protests in his home city of Portland, Maine.

But not everyone could go outside and participate in the rejection of entrenched racism and police brutality in the US. Edwards’s friend Rose Barboza, who also lives in southern Maine, was uneasy about protesting because she’d need to bring her young son with her, and she needed to be extra careful protecting him from COVID-19 because of his asthma.

Barboza approached Edwards to talk about other ways she could support the Black Lives Matter

movement. One of her ideas was to create an e-commerce site.

“I’m going to start a directory of all the Black-owned businesses in Maine,” she told Edwards. Edwards immediately knew Barboza’s idea had legs and vowed to support her.

Two sleepless days later, Barboza launched the directory with sixty businesses. News of the site spread quickly online. Reporters started calling for interviews.

More businesses were added (to date, blackownedmaine.com has more than 350 listings). As he watched the website take off, the clicks accumulate, and followers grow, Edwards marveled. “I had never witnessed anything like this in my life,” he said. “There was such a void. You had a group of Americans that were lit up collectively in a way they had never been before.” One reason Black Owned Maine has been successful is that it has provided people—of all races and backgrounds—with another outlet for protesting, another way to support their neighbors, friends, and fellow Mainers. “You had all these people in Maine who didn’t care about arguing, who didn’t want to go to a protest, but who wanted to support Black people,” Edwards said.

“We made a thing that exploded because it needed to.”

6 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

ROOM TO VIEW The beams were raised this summer on the John and Lile Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies that is due to open in spring 2023. Genevieve LeMoine, curator of the Peary MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center, and her colleagues are deep into planning for how they’ll be able to exhibit items from an expansive collection that the public hasn’t been able to view before.

“Visitors can expect to see more items on display, from old favorites, including the Hubbard Sledge, to new acquisitions such as this exuberant High Kicker, by Inuit artist Ineak Padluq. We received this work as a bequest about four years ago but have not yet exhibited it. The high kick is a traditional Inuit competition—requiring great athleticism,” says LeMoine. She feels the sculpture is symbolic of the excitement surrounding the new, much larger space to come.

In addition to new exhibit space that will accommodate more items, the building will feature dedicated classroom space—something they’ve previously lacked—that will facilitate opportunities for students and faculty to collaborate while working directly with the collections.

Ineak Padluq, High Kicker. Kimmirut (Lake Harbour), Nunavut, 2006. Serpentine and antler. Robert and MaryLou Sutter Collection.

PHOTOS: (EDWARDS) EMILY SAWCHUCK; (HIGH KICKER) GENEVIEVE LEMOINE

Dine

Perfect Roast Chicken Recipe by Missy Corey ’06 When Missy Corey ’06 ran a butcher shop in Chicago people were always asking her for her method to “perfectly” roast chicken. “It’s one of the best fall foods that you can eat with just about any seasonal veggies,” she says. Start with the highestquality three-pound chicken you can find, salt it overnight, and Missy suggests spatchcocking it. There are many videos explaining how to do that, and this recipe works just as well with a whole bird.

For the marinade: 1 head of garlic, chopped Juice of one lemon 2 tablespoons dried oregano (fresh is great if available) 2 tablespoons herbs de Provence 1 tablespoon brown sugar Pinch of black pepper 1 cup olive oil For the chicken: 1 three-pound chicken (the highest quality you can find) 2 teaspoons kosher salt 2 to 3 medium onions 1 to 2 pounds of small to medium carrots 1 to 2 pounds of potatoes 1 head of garlic 1 lemon Chicken stock or wine A smattering of fresh herbs (thyme, sage, oregano, savory, anything you have)

Rinse the chicken with cold water, pat it dry, and then salt it inside and out. Refrigerate it uncovered for at least one hour and up to overnight.

Whisk all of the marinade ingredients together in a medium bowl.

Pour the marinade over the chicken or add both the chicken and the marinade to a large Ziploc bag and marinate in the refrigerator for at least one hour, up to eight.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Roughly cut the onions, carrots, and potatoes (if they are not already small) so that they are quite chunky, big enough to not cook too quickly or turn to mush as the chicken cooks. Any root vegetables work well here if you want to swap any of these out for others that you have.

Cut the lemon and the head of garlic in half.

DID YOU KNOW? The wishbone is a forked bone fusing two clavicles located between the neck and breast of a bird. The wishbone ritual began with the ancient Etruscans, who used chickens to peck the ground where Etruscan letters had been laid to divine answers to questions about the future. When a chicken was killed, the Etruscans laid the wishbone (technically, the “furcula”) in the sun so people could touch it and use the chicken’s oracular power even after its death. As they touched the bone, they made wishes.

Place the chicken, breast-side up, on top of the vegetables, lemon, garlic, herbs, stock or wine in a roasting pan or Dutch oven large enough to fit everything. Roast the chicken for 60 minutes (35 minutes for a spatchcocked bird), or until the internal temperature registers 165 degrees.

When the chicken is done cooking, allow it to rest at least 15 minutes so that the juices can redistribute evenly. During this time you can allow the vegetables to continue cooking a bit over a low flame and make a pan sauce by adding a bit more stock or wine and a pat of butter. Carve the chicken and pour the sauce over it on a platter.

Serve with your roasted vegetables.

Missy Corey ’06, executive chef at Pennyroyal Café and Provisions in Saugatuck, Michigan, honed her craft under three James Beard award-winning chefs between Maine and her native Chicago. She was a 2012 winner on the Food Network show Chopped and was named one of Chicago’s top female chefs in 2015. Her cooking focuses on using seasonal produce and classic technique.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 7

Forward A three-sport athlete, excelled in golf, ice and baseball. Considered one of the mos hockey, members of the US Golf Association, t influential offi national championships over nearly a ciating 36 half-century.

Member of the Maine Baseball Hall of Fame Sports Hall of Fame, and Maine Golf Hall , Maine Maine Amateur Champion, 1950; 5-tim of Fame. e champion; 12-time Bath Country Club state senior champion; state parent and child champion (with son Robert); 15-time Maine rep in North & South Cham pionship at Pinehurst, NC. A dentist, Leon multiple-time winner of the Maine and was a Dental Championships, and was Natio New England nal Dental champion in 1969. rst two NCAA Propelled field hockey to Bowdoin’s fi time National Championships (2007 and 2008). Two- r of the Year, Player of the Year, 3-time NESCAC Playe3-time First ), 3-time All American (First Team twice All-NESCAC. Team All-New England, 3-time First Team s during losse Polar Bears won 74 games with only 5 lacrosse. and her career. Also lettered in ice hockey seasons (only Led field hockey team in scoring all four ng record player ever to do so); single-game scori r held records holder (5 goals, 10 points); at end of caree), goals in a for career goals (92), career points (205 season (32), and points in a season (67).

In Lindsay’s junior and senior y outscored Bowdoin’s field dedl ehan singl she seasons, -boggling 59-22 margin. mind a by s, hockey opponent

Did You Know?

Rookie Cards The College’s Athletic Hall of Honor welcomes new teammates.

Illustration by John S. Dykes In July 2020, the athletics department announced that six new inductees, representing nearly seven decades of Bowdoin athletics across nine different varsity programs, will join the eighty other honorees already enshrined in the Polar Bear pantheon. With COVID-19 limits on indoor gatherings still in place, the College will announce a later date for the Athletic Hall of Honor’s Class of 2020 induction ceremony.

Sports fans and history buffs can read more about the exploits of the Hall’s new and current members at athletics.bowdoin.edu.

8 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

Twice named an NCAA Div American in soccer and in ision III First Team Allthree times (First Team, twilacrosse. All-New England Team three times in soccer ce) and All-NESCAC First to All-New England and All-. In lacrosse, twice named was IWLA Division III GoalteNESCAC First Teams and Division III Academic All-Amnder of the Year (2005).

Bowdoin women’s lacross erican. Individual season wins (15) and min e record holder for singleute top ten all-time in career s played (1,139), and is in sav average (8.12), wins (35), es (457), goals against and minutes played (3,133) .

Com soccer and lacrosse (8,741), bining minutes played in hours representing the Pol Kendall spent more than 145 competition, or about 6 fullar Bears in intercollegiate days in a Bowdoin uniform .

As captain and player-coach, led the Pola golf team to the Maine College and New r Bear Collegiate Championships. Went on to England become one of the most successful amateur golfe America. Member of the Maine Sports rs in Hall of Fame and inaugural class of the Maine Golf Hall Maine Junior Champion; 6-time Maine of Fame.

Ama Champion (and youngest at age 17); 13-tim teur Senior Amateur Champion; 47-time club e Maine champion (a national record).

Ray captured the Country Club Championship title so man Portland that the prize now bears his name: the Ray y times—32— Lebel Trophy.

Led men’s soccer team to 40 wins (against only 19 losses and 3 ties) in a record-breaking four-year career. First Polar Bear soccer player to earn NESC Player of the Year recognition. NCAA Division III AC First Team All-American, NCAA Division III Second Team All-American, All-New England First Team and AllNESCAC First Team 3 times. Bowdoin’s Outstandin Male Athlete for 2008. All-time men’s soccer recordg holder for career goals (35); record holder for single season assists (11) and career points (88).

Not only was Nick a prolifi scorer, he was also a clutch one—ten of his caree c r goals (over 28%) were game-winners.

A vi s he to ctory ad co th the in ach to e Sw NCA the fi , led 20 the eet A D rst the in s 07), Elite Sixte ivisio 7 cha wom Id ch an Eig en n I mp en Fam aho S ool h d to t ht 6 7 str II tou ionsh ’s bas w e tat isto he con aig rne ips ke in N innin and N e Un ry (2 first N secu ht yea y 9 t in N tball of ES g p ew iver 00 CA tive rs ime ESC tea 200 the Y CAC ercen Eng sity. 4). Fo A Ch seas (200 s in 1 AC h m to 4); ear ); W tag land Mem rme am ons 1 to 0 ye isto NE (20 BCA e (2 Ba be r s pio (20 200 ars ry, SC 04 N 35 sk r o tan nsh 0 7) , AC ); CA –4 etb f Id do ip 2 to , 76 Co Dis A D 8) f all ah ut ga con ach tric iv rom Ha o S pla me sec of t t I C ision 19 ll of port yer uti he oac III 98- Fam s H at ve Yea h o Na 20 e all ho r (2 f th tion 08 ( . 83 of me S 00 e Y al C 90 % t gam ef’ 2, 2 ea oa % es s tea 00 r (20 ch fro ms 4, 2 03 m2 w 00 , 00 on 6).

1 to 20 07.

Forward Academics

Sound Bite

“Maybe you spent your time here zapping lobster hearts, or sculpting cardboard shoes, or proving that one is greater than zero. …Whatever it was, you studied something you loved, and because of that love… you worked harder, thought more carefully, and were more fully engaged with your learning.

And in doing so, you stretched and grew your abilities to greater heights.”

—DAVID ZHOU ’21, CLASS OF 1868 PRIZE WINNER, SPEAKING AT HIS COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY ON MAY 29, 2021.

10 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

Left to right: Max Muradian ’22, professor Michèle LaVigne, and Melody Khoriaty ’21 collect and filter water samples for measuring ocean levels at Land’s End Beach, Bailey Island.

A Voice for Science Paleoceanographer uses her skills for civic good.

WHEN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR of Earth and Oceanographic Science Michèle LaVigne was in graduate school, she picked up on the tacit understanding that serious scientists, in their quest to uncover empirical truths, should focus solely on their research. To contribute to politics or to educating the public signaled that you may be a bit of a dilettante.

But as global warming has progressed, and more people around the world suffer its effects, this stance has shifted. “I’ve seen our field expand the ways we’re using our science beyond traditional research and publishing in academic journals,” LaVigne said. “Going to science conferences over the last ten years, I have seen more sessions and programming supporting outreach, education, and communication.”

This year, LaVigne decided to put more effort into the civic side of science. She’s part of a relatively new program offered by her professional association, the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The yearlong training, called Voices for Science, equips researchers with the skills to advocate for science funding and for government initiatives grounded in sound research.

As a professor and a mother, LaVigne said she’s extra motivated to contribute to our civic discourse. “I have two young kids, who are three and seven, and when they grow up, I want to be able to tell them I leveraged my science, skill set, and position of privilege to have the biggest impact I could on the issue of climate change.”

PHOTO: MICHELE STAPLETON

Campus Life

Alumni Life

Compassion as Priority In a time when the stigma long associated with mental health is being peeled away and popular society turns a more understanding and compassionate eye to mental health as simply a part of overall health, more people are seeking help when they need it, including students. The mental health and wellness of students is a critical priority at the College. On average, Counseling and Wellness Services assist a quarter to a third of the student body annually. As the need for services continues to increase, so too has the College’s commitment to enhancing resources with new partnerships that grant students greater access, range, and diversity in how mental health care and wellness are addressed. Staff numbers have increased to five full-time counselors, one full-time psychiatric nurse practitioner, one assistant director of wellness programming, one postdoctoral fellow, and one clinical intern. A new partnership with Maine Medical Center includes a part-time psychiatric fellow. LifeWorks/MySSP provides around-the-clock access to crisis management and short-term counseling via text, chat, phone, and video. Therapy Assistance Online offers students self-help resources including interactive exercises and educational guidance. These and other new partner-based services are in addition to the College’s group, meditation, and wellness services that have been steadily expanded in recent years. And a crisis phone service (ProtoCall) continues to provide acute care and triage at any time for students anywhere in the world.

ILLUSTRATION: MICHAEL AUSTIN; PHOTO: COURTESY OF ALEX CORNELL DU HOUX ’06

Marine combat veteran Alex Cornell du Houx ’06 pictured on his last deployment to Afghanistan in 2018 while on a mission with British NATO forces.

Saving Afghan Allies Alex Cornell du Houx ’06 took part in an international effort to help journalists, activists, and others judged to be in danger from the Taliban.

THE FORMER US MARINE teamed up with other veterans, international

business executives, and nonprofits as part of a privately funded effort in coordination with the Department of Defense. Their mission was to evacuate thousands of endangered Afghans as the hardline Taliban regime assumed power. “It started with two phone calls,” said Cornell du Houx, now a US Navy Reserve public affairs officer and, in civilian life, head of the nonprofit Elected Officials to Protect America. “One was from a USA Today reporter I know, concerned about a colleague trapped inside Afghanistan, the other from a veteran I had served with in Afghanistan in 2018. She and I ran with a team of female athletes who used to run inside our base compound for security reasons.” She relayed the disturbing news that members of the new Taliban regime had targeted the athletes, beating one of them up, vandalizing her home, and taking their running shoes.

“The race was on to get these and other threatened Afghan allies, including journalists, filmmakers, and other activists, out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible,” said Cornell du Houx, who served with the US Marine Corps in Iraq in 2006. Drawing on his political and military connections, he was able to enlist the help of, among others, the Ukrainian government, which provided transit visas and asylum, and made space on their military transport aircraft.

Cornell du Houx’s efforts helped rescue about four hundred people, including the female runners and the USA Today reporter, and was part of a wider, nongovernmental effort that helped around five thousand endangered Afghans flee to safety in the chaotic days following the Taliban takeover. Many more did not make it, said Cornell du Houx, and efforts are continuing to help those left behind.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 11

Forward Courses

Athletics

A New Academic Avenue This fall Bowdoin began offering a minor in urban studies.

Three faculty members talk about courses they’re teaching on the subject.

MODERN ARCHITECTURE Senior Lecturer in Environmental Studies Jill Pearlman “Without buildings, there would be no cities. The course explores major buildings, building types, and architectural theories in the modern era, while also focusing on developing students’ visual acuity and understanding of the spatial language of architecture and urban form. We look at how the built environment has responded to technological, environmental, cultural, and aesthetic developments over time while exploring its role as a carrier of historical, social, and political meaning.”

RACIAL AND ETHNIC CONFLICT IN US CITIES Geoffrey Canada Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History Brian Purnell “This course studies how racial and ethnic violence changed over time in cities in the US. As part of the new college requirement Difference, Power, and Inequality, the course also studies how urban segregation and discrimination created, in the words of the US Kerner Commission Report in 1968, ‘two Americas, separate and unequal.’ Students also examine how these histories shape their own lives and what we can do in the future as a nation to improve.”

CITIES OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies Rachel Sturman “I’m excited to be able to add this course to our curriculum. It provides an introduction to urban studies, while also centering the experience of non-Western cities shaped by histories of European and American colonialism. The dynamics of life in these cities lie at the heart of today’s global transformations. Students are also really enriching the class by sharing their experiences of growing up in these cities.”

12 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

Signs of Strength COACHES WERE ABLE TO RETURN to in-person recruiting over the summer and actively engaging with prospective students nationwide.

In addition to the promotion of Lara-Jane (LJ) Que to head coach of men’s and women’s indoor and outdoor track and field, four new head coaches joined the department: Alex Lloyd (men’s basketball), Sacha Santimano (women’s basketball), Ben Raphelson (cross-country and track), and Bill Mason (men’s lacrosse).

A partnership with Mid Coast Hospital has been established to provide on-campus physical therapy services at Farley Field House for all students. In addition, the team physician will hold a clinic for injured athletes and students in Watson Arena twice weekly. And this year, for the first time, every Bowdoin athlete will receive practice participation apparel (T-shirt, shorts, sweatshirt, and sweatpants)—a form of comprehensive aid that reduces for many the financial burden associated with participation on a varsity team.

These important strides are possible in large part due to the Bowdoin community’s ongoing financial support of the athletic program.

Another important form of support? Fans! The fall sports season welcomed back in-person spectators, who have been missed for too long.

PHOTO: BRIAN WEDGE

Sustainability

BUILDING ACCOLADES Bowdoin’s Schiller Coastal Studies Center continues to garner attention for the sustainable building practices and architectural designs that informed the recent expansion.

In October, the Connecticut Green Building Council selected the project for a 2021 Institutional Merit Award during a year in which a record number of entries were submitted.

(Centerbrook Architects & Planners, the firm responsible for the design, is based in Connecticut.) And in August, the Living and Learning Center (pictured)—the central structure among the facility’s new buildings—was certified by Passive House Institute US, Inc. Passive buildings are designed to minimize energy use while ensuring consistent, comfortable temperatures and healthy air quality. This also means that they are super-insulated and airtight, with triple-paned windows and sophisticated ventilation systems.

PHOTO: FRED FIELD

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 13

Forward

170 10

50

8

Steps to pre-crease folds for the crab

2

Average number of models Jared folds each week

Hours overall it took to fold the crab

Total steps in the crab model

Weeks, the length of Jared’s 2021 Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation Coastal Studies Research Fellowship

9

Age at which Jared began origami

500 Estimated number of models Jared has made

By the Numbers Estimated number of models Jared has gifted

Pure Origami As a child, Jared Lynch ’24 taught himself origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, by “watching hundreds of YouTube videos.” It’s a rather simple origin story for a complex skill full of mathematical intricacies, and one that belies the depth of Jared’s intention with his self-taught art. “Origami is a big part of my identity,” he says. “It’s one of the reasons I came to Bowdoin. It’s my idea of the common good— I make things and give them away to people.” Jared folded this crab model as a thank you gift for Professor of Biology and Director of the Bowdoin College Schiller Coastal Studies Center David Carlon, who was Jared’s research mentor this past summer.

In his research, Jared explains, he sought to “determine if variation in heat tolerance for green crabs is linked to differences in mitochondrial DNA.” Jared sort of crabwalked his way into his summer position, in fact. “I was looking through the Bowdoin website to find things that interest me,” he said, and he found Carlon’s research.

So, Jared emailed him. Carlon not only said yes when Jared asked to study with him, but helped Jared secure a Bowdoin-funded summer fellowship to make it happen.

14 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

Individual scales on the most advanced model Jared has made, a Ryujin (type of Japanese water dragon) that took him four months to create

400

1,500 PHOTO: DENNIS GRIGGS

College Life

Campus Life

Listen and Learn A LIVELY NEW PODCAST dropped in October, meant to entertain and

educate. The College launched “Bowdoin Presents,” starting with a series of six episodes dedicated to exploring issues connected to our democracy.

Guests include alumni, faculty, and staff in conversation with journalist Lisa Bartfai on topics ranging from the climate crisis, the media, and faith to questions surrounding information polarization and more. New episodes air every other week through the end of December. The series is currently available on Google Play, Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, Simplecast, and wherever you find podcasts.

Archives

CONFLICT RESOLUTION

Teaching Math, Making History In the summer of 1959, a group of high school math teachers participated in a program of study at Bowdoin sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Teachers selected to continue the program for four years were awarded master’s degrees. During a special summer commencement ceremony on August 3, 1962, Bernice Engler (left) and Carolyn Mann (right) received the first degrees—other than honorary degrees—conferred upon women in Bowdoin’s history. Bernice Engler G’62 died in 1979. Carolyn Mann G’62, now ninety and retired from teaching high school math, lives in Brooklyn, Connecticut.

PHOTO: GEORGE J. MITCHELL DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES; ILLUSTRATION: SANDRA DIONISI

Alternative practices to address roommate conflicts and more minor student misbehaviors have been common on campus for several years. Residential Life, in particular, has used restorative justice, mediation, and other tactics to help students overcome disagreements. This fall, Bowdoin implemented a new tool for bridging such divides: The Program for Nonviolence and Conflict Resolution (PNVCR).

“There’s a desire at Bowdoin to use restorative processes more because they build community, establish community standards, and respond to harms,” said Residential Life Director Whitney Hogan, who has been instrumental in introducing restorative justice to Bowdoin. Currently, PNVCR includes more than a dozen staff, faculty, and students who have been trained to help settle disputes. The founders of the program—which include Hogan, Associate Dean of Student Affairs and Community Standards Kate O’Grady, Director of the Rachel Lord Center for Religious and Spiritual Life Eduardo Pazos, and Druckenmiller Professor of Chemistry and Environmental Studies Dharni Vasudevan— hope that PNVCR will bring change to Bowdoin on a broad scale. “We are working to integrate this into the fabric of the Bowdoin community so that it becomes the preferred method to addressing conflict,” said O’Grady. “We want it to become part of why somebody might want to be at Bowdoin.”

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 15

Forward

Game On

BELIEVE IN BELIEVE An athlete wouldn’t take to the pitch if they didn’t think they had a chance of winning, but despite home-field advantage, statistics were not in favor of the men’s soccer team when they faced off against Amherst on Saturday, September 11. The Bowdoin men’s footballers hadn’t bested Amherst in twenty-four regular season matches, going back to 2008, and the Mammoths were ranked number two in the nation as they lined up on Pickard Field. Against those odds, the Polar Bears matched the Mammoths evenly through the seventy-fourth minute, when Drake Byrd ’22 lofted a beautiful corner kick to the far side of the penalty area, where Dylan Reid ’22 headed it back toward the center of the box, and Charlie Ward ’22 rose above a crowd to head the ball into the back of the net and give the Polar Bears a 1-0 lead. Bowdoin goaltender Michael Webber ’23 made eight saves, including a hold-your-breath oneon-one after an Amherst forward slipped behind the Bowdoin defense with 1:30 to go, and preserved the upset.

16 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

Academics

Iris Davis ’78 in conversation at an Alumni Council event in 1992.

Davis, for whom one of four new endowed professorships has been named, was elected trustee in 2014 and died in 2018, before the end of her first term.

New Chairs Honor Distinguished Black Graduates

Dylan Reid ’22 celebrates the winning goal that caused a major upset of number two-ranked Amherst at Pickard Field on September 11. Reid and Drake Byrd ’22 assisted Charlie Ward ’22, who headed home the stunning shot.

Bowdoin has created four new endowed faculty professorships that honor distinguished Black graduates of the College. “Our new colleagues will engage in and catalyze interdisciplinary scholarship on issues of race, racism, and racial justice and enhance our students’ understanding of these issues as we prepare them to make change and to lead in the world,” President Clayton Rose said in announcing the professorships.

The four new chairs, endowed by anonymous gifts, will be named in memory of: Matthew D. Branche ’49, MD, overseer emeritus, the first Black student to serve as class president at Bowdoin and to be pledged by a chapter of a national fraternity with a membership policy of racial exclusion; Iris W. Davis ’78, a student leader in the early days of coeducation at Bowdoin, an outstanding athlete, trustee of the College, environmental scientist, and policy leader in Massachusetts; Rasuli Lewis ’73, a founder and leader—with Geoffrey Canada ’74, H’07 and current Bowdoin Trustee George Khaldun ’73—of the Harlem Children’s Zone, and one of the creators of the Peace March and a leader of the Peacemakers program; and Frederic Morrow ’30, H’70, the first Black person to hold an executive position in the White House and a civil rights advocate, author, and business leader.

The spendable income from an endowed professorship underwrites what Bowdoin provides to a faculty member, including compensation, research and teaching support, and sabbatical leaves. President Rose points out that increasing the number of the College’s endowed professorships was among the critical goals set forth in the From Here campaign, which launched in February 2020. “I am thrilled that we are able to honor these remarkable Bowdoin alumni in this special way,” he said, “and I look forward to recognizing, in this and other ways, the generosity, impact on Bowdoin, and accomplishments of others in our history and in our community, including those who identify as Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous.”

To read more about the newly endowed chairs and the alumni they honor, visit bowdoin.edu/news.

PHOTOS: (REID) BRIAN BEARD; (DAVIS) DEAN ABRAMSON

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 17

Forward On the Shelf

Campaign Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel ANTHONY DOERR ’95

(Scribner, 2021) In a highly anticipated follow-up to his 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr ’95 has written a soaring story that reflects our vast interconnectedness through children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope—and a book.

(From the publisher.)

Promises Kept “Chuck had an incredible way of working with people. He made us feel that anything was possible and no idea was too small. While teaching and mentoring us, he encouraged us to grow into our own—making us believe that we could accomplish anything. Dreaming big was something Chuck excelled in, especially when the end goal was development that had the potential to change people’s lives.”

This is how Charles Benjamin, the current president of the Near East Foundation (NEF), remembered his predecessor and mentor Richard Charles (Chuck) Robarts ’55 during a 2018 memorial service honoring Robarts’s life. Through his decades-long work with organizations like the Ford Foundation and the NEF, where he served as president for twenty-two years, Robarts was a leader in meaningful, life-altering development programs across the Middle East and Africa.

Robarts was born and raised in Rockland, Maine, and recently his wife, Dee, and sons, Alex and Andrew ’90, established the Richard Charles Robarts Family Scholarship Fund, which provides financial aid for students from the Rockland area. The fund is the first to qualify for the First Promise Challenge, an initiative that matches new financial aid and comprehensive aid endowments with a $100,000 gift from an anonymous donor.

Learn more about the challenge at bowdo.in/first_promise_challenge.

A Seat at the Table: The Nancy Pelosi Story Practicing Atheism: Culture, Media, and Ritual in the Contemporary Atheist Network

ELISA BOXER ’93

Illustrations by Laura Freeman (Penguin Random House, 2021)

HANNAH K. SCHEIDT ’10

Current NEF president Charles Benjamin (left) and the NEF president at the time, Chuck Robarts ’55, standing in an irrigation ditch in Southern Morocco in 1993.

(Oxford University Press, 2021)

Easy Chinese Cookbook: Restaurant Favorites Made Simple CHRIS TOY ’77

(Rockridge Press, 2020)

Electric Mountains: Climate, Power, and Justice in an Energy Transition SHAUN A. GOLDING ’01

(Rutgers University Press, 2021)

18 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE NEAR EAST FOUNDATION

Emilie Grand’Pierre ’23 swam for Haiti in the Tokyo Olympics.

Athletics

Making a Splash EMILIE GRAND’PIERRE ’23 was walking back to her residence hall after swim practice one day last March when her mother phoned from the family’s home in Atlanta, Georgia. Emilie answered, thinking it would just be a regular check-in, but her mother had big news on the other end: Emilie had a chance to compete at the Tokyo Olympics.

Grand’Pierre, whose parents are from Haiti, holds five national records for the Haitian women’s swimming team, including in the 400m freestyle (4:53.96); the 50m (34.11), 100m (1:17.04), and 200m (2:49.92) breaststroke; and the 200m individual medley (2:34.84).

“Being able to wear my flag on my cap and show others that there is more to Haiti than the terrible news headlines is one of the biggest joys of my life,” Grand’Pierre said. “I just really want to be a role model for other Haitian girls. It’s such an honor that I pinch myself every day.” The swimming gene pool is deep in the Grand’Pierre family—competing for her country is an honor that Emilie’s sister, Naomy, earned first, swimming for Haiti in the 2016 Rio Olympics.

In Tokyo in July, Grand’Pierre won her first-ever Olympic heat in the women’s breaststroke 100m race, but came up shy of qualifying for the semifinals.

Brad Burnham, head coach for the Bowdoin swimming and diving teams, describes Emilie as someone who embraces the “idea that she is much more [than her swimming], and her identity is not wrapped in athletics.

She can have a rough day and leave it, and get back to her room to take on her academics, [then] go back the next day in the pool and try again.”

Because of COVID-19, Grand’Pierre has only participated in one season of intercollegiate competition, but she’s already made a splash for Bowdoin. In her first year (2019–2020), she qualified with the team’s 200m medley relay for the NCAA Division III Championship, and she earned All-American honors.

Read an interview with Grand’Pierre at bowdoin.edu/news.

PHOTO: AL BELLO/GETTY IMAGES

On the Shelf

The Packraft Handbook: An Instructional Guide for the Curious

Luc Mehl, Illustrations by

Worlds Apart: My Personal Life Journey Through Transcultural Poverty, Privilege & Passion

SARAH K. GLASER ’11

MAI LE ’00

(Things To Luc At, 2021)

(Waterside Productions, 2021)

The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland JAMES CHARLES ROY ’67

48 Whispers: From Pine Ridge and the Northern Plains KEVIN HANCOCK ’88

(Post Hill Press, 2021)

(Pen & Sword Books, 2021)

The Turbulent Sea: Passage to a New World

Far-Faring for Falcons: An Arctic Voyage with Nicholas of Lynn

CHARLES N. LI ’63

SPENCER APOLLONIO ’55

(Regan Arts, 2021)

(E-Book Time, 2021)

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 19

Column

Creating Many Ripples Tom Putnam ’84 reflects on the ways teachers affect, and sometimes redirect, the river of lives that passes through their classrooms.

WHEN LEROY GAINES ’02, who I knew in the

1990s as a high school Upward Bound student, emailed me to let me know he was the recipient of Bowdoin’s 2021 Distinguished Educator Award, I thought of two of my mentors, Paul Hazelton ’42 and Dory Vladimiroff H’94.

Like many Bowdoin undergraduates from Maine, I was drawn to Paul’s legendary education classes and to the idea that, upon my graduation, I would return to my hometown (or a neighboring community) to teach high school. At Paul’s suggestion, the summer after my junior year and before fulfilling my student teaching requirement, I got my feet wet by serving as a tutor and counselor on campus for six weeks with Bowdoin’s Upward Bound program (the first of what would be, for me, sixteen consecutive Upward Bound summer sessions).

Upward Bound is a federally funded program that helps low-income high school students become the first in their families to attend college. Paul had a hand in securing Bowdoin’s inaugural Upward Bound grant in the mid-1960s—though the creative force behind the program was its longstanding director, Dory Vladimiroff, who was also one of the first women to serve in an administrative leadership position at Bowdoin.

A few years later, my first real job was indeed teaching high school—coincidentally, in Paul’s hometown of Saco, Maine. It did not go well.

As for many rookie teachers, classroom management was my bane, and when it came time to sign my contract for another year, I balked.

The Saturday after I informed the principal of my decision, I attended a weekend gathering of Bowdoin alumni educators that had been organized by Paul. During a break, I let him know I had just resigned. He encouraged me to reconsider and dipped into his canvas bag to give me his copy of a recently published book, Among Schoolchildren, by Tracy Kidder. Kidder had spent an entire year shadowing a fifth-grade teacher in a public school in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

The book’s charm is captured in these words: Teachers usually have no way of knowing that they have made a difference in a child’s life, even when they have made a dramatic one. But for children who are used to thinking of themselves as stupid or not worth talking to or deserving rape and beatings, a good teacher can provide an astonishing revelation.

A good teacher can give a child at least a chance to feel, ‘She thinks I’m worth something. Maybe I am.’

Good teachers put snags in the river of children passing by, and over the years, they redirect hundreds of lives. Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world and they

I looked upward at the whispering pines and recalled the encouragement that Dory and Paul provided me as a student and as an aspiring teacher. I envisioned their spirits living on through a new generation of educators like Leroy.

20 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.

The combination of Kidder’s story and Paul’s encouragement inspired me to return to the classroom for a second year. I was mildly more successful in round two, but when the opportunity came the following spring to work more closely with Dory and to serve as the assistant director of Bowdoin’s Upward Bound program, I jumped at the chance.

I was fortunate to work for Upward Bound for the next two years, assisting fifty or so students in Washington and Aroostook Counties. And when my wife decided to attend graduate school in western Massachusetts, I was lucky again to be asked to serve as the Upward Bound director at the Northfield Mount Hermon School (NMH), assisting high school students from Hartford, Springfield, and Holyoke—which is where I first met Leroy Gaines, who I recruited as a sophomore at Holyoke High to join the NMH program.

No matter what trajectory Leroy chose, he would have made his mark on the world— with or without Upward Bound. There is a gentleness to his personality that, I imagine, makes him an especially effective elementary school educator. As a teenager, he also personified what author Ron Suskind described as “a hope in the unseen . . . a hope in a better world he could not yet see that overwhelmed the cries of ‘you can’t’ or ‘you won’t’ or ‘why bother.’ More than anything else, mastering that faith, on cue, is what separated him from his peers…”

That said, it is also fair to say that had Leroy and I not crossed paths it is unlikely that he would have applied to Bowdoin. And while I recall suggesting that he consider adding my alma mater to his list of prospective colleges, I did my best, when he was accepted, to not influence his decision on where to matriculate (though the generous financial aid package that Bowdoin offered was hard to resist).

Leroy and I have kept in touch through the years as he completed his undergraduate degree, served in Teach for America, attended Columbia’s Teacher’s College, and became

Leroy Gaines ’02, Bowdoin’s 2021 Distinguished Educator of the Year, is a program director at New Leaders, a national nonprofit that trains and supports public school teachers and administrators with the goal of achieving educational equity across the US.

an award-winning elementary school principal in Oakland, California.

The week after Leroy received the Distinguished Educator Award in June, I was driving through Brunswick. Having rounded the corner past the First Parish Church and onto Bath Road, I looked to my left and smiled knowingly at Dory’s former Upward Bound office on the first floor of Ham House and then to my right, passing Paul’s second-floor office in Sills Hall.

As I drove on toward Cook’s Corner, I looked upward at the whispering pines and recalled the

PHOTO: BRIAN WEDGE ’97; ART DIRECTION: MALIA WEDGE ’98

encouragement that Dory and Paul provided me as a student and as an aspiring teacher. I envisioned their spirits living on through a new generation of educators like Leroy. While in their lifetimes they may not have fully known the good they accomplished, they also could not have imagined how the ripple effect of their work reverberates now through others summoning, as Tracy Kidder describes, “an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together.”

In the email Leroy sent this spring with news about his being honored by the College, he

expressed his appreciation to me for the role I had played in the person he has become.

But what he didn’t know was how deeply his presence and example have enriched my own life—much, as I imagine, as he will feel in the future when the children he has taught and mentored reach out to him to share news of their accomplishments.

Tom Putnam ’84 is director of the Concord Museum and the former director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 21

When Luna Soley ’22 embarked last winter on a cross-country road trip, she found connections to Maine and to Bowdoin—the place that had brought her mother to Maine so many years earlier—in unexpected places, in shared experiences, in things that haven’t changed.

BY LUNA SOLEY ’22

ILLUSTRATIONS BY LIZZIE GILL

T

The blinkers stopped working in Kansas. We’d forgotten we needed them. Strawberry-blond stubble of cornfields in the snow and the road so straight it looks like a diagram in perspective drawing. The sky is a washed-out old sheet tucked in too tightly at the corners. We’re in Kansas, and we’re talking about heaven.

24 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

Perrin(Milliken ’22), in the driver’s seat, goes first. There’s something freeing about talking without having to look at each other, but her answer surprises me so much I turn my head.

“Walking around an airport before the flight takes off.” She glances at me and smiles, “You?” The question “what’s your idea of heaven?” is from a deck of getting-to-know-you cards we brought from her house in Vermont, tucked into a canvas bag between homemade granola and a box of cassettes her dad made for her mom in college. (“If you hear my voice,” he warns us, “turn it off.”) Bringing the cards is somewhat ironic because we already know each other well. Over the past year, cross-country skiing at Pineland and early morning breakfasts in Reed House have morphed into letters and FaceTime calls, then late-night resolutions and stifled laughter from the room we shared in a house of friends taking classes online. As our worlds shift, our friendship calibrates, keeps up. And now we’re driving to Salt Lake City in a borrowed car, in winter, in the middle of a pandemic.

I’m not ready to answer the question yet.

“Why an airport?”

Perrin thinks about it. “Because I still have all the excitement of going on a trip, but I haven’t gotten there yet. My expectations haven’t met reality.”

“I think mine would be waking up early with friends around and everyone else is still asleep.”

We’re quiet for a few minutes.

“But this is pretty good too.”

When my mother, Jean Hoffman ’79, hitchhiked cross-country in the summer of 1975, the year she matriculated at Bowdoin, things were different. Fleece hadn’t been invented.

Composition notebooks cost only fifty-nine cents, as I read off the toast-colored cover of her journal from the trip. Well-intentioned parents

might not have let their teenage daughters hitchhike, but if those daughters bought a bus pass and swore to stick to the bus route, well, they had no way of knowing.

My mom and her friend Leslie went because they wanted to see the West, mostly Colorado.

They didn’t bring a tent. They did bring refillable peanut butter and jelly squeeze tubes, my grandfather’s yellow vinyl rain slickers, and one book apiece. They also brought Leslie’s fifteen-year-old sister, Eve, which was probably a mistake.

From the trip, not much remains. As Leslie, who is still wavy-haired and blunt, tells me over Zoom, she can’t really remember where she went with my mom and where she went with another friend shortly after.

“We didn’t do any deep thinking about it,” she says. “We just sort of went for it.”

There is my mother’s journal, which stops abruptly in Lake Tahoe after an all-night drive through the Tetons. There is a silver Indian bracelet Leslie bought for her in the Mesa Verde Co. outlet, and which I’ve never seen because she keeps it in her safe deposit box, even though it cost practically nothing. And there are these two women, who remain friends after nearly fifty years.

As I learn from poring over the journal when I get back (reading it in one sitting feels uncannily like an all-day drive), Perrin’s and my trip differed from my mom’s and Leslie’s in a number of ways. Most notably, we had a plan.

Unusually, it included a long list of things we would not do, such as: 1. Buy groceries 2. Sleep inside 3. Go inside except for an emergency or to use the bathroom On the way out to Utah, we would sleep in the back of our friend’s Jeep in the driveways of Bowdoin classmates. Once we picked up Perrin’s car in Salt Lake City, we would camp around the Southwest for a week, dropping her off, COVID-free, at a remote field studies program in Arizona. I would then have four days to make it home to Maine before the start of classes. We were bringing, among other things, ten gallons of water, an enormous Tupperware container of lasagna, a stack of child-sized N-95 masks, and a violet wig.

THURS, 7/10, 1975

Left DC amid hail and sad parents. I feel awake but cold, no real sense of detachment, sadness or excitement.

Waiting in bus stations dulls most everything.

On Monday, January 25, 2021, in an upscale Ohio suburb, Perrin and I are awakened at 6:00 by the father of a classmate who finds our car in the driveway en route to the morning paper and considers calling the police. His daughter, whom we know, is away and neglected to tell him we were coming. I open my eyes blearily to a pair of sweatpant-clad legs framed by the rear doorway and the sound of Perrin apologizing profusely over the roof of the car.

We spit toothpaste into the privet hedges before I back the car out and accelerate toward the highway. The sky is crushed gray velvet; it starts to rain.

TUES, 7/22, 1975

We’ve just been stopped by a burly cop who “didn’t agree with the law” (allowing hitching in Colorado) and asked to see our I.D. and “if our parents knew where we were.” I wonder if anyone says no?

WED, 1/27, 2021

Lander, Wyoming, is so cold our breath fogs on the windows and freezes into a pattern like it does on old oak leaves in the woods at home.

The snow is sparkly and dissolves when I touch it—“hoarfrost,” our friend’s dad corrects. There are horses in the field beyond the house. We eat homemade apple bread off the hood of the car and blow into our hands.

THURS, 1/28, 2021

In Salt Lake, we stop during a blizzard and go Nordic skiing with our friend, the owner of the Jeep, which we’ve by now christened Silvia.

The ski area is deserted, and all the rocks are wearing tall soft hats of snow. We slide off one and land chest deep, snow powdering our noses, laughing too hard to get up. I understand that somewhere—a while back, before the bend in the road—I’ve left my worries like an apple core flung out the window. When was it? While listening to Dolly Parton tapes through the crackly speakers in the rain? Crossing time zones in the night and cheering when the odometer

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 25

ticked past 205,000 miles? When did we stop leaving, and then stop getting somewhere, and start going?

SUN, 7/27, 1975

We’ve set up a makeshift tent with the heavy plastic given us by the couple at Mesa Verde campground. […] This is a beautiful, isolated spot about 9,000’ up in rugged, snow + rock capped mountains. […]

Les, Eve + I are sitting around a little fire, each reading or writing within our tiny ring of pines. To the right is a small, bright green meadow, to our left high, rocky peaks, and pine and aspen forests.

I feel warm, content; happy to be here and with Leslie and Eve. TUES, 7/29, 1975

I’ve gotten accustomed to roughing it. The dirt no longer bothers me. […] I think of bed as a warm sleeping bag rather than sometimes wishing for a clean bed.

MON, 2/1, 2021

Above: Luna’s mother, Jean Hoffman ’79, in Colorado on her 1975 road trip.

Opposite page: Luna Soley ’22 in White Sands, New Mexico, February 2021.

Opening spread, top right: Perrin Milliken ’22.

Photographs courtesy of Luna Soley ’22.

26 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

The New Mexican mountains are creamy brown and secret, scooped out. Like taking a halfeaten pint of coffee ice cream from the freezer in the dark. It’s the first place I’ve been where I think I could live without the ocean. The sun sets blue in the wide, flat plains of grass and on the slopes of the mountains, and we are quiet for hours.

We spend an entire day at White Sands National Park and stray off the path marked by red posts driven into the dunes. Perrin wants to run, and I’d rather walk, so we split up. It’s a bad idea. We’re both out of water, and I didn’t bring my phone. I walk barefoot up and down over the crests of the dunes. I can start to feel my scalp burn under the part in my hair. To distract myself, I think about a book I’d read that winter, Arabian Sands. The author, a British explorer, spent years living with nomadic tribes in the empty quarter of the Arabian desert between Saudi Arabia and Oman. The men carried little. Coffee, sugar, dates, flour, rice, lard, and guns. A sheepskin or a scrap of carpet to sleep on. They walked barefoot; some slept directly on the sand without a blanket in the freezing nights. Their sleeping patterns were entirely different. Cold in the night, they would

wake every few hours to sit and talk, telling the same stories over and over. Conversation was nourishment and warmth.

I think about driving with Perrin, about talking all day in the car. About how I—who so often feel unmoored, who am still a little afraid of driving alone at night—have seen out the window along the shifting roadside always a fixed point on the horizon. Will that sense vanish again, when the trip ends and none of my destinations are as clear as the town we can reach before dark? Have I escaped something out here, or caught up to something instead?

My own speeding nature, the quick-drawn map of doubts and desires, the places I’ve doubled back. And the uncertainty always there like a ghost limb, at twenty, the uncertainty that I’m doing the right thing.

For the first time, I think about my mother.

Remember her mentioning the road trip she took with her friend. What did she think about, staring out the window? Did she wonder about Bowdoin, about the future? Suddenly it feels very important that I find Perrin. We should never have split up. I start to jog. The sand, which gave way beneath my feet while walking, hardens on impact, and I move more easily.

Just as I’m starting to really worry, I see the car from the top of my dune, and pound my heels in and somersault down the face, whooping, sand dusting my knuckles and forearms like powdered sugar. Moments later, miraculously, Perrin appears at the edge of the parking lot.

For the first time, I think about my mother.

Remember her mentioning the road trip she took with her friend. What did she think about, staring out the window? Did she wonder about Bowdoin, about the future?

THURS, 7/24, 1975

The dunes are incredible. Sandwiched against the high, rugged Sangre de Cristo mountains and another range, on the edge of a broad, flat desert, they are a chunk of Arabia surrounded by Colorado mountains.

The sunset was beautiful over the dunes. First an orange blob, then the entire area glowed bright red.

The desert was shrouded in pink mists. As the sun sank behind the dunes, straight yellow-white rays pointed out from where the sun had been.

We climbed the dunes today and I was freshly amazed at their size, location, steepness and mere existence. Apparently they shifted considerably last night, as the wind was fierce and cold through narrow mountain passes.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 27

We intended to climb the highest dune, but went up a closer huge one instead. The ascents were terrible. The steepness, wind, heat and ever shifting sand made a modified pigeon stance necessary. Going down was great, I ran, fell, and ran again, flopping down at the bottom.

TUES, 7/29, 1975

I still think largely in terms of the future and grand designs. […] I have great difficulty in living for the moment and experience.

WED, 2/3, 2021

In Arizona, we whiz past signs for the Grand Canyon without a second thought. The Piña Colada song comes on the radio. Perrin cranks it up.

“Stop,” I yell. “This song is so dumb!”

“I want to get married to this song!” She’s dancing; my hands are over my ears.

“Why?!” She turns it down.

“Have you ever listened to the lyrics?”

I hadn’t.

I was tired of my lady We’d been together too long Like a worn out recording Of a favorite song So while she lay there sleepin’ I read the paper in bed And in the personal columns There was this letter I read If you like piña coladas And gettin’ caught in the rain If you’re not into yoga If you have half a brain If you like makin’ love at midnight In the dunes on the cape Then I’m the love that you’ve looked for Write to me and escape.

“It’s about appreciating what you have,” she explains. “Anyway, I’ve always loved that song.”

“Perrin?” I ask.

“Yeah?”

“Do you think this is a bit like walking around the airport before the flight takes off?

The road trip?”

We think about that.

28 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

I had thought that all those trips to the gas station might fill something in me, a reservoir of new experiences. Instead, it was all the time together in the car with Perrin that had done it. Where we were going—that didn’t really matter at all.

Being together made the view out the window enough.

THURS, 2/4, 2021

The first night after dropping Perrin off, I drive as far as I can into Santa Fe National Forest and pull into a trailhead parking lot. I’m less nervous about sleeping in the car alone than I am about meeting the editor of a magazine in Santa Fe the next morning—mostly what I will do about my hair. I’m so exhausted I fall asleep hemmed in by luggage in the back of the car, barely bothering to make space for my sleeping pad.

Headlights wake me, then the sound of gravel crunching under another car’s wheels.

It’s far too late for this to be an innocent hiking trip. I don’t move, suddenly grateful I never cleaned out the back of the car last night.

Maybe they won’t see me at all. Voices. I can’t tell if they’re male or female. Then two sets of footsteps, moving away. I ease open the door and step out onto the snow in my socks without turning on a light. I tiptoe over to the car.

There is a box of strawberry seltzers in the back seat, fleeces, a flannel shirt. I walk around to look at the license plate. It’s from Maine.

I have breakfast with them in the morning.

They’re making oatmeal, too. Two women my age. One is from Vermont, near Perrin’s hometown, the other from Maine. They’ve just dropped a friend off at a semester program in Arizona, near the border.

SUN, 2/7, 2021

On the drive back to Portland from DC, it snows the whole way. Like the road doesn’t want me to leave. In Connecticut, I pull off the highway and sleep in a Lowe’s parking lot until the roads are cleared. I’m hungry and tired, already too late to make the last ferry home. I see a lit-up McDonald’s sign further down the strip and

burst out laughing. Of course, there is only one fitting way to end my great American road trip, alone and driving through a blizzard. I pull into the drive-in and order number one on the menu, a Big Mac meal.

Hands slick with ketchup, driving one-handed up I-95 in the dark and onslaught of snow, something settles in me. Somehow, instinctively, I’d known that driving more than 7,000 miles was exactly what I needed to feel ready to come home. To face another semester online, and then my final year of college, not always wanting to be somewhere I wasn’t. I had thought that all those trips to the gas station might fill something in me, a reservoir of new experiences.

Instead, it was all the time together in the car with Perrin that had done it. Where we were going—that didn’t really matter at all. Being together made the view out the window enough.

That song comes on the radio again. This time, I turn it up.

So I waited with high hopes And she walked in the place I knew her smile in an instant I knew the curve of her face It was my own lovely lady And she said “Oh, it’s you” Then we laughed for a moment And I said “I never knew That you like piña coladas And gettin’ caught in the rain And the feel of the ocean And the taste of champagne” I remember a story a professor told me in an English class once, a passage she paraphrased from an Irish folktale. In it, the legendary

warrior Finn MacCumhaill is talking with his men—one night around the fire, we imagined—about music. They wonder what the sound of the most beautiful music is. Is it this instrument, or that one? It gets later, their answers more abstract. Is it the sound of the wind in the trees, or the waves on the shore?

No, says Finn, it’s the music of what happens.

That is the most beautiful music of all.

The story of my mother’s trip, and of mine, is a tune that sticks long after I’ve lost the words. Raindrops racing each other down the sides of the tent, the things you talk about when you talk to keep yourself awake. It’s the harmonies I remember. Connection, and shared experience. Those were the sunsets that pooled in potholes on the road like molten gold, and the silver bracelet.

Looking through my mom’s journal from the trip after I get back, I find loose papers tucked in between the pages. A poem Leslie wrote her, a postcard from a friend— and an entry written a year later from a weekend spent alone at the old family home in Rhode Island.

Friday, May 28, 1976, it reads: I miss Bowdoin.

I miss Karen, John, Haste, Amy, Tony, Toni, Maevis, Donald, Mac, Steve, Migs, Jim, Donald, Mark, Allison, Boi Boi, the Betas, the Union, Taster’s Choice with 3 doinks, rain, the chapel, anti-WASPS, the 5th floor, Coleman first floor right, the door—all (or lots) of it.

I miss Bowdoin.

Luna Soley ’22 is from Peaks Island, Maine. She is an English major, a sea kayaker and a sailor, and a contributor to Outside magazine. For her next road trip, she wants to take the Trans-Siberian Railway.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 29

A CERTAIN KIND OF

BRAVERY In her research and in her teaching, Associate Professor of Government Barbara Elias focuses on a complex, thoughtful answer to any question rather than finding the “right” one.

BY KATY KELLEHER PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRED FIELD

POWER HUNGRY. Rise to power. Power structure.

Balance of power. These are expressions that are widely used, but according to Barbara Elias, power is a poorly understood concept in the world of politics. “Believe it or not, even though power is central to politics, we don’t have a straightforward definition for what power is,” she says. Especially in the US, she argues, where we tend to use “power” as a shorthand for both resources and influence. “But resources don’t always lead to influence. That’s what brings me to the field of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies: thinking through the fundamental ideas of power and politics, and where influence comes from on and off the battlefield.”

Elias has built her career asking, and attempting to answer, some of the hardest and most pertinent questions of our time. She came to her field of study—Elias is an expert in counterinsurgency warfare—after witnessing the September 11

attacks while she was still a college student at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

“I was a US history major, not a political science major,” she clarifies. She had hoped to work for the intelligence community or the US State Department, and she thought it would be beneficial to understand the mistakes made in twentieth-century conflicts. When she began her honors thesis, she was focused on researching the US war in Vietnam. To her, this was “so obviously a case where US strategy was terribly wrong.” Although there were brilliant minds in charge of dictating policy and directing troops in Vietnam, America still failed, thanks to a series of decisions that Elias calls “ineffective and irresponsible.” She says, “I wanted to understand, from start to finish, how this would happen. Then, Osama [Bin Laden] attacked the United States and my thesis became lessons from Vietnam for the war that was coming.”

At the time, her classmates thought it was crazy what Elias was doing. “A lot of people in 2001 thought, ‘Why are you forcing Afghanistan into the lens of Vietnam?’ But it was unfortunately prescient,” she says now. This feels like an understatement given current events, but it’s also typical of Elias. She’s a careful speaker and writer, someone who wades into deep water slowly but sure-footedly. She knows that even revealing her field of study can lead to emotional responses in conversation. After all, many people in America and abroad have had their lives altered by war and its ripple effects. “I tell my students on their first day of class that it will be contentious,” she says. “It should be contentious if we are building the kind of community that we want here at Bowdoin, where there is open space for debate, where there isn’t a fear of saying the wrong thing, where intellectual curiosity and nerve are valued.” She would rather that students

32 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

become emotionally invested, would rather they speak up and venture opinions that differ from the crowd, would rather they challenge one another and her too than see the opposite.

A classroom full of nodding heads wouldn’t serve anyone in the long run. Not considering every angle of an issue, even the improbable and unpopular stances—that’s just another way mistakes have been made in the past.

While Elias chose not to pursue a career in politics herself, she’s spent years studying how people at various levels of government come to execute a course of action. She has been teaching at Bowdoin since 2013, and received tenure this year, though a job in academia wasn’t always her dream. After graduating from college in 2002, she went to work at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, where she received “an invaluable education” in how to get declassified documents, the strengths

and weaknesses of national security records, and how best to utilize both for research. She met with congressional figures like Republican senator from Texas John Cornyn and former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. In 2006, Elias took over as the director of the Afghanistan/Pakistan/Taliban Documentation Project at the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. Ultimately, she left to attend graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania because, she explains, “I was becoming a regular source of information for several journalists writing about Afghanistan but did not feel I knew enough to be in that position. I needed a deeper knowledge set, so I decided to get a PhD in politics.” It was at UPenn that Elias discovered her aptitude for teaching and her love of university life. She also realized that she didn’t need to be a policy maker to effect change.

Research had a role to play, too.

“Who am I, or who is anybody, to comment on these really complicated things that are life and death when they make their way into policy? But in my own tiny way, if I could nudge things one way or the other, what a tremendous opportunity that would be.”

While human stories have shaped how she understands warfare and how American actions affect conflict abroad, Elias prefers to glean these stories not from people directly, but through official reports, summaries, budgets, and memos. For the past two decades, Elias has been attempting to understand the complexities of the Taliban insurgency and the US government’s failure to contain it. She uses US government documents that have either been declassified or leaked (including the now-famous Donald Rumsfeld “snowflake” memos) to study the decisions that ultimately led to the Taliban’s taking of Kabul and declaration of victory in August 2021.

While her work has put her across the table from war veterans and US, Afghan, Iraqi, Syrian, Pakistani, Indian, and Iranian policy makers, and while she describes current events as “heartbreaking,” she does try to stay impartial—even apolitical. She wants understanding first; influence can come later. “When you’re working with people in politics, they try to pull you to see their side. I listen intently and am grateful to have the chance to hear them out—they always know things I don’t,” Elias says, “while also relishing the space offered to me as an academic to question their claims from multiple angles and to equally consider competing perspectives.

“I also deeply appreciate working with professionals in foreign policy who serve all administrations, who serve the American public no matter who is in the White House,” Elias continues.

“The best information I’ve found is often in intelligence and diplomatic documents that were created by those professionals.” This, she says, has always helped her “to stay a bit above the fray” of current Washington power struggles.

“Relying on primary source documents helps me reach for a more objective perspective. They are not only date-stamped, but time-stamped,” she says. Documents are similar to statistics— they are most useful when examined in bulk.

Unlike human memory, which is colored by feelings about the outcome of an event, a document provides a snapshot of the moment.

It can tell you who was there at a meeting, what was recorded in the moment, and even who was silent at the table.

Those years spent in the archives helped Elias to craft her award-winning book, Why Allies Rebel: Defiant Local Partners in Counterinsurgency Wars.

Using thousands of documents as her source material, Why Allies Rebel analyzes post–World War II conflicts in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Lebanon, Cambodia, and Angola—examining how large-scale counterinsurgency interventions can answer high-stakes, complex questions about history and human behavior. When it seems like it would be in their best interest to cooperate, why do some small allies defect? Why do alliances fail? What can be done to better anticipate these problems before they arise? “Given the current accumulation of unresolved subnational wars, this volume

deserves careful consideration by policy makers and scholars,” wrote Eli Berman, professor of economics at the University of California–San Diego in his review of Why Allies Rebel. It’s Elias’s hope that her writing on history might aid policy makers in arriving at more considered choices in the future. After all, there was a window of time in the US war where there could have been a more positive outcome for both American interests and Afghan civilians.

The Taliban was unpopular and oppressive; the US could have taken different approaches and potentially secured different outcomes. “I feel humbled to have a position and time that lets me think through really important issues in world politics. That is a privilege,” Elias says.

“Who am I, or who is anybody, to comment on these really complicated things that are life and death when they make their way into policy?

But in my own tiny way, if I could nudge things one way or the other, what a tremendous opportunity that would be.”

Elias brings this same combination of humility and ambition to her work in the classroom, where she asks her students to take part in discussions and simulations that challenge their preconceived notions about American history as well as their own personal sense of ethics.

One of the more basic tools in her arsenal is the “prisoner’s dilemma,” which she’s been using since her days at the University of Pennsylvania.

A well-known example in the field of game theory, this situation involves two prisoners, both of whom have been imprisoned for their role in a crime. Prosecutors have given them both the same incentive to betray each other. If they work with the prosecution (i.e., “defect”) they will go free while the other prisoner is condemned to three years in jail. If both prisoners defect, they will each receive two years. But if both prisoners refuse (i.e., they “cooperate” with each other by remaining silent), they will have to serve just one year. Under this scenario, it would make rational sense for players to pick betrayal over loyalty. “I use this as a way of demonstrating why cooperation can be hard to achieve,” she says.

Yet, at Bowdoin, Elias admits she sometimes has difficulty getting anyone to snitch. “At UPenn, I had no problem, but I think Bowdoin students tend to be really community-minded,” she says.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 33

“For someone who studies coercion, this is an amazingly encouraging testament to Bowdoin, the world, and the future.”

Of course, as the semester wears on, the simulations get more complicated, and the discussions become more fraught. Pretending to be mob members singing to the cops can feel like acting in an old Hollywood film, but taking on the role of the Taliban is a heavier task. In the early months of 2020, John Seider ’22 remembers going into his counterinsurgency class and being assigned to a group that had to represent the best interests of the Taliban. Another group was assigned to think about how the United States could best achieve their goals, and a third group was tasked to represent Afghan civilians caught in between the two. Through the course of the exercise, Seider’s group began to realize that, although the Taliban group had fewer resources, they also had “almost no rules” about how they had to behave. “Whereas the US group had to juggle domestic political popularity and international combat norms,” he explains, the Taliban could “leverage” their non-state status to gain the upper hand. He spent hours with his group, thinking about how to gain strategic and tactical advantages. “It is with these creative, engaging activities that Professor Elias makes the class challenge its initial assumptions and think critically about these complex scenarios,” he says.

In the months since, Seider has had the opportunity to reflect on the course and his brief stint role-playing as the Taliban. “One of the big lessons I learned from Professor Elias was that the turnover in US political regimes, because of the time frame on our election cycles, complicates lengthy counterinsurgency missions,” he says. “Following the withdrawal from Afghanistan is a good example of how complex these missions can be when they span multiple administrations with different understandings of the conflict.” Like his professor, Seider focuses not on condemning one administration or praising the other, but recognizing how long-term wars can be lost, inch by inch, by the wealthier, more “powerful” nation.

This fall, Elias is teaching a first-year seminar called Weapons of the Weak, a class that changed senior Ailish O’Brien’s course of study when she took it. “I was somewhat interested in the topic

34 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

“... I am poking them to think critically for themselves, not trying to get them to think what I think. What’s important is asking these questions together.” but had no intention of being a government and legal studies major. I came into Bowdoin wanting to do premed,” she says. “But the seminar was fascinating, and I loved going to the class.” Not only did Elias’s engaging teaching style help O’Brien overcome her “impostor syndrome,” it also inspired her to switch fields of study. This fall, she (and Seider) are taking Islam and Politics with Elias. Over the course of her studies, O’Brien has gained personal confidence in her writing, intellect, and arguments, as well as a greater ability to “form nuanced opinions.” She came to Bowdoin worried about being incorrect, but through her classwork, she discovered that being wrong wasn’t the worst thing you could be. “The way Professor Elias created a space where I felt okay speaking up—and being corrected when I was wrong or misinformed—was incredibly helpful to my growth as a student and a speaker,” she says. “I knew it was okay to make a mistake in her class and that I would receive better information.” Now, she’s focused on having complex, thoughtful answers to questions rather than finding the “right” one. “I think it’s a better way to solve problems,” she says.

This might be the only thing Elias actively wants to hear from her students. She says you should “always be suspicious” of a simple answer in international politics: “You don’t have to know a whole lot about the specific topic, but you should know that anything very simplified is almost certainly misleading.” She works hard to create a space where students can share their thoughts on a subject without fear of “cancellation” or academic reprisal, where students of all backgrounds are welcome—because, when you’re dealing with life-or-death scenarios,

people need to hear every voice. Even the unpopular ones. Perhaps especially the unpopular ones. “I often voice a variety of argumentative opinions in the classroom in order to push students to do the same, assuring them that I often say things in our work that I do not personally believe, but I am poking them to think critically for themselves, not trying to get them to think what I think,” she says. “What’s important is asking these questions together.” Every now and again she’s become frustrated with students—not because of what they’re saying, but because of what they’re not saying. “Once, in my counterinsurgency class, I slapped the table and said, ‘The men and women on the ground don’t have the option not to come up with an answer. You can’t hide in the ivory tower. People are dying in these wars; we owe it to them to do the work understanding why.’” She doesn’t want students to opt out of caring, even after they’ve left the classroom, because that’s how forever wars are forgotten and pushed to the back of a nation’s consciousness. “All Americans have to take the application of violence in US foreign policy seriously,” she says.

This fall, things will be a bit different in Weapons of the Weak. Elias plans to focus on her specialty: the US war in Afghanistan. “Instead of holding it in the back of my head while teaching about Syria and Iraq, I’m going to be able to teach about Afghanistan as a successful insurgency, unfortunately,” she says. She’s looking forward to this shift, because it will allow her to engage with a group of young people on a subject that feels both long-ago and incredibly recent. For much of their childhood, Elias points out, the war was in the back of the American

Ailish O’Brien ’22 (left) says that studying with Professor Elias has given her a new personal confidence and a greater ability to “form nuanced opinions.”

consciousness. “I think they come in highly skeptical of elder statesmen and their choices, perhaps a similar place that I was in when I started studying Vietnam,” she says. She hopes her classroom will be a space where they can process some of these “really difficult, heartbreaking moments in international politics, where they can think through some of the kinds of questions that should have been asked before, that should always be asked.” Although she knows there’s a “narrative about the fragility of this generation,” she has yet to witness it. Instead, she sees a group of young people who are ready to make their own decisions, adhere to their own system of values.

Her role is to further complicate matters. To ask them to think like their parents’ generation, their parents’ parents’ generation, like insurgents, like soldiers, like civilians and college students in other countries, like politicians, like terrorists.

In this way, the classroom is a safe space, one where students can try out new ideas, embody different perspectives, and work to challenge their own beliefs. “I think of people like George Ball, Undersecretary of State in Vietnam who issued warning after warning for US policy in Vietnam against prevailing opinions of escalation, and Representative Barbara Lee from California, a Democrat who was the one vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that set off the sweeping war on terrorism in response to 9/11,” she says. “In explaining her single dissenting ‘no’ vote, Representative Lee quoted a sermon, ‘As we act, let us not be the evil that we deplore.’ She saw both sides, even in her grief as an American days after 9/11, fearing terrorism, but also fearing the impending US wars, and she voiced something very unpopular and very smart.” It’s a certain kind of bravery, one that can be practiced and sharpened. She wants her students to learn how to go against consensus, because those are the voices that can change the course of history. “I always tell students about the one person in the room, the individual who asked the cutting-edge question.

What does it take to do that?”

Katy Kelleher is a freelance writer and editor living in Buxton, Maine. She’s currently working on a book, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, due out in 2023 from Simon and Schuster.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 35

As we mark fifty years of coeducation at Bowdoin, it is easy to think of a stark line between the days of women at the College and the days before, when there were none. But of course there were women at and around Bowdoin. They not only had a presence and an influence—they were in many ways where the thread began.

THE WOMEN BEFORE

BY SURYA MILNER ’19

A

Opening spread: In 1904, Kate Douglas Wiggin received the second honorary degree granted by the College to a woman (the first was Sarah Orne Jewett in 1900).

Wiggin led the kindergarten education movement in the US, establishing in San Francisco the first free kindergarten on the West Coast. She was also an author of many books, the most famous of which is Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, published in 1910. Pictured is the 1904 Commencement procession, including honorary degree recipients President Hyde, Honorary 1886; Trustee Samuel Valentine Cole, Class of 1874, Honorary 1898, president of Wheaton College; Trustee and former President Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Class of 1852, Honorary 1869; Trustee Oliver Otis Howard, Class of 1850, Honorary 1888; Edward Little Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Wilmot Brookings Mitchell, Class of 1890; and Trustee Thomas Hamlin Hubbard, Class of 1857, Honorary 1894. Wiggin is behind Hubbard in the white dress.

Opposite page: The 1877 Summer School of Science cohort, in front of Adams Hall, included several female students who joined members of the Bowdoin Class of 1877 for the program.

38 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

AS TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD German professor Helen Cafferty walked across the Quad, her suede flats left colorful imprints in the wet February snow. She didn’t think much about it at the time: she had just flown in from Detroit and was wrapping up a series of interviews for a faculty position at the College. But months later, after she’d begun teaching classes in the basement of Memorial Hall, she realized some symbolism in those hyper-visible footprints.

She was a woman at Bowdoin, the first female professor hired to teach there, and, as she remembers, “Bowdoin was a gentlemanly place.”

Bowdoin had only recently opened its doors to women as students at the beginning of that academic year. In that first year, women comprised just 14 percent of the student body.

Cafferty was one of three women faculty hired in 1972. Despite the striking image of her footprints, and the symbol she took them to be at the time, she knew she was far from the first woman to shape the College’s landscape.

“There had always been an important female presence at Bowdoin,” she remembers, referring to the wives of the male faculty, who until that point represented the largest group of women on campus. “These women were highly educated in their own right.”

In the two centuries prior, when Bowdoin was a growing college on a gentle, sloping hill, women orbited the College in many ways. They were writers, mothers, botanists, academics, secretaries, wives. They created spheres—big and small, physical and felt—of art, literature, and community.

For the Bowdoin student of today, the story of the College takes shape through a specific mélange of personal and institutional mythology. Each newly formed class arrives on campus with ideas, both vague and distinct, about the people who came before them. Scrawling one’s signature in the leather-bound matriculation book in the president’s office connects each incoming student with Bowdoin’s lineage. But the story of Bowdoin is shaped by many more names than are often given credit. What follows is a sketch of some of those people. In the classroom, in the community, at events both formal and informal, women made deep inroads at the College, paving a path to coeducation.

One hundred years before Cafferty arrived on campus, Bowdoin had just welcomed its sixth president, a renowned alumnus and Civil War hero with a horseshoe mustache who believed that women belonged at Bowdoin. At his inaugural address in 1871, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, of the Class of 1852, lamented an “old Bowdoin,” a place where women were “banished and hence degraded, so that even to admit her to a place in the higher education is thought to degrade a college.” In the next iteration of Bowdoin, he said, “women too should have a part in this high calling [education] because in this sphere of things her ‘rights,’ her capabilities, her offices, her destiny are equal to those of man. She is the Heaven-appointed teacher of man, his guide, his better soul.”

Save for those who, from Chamberlain’s time on, were permitted to audit classes, and despite Chamberlain’s inaugural rhetoric, women enjoyed few forays into Bowdoin’s educational spheres for the century that would follow. It wasn’t that coeducation was an uncharted phenomenon at the time: Bates College opened to women at its founding in the 1850s, and Cornell University admitted its first female students around the time of Chamberlain’s speech in the 1870s. And at Bowdoin, women had, in fact, woven themselves into the fabric of the College for the preceding century: wealthy benefactors, like Sarah Bowdoin and Harriet and Sophia Walker, had shaped the campus from afar, while community members like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Sarah Orne Jewett forged a vibrant literary community.

Five years after Chamberlain’s address, eleven women climbed the stairs to the Cleaveland Cabinet on the top floor of Mass Hall to fill their notebooks with the latest teachings in mineralogy, chemistry, and zoology. They were students at the Summer School of Science, Bowdoin’s program to give young, local Mainers some practice dissecting animals and handling chemicals. Comprising a little less than half of the institute’s enrollees, the women took trips to nearby quarries and coastlines to collect samples for their experiments back on campus.

Around this time, leading up to the turn of the twentieth century, women’s colleges like

Bryn Mawr, Smith, and Wellesley joined earlier institutions like Vassar and Mt. Holyoke to create something of a hub of colleges for women in the Northeast. At Bowdoin, the isolation of the Maine coast encouraged a “cloister spirit,” as Chamberlain called it, a place where boys could drop and reemerge, after four years, as learned men. As women’s colleges multiplied, so too did educated women, some of whom married Bowdoin men and found themselves making a home in Brunswick. In this secluded environment, they gathered as wives of Bowdoin professors and presidents. Such was the case for the woman who would set the tone for women on campus for much of the 1900s: Edith Sills.

A graduate of Wellesley and the wife of Bowdoin president Kenneth C. M. Sills (Class of 1901), Edith Sills was, to most who knew her, the heart of Bowdoin hospitality. She made Bowdoin a familiar and warm place for students, remembering the names of each of the 400 undergraduates and usually something about their origins or proclivities—details learned through many evenings spent with various groups at the Sills home at 85 Federal Street.

But Edith Sills was more than a winning host. An advocate for women’s education and a cultured traveler, Sills crafted an enduring legacy in the decades leading up to coeducation. If Bowdoin is a place where

PHOTOS: (ABOVE AND OPENING SPREAD) GEORGE J. MITCHELL DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES

identity is shaped by those who came before, Sills clearly figures prominently.

Throughout her thirty-four years as Bowdoin’s “first lady,” Sills did what she could to bridge the gap between women and education. A teacher of Greek at Brunswick High School and a fervent classicist, Sills devoted herself to a type of learning that centered women. She was a trustee of several women’s colleges and, for a time, the president of the College Club of Portland, founded by early women college graduates in 1900 for intellectual stimulation and to encourage other women to earn bachelor’s degrees. At Bowdoin, she established a fund to bring distinguished

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 39

A Context for Coeducation There were women at and around the College long before the vote to admit female students, and of course there were changes in our laws and our society that both impacted and reflected attitudes and shifts in culture. Here are some milestones in women’s history leading up to Bowdoin’s momentous decision in 1971.

1833 Oberlin becomes the first college in the United States to admit women.

1837 Mount Holyoke is founded, the first of the Seven Sisters women’s colleges.

1848 The Seneca Falls Convention, considered the first women’s rights convention, is held in Seneca Falls, New York.

1855 Bates becomes the first coeducational college in New England.

1871 In his inaugural address, Chamberlain says, “Woman too should have part in this high calling.”

For Sprague, as for Sills, believing in educating women and believing that Bowdoin should admit women were not equivalent causes, and support of one did not necessitate the other.

women to speak—Eleanor Roosevelt being one warmly received guest—and endeared herself to most who met her: the student body, faculty wives, and visiting luminaries.

There is no mention in the archives of Sills’s direct support of coeducation. That might be because, when she arrived at Bowdoin in 1918, the dominant culture war of the time was for women’s right to vote. Sills herself was a vocal opponent of suffrage. “Our government is not a democracy but a representative republic, with the family as the unit,” she wrote. “The Suffragists are trying to tear away the cornerstone of our government by destroying the family as the unit—by allowing everybody to vote.” Sills’s opposition to suffrage points to a general truth about the history of Bowdoin women. Despite the impulse to combine suffrage and education as kindred mileposts on the long road toward women’s rights, the lines weren’t necessarily contiguous. Among women of New England, support for a coed academy didn’t necessarily translate to rights in the voting booth. “My suffrage friends are always trying to persuade me that Suffrage will broaden women’s interests and educate them,” Sills wrote elsewhere. “The object of Suffrage is to govern not to educate.”

Sills would, alongside her friend Kate Douglas Wiggin—who, in 1904, became the second woman to receive an honorary degree from Bowdoin—help found Bowdoin’s preeminent women’s organization, the Society of Bowdoin Women. The first of its kind at the College, the group coalesced to raise money for the endowment and establish a welcoming, warm space for women on campus. Requirements for participation were simple: members were to pay an annual fee of one dollar and had

to “love” a Bowdoin man, whether he be a grandson, son, brother, husband, or friend.

The Society’s criteria resonated; by the early 1960s, the group had more than 1,000 enrolled women, many of whom gathered at the group’s temporary headquarters in Gibson Hall during Commencement exercises.

The Society of Bowdoin Women was also in the business of funding lectures by women they deemed “outstanding.” In 1963, the Society brought Hannah Arendt, a German-born political scientist and writer, to speak on the topic of personal responsibility under dictatorship.

This too was part of Sills’s legacy: as Bowdoin’s host to Eleanor Roosevelt, W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, and others, Sills had introduced worldly figures to the somewhat secluded college—to its students and its community of women. Arendt, and many after her, were brought through the endowment of the Edith Lansing Koon Sills Lecture Fund.

“We kept all the women happy,” said Mary Lou Sprague, who served as president of the Society after witnessing her mother do the same. Ever since she was a girl running across the Quad in white ankle socks and Mary Janes on visits with her family, Sprague considered Bowdoin a type of home: her grandfather, father, brother, husband, and then, much later, her grandchildren, were all alumni. She was of a generation that, by the 1950s, had begun to signal the sea change that, in some ways, precipitated coeducation: an influx of student wives on campus when men who had postponed their studies for World War II enrolled at the College. The Society of Bowdoin Women gave those wives a welcoming place to go.

While the Society brought more women to campus, its members weren’t intimately

Bowdoin President Kenneth C. M. Sills, Class of 1901, and Edith Sills in an undated photo.

PHOTO: GEORGE J. MITCHELL DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES

concerned with gaining a foothold in Bowdoin’s classrooms. “I don’t think that was the kind of thing that the Bowdoin women would have made a big splash about—that would not have happened,” Sprague said in 2011. “It wasn’t something that I was particularly concerned about, and I don’t think most of my peers were. I went to a girls’ school in Portland, and then I went to Bryn Mawr, and I never felt like I had a lesser education.”

In fact, Sprague had a kind of Bowdoin education: during World War II, while she was studying at Waynflete School in Portland, underutilized Bowdoin professors—tasked with teaching a student body that had shrunk to half its usual size of 600—rode the train to teach at Waynflete. Sprague remembered these lessons fondly, though she didn’t consider them representative of the type of coeducation that was discussed at the time. Like Sills, Sprague was the type of person Helen Cafferty would encounter decades later: well-educated, welcoming, an ardent supporter of the College. For Sprague, as for Sills, believing in educating women and believing that Bowdoin should admit women were not equivalent causes, and support of one did not necessitate the other.

As World War II produced a society-wide shift in traditional gender roles, Bowdoin found itself asking women to fill positions formerly held only by men. With some professors drafted into military service, a few wives of faculty taught meteorology and mathematics in their place. When the husbands returned, along with half of the student body that had been sent abroad, these women departed the classroom. Some of them likely joined the second women’s organization at the College, the Bowdoin Wives Association. Housed in Moulton Union, the group had begun in the 1940s and provided a place for wives to mingle on campus. They hosted dances, bingo nights, fundraisers, and games of charades, which they advertised in their regular newsletter, dubbed the Chit-Chat. It also featured recipes and ads for babysitting services and house cleaners.

“However unfamiliar and unexpected our presence on the Campus may have been in the tradition of the College, we ARE and will always be a REAL part of Bowdoin College, sharing its

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 41

Left: Society of Bowdoin Women officers, 1967 (left to right), Catherine Daggett, Stella Knight, Judy Warren, Barbara Welch, Marion Bird, and Martha Coles.

Right: Clara Hayes at her desk outside the president’s office in Massachusetts Hall, March 1935. She served as secretary for the president of the College for thirtyfour years, the entire tenure of President Kenneth C. M. Sillls (Class of 1901).

42 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

triumphs and growth with our husbands and sons,” read a 1948 newsletter.

The Bowdoin wives persisted alongside the Society women for the ensuing decades, at luncheons, dances, Commencements, and Masque and Gown productions on the museum steps.

By the late ’60s, Bowdoin was still a distinctly men’s college, though the arrival of women as students loomed on the horizon. In 1968, in Wheaton, Massachusetts, a woman named Evelyn Banning wrote a letter to Richard Moll, Bowdoin’s dean of admissions. As the associate dean at Wheaton, Banning was fielding questions from Wheaton’s then all-female student body about a new exchange program, one that included Bowdoin. They were eager to know: Might the women attend Bowdoin the next fall?

The next year, the College commenced a test run of coeducation. Called the Twelve College Exchange, students from colleges including Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Vassar

could apply to spend a semester or a full academic year at any of the colleges in the exchange. In Brunswick, the newly arrived female students made a home in a former dean’s house on Federal Street. “Everyone is treating us like princesses—especially the students,” Tricia Luther, an exchange student from Mount Holyoke, told an Orient reporter in 1969. Luther joined the otherwise all-male cheerleading squad and seemed to have a largely positive experience during her exchange. Due to their novelty on campus, other women described feeling a bit lonely.

“Did you have a nice vacation?” begins a column in the Orient the following spring. “A question sincerely meant, a friendly smile, genuinely pleased to see you back. Haven’t seen or heard that in quite a while.” These are the first words of an open letter written by five of Bowdoin’s exchange students. “Sure, Bowdoin College was eager (perhaps still is) to have

1876 Eleven women participate in Bowdoin’s Summer School of Science.

1890 Mary Sophia and Harriet Sarah Walker commission architect Charles Follen McKim to design a building “entirely devoted to objects of art” that will become the Walker Art Building.

Wyoming is admitted to the Union and, because they passed the first woman suffrage law as a territory, becomes the first state to allow women to vote.

1900 Sarah Orne Jewett becomes the first woman to receive a Bowdoin honorary degree.

Kate Douglas Wiggin was the second in 1904. coeds, but then why do our male counterparts treat us as if we don’t exist?”

Despite these challenges, one of that letter’s authors, Susan Jacobson, decided to extend her time at the College. Just one day after the Governing Boards voted in favor of coeducation, she applied for admission as a full-time student. In 1971, she became the first woman to earn a bachelor’s degree from the College, the only one in that year’s graduating class. From the top of the Walker Art Building steps, she peered above her black-rimmed glasses, surveying her classmates and their families, and began to speak. Instead of invoking the novelty of her historic accomplishment, she credited the long legacy of Bowdoin women who preceded her.

“Loyal females have sat through subzero temperatures at football games,” she said. “[They] sewed costumes for Masque and Gown, instilled morale through the auspices of the Society of Bowdoin Women, and bequeathed monetary

benefits,” she said to the crowd. “Bowdoin can now remember these selfless women by providing their descendants with a chance to earn a diploma.” Jacobson’s words conjured for the crowd a far-reaching and varied ensemble of women—past, present, and future. What mattered then, in that moment, was not whether that ensemble—of Mary Lou Sprague and the rest of the Society women—envisioned a line from their lives to the future paths of Susan Jacobson. Their continued presence, built over decades, was the through line between Bowdoin as a men’s college and Bowdoin as a place for women too. A place, continued Jacobson, that “will one day represent a harmonious microcosm in which male and female members work in complementary fashion to achieve overall unity and productivity.”

The offerings of early Bowdoin women—in the societies, the associations, the exchange programs—came to reveal and, in some ways,

PHOTOS: GEORGE J. MITCHELL DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES

1917 Jeannette Rankin is sworn in as the first woman elected to Congress.

1918 Kenneth C. M. Sills becomes president of the College; he and his wife, Edith Sills, are fixtures on campus for the thirty-four years of his presidency.

1920 Ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution is completed.

1922 The Society of Bowdoin Women is founded.

1941 The US enters World War II, and women filled jobs that men serving in the war left behind, dramatically altering gender roles.

1940s The Bowdoin Wives Association operates on campus.

1964 Passing of the Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination based on, among other conditions, sex.

1966 The National Organization for Women (NOW) is founded.

1969 Women arrive on campus as part of the Twelve College Exchange.

1970 Bowdoin’s Governing Boards vote in favor of coeducation.

1971 Susan Jacobson becomes the first woman to earn a bachelor’s degree at Bowdoin.

Lou Emma Holloway is the first woman of color to work as a professor (visiting associate professor of history) at Bowdoin.

44 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

crystallize the forces of change that had been fomenting at Bowdoin for the preceding decades. As attendees and organizers of events, as writers and as distinguished speakers, each was a player in the long history of women at Bowdoin. Each had their own ideas about the role and influence of women, whether in the classroom or the voting booth, whether they felt those opinions to be personal, political, or even relevant to their carving out space in the College. That those might not map perfectly onto contemporary ideas of feminism speaks to the delicate complexity of what it means to be a woman forging a place for herself.

These women and their organizations built the place where Helen Cafferty arrived in 1972, when the College had welcomed women as students but still had very few on the faculty.

“This was a time that, if I had been married, I would have had to have my husband’s signature to open an individual bank account with my

own money,” Cafferty said. In that first year, the image of her footprints from her walk across campus still lingered in her memory, but what they signified began to change for her. Once a symbol of her personal journey, to Cafferty they became an emblem of women at Bowdoin as a whole. “I thought of them as a metaphor for the battle that was waged to achieve equal representation of women in the student body, the faculty, and administration,” she said.

In the thick of that struggle, Cafferty still felt “very lucky” and appreciated her male and female colleagues’, as well as the Society of Bowdoin Women’s, cultivation of a hospitable, welcoming environment for the new female faculty. In those years, they still held whitegloved teas and potlucks, which Cafferty attended and sometimes planned. “I am still grateful for the Bowdoin wives’ support and welcome,” she said. Without being formally admitted to the College, these Bowdoin women

PHOTO: GEORGE J. MITCHELL DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES

created a sincere, warmhearted space that ushered in Bowdoin’s first long-term female professors and graduates.

When women did arrive as students, they added their names to the accumulated memory of all those women who had shaped Bowdoin from outside of the academy for the preceding century. In the years to come, more women would join Cafferty on the faculty, including Matilda White Riley P’58, H’72, Bowdoin’s first female full professor, and Barbara Kaster, one of the first female professors to be granted tenure at Bowdoin. Roz Bernstein H’97, P’77 would soon become one of the first two female overseers of the College (and eventually the first female trustee), and Deborah Mann ’75 would speak at Commencement, representing the first fully coed class to graduate from Bowdoin. In 1971, the field hockey team became the first women’s athletic team on campus and was coached by the College’s first female coach, Sally LaPointe.

PHOTO: COURTESY OF HELEN CAFFERTY

A little over thirty years later, in 2007, the field hockey team would win the first national championship by any team in Bowdoin history.

Cafferty said that she views coeducation not as the time at which Bowdoin admitted women, but as the point at which women comprised 50 percent of the student body, and then, also, the point at which women reached parity in the faculty. Student body gender parity first occurred in 1992 (with the Class of 1996), and gender parity on Bowdoin’s faculty was first achieved in 2009. The women who came before coeducation unspooled a long thread. The decision to admit women as students in 1971 changed Bowdoin forever. It would take a great deal of work by many dedicated people over many more years to tie it all together and, as Cafferty notes, to realize true coeducation.

Surya Milner ’19 is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.

Left: Susan Jacobson ’71 pictured in the then-Senior Center (now the entrance to Thorne Dining Hall) in April 1971.

When she was five, she told her father, Payson Jacobson ’40, that she would graduate from his alma mater. “There is a slight problem,” Payson remembered saying to his daughter.

Right: Helen Cafferty photographed at Giant’s Stairs in Harpswell in 1972, the year she began teaching at Bowdoin. One of three female professors hired by the College that year, Cafferty was the first woman to pass through all the ranks from assistant to associate to full professor. She retired from Bowdoin in 2011 and was elected William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of German and the Humanities Emerita.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 45

Kaitee Daley ’09, vice president for social media at ESPN, talks about beginning her career in a field that was just beginning itself.

Looking for Cranes How did you become interested in sports journalism, and in its social media component?

Originally, I had my sights set on being an agent because I thought it would perfectly combine my passion for sports and interest in law school.

But after helping a small sports agency with their website redesign and working on Bowdoin’s athletics site reboot, I realized how much I loved the intersection of digital media and sports.

Social media really hadn’t been established as a full-time profession when I joined ESPN in 2009, but I was fortunate to start my career in a program with a heavy emphasis on mobile, and that sparked my curiosity about how fans my age were consuming sports content. I was intrigued by the rise of Twitter while working as a digital editor and, eventually, I was hired as one of two people responsible for the SportsCenter social channels.

webcasts, and working alongside a wonderful mentor in sports information director Jim Caton. Bowdoin’s Career Planning team also helped me navigate numerous applications and interviews in the sports media field.

How did your experiences as a Polar Bear athlete influence you?

My closest friends and best memories are tied to the Bowdoin athletics community. Working together as a team, balancing practices and games with a rigorous academic schedule, learning from both wins and losses—all of it helped prepare me for a career in sports. And I might not even be at ESPN today without the kindness of two wonderful Bowdoin basketball fans who helped get my résumé in front of a few people there!

How did your experiences at Bowdoin play into this trajectory?

Can you explain a little about your role at ESPN?

Bowdoin helped me build key critical thinking, writing, and time management skills that I use every day. I’m so grateful for all those lessons in Hubbard Hall, including from Professor Selinger, who encouraged me to follow my heart when I told him I was torn between spending time on LSATs and pursuing my passion for sports media. I was also able to build skills outside of the classroom, hosting a sports debate show on Bowdoin Cable Network, leading playby-play and color commentary for basketball

I lead a team of social media specialists who create content for more than twenty ESPN social brands across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and the “Stories” section of the ESPN app. I used to be more heavily involved in day-to-day creation of posts, but now I focus more on shaping our strategic approach, working with league and social platform partners, collaborating across the broader Disney ecosystem (ESPN is owned by Disney), and identifying new areas of business and audience expansion.

46 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

What are the most challenging and satisfying aspects of it?

Working in social media requires mental toughness. People who don’t know you at all will think nothing of publicly tearing down your work, so it’s incredibly important to lift your teammates up and focus on all the people you make smile. I love it when someone on the team has an amazing creative idea and you see fans validating that effort with positive feedback and engagement.

What sort of advice would you give to a young professional just beginning their career?

The best advice I was given was to always “look for the cranes.” In other words, what is being built or reimagined at your company and how can you add value? My overarching big three (we love a big three in sports) are to work hard, be curious, and be nice. I know being nice seems obvious, but I think people underestimate how much of a door-opener it can be.

Kaitee Daley ’09 played softball and basketball at Bowdoin and parlayed her athletic experience, a lifelong love of sports, and a newer interest in digital media into a career at ESPN, where she now oversees a creative team responsible for more than twenty ESPN social media channels.

For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

PHOTO: KELLY BACKUS/ESPN IMAGES

Whispering Pines

Faith, Love, and Commitment A penned note brings the life of Thomas Joiner White M’1849 into sharp focus.

THOMAS JOINER WHITE and John Van Surlay DeGrasse were the second and third Black men to earn degrees from an American medical school, both graduating from the Medical School of Maine in 1849. While DeGrasse is recognized as the first Black physician admitted to the Massachusetts Medical Association and was one of the few commissioned Black officers during the Civil War, very little had been known about White until recently, when Canadian researchers brought his story to light.

Thomas White was born to free Black parents in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1827. His father, the Reverend Sampson White, was a prominent abolitionist in Washington, DC, and later in Brooklyn, New York. Thomas prepared for medical school under the direction of a London-born doctor in New York. The Medical School of Maine required three years of supervision by a preceptor, two thirteen-week sessions of lectures, and a thesis. Of the thirty-five medical school students in the 1849 cohort, fifteen received diplomas.

Seven of the thirty-five served in the Union army during the Civil War, while one was a Confederate surgeon.

After receiving his MD, White was listed in the 1850 census as a physician, single, and living with his parents in Brooklyn. He was secretary for the Legal Rights Association (a forerunner to the NAACP) and belonged to a vigilance society that thwarted “slave-catchers” in New York. In 1856 he married Emma Gloucester, an Oberlin College graduate.

Emma’s mother, Elizabeth Gloucester, was a friend of radical

48 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

abolitionist John Brown. She built a fortune owning and operating boarding houses in Brooklyn, and at the time of her death was described as the richest Black woman in America.

Thomas and Emma White moved to Ontario after their marriage. By all accounts, White was a well-respected physician in Chatham. The Whites both contributed articles on race relations in Canada to The Anglo-African Magazine, which also published the writings of Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, John Mercer Langston, poet Frances Watkins, journalist Mary A. S. Cary, James McCune Smith, and White’s medical school classmate John V. DeGrasse.

In the summer of 1863 White decided to return to the United States to join the US Colored Troops as a surgeon, as DeGrasse had done in May of that year. As he was preparing to leave, he fell ill from cholera and a streptococcal bacterial skin infection. In a pre-antibiotic age, the combination proved fatal, and Thomas White died on August 9, 1863, at the age of thirty-six. A note found in his coat pocket expressed his faith, love of family, and commitment to a cause greater than himself: “A few days ago I seemed to be in the full enjoyment of health and life—but, alas, how changed now, for Saturday last I was attacked with ‘Cholera Morbus,’ and just as I supposed I was about well of that, erysipelas of the face claims me as a victim. This last disease will most likely terminate my earthly career. O Lord, if thou hast ordered it so to be, Thy will be done—One favor I would ask and that is, that … my little child may always enjoy Thy especial care; early may she learn to love Thee and always walk in Thy paths. Lord bless my dear Mother, my Wife and my beloved Father. Oh, God! Bless the cause of human liberty—may colored men prove themselves worthy of the trust committed to their hands, viz: the emancipation of their race from slavery—Strike the oppressor wherever you find him. Freedom now or never.

I was just endeavoring to consummate arrangements with the Secretary of War whereby I should have returned to my native land and joined some of the ‘colored troops of the US.’ But my Lord and Master, it seems, intends taking me to himself—glory be to His holy name.

– Thomas Joiner White Chatham, July 10th, A.D. 1863.

I should like to be buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.

– T.J.W.” Thomas Joiner White is buried in the Gloucester family plot in Green-Wood, section 31, lot 9817.

John R. Cross ’76 is secretary of development and college relations.

ILLUSTRATION: ERIC HANSON

Connect ALUMNI NEWS AND UPDATES Justin J. Pearson ’17 was based in Boston working as special assistant to Gerald Chertavian ’87, P’20, P’22, founder and CEO of the nonprofit YearUP. With the ability to work remotely for YearUP, Justin returned to his hometown of Memphis to be near family during the COVID-19 pandemic and made headlines leading a successful fight against an oil pipeline that had been planned to run through his community.

JUSTIN J. PEARSON ’17

ELEVATE THEIR VOICES In my role as cofounder of Memphis Community Against the Pipeline and its spokesperson, I have been helping organize the community’s response, managing and building a multiracial and economically diverse regional and national coalition, and raising financial resources to build our organization. We garnered national attention with support from [former] Vice President Gore and Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. Southwest Memphis suffers from seventeen toxic release inventory facilities and four times the cancer risk than the national average.

We need laws that stop this from happening and an organization to help drive this work forward. We’ll be officially changing our name to Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP) to start tackling some of these broader intersectional challenges.

Environmental justice is racial justice. We must listen to the communities suffering the most, elevate their voices, and empower them to create change. That’s the beauty and power of a Bowdoin education if it’s used right.

My parents are the greatest motivators and inspiration of my life, and my grandmothers before them. We never had much financially but maintained a deep faith in God and a deep faith in attaining what may seem impossible.

At Bowdoin, it was a college degree. In Memphis, it is a safer and cleaner environment. I watched two teenage parents raise five Black boys in America, and none are deceased or incarcerated.

Then, I witnessed them both earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees before I went to college.

Their drive and faith are unparalleled.

For more of our interview with Justin, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

PHOTO: HOUSTON COFIELD

Connect

1949

Bob Grover: “I would love to be [at Homecoming] to celebrate with my friends and classmates. However, I (age 93) and my wife, Gerry (age 91), live in Portland, Oregon, and find it hard to travel long distances.

I fondly remember my time at Bowdoin and the superb education that I received. It helped prepare me to enjoy an exciting career as a faculty member at Oregon Health Sciences University. I spent twentyseven years as an associate dean, and one year as acting dean, of the School of Medicine and retired in 1993 as a professor of medicine and psychiatry. Since then, I have enjoyed a second career as an artist, and art is keeping me sane.”

1962

Reunion

Roy MacDonald: “I was shocked and saddened at the news of Dick Ladd’s death. In the past few years he befriended me and we met several times in either Baltimore or Annapolis. My last conversation with him rang with his happiness at moving from his home of many years in Annapolis to new digs with Sabra in Chester, Maryland, just across the Chesapeake Bridge. He was always a gentle giant, fiercely proud of Bowdoin as well as his Yankee heritage. Our world has lost a very good man. On my front, Cindy and I sold our townhouse next to Baltimore Harbor in mid-spring and moved to Naples, Florida. We couldn’t be happier at this point in life. We live in a gated-resort community, only minutes from the beaches in Naples and Marco Island. Our health, attitude, and spirits are good. Amazingly, although it’s just been a few months, I really feel ten years younger.”

Peter Webster: “John Foss ’69 has been guiding the schooner

American Eagle, along with hundreds of guests in small groups, off the Maine coast for thirty-six years. Margie and I were thrilled to travel under his watchful eye and navigational proficiency as a gracious host, prior to his impending transition to firmer terrain. It was a glorious experience!”

1963

“The National Intelligence University (NIU) bid farewell to Joseph Gordon, Colin Powell Chair for Intelligence Education, as he retired from federal service.

Gordon first served as a professor of European studies in 1981 at the Defense Intelligence School. He was the only NIU faculty member to have served at the school’s original campus at Anacostia Naval Station and at the current main campus in Bethesda, Maryland. He returned as a member of the faculty in each of NIU’s predecessor organizations, the Defense Intelligence College, Joint Military Intelligence College, and the National Defense Intelligence College. For over a decade, Gordon served as the chair of the European concentration. He also established the Certificate of Intelligence Studies: Strategic Warning Analysis Program, which enlightened generations of intelligence officers on the successes and failures of warning intelligence, contemporary warning challenges, and associated methodologies and analytic techniques.

Gordon combined his experience in the field, including tours in Sarajevo and NATO Headquarters, with his passion for research and teaching.

Gordon leaves a legacy of influencing hundreds of students whose perspectives on intelligence were enriched through coursework, thesis research, and academic debate.

Several of his former Strategic

50 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

“Ten years later, she announced proudly that her son had just been accepted at Bowdoin! The cufflinks held their promise.”

— TED STRAUSS ’65 ON THE BOWDOIN CUFFLINKS PURCHASED AT A THRIFT SHOP THAT TURNED OUT TO BE A GOOD LUCK CHARM

Warning Program students went on to become adjunct faculty and serve on NIU’s senior leadership team. An avid cyclist and triathlete, he biked to work regularly from McLean, Virginia, first to Bolling AFB and then to the campus in Bethesda.

Always the academic, Gordon plans to address long-postponed publishing projects during this next phase of his life.” From a National Intelligence University announcement, March 9, 2021.

1965

Ted Strauss shared a story from his sister, a volunteer at a thrift store in Damariscotta, Maine: “Ten years ago, a lovely woman from California walked into our fairly new thrift shop and spied a pair of Bowdoin College cufflinks in the

jewelry department. She promptly bought them. She and her young son both had aspirations for his attending Bowdoin College when he became old enough. They represented a sort of good luck charm for them. Today the same mother and son visited our shop. She tried to catch my eye at checkout. She was smiling from ear to ear. She related her story to all of us at the counter and announced proudly that her son (standing right beside her, also grinning from ear to ear) had just been accepted at Bowdoin and would soon be starting his freshman year!

The cufflinks held their promise. This is the kind of story that absolutely stuns us with gratitude for many of the sometimes seemingly simple gestures we are able to make to enhance other people’s lives!”

ILLUSTRATION: ERIC HANSON

Remember

The following is a list of deaths reported to us since the previous issue. Full obituaries appear online at: obituaries.bowdoin.edu

Richard W. Brown ’56 July 24, 2021

Benjamin B. Whitcomb III ’71 April 23, 2021

Clark H. Neill ’56 August 8, 2021

Harold E. Cloud Jr. ’73 June 15, 2021

Gerald W. Blakeley Jr. ’43 July 2, 2021

Saul H. Cohen ’57 February 4, 2021

Laddie C. Dunson ’74 May 12, 2021

Curtis F. Jones ’43 June 5, 2021

Chester W. Cooke III ’57 July 7, 2021

G. Sandford Nevens III ’77 June 14, 2021

Robert H. Allen ’46 June 26, 2021

Robert F. Garrett III ’59 May 28, 2021

Susan Mock Gallup ’78 September 13, 2020

Corydon B. Dunham Jr. ’47 May 26, 2021

James L. Pulsifer ’61 May 17, 2021

Marc F. Wathen ’78 May 1, 2020

Donald H. Lyons ’48 August 24, 2021

Reginald E. Burleigh ’62 August 31, 2021

Mary Calanthe Wilson-Pant ’79 August 8, 2021

John D. Davis ’52 June 16, 2021

Robert D. Burnett ’62 August 25, 2021

Leslie S. Rod ’81 August 3, 2021

William H. Drake II ’53 August 27, 2020

Richard B. Ladd ’62 July 18, 2021

Kevin M. Walsh ’81 September 7, 2021

Peter D. Gittinger ’53 June 25, 2021

Granville D. Magee ’62 May 23, 2021

Erica Roth Campbell ’82 May 19, 2021

Alan R. Gullicksen ’53 May 29, 2021

Philip H. Hansen III ’64 June 25, 2021

Roger J. Selverstone ’85 August 8, 2021

Bruce Wald ’53 February 14, 2021

Dwight L. Newcomb ’66 June 3, 2021

Thomas A. Long ’06 August 26, 2021

David S. Coleman ’54 April 27, 2021

Paul W. Soule ’66 July 19, 2021

Anna T. Nutter ’11 July 13, 2021

Ettore N. Piraino ’54 March 23, 2020

Ronald H. Shone ’67 August 28, 2021

Benjamin W. Hill-Lam ’13 August 15, 2021

Richard P. Hopley ’55 May 7, 2021

Harry H. Baldwin IV ’68 August 13, 2021

H. Alan Stark ’55 February 13, 2021

Jeffrey E. Reichel ’70 July 15, 2021

PHOTO: ARTIST_CREDIT

FACULTY/STAFF Donald Almy July 12, 2021 Roger Bechtel May 10, 2021 John D. Davis ’52 June 16, 2021 Patricia Gipson August 14, 2021

GRADUATE Elizabeth L. Bliss G’70 March 12, 2021

HONORARY Bernard Lown H’88 February 16, 2021

Bowdoin obituaries appear on a dedicated online site, rather than printed in these pages.

Updated regularly, the improved obituary format allows additional features that we can’t offer in print, specifically the ability for classmates, families, and friends to post photos and remembrances.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 51

Connect

1971

In his second career as an artist, Bob Grover ’49 painted this acrylic self-portrait.

Mark Cornetta: “It was on a morning in early July of this year when I had just arrived at Stone Mountain State Park, North Carolina. After leashing up my two dogs in preparation for a nice hike, I started up the old dirt road to the re-created mountain homestead for which the park is known. Coming down the road were a young man and his parents, the young man sporting a T-shirt announcing his association with a certain small college in Maine. There in the remote southern Appalachian Mountains, it would have been hard to measure which of us was more delighted to meet the other, Joe Hilleary ’20, or me.”

Peter Webster ’62 shared the helm of the schooner American Eagle with her captain, John Foss ’69, during a sail off the coast of Rockland, Maine, this summer.

52 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

1977

Reunion

Eric v.d. Luft is celebrating [twenty-five] years doing business as Gegensatz Press, publishing nonfiction books. Among the authors he publishes is the poet Deborah Boe ’76. He has completely revamped the website at gegensatzpress.com.

Go ahead! Look around! Maybe you’ll find some deals. From an Eric v.d. Luft email, May 3, 2021.

John Bannon “was one of six attorneys from Portland, Maine-based Murray Plumb & Murray to have been recognized in The Best Lawyers in America 2022. Bannon was selected in the fields of land use and zoning law and litigation, and was also named land use and zoning Lawyer of the Year for the city. He is a partner of the firm and chair of the land use and environmental law practice group.” From the Bangor Daily News, August 20, 2021.

Peter Pressman: “I have just accepted a faculty position as professor of medicine at the Saba University School of Medicine in the Dutch Caribbean. The prospects for curriculum development and research initiatives are extremely exciting, and the island is nothing short of Jurassic Park in its wild beauty.”

1975

1978

1974

Gene Wheeler ’57 had a serendipitous meeting with Wes Fleuchaus ’11 and Christian Ebersol ’11, who were dining with family and other alumni at Barnhouse in Chilmark, Massachusetts, on July 4.

student experience at WA and enjoys providing support to the WA Black Student Union. He currently serves on the Worcester Academy Board of Trustees.” From a Worcester Academy press release, June 3, 2021.

“On June 4, 2021, American jazz vocalist Victor Fields delivered the 187th commencement address at Worcester Academy (WA) in Worcester, Massachusetts. Fields, an alumnus of the school, is a Billboard-charted artist, critically acclaimed international vocalist, and leading interpreter of classic American music. He has been a dynamic presence at Worcester Academy as a trustee, as recipient of the academy’s Class of 1908 Cole Porter Award, and as founder of the Worcester Academy Association of Black Alumni. He has a special interest in the Black

Jeffrey Solomon: “In November 2020, I joined Beta Technologies in South Burlington, Vermont. We are designing and building an electric vertical aircraft (EVA) for passenger and cargo transportation. My focus is on creating the quality system at the company.”

“Largo Medical Center, a teaching hospital in Largo, Florida, recently welcomed new chief medical officer Dwight Stapleton.

Stapleton is a cardiologist and most recently served as vice president of clinical specialty services and regional chief medical officer for OSF HealthCare in Illinois. Prior

to that role, he served as department of medicine chairman, chief academic officer, and chief of cardiovascular services of Guthrie Clinic, and as associate dean of the Commonwealth Medical College.

Stapleton earned his doctorate at Yale University and completed his internship, residency, and fellowship at University of Washington.

He later received his master’s in medical management from Tulane University.” From a Largo Medical Center press release, April 26, 2021.

1980

Martha Hodes, professor of history at New York University, has been appointed for a two-year term as interim director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, beginning September 2021. Martha was herself a Cullman Center Fellow in 2018 and 2019.

“The US Senate has confirmed union lawyer David Prouty to a seat on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The NLRB hears unfair labor practice cases brought by workers and unions and oversees private-sector union elections.

Prouty will serve a five-year term [that began in August], when Republican William Emanuel’s term ended. Prouty was previously general counsel of the union UNITE HERE and served as a senior lawyer for the Major League Baseball Players Association from 2008 through 2017, when he joined SEIU 32BJ. The union represents about 175,000 workers in New York City.” From a reuters.com news release, July 28, 2021.

Jocelyn Shaw: “We’ve had lots of opportunities to connect with our Bowdoin peeps this year. In May I hosted a Zoom cocktail party for members of the Class of 1980.

Russell Johnson, Bruce Kennedy,

Leslie White Bradshaw, Ken Harvey, Chris Crocoll, and Pat Inman attended. In June we went to Maine and saw my cousin Curtis Jirsa ’01, my brother Randy Shaw ’82, and friends Mike Evans ’81 and John Leeming ’78. In August we went to Rhode Island and saw Randy again, as well as friends John Ottaviani ’79, Jean Daley, and Theo Aschman ’78. In addition to all the Bowdoin travel, we’ve also been to Mackinac Island, Bermuda, and mid-Michigan. We have been taking full advantage of being vaccinated and able to travel!”

Mary Jo Gorman Keaney ’86

1985

“On August 10, the board of trustees of the International Center of Photography (ICP) announced the selection of David E. Little as its new executive director, following an international search. Little joins ICP after six years as the John Wieland 1958 Director and Chief Curator of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. His tenure at the Mead was marked by a record of successful fundraising, collection growth and diversification, and institutional planning that strengthened the curatorial program and its educational role within Amherst’s liberal arts curriculum. Little’s prior positions include time as the curator and department head of photography and new media at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, associate director and head of education at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and director of adult and academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art. The International Center of Photography is the world’s leading institution dedicated to photography and visual culture. Through exhibitions, education programs, community outreach, and public

Honoring a mentor and paying it forward.

In celebration of Fifty Years of Women at Bowdoin, Mary Jo Gorman Keaney ’86 has established the Barbara Weiden Boyd Endowment Fund in honor of her classics professor. The new endowed fund will benefit from a charitable remainder trust arranged by Mary Jo and provide enrichment funding for classics students.

If you’d like to know more about arranging a gift like Mary Jo’s that will provide you with income for life and the College with endowed funds in perpetuity, visit the Office of Gift Planning’s website at bowdoin.edu/gift-planning, or contact Nancy Milam or Liz Armstrong at 207-725-3172 or giftplanning@bowdoin.edu.

bowdoin.edu/gift-planning

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 53

Connect Sarah Haggerty ’91

programs, ICP offers an open forum for dialogue about the power of the image. Since its inception, ICP has presented more than 700 exhibitions, provided thousands of classes, and hosted a wide variety of public programs.” From an International Center of Photography news release, August 10, 2021.

1986

Catching Up

MAPPING THE FUTURE Sarah Haggerty ’91, a conservation biologist and GIS manager at Maine Audubon, plays a key role in the organization’s priority on climate change.

MOST OF MY WORK these days is on how to encourage

renewable energy development in Maine to combat climate change, and to site this energy development in a responsible way with regard to the environment. Using my GIS experience, I led the development of a new online mapping tool to help guide the siting of solar and terrestrial wind energy projects to avoid or reduce impacts on important wildlife habitats. It’s exciting to be involved in helping Maine turn toward a brighter future!

IT SURPRISED ME WHEN I WAS AT BOWDOIN to learn that gender integration came so late. I had a roommate whose father had gone to Bowdoin, but her mother wasn’t able to. Current students are more than one generation removed from the all-male days, so it may seem like ancient history, but there’s still a lot of work to do.

For more of our interview with Sarah, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

54 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

“Frank Mitchell has been elected to the board of the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), an organization that invests in artists and communities and fosters equitable access to the arts, enriching the cultural landscape in New England and the nation. Mitchell is a cultural organizer in visual arts and public humanities, currently serving as curatorial adviser for the Toni N. and Wendell C. Harp Historical Museum at the Dixwell Q House.

Mitchell has taught at the University of Connecticut, Trinity College, and the University of the Arts and has curated exhibitions and published on the topics of African American food culture, African American Connecticut, Black artists exploring spirituality, and more. Mitchell previously served as executive director at the Amistad Center for Art and Culture. He began his career at the Studio Museum in Harlem and is a former member of NEFA’s advisory council.” From a New England Foundation for the Arts press release, July 13, 2021.

1989

Peter Quimby, “head of school at the Governor’s Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts, has been elected president of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. The position is for a three-year term ending in 2024.

The election took place at the forty-sixth Triennial Council, which

convenes every three years to carry out the business of the Society.

Quimby earned his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Since then, he has served in several chapters and at the national level. Most recently, he served as vice president of the Society from 2018 to 2021. In a press release, Quimby said, ‘I have witnessed the transformative power of education in my own life, and in the lives of thousands of students at both the college and high school levels, and that education has been deeply rooted in the arts and sciences. Phi Beta Kappa has championed these values since the founding of our nation, and I am honored to be assuming new leadership responsibilities as president.

The Society’s efforts to promote academic excellence and advocate for the liberal arts and sciences are vital to the future of our democracy, and I look forward to working with the Society’s staff and senate to advance these efforts in the coming years.’” From a Newburyport News article, August 8, 2021.

1992

Reunion

“In September, multimedia artist, composer, and writer Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, was welcomed to the Yale Quantum Institute (YQI) artist-in-residence program. The program, which had been on hiatus for a year, explores art as a medium with the goal to increase the understanding and discourse of quantum physics. Miller’s work immerses audiences in a blend of genres, global culture, and environmental and social issues. In this role, he will interact with faculty members, researchers, and students, attend colloquia and events, and produce data-driven multimedia immersive

PHOTO: MAINE AUDUBON

artwork based on the work of YQI researchers and their collaborations. Additional public events will be hosted at YQI to showcase the work Miller and the YQI members will create during the residency.”

From a Yale Quantum Institute online article, September 3, 2021.

1993

“Maine author and Emmy Awardwinning journalist Elisa Boxer has written A Seat at the Table: The Nancy Pelosi Story, a picture book that tells the little-known story of Pelosi’s rise to power. Pelosi has been making headlines since 1987, when she was first elected to Congress. But now more than ever, the first female House Speaker is taking center stage. From reaching a historic budget resolution compromise to issuing stern warnings to the Taliban on its inhumane treatment of women and girls to courageously calling the House of Representatives back in session after the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, Speaker Pelosi’s leadership is on full display. The book features an exclusive interview with Speaker Pelosi herself and was officially released in September.”

From a news release by Elisa Boxer, September 1, 2021.

1995

Darcie N. McElwee has been nominated by President Biden to serve as one of eight new United States Attorneys across the country— “officials who will be indispensable to upholding the rule of law as the top federal law enforcement officials for their districts. These individuals were chosen for their devotion to enforcing the law, their professionalism, their experience and credentials in this field, their dedication to pursuing equal justice for all, and their commitment to the

independence of the Department of Justice. McElwee is an Assistant United States Attorney in the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Maine, where she has served since 2002. She has served as the Project Safe Neighborhoods coordinator for the office since 2005. Between 2005 and 2008, she was an adjunct professor of advanced trial advocacy at the University of Maine School of Law. McElwee began her legal career as an Assistant District Attorney for the Penobscot and Piscataquis Counties in Maine from 1998 to 2002.” From a White House Briefing Room press release, August 10, 2021.

Joe Hilleary ’20 and Mark Cornett ’71 bumped into each other on the trail at Stone Mountain State Park, North Carolina, in July, and made the Bowdoin connection because of Joe’s T-shirt.

1999

Katie Benner, who covers the US Department of Justice for The New York Times, appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air Thursday, August 12, 2021. She broke the story that led to ongoing investigations into President Trump’s alleged attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election results.

Benner, a Bowdoin College trustee, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for her reporting on sexual harassment.

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, August 13, 2021.

Kimi Phillips-Lohrmann: “And just like that, we are a family of five.…We are so excited to welcome our daughter Charlotte Kimiko Ila Lohrmann into the world. Charlotte was born at the Klinikum Rechts der Isar of the Technical University in Munich on Tuesday, July 27, at 8:18 a.m., weighing 3,520 grams (7.76 pounds) and measuring 52 cm (20.5 inches) long. Jasper and Felix were thrilled to finally meet their baby sister, and they have been showering her with hugs and kisses ever since. We are doing well too, and adjusting to life with three children, all under four years old.”

John Holt ’79 and his oldest daughter, Gemma, hug after summiting Denali on June 6, 2021. It was John’s fifth successful climb of the world’s “Seven Summits”—the highest mountains on each of the seven continents— and Gemma’s fourth.

In August, Dianne Fallon ’84, Leo Tinkham ’83, Louisa Boehmer Wickard ’85, Susan Abbattista ’83, Bill Songer ’83, Kirk Petersen ’83, and Nick (John) Pilch ’83 took a sunny cruise on Sebago, Maine’s second-largest lake. (Nick took the photo.)

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 55

Connect

2000

In August, Mary Jo Gorman Keaney ’86 (middle; Vero Beach, Florida) had a mini-reunion with Joe LaCasce ’86 (all the way from Oslo, Norway) and his sister Ann LaCasce ’87 in Ann’s hometown of Needham, Massachusetts.

Kimi Phillips-Lohrmann ’99 and her husband, Christian Lohrmann, welcomed Charlotte Kimiko Ila Lohrmann into the world on July 27.

Alex Cornell du Houx ’06, a former US Marine and current US Navy Reserve public affairs officer, bumps elbows with former President Barack Obama at the Washington, DC, Community Vaccination Center. Alex’s operational planning team was tasked with writing the distribution plan for over 11 million military, government, and civilian beneficiaries worldwide in coordination with the White House COVID Task Force, and then helped implement the Community Vaccination Centers across the country. Obama visited the DC site to thank the group for their work.

56 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

Despite the lockdown and isolation of the past fifteen months— or perhaps because of it—director Kevin Newbury has helped create a new artist collective focused on community and inclusion. The nonprofit collective, Up Until Now, was recently featured in The New York Times for covering ten classic songs by Black female artists in sign language. The series, SOUL (SIGNS): An ASL Playlist, “makes music visible.” (ASL stands for American Sign Language.)

And they had a gigantic debut. The collective’s rendition of Gladys Knight and the Pips’ song “Midnight Train to Georgia” lit up seventy-five screens around Times Square in New York City every evening between July 1 and July 31, exactly at 11:57 p.m.

The screenings were part of the Times Square Alliance’s Midnight Moment, a late-night public arts event, and featured native ASL speaker Brandon Kazen-Maddox with Mervin Primeaux-O’Bryant, a deaf actor and dancer. While not all of the collective’s work will incorporate deaf artists or sign language, the SOUL(SIGNS) project exemplifies the collective’s commitment to “inclusive, accessible, and equitable working environments” and making interdisciplinary art that “is radically empathetic, accessible, diverse, and inclusive,” according to its mission statement. “Up Until Now is about finding new structures for artistic creation, giving everyone a seat at the table, and learning from the intersectionality of a diverse group of artists,” Newbury said. The collective has fifty-two collaborators—and counting—as of late June.

Participants are dancers, makeup artists, musicians, and more, and they’ll make film, TV, theater, dance, opera, and hybrid work. From a bowdoin.edu/news story, July 6, 2021.

2004

Ana Fonseca Conboy: “I’ve recently received tenure and been promoted to associate professor of French at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, in St. Joseph, Minnesota. And, while I’m the bearer of good news, I’d also like to share that I was awarded the Grell/Spaeth Teacher of Distinction Award at CSB/SJU this year. During a year of such distress and anxiety in other realms, these two pieces of news were very welcome.”

2006

Alex Cornell du Houx: “I’ve been supporting the vaccination effort combating COVID disinformation over the past year that has taken me from Japan to DC to San Antonio to New York City, New Jersey, and back to DC supporting comms operations. It has been one of the most challenging yet heartwarming missions.”

“Law360 has named Kelly L. Frey to the publication’s 2021 Rising Stars List, which highlights attorneys under forty whose legal accomplishments transcend their age. He was selected in the real estate category. Frey is a skilled litigator who advises clients on a broad range of disputes involving commercial real estate and government regulation. He has extensive experience litigating complex lease disputes, commercial evictions, permits/zoning appeals, tax abatements, property valuations, government investigations, and administrative proceedings before state and federal agencies. Law360’s 2021 Rising Stars List consists of 180 attorneys hailing from more than 80 law firms and spanning 38 practice areas. After reviewing more than 1,400 submissions, winners were selected based on their career

accomplishments in their respective disciplines.” From a Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky, and Popeo PC online press release, May 31, 2021.

Benjamin Yormak was quoted in Time magazine’s March 15, 2021, issue “Women of the Pandemic,” speaking as the lawyer for one of the women featured prominently in the piece. The case—and others noted in the article—serves as one example of the inordinately high number of female employees who lost or had to leave their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many workplaces were forced to shut down or reduce the number of staff.

2007

Reunion

Michael Curtis “is one of eight individuals to be named a 2021 inductee in the Midcoast Sports Hall of Fame in Waldoboro, Maine.

Michael attended Rockland District High School from 1999 to 2003 where he was a three-sport athlete in baseball, basketball, and football. Football was the sport he was most noted for, along with his academic excellence, receiving several scholar/athlete awards. In football, Mike broke many records for Rockland football as a running back, scoring forty-two points in one game on six touchdowns and three two-point conversions, and rushing for 318 yards in that game.

He was a two-time All Campbell Conference selection and was chosen team MVP during his sophomore and senior years. He was the first Rockland football player ever to be chosen as a James J. Fitzpatrick semi-finalist [the annual award recognizing the best high school football player in the state of Maine].

During his high school career Mike carried the ball 408 times, rushing for 2,759 yards. He went on to

Bowdoin [where he was a] running back, kick return specialist, and defensive back.” From a Boothbay Register article, July 19, 2021.

Sam Hight, his parents, Lou ’74 and Debbie ’75, and “the Hight family of auto dealerships celebrated 110 years in business by announcing a beer collaboration with Bigelow Brewing—the first known brewery and auto dealership collaboration in the country. Together, the two Skowhegan, [Maine], businesses have launched Hight’s Tin Can Sailor, a Scotch ale honoring the legacy of [Sam’s grandfather], the late Lt. S. Kirby Hight ’38 as a war hero and business icon. The term ‘tin can sailor’—used to describe Navy sailors on destroyers—pays homage to Kirby’s service to his country, and highlights his affection for scotch, cigars, and most importantly, his dedication to the community. The Hights have announced that they will be donating $1 for each can of Tin Can Sailor sold to the Skowhegan Free Public Library. Founded in 1911

by Walter H. Hight, the Hight Family of Dealerships have been serving the automobile needs of central and western Maine for over ten decades.

Now consisting of four dealerships: Hight Ford in Skowhegan; Hight Chevrolet Buick GMC in Skowhegan; Hight Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram in Madison; and Hight Chevrolet Buick GMC in Farmington. The Hight Family of Dealerships are the only National Automobile Dealers’ Association (NADA) century award-winners—an award given to automobile dealers that have held their dealerships under one family for 100 consecutive years—in New England.” From a Bangor Daily News online news story, August 16, 2021.

Beth Kowitt, a senior editor at Fortune magazine, has won a 2021 New York Press Club Journalism

Reunion 2019

One of Bowdoin’s greatest resources is the energy and expertise of our alumni.

Thinking of volunteering? Scan this code to learn about ways you can contribute your time and talents to your college.

A goal of the From Here campaign is for 85 percent of our alumni to engage with the College—through volunteering, attending an event, or making a gift to Bowdoin.

bowdoin.edu/fromhere

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 57

Connect Travis Dagenais ’08

Award for business reporting. The award honors her reporting and writing in the article “America’s Black Brain Drain,” which examines why African American professionals are moving abroad and staying there, and which appeared in the August/ September 2020 issue of Fortune.

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, June 28, 2021.

2008 Catching Up

MOVEMENT BY DESIGN Travis Dagenais ’08, once a Bowdoin Magazine student intern, and recently assistant director of communications at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, will soon swap coasts for a new role as a communications director at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design.

I WAS A BOOK PUBLICIST at the wonderful Beacon Press in

Boston for several years, and that helped me appreciate that communications, as a practice, can act as a window on so many different fields, ideas, communities, and individuals.

I’m intellectually surprised and humbled each day at work.

I had no training in architecture or design before taking this role, and I’ve been able to sharpen my professional abilities while learning about design disciplines and all of their fascinating, sometimes unexpected, applications.

SPACES AND ACTIVITIES INVOLVING FITNESS AND SPORT had always terrorized me with a sense of non-belonging. I wandered into a yoga studio when I was twenty-four, and from there started finding new ways of moving and understanding my physical self. I’m intrigued by the connection between physical movement and emotional and mental health. I’ve discovered joy in activities that I once dreaded or thought weren’t for me, and I’ve learned a lot about myself and how I think on and off the yoga mat or the treadmill.

For more of our interview with Travis, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

58 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

Courtney Camps Toomey: “Mark [Toomey, Boston College ’02] and I got married last May in Westerly, Rhode Island, on a beautiful day. While it was a downsized celebration due to the pandemic, it was a wonderful time, bringing together a great group of Polar Bears who have welcomed Mark into our Bowdoin family.”

2009

Libby Barton Winton “and her husband, Tyler (Vanderbilt ’05), welcomed their daughter, Eleanor ‘Ellie’ Grace Winton, into their lives on June 25, 2021, in Charleston, South Carolina. [We are] in love and in awe of this special lady.”

Ben Freedman: “After two COVID-canceled attempts, my wife and I had a twelve-person wedding in my parents’ backyard in Little Compton, Rhode Island, with our parents and siblings (sadly, we weren’t able to include any Bowdoin friends in person). My wife’s name is Aliza Hoffman, University of Pennsylvania ’10.”

“Opera House Arts in Stonington, Maine, has announced that, following a national search, Cait Robinson became its new artistic director beginning September 19, 2021. Robinson’s recent productions include The Clean House at Portland Stage Company, Pinocchio at Cincinnati

Playhouse in the Park, Proclamation: World Sick and Proclamation: Unite at American Repertory Theater, The House of Bernarda Alba at Ohio Northern University, and Gidion’s Knot and False Flag (world premiere) at Dramatic Repertory Company. She has directed workshops at Cincinnati Playhouse, ART, Portland Stage, The Lark, the Drama League, and New Repertory Theater, among others. She is a former Drama League New York Directing Fellow and headed the college summer intensive program at Cape Cod Theatre Project. Past affiliations and training include Senior Directing Fellow at Cincinnati Playhouse, Lincoln Center Directors Lab, SDCF Observership program, Directors Lab West, American Conservatory Theater fellowship program, Portland Stage Company internship, Celebration Barn Theater, Bowdoin College, and the National Theater Institute. She is an associate member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. Opera House Arts restored the Stonington Opera House, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, to its original role as a community gathering space and performing arts center in 1999. Its programs continue to serve Deer Isle, the Blue Hill Peninsula, and greater Hancock County’s yearround residents and visitors of all ages.” From a Penobscot Bay Press online news story, September 10, 2021.

Ian Yaffe “will be the first director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office of Population Health Equity, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) announced in August. Central to Yaffe’s work will be implementing a $32 million federal grant awarded to Maine

PHOTO: CHELSEA BORCHERS

CDC in June to address COVID19-related health disparities and advance health equity among underserved populations at higher risk. This includes racial and ethnic minority groups and people living in rural communities, DHHS said in a written statement. In June 2020 Maine had the nation’s largest racial disparity in COVID cases, with statistics showing that members of the state’s small but growing Black communities were contracting COVID-19 at a rate more than twenty times that of white residents. Yaffe now is chief operating officer of DHHS’s COVID-19 Social Supports Program. In his current role, he oversees the agency’s work to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate COVID-19 services, including contact tracing, testing, quarantine and isolation support, and vaccinations, with a focus on collaboration with community-led organizations. He was selected for his new role following a national search. From 2010 to March 2021, Yaffe led Mano en Mano, a statewide nonprofit serving immigrant and farmworker communities through educational, health, housing, and advocacy support. Maine CDC Director Nirav Shah said the new office will be aimed at ‘removing barriers that limit the full potential of all Maine people to lead healthy, safe, and opportunity-rich lives.’” From a Portland Press Herald news story, August 23, 2021.

2011

Maina Handmaker was featured in a June essay in The New York Times for her work with seabird populations on Deveaux Bank off South Carolina. The spit of sand, about 250 acres, is a gathering place for tens of thousands of birds.

Of the fifty-seven coastal water bird species that South Carolina has identified as of “greatest conservation need,” virtually all are found on Deveaux. Handmaker, a graduate student at the University of South Carolina, led a team of scientists assembled to study and count the whimbrels that gathered on the island to roost at night, and to catch birds that would be fitted with transmitters to track their migration to their winter homes in the Arctic.

Using strategically placed mist nets, they trapped and outfitted fourteen whimbrels—when the tagged birds return from the Arctic, the biologists will learn how the abundance of food on their foraging grounds, and the energy spent commuting back and forth from Deveaux, may affect their reproductive success.

This information, in turn, will inform the development of conservation policies to safeguard whimbrels and the other shorebirds of Deveaux.

From a New York Times guest essay, June 19, 2021.

Libby (Barton) Winton ’09 and her husband, Tyler (Vanderbilt ’05), welcomed their daughter, Eleanor “Ellie” Grace Winton, into their lives on June 25, 2021.

2013

Rachel Lopkin Kennedy: “Rachel Lopkin and Walker Kennedy ’15 were (finally!) married, 364 days after their original wedding date and three postponements later, surrounded by fully vaccinated family and friends at French’s Point in Stockton Springs, Maine. The ceremony was officiated by Dan Cohen ’15. The couple met in 2012 as members of the WBOR management team and have been together ever since.”

2014

“Curated by Elizabeth Humphrey, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art exhibition There Is a Woman in Every Color: Black Women in Art examines the representation

Peter Butterfield ’86 and Sarah King ’10 at the opening bell ceremony for Flywire (FLYW), which had its initial public offering on the Nasdaq stock exchange on May 26, 2021. Sarah is Flywire’s senior director of global communications and brand, and Peter is general counsel and chief compliance officer.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 59

Connect

Christian Ebersol ’11 caught up with fellow Polar Bears Eliza Jevon ’21, Holly Lyne ’21, Paul Magaud ’23, Hadley Jevon ’23, Claire Traum ’21, and Wes Fleuchaus ’11 over Fourth of July weekend at Barnhouse in Chilmark, Massachusetts.

On July 7, 2021, eighteen Polar Bears from the classes of ’17 and ’18 launched their hundred-mile river trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Central Idaho, grateful to swim, hike, and paddle down one of the few remaining undammed rivers in North America. Pictured: Nik Bergill ’18, Kate Berkley ’18, Bo Bleckel ’18, Michael Butler ’17, Luke Carberry ’18, Jesse Chung ’18, Melissa Cusanello ’18, Aidan French ’18, Phillip Galonsky ’18, Eric Guiang ’18, Sabina Hartnett ’18, Jasper Houston ’18, Linnea Patterson ’18, Ben Sickle ’18, Carina Spiro ’18, Brewster Taylor ’18, Dana Williams ’18, and Zoe Wood ’18.

60 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

of Black women in the United States over the past two centuries, and explores a history of marginalization of women of color in American art.

While Humphrey was able to identify many works in the Museum’s permanent collection that related to the themes of the exhibition, she also found large gaps and looked to other institutions to fill them. ‘Black women represent less than 1 percent of the permanent collection,’ said Humphrey, who completed her two-year appointment as curatorial assistant in July and is now working toward her doctorate in art history at the University of Delaware. ‘It was easy to get absorbed in the works that I could count and feel like it was a lot. But when you put it in perspective of the permanent collection, it was a small portion of the story we wanted to tell.’ The lack of representation among Black women in the arts is hardly unique to Maine or Bowdoin, she added.

‘This is a pervasive issue in a lot of mainstream museums, where representation of people of color in art is significantly less.’ She hopes the exhibition highlights both the contributions of Black women artists and how Black women have been portrayed in the arts over two centuries. She also hopes the exhibition prompts people to think about the art they do not see when they visit a museum or art gallery. There Is a Woman in Every Color is divided into themes of portraiture, the Black female nude, documented histories, labor, artistic exploration, and the influence of literature. The exhibition is installed in the museum’s lower-level galleries and is the first show visitors encounter when they enter the building. It closes at Bowdoin on January 30, 2022, then travels to the El Paso Museum of Art in Texas, the Tweed Museum of Art at the

University of Minnesota–Duluth, and the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.” From a Portland Press Herald article, August 29, 2021.

Alex Tougas: “Alex Tougas and Sydney Spiro (Oberlin College ’15) were finally married on July 2, 2021, after postponing a year due to COVID! They were joined by friends and family on a beautiful summer day on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.”

2016

Sarah Frankl: “Sarah and Joe [Durgin ’13] had the best day of their lives when they were married on May 30, 2021, in Alaska, surrounded by friends and family!”

Apekshya Prasai “is the recipient of this year’s Jeanne Guillemin Prize at the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS). Guillemin, a longtime colleague at CIS and senior advisor in the security studies program, endowed the fund shortly before her death in 2019. An authority on biological warfare, Guillemin established the prize to help support female PhD candidates working in the field of security studies, which has long been dominated by men.

Growing up in the periphery of the civil war in Nepal, Prasai was exposed to a ten-year conflict that by some accounts left 19,000 people dead and 150,000 people internally displaced. The insurgency was led by the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoists (CPN-M) with the aim of overthrowing the ruling monarchy and establishing a people’s republic. The war ended in 2016 under the auspices of the United Nations, and a peace treaty between the Nepalese government and the Maoist rebels. Of the many related activities that were difficult

for Prasai to make sense of at the time, she was particularly perplexed by the large numbers of women who joined the People’s War. As a PhD candidate in the department of political science, Prasai seeks to better understand this puzzling phenomenon and investigate the dynamics of women’s participation in conflict. Drawing on original data collected through fieldwork in Nepal and secondary data from across South Asia, Prasai’s dissertation analyzes the processes that trigger women’s inclusion in rebel organizations and examines how women themselves influence these processes. Like Guillemin, Prasai is committed to advancing women and other historically excluded groups in academia and has worked in various capacities to further this goal. Her research has involved extensive fieldwork interviewing CPN-M members who participated in the People’s War and collecting primary documents back in Nepal. She will apply the funds from the Guillemin prize toward additional fieldwork in Nepal.” From an MIT News online article, July 30, 2021.

2018

Nik Bergill: “On July 7, 2021, eighteen Polar Bears from the Classes of ’17 and ’18—me, Kate Berkley, Bo Bleckel, Michael Butler ’17, Luke Carberry, Jesse Chung, Melissa Cusanello, Aidan French, Phillip Galonsky, Eric Guiang, Sabina Hartnett, Jasper Houston, Linnea Patterson, Ben Sickle, Carina Spiro, Brewster Taylor, Dana Williams, and Zoe Wood—launched their hundredmile river trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Central Idaho. The team was so grateful to swim, hike, and paddle down one

of the few remaining undammed rivers in North America. Even more importantly, they felt lucky and overwhelmed to be vaccinated and reunited after a long period of separation. The motley crew would like to credit Michael Woodruff ’87, SJ Tinker ’13, Adam Tinker ’13, and Anna Bastides of the Bowdoin Outing Club for teaching them a thing or three about whitewater, trip leading, and the simple joy of messing about in boats with your friends. Note: The Middle Fork of the Salmon is the rightful land of the Tuka-Deka.

Also known as the ‘Salmon Eaters’ in English, the Tuka-Deka were attacked and forcibly removed from the Middle Fork in 1879 by the United States military.”

Morgan Rielly, a member of the Maine House of Representatives, was honored with the 2021 State Service Leadership Award from America’s Service Commissions (ASC) at a virtual award ceremony held September 14, 2021. Launched in 1997 by a group of state service commissioners and executive directors, ASC is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization whose mission is to lead and elevate service as a strategy to build community in solving local challenges. Each year, the ASC Innovation and Leadership Awards recognize the leadership and accomplishments of state service commissions and their commissioners, staff, programs, and legislative champions from across the United States and its territories. Honorees were selected through a competitive national process. In his first term and as the youngest Democratic member of the legislature, Rielly began work on a modern version of the Civilian Conservation Corps and introduced a bill, passed unanimously in both

chambers, to establish the Maine Climate Corps. At the same time, Rielly supported the creation of Maine Service Fellows, an initiative to expand service in Maine beyond AmeriCorps. Rielly says the Maine Service Fellows program fills a crucial gap in service infrastructure in Maine by placing recent college graduates in rural and underserved communities across the state to help with critical COVID-19 economic relief projects along with ongoing pre-pandemic issues relating to public health, housing, and workforce development. He says the Maine Climate Corps is an intergenerational corps that will work to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis, adding that members will also work to maintain the health of our lands, resources, and community members. Rielly, who is representing Westbrook, his hometown, is a member of the legislature’s Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee.

While in high school, Rielly served two years on the Westbrook City Council. From a bowdoin.edu/news story, September 16, 2021.

2019

On May 2, Connor Rockett outpaced over 570 runners to become the first-place winner of the 2021 Providence Marathon, completing the course in two hours, twenty-three minutes. Despite some adjustments for the pandemic—participants wore masks until the onemile mark and starting times were staggered and tracked digitally— the gathering amounted to one of the biggest local events yet on the back stretch of the pandemic. From a Providence Journal article, May 3.

This past June, Kevin Trinh was awarded the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) grant, which

gives researchers and their advisors $135,000 over a three-year period.

Established in 2019, FINESST grants support graduate students in the field of Earth and space sciences whose research goals align with NASA’s principal objectives.

Last year, just thirty-four out of 246 FINESST applicants in the planetary science division were awarded funding. For the past year, Trinh has been working with his PhD advisor, Joe O’Rourke, an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.

O’Rourke studies the long-term evolution of planets. Trinh’s current research more narrowly focuses on the structural and thermal evolution of Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons. From a bowdoin.edu/news story, June 28, 2021.

2021

“Ryan Telingator has been named one of six recipients of the 2021 FAO Schwarz Fellowship in social impact.

Each year, the Foundation supports six new outstanding recent college graduates with paid, two-year fellowship positions at leading nonprofit organizations in three cities.

Alumni of the fellowship program regularly go on to hold leadership roles at nonprofit or public service organizations and programs. The prestigious fellowship is one of a few programs of its kind focused on social impact leadership. It also includes professional development experiences such as retreats, mentoring, and networking. Ryan will be at Jumpstart Boston. He is the fourth Bowdoin graduate to have received the prestigious award. Previous fellows include Emily Goodridge ’08, Joyce Kim ’18, and Nicholas Mitch ’18.” From an FAO Schwarz Family Foundation press release, May 7, 2021.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 61

Connect

1

2

3

4

7

62 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

5

8

9

Celebrate

1. Daniel M. Harrington ’95 and Megan Prout (St. John’s College– Santa Fe ’01) were married on June 19, 2021, in Ukiah, California.

Pictured: Justin K. Holland ’95, Robert E. Harrington ’65, Dan and Megan, Anand R. Marri ’95, Laurie Harrington ’91, and Jeff Harrington ’91. The Bowdoin banner they are holding is circa 1965.

2. Emily Clark ’15 and David Bean ’13 were married on July 30, 2021, in South Berwick, Maine. Pictured: Marcus Schneider ’13, Katie Ross ’14, Fhiwa Ndou ’13, Christian Boulanger ’15, Emma Young ’15, Lucy Saidenberg ’15, Emily and David, Anna Cumming ’15, Maggie Bryan ’15, Erin Silva ’15, Matthew Gamache ’13, Samuel Chick ’13, Andrew Zembruski ’13, Riker Wikoff ’12, Ryan Larochelle ’13, Andrew Gluesing ’13, Leah Greenberg ’13, Hannah Young ’13, Erica Swan ’13, Annie Leask ’13, and Sarah Fiske Larochelle ’13.

6

3. Rachel Lopkin ’13 and Walker Kennedy ’15 were married on June 12, 2021, in Stockton Springs, Maine.

Pictured: David Treadwell ’64, Anna Morton ’15, Walker and Rachel, Nasra Hassan ’13, Grace Hodge ’13, Dan Cohen ’15 (who officiated the ceremony), Patty Boyer ’15, Ben Osher ’15, Keel Dietz ’12, Jake Spertus ’15, Matt Friedland ’15, Leigh Andrews ’15, Evan Horwitz ’15, and Tom Gawarkiewicz ’15. Joining in spirit from afar were Marble Karuu ’14, Ike May ’15, Rachel Courtault Chapman ’13, and Harrison Chapman ’11.

4. Sarah Frankl ’16 and Joseph Durgin ’13 were married on May 30, 2021, in Portage, Alaska. Pictured: Kaya LeGrand, Max Brandstadt ’13,

Jim Reidy ’13, Erica Reidy ’14, Zach Rose, Samantha Leahy ’13, Joseph and Sarah, Casey Stewart ’14, Abigail Mahoney ’16, Connor Mulhall, Wiley Spears ’14, Madelena Rizzo ’14, Katelyn Suchyta ’16, Jake Ohman, and Thomas Fernandez.

5. Faustino Ajanel ’16 and Liann Van Volkinburg were married on July 24, 2021, in Topsfield, Massachusetts. Pictured: Dash Lora ’16, Jehwoo Ahn ’16, Kaitlyn Theberge ’16, Michael Bartini, Hugh Hardcastle ’65, Surrey Hardcastle, and Faustino and Liann.

9. Courtney Stock ’09 and Tim Callanan (Suffolk University ’09) were married on October 13, 2019, in Chittenden, Vermont. Pictured: Michael Peraza ’07, Emily Swaim Ranaghan ’09, Emma Reilly ’09, Katherine Finnegan ’09, Beatrice Shen ’09, Claire Cooper ’09, Ashley Fischer Mabry ’09, Lola Chenyek Yen ’09, Tim and Courtney, Emme Duncan ’09 (who officiated the ceremony), Loretta Park ’11, Audrey Chee-Read ’09, Michael Ardolino ’08, Kelsey Read ’09 (with daughter Lilah Read), Arden Klemmer ’09, and Alanna Beroiza ’09.

6. Benjamin Freedman ’09 and Aliza Hoffman (University of Pennsylvania ’10) were married on September 10, 2020, in the backyard of Ben’s parent’s home in Little Compton, Rhode Island.

7. Courtney Camps ’08 and Mark Toomey (Boston College ’02) were married on May 22, 2021, in Westerly, Rhode Island. Pictured: Peter Fritsche ’10, Joshua Miller ’08, Travis Dagenais ’08, Kerry Twombly Ballinger ’08, Martha Royston Saad ’08, Courtney and Mark, Laura Small Wilcon ’08, Kate Herlihy ’08, Kaitlin Hammersley ’08, and Emily Goodridge ’08. Not pictured: Bowdoin friends who celebrated via livestream.

8. Alex Tougas ’14 and Sydney Spiro (Oberlin College ’15) were married on July 2, 2021, at the Annapolis Maritime Museum in Annapolis, Maryland. Pictured: Yoni Held ’14, Lloyd Anderson ’16, Alex, Maria Kokinis Tougas ’85, Lyle Anderson ’16, Chris Granata ’14, and Andrew Park ’15.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 63

Here

BY EDGAR ALLEN BEEM P’13

Lawns, fields, and forests all over Maine were covered with a bumper crop of fruiting fungi this summer and fall. It wasn’t difficult getting in touch with the Maine Mycological Association (MMA) to find out why. As it turns out, the library of the MMA is housed in the Gibson Hall office of Delmar Small, manager of budgets, concerts, and instruments for the Bowdoin music department and vice president of the MMA. Small explained that the cool, wet summer was responsible for the abundance of fungi (both Portland and Bangor recorded their wettest month of July on record), and “that many species fruit in the fall—more in the fall, in fact, than the summer.” A full 90 percent of native Maine mushrooms are visible in autumn.

Plentiful fungi is a good sign. Mushrooms are the fruit of the mycelium, a mostly subterranean network of nutrients and communication between trees and plants, and their presence indicates a healthy soil.

Mainely Mushrooms Foraging for mushrooms increased in popularity during the pandemic. Membership in the Maine Mycological Association (MMA) tripled from 100 to 300 during the pandemic, and a Facebook group called Maine Mushrooms now has 13,800 members.

There are some 27,000 species of mushrooms worldwide.

The MMA has identified 2,500 of them in Maine. There are at least nine mushroom farms in the state, growing popular varieties such as porcini, oyster, hen, and chicken of the woods, along with an estimated 200 commercial wild mushroom harvesters.

Only about 3 percent of wild mushrooms are poisonous. On average, there are only three deaths a year in the United States from toxic mushrooms. The most common mistake mushroom foragers make is confusing toxic jack-o’-lantern mushrooms (which are orange) for delicious golden chanterelles (which are yellow). Poisonous mushrooms primarily damage liver cells.

Gary M. Pendy Sr. Professor of Social Sciences Jean Yarbrough cooks with the mushrooms she forages. “It’s a great pleasure to make a dish for people they wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else,” says Yarbrough, whose recipes have included maitake risotto, hedgehog tarts, scallops with black trumpets, and lobster with matsutake in a dashi reduction.

Only three states have an official state mushroom. Minnesota adopted the sponge-like morel in 1984. Oregon named the Pacific golden chanterelle its state mushroom in 1999.

And Texas named the Texas Star, aka Devil’s Cigar, its state mushroom just this year.

Greg Marley, author of two books about Northeastern mushrooms and the person New England poison centers call when they have a mushroom to identify, says that based on a survey he did of foragers, the golden chanterelle would be a logical choice for a Maine state mushroom as well. “[It’s] the favorite edible mushroom in this state and probably New England,” says Marley. “Second would be the black trumpet.”

For more facts about Maine fungi, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

64 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

PHOTO: TRISTAN SPINSKI

MASTERPIECE “This lovely character is Suillus spraguei, the Painted Bolete,” says Delmar Small. “The Painted Bolete is not a gilled mushroom, rather it has large yellow pores under the cap. When the mushroom is young, as in this photo, the pores are covered by a veil. As the cap expands, the red outer layer cracks, and the underlying surface shows through, hence the name ‘painted.’”

Photographer Tristan Spinski found this specimen about thirty minutes east of Bangor along Route 9.

B M B C B, M 04011

NON-PROFIT U.S.POSTAGE PAID BOWDOIN COLLEGE

“Bowdoin can now remember these selfless women by providing their descendants with a chance to earn a diploma.”

—Susan Jacobson, the first woman to earn a bachelor’s degree at Bowdoin, speaking of the Bowdoin women who came before her in her 1971 commencement speech.