Toby Kiers ’98—evolutionary biologist, founder of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, and the youngest scientist ever to win the prestigious Spinoza Prize—digs deep to map the global fungal diversity that’s critical to life on Earth.
20 A Long Hike on the Shortest Day
Marine scientist and avid skier John Bohorquez ’13 recounts the challenge— and beauty—of a trek in Maine’s Bigelow Range on the winter solstice.
30 Parts Unknown
In executing their projects, Watson Fellows must embrace a journey with all its ups and downs. Along the way, they learn lessons for a lifetime.
38 A Past Present
Podcast hosts and English faculty members Tess Chakkalakal and Brock Clarke visit the lovely and a little bit haunting Pettengill Farm.
5 Talent on Tap: Whether she is singing with her band, acting in community theater, or tending bar at Washington, DC’s legendary Old Ebbitt Grill—for Andrea Weeks ’03, it’s all performance.
7 Dine: Pastry chef, author of many cookbooks, and longtime food professional Lauren Chattman ’85 shares a recipe for a delicious olive oil cake.
8 Black and White All Over: In the animal kingdom, black and white can mean cute and cuddly— or dangerous and stinky.
15 A Rose in Blue: President emeritus Clayton Rose returned to campus to join artist Lanie Wurzel and President Safa Zaki to unveil the newest Bowdoin presidential portrait.
18 Crushing It: Meet Larry the Lobster, denizen and impressively picky eater at the Schiller Coastal Studies Center.
48 Curious Science: Biologist Jacob Blum ’13 embarks on a project to rethink and optimize the process of cell engineering for cell therapies.
IT BEGINS HERE
President Safa Zaki welcomed the Class of 2028 to campus on August 27, in one of their earliest activities as a class. In her talk, she reminded them that just a year ago she had also been new to Bowdoin and told them that she was confident they would, like her, find a vibrant community, alive with possibilities and opportunities.
Photo by Michele Stapleton
Respond
An Elegy for a Prince
The Andover Shop shared Mr. Aldrich’s “Prince of Tweeds” (Spring 2024). I wasn’t expecting to be made so happy today, because I loved to see Charlie remembered. I wasn’t expecting to be made so sad to be reminded how long he’s been gone. We bonded over my hometown’s mills (Goodall Mills in Sanford), our love of music and books, and my poetry. “If you want to be a doctor that’s fine, but don’t give up being a writer. That’s what you are,” he told me. He taught me how to tie a bowtie, took me to the textile museum in Lowell, and, when I went on my great walkabout through the UK, prepared letters of introduction to all these weavers, cloth merchants, dye-houses, and tailors. “I’m going to give you an education,” he said as he signed each one. Those were golden tickets! I had written him an elegy and thought perhaps it might be of interest to those who read the article:
EVEN SLIMMER ODDS
I enjoyed the article on Corey Colwill’s spin at the wheel (Spring 2024), but if his chances were six hundred out of a million, it was .06 percent rather than .6 percent—pretty honored indeed!
Rob Osterhout ’64
THE BUSTLE
I enjoyed reading “Humanity’s Art” (Winter 2024). The article’s focus on cities as humanity’s greatest achievement and the recent establishment of an urban studies minor at Bowdoin reminded me of a radical
“MEASURED
BY THE YARD”
He’s shed his coat, and we can touch not much more than the hem of him now. What is left when the weft of friendship’s fabric frays on days like this? His pleasures were measured by the Yard, talking shop or Pops’s syncopation, tying bows on those in school who’ll fuel economies, or greeting bons amis from Andover. Now Gabriel blows his horn while our friend mends well-worn rainbows with heaven’s cloth and sews a ticket pocket for an angel trying to catch a falling star.
Michael P. H. Stanley, Harvard ’13
experiment I participated in as a freshman in 1969. That fall, for the second and final time, the College offered an interdisciplinary course titled “The Urban Crisis.” It incorporated professors from the art, economics, government, and sociology departments. Many students in the class hailed from Downeast or other rural communities, and the course opened their eyes to the experience that the few of us, including me, who grew up in large cities lived. For me, conversely, the course was a way to ease academically into the rather different pace and atmosphere of a small-town
college hundreds of miles from my bustling home. The educational experience was extraordinary, and I remain proud of the lengthy term paper I wrote for the class. It is gratifying, moreover, to see that, with the new urban studies program, Bowdoin is tackling the world of cities intellectually again. After fifty-five years, it’s not too soon.
Alan M. Christenfeld ’73
CORRECTION: With apologies to his friends and family, we note that we mistakenly listed the class year for George M. Taylor as ’41 instead of ’81 in our last issue.
MAGAZINE STAFF
Editor
Alison Bennie
Designer and Art Director
Melissa Wells
Managing Editor
Leanne Dech
Senior Editor
Doug Cook
Design Consultant
2Communiqué
Contributors
Jim Caton
John Cross
Cheryl Della Pietra
Rebecca Goldfine
Scott Hood
Janie Porche
Tom Porter
On the Cover: Photographs of Pettengill Farm by Greta Rybus
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: TRISTAN SPINSKI
TALENT ON TAP
Everyone wants to experience a restaurant their own way. Whatever the customer needs, it feels really great to deliver and make a lasting impression—inspire them to come back. When guests ask for me it’s an honor, and I’ve made some lasting relationships. Bartending isn’t always glamorous, though. There are long hours, and when you don’t work, you don’t get paid. With many people come many personalities, and we humans can be brutal. I hear more behind the bar than you think.
I grew up in a cabin on a lake in northern Maine. Though my mother was part of my life, my dad raised me. He introduced me to a diverse world despite being one of the few Black families. He was a pilot and ran the airport. Every time I see a C152, I think of him. I thought my path was going to be in the sciences, but my music and theater director saw it differently. I visited Bowdoin on a warm April afternoon. I think there was a band playing. I walked my acceptance letter immediately to the admissions office. Other bartenders and people I meet inspire me. Music. Nature. My daughter. To build a safe and positive environment and give her every opportunity to succeed in this world will always keep me going. Seeing her grow and learn so much every day—doing the same can’t be beyond my own capacity. Because I don’t have to take my work home, I can write, create, or perform with my band. I am also part of a small community theater group. We put on a production annually and it is such a joy. In a way, it’s all performance.
For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.
FROM BOWDOIN AND BEYOND
PHOTO: ANDRÉ CHUNG
Andrea Weeks ’03 tends bar at Washington, DC’s oldest saloon, Old Ebbitt Grill, founded in 1856.
ANDREA WEEKS ’03
Athletics
Celebrity Coin Toss
Prior to the first home football game on September 21, Alex Grand’Pierre ’25 delivered the opening coin toss. Grand’Pierre represented his home nation of Haiti at the Paris Summer Olympics and was recognized in a pregame ceremony at Bowdoin by head official Sean Burke, prompting a standing ovation from the Whittier Field crowd in attendance. Grand’Pierre is the tenth Olympian in Bowdoin history, following in the footsteps— or swim strokes—of his older sister, Emilie ’23, who swam for Haiti in the 2020 Games. Other Bowdoin Olympians include hammer throw gold medalist Fred Tootell ’23, bobsled gold medalist Geoffrey Mason ’24, women’s marathon gold medalist Joan Benoit Samuelson ’79, and paralympic 10K Nordic skiing silver medalist Jake Adicoff ’18. See the full list at athletics.bowdoin.edu.
On View
Lured by a Trap
Thanks in part to the Collectors’ Collaborative, the Museum adds to its growing group of contemporary works by Asian American artists.
THIS SUMMER, representatives from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s (BCMA) curatorial team joined members of the Collectors’ Collaborative for a visit to the studio of photographer Jarod Lew. Established in 2007 and led by co-chairs Ellen Grenley McKernan ’06 and Isabel Taube ’92, the Collectors’ Collaborative is a group of Bowdoin alumni with connections and expertise in visual arts. They organize gatherings at studios, galleries, or museums and can contribute to a designated fund that allows them to recommend a work of art by one of the artists they engaged with for BCMA purchase.
During the group’s visit to his studio, Lew shared examples of his expansive photographic practice, which explores intergenerational encounters with diasporic loss, displacement,
memory, race, and identity. Members of the collaborative were intrigued by Finger Trap, a photograph Lew made on a beach in Connecticut while earning his MFA in photography from Yale University’s School of Art, and recommended it for purchase. In the image, one young woman attempts to lure another into a “Chinese finger trap.” Lew’s fascination with the game stemmed from the fact that, despite its name, it is likely not of Chinese origin. Rather, it emerged in Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the name first appearing in a 1953 newspaper advertisement. To Lew, the name exemplifies how Asian culture has been misrepresented in Western society, even in obscure and seemingly innocuous ways.
Jarod Lew, Finger Trap, 2023
DID YOU KNOW?
Almonds belong to the prunus family, which includes roses, peaches, cherries, and—unsurprisingly, given the name—plums. The nuts, which grow on trees that were first cultivated in the Early Bronze Age, are not actually nuts but the seed of the fruit.
A nutritional powerhouse, almonds contain vitamin E and are high in fiber and protein.
Almond Flour and Olive Oil Cake
Recipe by Lauren Chattman ’85
Olive oil isn’t just for salad—it adds subtle flavor and aroma, and cakes made with olive oil are never dry. The almond flour in this recipe has a mildly sweet and nutty flavor that adds yet another layer.
1 cup almond flour (not almond meal)
¼ cup unbleached all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon salt
4 large eggs
½ cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
¼ cup lemon juice
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Confectioners’ sugar (optional)
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spray an 8-inch springform pan with nonstick cooking spray, line the bottom with a circle of parchment paper, and spray the parchment paper.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the almond flour, all-purpose flour, and salt.
With an electric mixer on high speed, beat the eggs until light and fluffy, 4 to 5 minutes. With the mixer on, slowly add the sugar and continue to beat another 3 minutes. Beat in the oil, lemon zest, lemon juice, and vanilla.
With a rubber spatula, gently fold in the flour mixture, taking care not to deflate the eggs. Pour into the prepared pan.
Bake until just set and a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out with just a few crumbs attached, 40 to 45 minutes. Transfer the pan to a wire rack.
When the cake is cool, release the sides of the pan. Use a spatula to remove it from the bottom of the pan and transfer to a serving platter. Sift confectioners’ sugar over the cake if desired, slice, and serve.
A former pastry chef, Lauren Chattman ’85 is the author of nine cookbooks and coauthor of many more, including Dessert University with former White House pastry chef Roland Mesnier and her newest book, Slow Rise (Penguin Random House, October 2024) with Daniel Leader. Her recipes have appeared in Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, Cook’s Illustrated, The New York Times, and Redbook, among others.
Colobus monkeys, known for their ability to wriggle free from the clutches of their enemies, are covered with long, thick fur that makes them difficult to grasp and helps prevent what would otherwise be a killing bite.
Did You Know?
Black and White All Over
In the animal kingdom, black and white can mean cute and cuddly—or dangerous and stinky.
Illustration by Owen Davey
Many Bowdoin Polar Bears know that polar bears in the wild are visually very cool—their white fur is actually translucent, and the skin that underlies it is jet black. Our seemingly all-white mascot is in fact both black and white, just like the colors of our athletic teams’ uniforms. Black and white coloration is a type of what’s called aposematism, “a defense strategy and a signal to warn predators against eating certain prey items,” said wildlife veterinarian Karen Terio ’92, professor at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine and chief of the zoological pathology program. “Aposematism is commonly thought of in terms of visual cues—brightly colored poison dart frogs or the stark black-and-white coloration of some animals—to signal danger.”
With thanks to Royal Society for the Protection of Birds conservationist Natasha K. Howell, who completed her doctoral research on the topic of black-and-white animals at the University of Bristol.
Scientists at UC Davis found the driving force behind the zebra’s striking evolution was blood-sucking tabanids, such as the horsefly and tsetse fly, who have an aversion to striped surfaces. Too bad it doesn’t work on everyone, notes Terio. “Lions certainly seem to find zebras palatable and do not seem deterred by their stripes.”
Penguins’ countershading is more of the conventional type— it protects them by making them hard to spot. Seen from below, their white bellies blend in with light-filled surface waters and, from above, their black backs look like the dark of the deep ocean.
Blocks of black-and-white head fur, as seen on the famously belligerent honey badger, are associated with pugnaciousness—aggressive or offensive behaviors that aren’t part of hunting prey, just a honey badger being kind of a jerk.
Research into giant pandas suggests they were unable to molt rapidly enough to match the alpine snowy habitats and dark tropical forests of their seasonal backgrounds. So they evolved into something of a living compromise, like a black-and-white cookie of the animal world.
Dalmatians are born with a pure white base coat and start to show spots at about two weeks in both their fur and their skin. The piebald gene responsible for the spots is also associated with increased risk factors for deafness.
Most research into aposematic coloration has focused on noxious anal secretions, the kind of defense used so well by skunks. Their black-and-white stripes signal that ability to predators, hopefully making them off-putting.
On the Shelf
What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures
AYANA ELIZABETH JOHNSON, Roux Distinguished Scholar (One World, 2024)
In essays, interviews, poetry, and art—and with data—Ayana Elizabeth Johnson looks at solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture, and justice. Johnson is a marine biologist, policy expert, writer, and teacher currently serving as Bowdoin’s Roux Distinguished Scholar.
Sabor Judío: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook
Ilan Stavans and MARGARET E. BOYLE, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures (University of North Carolina Press, 2024)
That Time We Ate Our Feelings: 150 Recipes for Comfort Food from the Heart
LISA LUCAS ’89 with Debrianna Mansini (Apollo Publishers, 2023)
How Maine Decides: An Insider’s Guide to How Ballot Measures Are Won and Lost CHRISTIAN POTHOLM ’69, DeAlva Stanwood Alexander Professor of Government Emeritus (Downeast Books, 2024)
Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul
AUDEN SCHENDLER ’92 (Harvard Business Review Press, 2024)
Newcastle and the New Deal
Frances Perkins was the first woman to serve in the presidential cabinet and is a cousin to Bowdoin history.
BEFORE FRANCES PERKINS traveled to Washington, DC, to work for Franklin D. Roosevelt and remake American life as we know it as the driving force behind the New Deal, she spent her childhood summers at her family’s farm in Newcastle, Maine. In the summer that she was fifteen, Union general, founder of Howard University, and Bowdoin graduate Oliver Otis Howard— the cousin of Perkins’s mother,
Cynthia—visited, and Perkins served as his scribe during his stay.
Today, the Perkins home, a stately brick house, is a National Historic Landmark. Visitors can tour a small museum in the attached barn to read about how, as Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, Perkins implemented policy priorities she told Roosevelt were a condition of her joining his cabinet. These included ending child labor and establishing a forty-hour workweek, minimum wage, unemployment compensation, and Social Security. The first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, she accomplished all but one of the items she had presented to Roosevelt: universal access to health care.
The nonprofit that manages the Frances Perkins Center has petitioned President Biden to designate the Perkins home as a national monument, which would make it just the second in Maine.
Bowdoin Relatives
Frances Perkins, secretary of labor, 1933–1945, and relative of Bowdoin graduate Oliver Otis Howard
PHOTO: HARRIS & EWING
Brunswick
Worth Remembering
When Martin Luther King Jr. came to speak at Bowdoin in 1964, it was clear that the crowd was going to be too large for the spaces the College had at the time. As happened throughout the College’s and the church’s shared history, First Parish Church filled the void, and the event was held there. To commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of King’s visit, in October the church created a historical marker to be placed in the sanctuary.
As part of the commemoration weekend, First Parish presented The Malaga Ship: A Story of Maine and the Middle Passage, a one-man show by award-winning storyteller Antonio Rocha that explores the illegal slave trade in Maine. The show was complemented by an exhibit designed by the Pejepscot History Center, Brunswick and the Slave Trade. “Our purpose in hosting this event,” said First Parish’s Rev. John Allen, “is to not only focus on the pieces of our history that we are inclined to celebrate, but also to look at the parts of the story that are more painful to remember.”
Inside the Pack
Collections A new search tool turns up fun finds, including a series of collectible cigarette cards featuring Bowdoin’s polar explorers.
SYSTEMS LIBRARIAN Summer Unsinn had a few of what she calls “stumble-upon moments” (when she came across information that surprised and delighted her) while troubleshooting a new search tool that links Bowdoin’s library and special collections with the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Bowdoin College Museum of Art over the summer.
“The one that really cracked me up was a set of collectible cigarette cards for polar explorers,” Unsinn said. Helping set up the College’s first integrated search feature “opened my eyes to a lot of neat things that the museums have,” she added.
Unsinn’s find exemplifies one of the reasons Bowdoin’s librarians, archivists, and museum directors wanted one tool to search all the College’s cultural collections. They say it will enhance “discoverability,” making it more likely researchers will find information that leads them to new interpretations of history.
The cards Unsinn came upon were packaged around the turn of the twentieth century in cigarette cartons, like “toys in cereal,” said museum curator Genevieve LeMoine. The Arctic Museum has two complete sets—around 105 cards all together— from Player’s Cigarettes and Hassan Cigarettes’ “World’s Greatest Explorers” series.
They include reproductions of portraits by Italian artist Albert Operti, as well as scenes you might come across if you were traveling to the Arctic in 1900—like an “approaching blizzard” or a “sledge party crossing a crevasse” (into which one unfortunate explorer is seen tumbling). Some of the cards were donated; others were museum purchases.
LeMoine noted that the Hassan set includes a portrait of Matthew Henson, a Black explorer who traveled with Robert Peary, Class of 1877, on several voyages. “Most of the cards highlight the leader of the expedition,” she said, making Henson’s card unusual. But Operti, who traveled with the men, “knew Matthew Henson, and it was clear to him how important he was to Peary.”
First Parish Church in Brunswick
Faculty
Ancestor-Led Research
Historical research is often opaque, pockmarked with holes and vague outlines. But in the history of White Oaks, Ishmael Titus emerges with sharp-edged clarity.
HUMAN GEOGRAPHER Allison Guess is collaborating with members of a large extended family to research one of their ancestors from White Oaks, an erased Black community in western Massachusetts. Guess was named Bowdoin’s Iris W. Davis Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies in June 2023.
Though Black people made up the majority of White Oaks residents in the late 1800s, by the 1940s most were driven out by the Ku Klux Klan and their supporters.
With members of the Titus family, including Solomon Titus Taylor, who would become a research partner for her in the project, Guess helped unearth more evidence about a Titus forefather named Ishmael Titus, who fled the
South and took refuge in White Oaks from the 1820s until his death in 1855.
Taylor grew up hearing stories of family members from his grandfather. As a young man, he became more dedicated to understanding his roots. “I would come home on leave from the marines and would sit down with my grandfather and pick his brain about the elders of his time. And I would document everything,” he said, recalling filling out many of the green stenographer notebooks issued to him in the military.
Titus was born into slavery around 1746 in Virginia. Fighting for one year in the Revolutionary War (in place of his enslaver) earned Ishmael his emancipation, but he voluntarily enlisted for two more years, likely because that was the surest way of avoiding capture and a return to enslavement. Despite his service, he was denied a Revolutionary War pension—repeatedly.
Ishmael’s descendants are working to address this injustice. Just this summer, a new inscription about Ishmael was added to the African American Veterans Monument in Buffalo, New York. “The untold stories that we learn from our ancestors have now come to the forefront,” Taylor said in a news report. This work “opens up more opportunities to tell more stories about African Americans who fought for this country.”
Investigating White Oaks alongside the Titus family is just one of Guess’s projects— she is also involved in a similar exploration of the Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohican Indians—but she said this arm of her research is exciting because “it illuminates a different model for doing research that is Black- and Native-led, descendant-led, and ancestor-led.”
Emily Renoff, a first-year from Glen Ridge, NJ, made a remarkable entrance into Division III women’s golf this fall, delivering one of the best campaigns in Polar Bear history. Her standout performance came at the Williams Invitational on September 28–29 at Taconic Golf Club, where she shot a -3 (68) on Sunday to claim the title. The victory made her the first Bowdoin player to win the prestigious tournament since it began in 1971. Renoff finished the weekend at -3 overall (71-68-139), setting new Bowdoin records for both singleround and tournament scoring.
Left: Painting of Ishmael Titus by Thomas Kelly Pauley
Emily Renoff ’28
Eating Up a New Class
Academics Economics professor Guillermo Herrera explores the role of food as a necessity and a source of happiness and entertainment in his new class, Eatconomics: The Economic Analysis of the Food Industry The course exemplifies how, in two centuries of existence, the economics department has responded to a changing world.
“My class has an environmental angle, so it is cross-listed with environmental studies. But in general, it uses economic tools to investigate an area that is of both commercial and social importance,” Herrera said. The class looks at how climate change is impacting food production and vice-versa, and it examines social justice issues associated with food, including the complex problem of hunger amid plenty. “I am pleased that there seems to be lots of interest and excitement from students,” Herrera said.
The syllabus of Eatconomics brings students on a sweeping journey through food history, starting with hunters and foragers and continuing to shoppers seeking organic, fair-trade, and shadegrown items. Along the way, they learn about water, international trade, food production and distribution, migrant labor, diets, and restaurants. Each subject maps onto economic principles like constrained optimization, asymmetric information, and game theory.
Designing and teaching a new course is satisfying, Herrera said, because it provides an impetus for him to learn about a new area outside of his specialty in fisheries economics. Plus, it’s a chance to include students in shaping the class’s trajectory. “This is a course that will change somewhat in the future,” he said. “The important issues will change, and I will survey my students on what they find interesting.”
Outing Club trips
By the Numbers
Counting on Adventures
Though some first-years might be surprised to start their Bowdoin education outside—camping, backpacking, canoeing, and maybe getting grimy doing something vigorous in nature—the resounding majority end up loving their Orientation Trips. (In a survey, 94 percent agreed or strongly agreed that the trip they took should be offered again.) The trips are new students’ first introduction to Bowdoin, and for many, to Maine. Each of the groups is led by two well-trained upperclass students. Soon after the first-years arrived on campus this year, they split into groups and departed, packed into vans loaded with supplies, including the cheese, tents, and other provisions enumerated here. For those who would prefer a more urban undertaking, the McKeen Center offers trips focused on community service. The Outing Club also has one centered around mindfulness and meditation. Orientation trips started in 1982, when several first-year students and a biology professor traveled to Kent Island to study local ecology. After hearing the students’ enthusiastic reports—and observing their smooth transition into college—Bowdoin established a larger, more ambitious orientation trip program, which has evolved into a proud college tradition.
Student support staff 23
Med kits to keep nicks and scratches clean and bandaged 96
1,008
2
84
Outing Club trip leaders
60
Canoes (this doesn’t include kayaks, rafts, and paddleboards used on other trips)
9
Days of training for trip leaders
Sleeping bags provided 140
Pounds of cheese for lots of cheese dream sandwiches (or grilled cheese sandwiches)
Tents, just in case students don’t want to sleep under the stars
Nights spent in dorms before leaving on trips
Snickers and Twix bars for quick energy
McKeen Center trips
State parks passes purchased
Kent Island trips, for an ecological experience
“I wanted to think about how I could use science to inform policies, and I wasn’t going to study it on my own on the weekend.”
—ROUX
DISTINGUISHED SCHOLAR AYANA JOHNSON, SPEAKING ABOUT DECIDING TO GET A PHD WHEN SHE WASN’T SURE SHE WANTED A CAREER IN ACADEMIA
Presidential
A Rose in Blue
Academics
AT THE FOREFRONT
The economics department celebrated an important birthday this fall: two hundred years of dedicated faculty efforts specifically to economics—one of the first colleges in the country to do so. In her keynote lecture, William D. Shipman Professor of Economics Zorina Khan introduced the audience to Samuel Phillips Newman, a Harvard graduate originally hired to teach classics at Bowdoin but who, in 1824, was appointed the nation’s first professor of political economy, a post he held until 1839. From these beginnings, she said, Bowdoin affiliates helped shape the US economy and were at the forefront of the American take-off in industrial and technological advances. Under Newman’s tenure, she explained, Bowdoin became a prominent place of politicaleconomic thinking. “Even Karl Marx was paying attention,” Khan observed. “In Das Kapital he scathingly derided the ‘childish arguments of modern economists,’ citing Newman’s Elements of Political Economy to prove his point.”
Initially a bit reluctant to embrace the long-standing tradition of sitting for a presidential portrait, former President Clayton Rose eventually acquiesced— with a condition. He wanted something a little different than the conventional representations that hang in Hubbard Hall. Enter Lanie Wurzel, a portrait artist who spent a year at Bowdoin in 1999 absorbing the foundations of painting from A. LeRoy Greason Professor of Art (now emeritus) Mark Wethli before transferring to Brown University. Wurzel also envisioned a departure from the norm and captured the College’s fifteenth president in a decidedly casual pose, hands in pockets and head just slightly tilted, awash in hues of blues and greens against a backdrop of water at the Schiller Coastal Studies Center. At the mid-September unveiling, President Safa Zaki highlighted three of what she called Rose’s most important achievements—his commitment to expanding opportunities for students from all backgrounds, his commitment to the teaching and study of the environment, and his dedication to creating teaching spaces that enhance both. Wurzel spoke of the influence of Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, the artists behind the portraits of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. When Rose had the floor, he praised Wurzel’s artistry and thanked President Zaki for welcoming him back to campus and for the work she is doing to further the mission of the College. “Being part of the Bowdoin community is the privilege of a lifetime,” Rose said, adding that, despite challenges that included stewarding Bowdoin through the height of the pandemic, his eight years in office were among the most important and satisfying of his life.
Above:
Bowdoin’s fifteenth president was on hand in Hubbard Hall to unveil the newest presidential portrait for the College—his own.
WOLF
LARSEN
AND THE CHILD OF WOE
Sarah Ramey ’03, who records as Wolf Larsen, got a call one day saying that a song of hers had been chosen for a scene in the show Wednesday, the big-ratings remake of The Addams Family by Netflix that stars Jenna Ortega. “That was an easy yes,” Ramey says. “But I had no idea what a hit the show was going to be. I’m so lucky I got to be a part of it! I got a DM from Thing saying he liked my song—easily the pinnacle of my career.”
“If I Be Wrong” was featured in episode seven of season one of the series, “If You Don’t Woe Me by Now,” in a very rainy funeral scene. Since then, Ramey has learned of a few more Netflix song placements that will be coming out later this year and next. She’s also releasing a new song later this year herself, for the first time since 2011.
Human Touch
In a world filled with talk of the ways—some of them very real and very handy—that AI can improve your writing, there’s still nothing better than a peer to help.
ELISABETH CHAN ’25
Biochemistry major; visual arts minor
I love helping students gain confidence. Our sessions are collaborative, with my role being to help them organize and express their thoughts while easing stress about writing. I love the variety—I get to explore assignments from so many different courses! But seeing students walk away feeling lighter and ready to take on their essays is even more rewarding. There’s something special about watching that moment when the tension lifts, and they feel more confident in their work.
MICHAEL MARTINEZ ’25
Computer science and education major
I don’t try to “fix” a student’s writing—we want to keep the personal voice and style. I can be an ear that listens, a lasso to wrap ideas together, a teacher to explain a concept, a learner for subjects I don’t know much about, and a peer. When I had my first session, I was surprised at how tired I felt afterward. I didn’t expect the role to be as mentally engaging as it is.
LUISA WOLCOTT-BREEN ’25
Earth and oceanographic science and education major; dance minor
I plan to go into education, so the writing center is really in line with where I am going next. I really enjoy talking with people and collaborating to learn from each other. I work with students in any state of the writing process, especially revisions. I find that a third-person perspective can bring in new questions that further a student’s thinking, and I can offer reflections from a reader’s point of view.
Alumni
Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams
Community
KALEIDOSCOPE
At Homecoming weekend, alumni and students followed Harvestfest with the first Kaleidoscope Celebration and Party. Starting in Mills Hall, the community enjoyed ethnic cuisine and heard from President Zaki, trustee Katie Benner ’99, and Rania Janmohamed ’25 during a celebration of the College’s multicultural community and then ended the night dancing to music from DJ Halcyon in Magee’s Pub.
PHOTO:
The spirit bear on Magee’s Pub wall, bathed in disco lights
Beyond the Bubble
Alumni Nathaniel Herz ’09 is among a handful of journalists recognized for their commitment to local news engagement across the US.
THE NONPROFIT Pulitzer Center, which funds reporting and journalism education globally, has included the history and environmental studies major in the inaugural cohort of its StoryReach US initiative. The new fellowship program is aimed at “investing resources in journalists and local news partners who value centering audiences in their editorial strategies [and who are] dedicated to finding creative ways to engage with readers beyond publication and outside of echo chambers and filter bubbles,” according to a statement from the center.
Writing in his newsletter, Northern Journal, Alaska-based Herz said the award will “largely fund travel and other elements of a project looking at access to commercial fisheries across coastal Alaska.”
Much of his current reporting, he said, focuses on looking at the ongoing impact of the privatization of some of the state’s most lucrative fisheries, including salmon, halibut, and black cod.
Creatures
CRUSHING IT
The Schiller Coastal Studies Center has 118 acres of coastal spruce-pine forest and fields, two-and-a-half miles of rocky shoreline, and one irascible lobster, lovingly called Larry.
Usually quite docile, he has recently taken to “lunging with both of his front claws,” said Heidi Franklin, research and instrument support technician and Larry’s caretaker at Schiller, who also reports that Larry routinely knocks over the warning signs placed near his tray.
Larry was perhaps at first an unwilling denizen—bycatch, as it’s called, unintentionally ensnared in a trap for invasive green crabs five years ago. Since that time, he has grown on folks, and his own growth has made him a bit of a marvel. His first molt, believed to have occurred when he was two years old, is on display near his tray and serves as a graphic depiction of just how large lobsters can become, especially when hand-fed a daily diet of mussels. Larry puts on quite a display at feeding time, cracking mussel shells with his crusher claw, but the star also exhibits some diva behavior. “I personally think Larry is very sassy and spoiled,” said student researcher Danny Lee ’25, tongue in cheek. “He refuses to eat anything but mussels, worms, and bait fish. I found several scientific papers citing that rock crabs are great for lobsters’ general health, so I caught some off the dock to feed him. However, every attempt would ultimately lead to Larry pushing the crab to the side and not eating it. He does not know what’s good for him.” Despite the discerning palate, Larry has proven himself good for morale at the center, even if his love is a little hard to handle.
Larry the Lobster
Nat Herz ’09 stands above the bridge on a commercial salmon fishing vessel in Old Harbor, a village on Kodiak Island, Alaska.
Internships
From Waste, Wildflowers
As part of her environmental studies internship this summer with the town of Topsham, Issie Gale ’25 took a tour of its solid waste facility with two other Bowdoin interns. Gale recalled that facility director Ed Caron described the establishment as “anything but a dump.”
Besides having world-class recycling capabilities, Topsham’s transfer station includes walking trails, fishponds, and a bike course. Caron asked the students what else they could imagine creating there.
Gale, who uses they/them pronouns, thought the closed landfills at the site—now beautiful grassy fields—had potential. They considered establishing a beekeeping operation or community garden but ditched those plans after learning that PFAS chemicals in the landfills could contaminate honey and vegetables. Gale also investigated building a solar farm. But then they learned about pollinator gardens at two other Maine transfer stations. Gale spent the remaining days of the internship researching how Topsham could convert its acres of landfills into wildflower-filled meadows that support critical pollinator insects. At the end of their internship, they presented a proposal to the town’s selectboard.
Topsham planner Josh Franklin said the town is excited by the plan. “We are pushing to turn Issie’s idea into a reality,” he said.
Alumni
A Storied Life
Barclay Shepard, Bowdoin Class of 1950, is presented with Boothbay Harbor’s Boston Post Cane, an honor bestowed on the town’s most senior resident.
THE TRADITION of the cane, which is ebony with a gold head, is even older than the ninety-eight-year-old retired surgeon who received it. It goes back to 1909, when a number of towns across New England were given the ceremonial cane by the Boston Post newspaper, to be presented to the communities’ oldest citizens. Shepard said he was pleasantly surprised to receive the cane in August, when town officials and family members gathered to make the presentation and celebrate his achievements. Among the group was Boston Cane curator and Bowdoin student Grace Campbell ’27.
Born in Boothbay Harbor, Shepard spent most of his childhood in Istanbul, Turkey, where his father was founder and longtime director of American Hospital. Returning to the US to study first at Deerfield and then go on to graduate from Maine Maritime Academy, he decided to go to Bowdoin when the war had ended and the US Navy was downsizing.
Shepard has lived an interesting life, including spending a year at sea as third mate on a merchant vessel and three years teaching English in Turkey, where he and his wife, Martha, whom he had met during his years at Bowdoin, moved in the early 1950s. Once he decided to follow in the family tradition of medicine, he took courses first at Harvard and then
enrolled in medical school at Tufts. For twenty-two years, he was a US Navy surgeon, specializing in thoracic surgery and serving on a hospital ship during the Vietnam War, where he treated battle wounds and at one point even performed open-heart surgery. After leaving the Navy, Shepard went on to work for the VA before retiring to Boothbay Harbor. His contributions to the local community include volunteering with the Woodchucks, a group that prepares and provides free firewood to local residents. The chainsaw-wielding doctor could still be found cutting up logs well into his nineties.
Barclay Shepard ’50 at sea
A Long Hike on the Shortest Day
Marine scientist and avid skier John Bohorquez ’13 recounts the challenge—and beauty—of a fourteen-mile trek in Maine’s Bigelow Range on the winter solstice.
WE BARRELED DOWN the unplowed, frozen road at dawn. Ivory white—no one had been down it since a storm had dropped a blanket of snow just a couple of days before.
I pulled the car into the parking area at the trailhead and turned off the engine. We sat inside in the quiet. It was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, and my brother and I were making our first winter ascent of a 4,000-foot peak in the mountains of western Maine.
I’d hiked Bigelow in the fall and summer, but in winter had only gazed at it across Carrabassett Valley during trips to ski Sugarloaf. I bought microspikes for my brother and ritualistically followed the weather. There had been a washout, followed by a few days of dry air and then a snowstorm just before our drive north from New York for Christmas—enough to freshen things up and cushion our footing, but not so much to make the road inaccessible for our Subaru. My brother and I filled our day packs with smoked salmon, a bag of cranberries, and enough warm water poured into our Nalgene bottles to last the day.
The first leg was the three-mile trek to the foot of the mountain. The snow was like something from a Bing Crosby movie. Flurries sprinkled down from the trees above and exploded like glitter bombs when they met the rays of the rising sun. We were walking on cotton candy.
A mile or two in, we hung a right at the fork to keep to the Fire Warden’s Trail. There were some inclines after that. But the trail was clear under the powder.
From the Moose Falls campsite it’s a steep series of stone steps to the Bigelow Col. The snow quickly deepened. There was ice. We strapped our spikes onto our boots and readied the rest of our gear: ski poles that stood in for
proper trekking poles and, even more clumsy looking, ski helmets and goggles that could make the difference between a sore noggin and a trip to the hospital in the event of a fall. We looked like idiots, but we were capable idiots.
At the intersection with the Appalachian Trail on top of the ridge, we found a tent platform where there were fresh moose tracks, no more than a few hours old. We shoveled some smoked salmon into our mouths and replaced our fleece liners with heavy snow gloves to begin the ascent up Avery, one of the twin peaks crowned with snowfields.
The way up is longer and more treacherous than it looks from the col. The trail narrows quickly; filled with loose rocks with deep holes in between, we found ourselves using our hands to grab icy rocks and trees. The snow became deeper, the drifts nearly waist-high. Soon the reality of the weather day was upon us.
We’d been protected from heavy winds for most of the day by the southern slope of the mountain. Once we crested the tree line and got our first exposure to the northern sky, the wind hit us like a freight train with an audible roar to match . Our faces numbed quickly as we admired our surroundings.
Avery is the most majestic peak in the Bigelow Preserve, and one of the most scenic in Maine. I unpacked my camera and started shooting. My brother pointed out a cloud in the distance. I took a few more photos, including one of my brother as he mustered a frozen smile to yell through the wind, “Winter hiking is fun!”
I bent down to pack my camera. By the time I lifted my head, the sun was gone. The cloud in the distance had quickly grown, and a dense cloud of heavy snow had covered us faster than any fog bank I’d ever encountered.
We took our spikes off so we could make faster progress on the way down but paid for it below the tree line where the snow covered ice. We slid a lot, and more than one tree branch saved me from bouncing down the rocks.
Back in the col, we had a decision to make. Back down the Fire Warden’s Trail to the parking lot? Ascend West Peak and turn back there?
Or we could take the full loop over West Peak, along the Ridgeline, over The Horns, down into Cranberry Pond, and back to the trailhead from there. Fourteen miles.
We chose the full loop.
“I figured we’d end up going the long way,” my brother said as he slung his pack over his shoulders.
As we ascended the eastern slope of West Peak, we came across a stretch of forest where the wind hadn’t blown and the snow lay settled. A tunnel of spruce standing like marble statues in a museum looked like they had been holding their poses for millennia.
The moment was quickly broken as we crested the ridge, hammered again by the northwest wind. From here, the highest point, we could see the Bigelow Range from end to end. In summer, the landscape can seem tranquil, even idyllic. Yet this terrain was the setting for one of the harshest wilderness expeditions in American history.
The British occupied Quebec in the years leading up to the American Revolution.
Benedict Arnold attempted to conquer the territory via a military campaign beginning in September 1775. Over the subsequent months, he and over 1,000 soldiers attempted to navigate up the Kennebec and Dead Rivers, over the Western Maine mountains, and down toward the St. Lawrence River, where they would lay siege on the Canadian city. But the colonists still considered the territory a true frontier then, little known and poorly mapped.
Arnold and his company learned the hard way that the distance was twice what they thought, and the conditions much more difficult. Half the soldiers starved to death or abandoned the campaign. Driven by desperation, Major Timothy Bigelow climbed the mountain that rose above their camp to survey the land and see if he could see the city of Quebec in the distance. (If the current view is any indication ,
A tunnel of spruce standing like marble statues in a museum looked like they had been holding their poses for millennia.
he was disappointed.) The mountain was named for Bigelow, but many of the survivors were either killed or captured in the subsequent failed invasion.
We did not linger to consider the mountain’s past for long and headed across the ridgeline toward The Horns, beyond which the mountain abruptly descends into Cranberry Pond. We kept our ice spikes on, leaning at a hard angle to counter the wind, and descended into the trees. From Sugarloaf, the ridgeline looks like a flat break between arduous peaks. It’s a cool stretch of
trail on a summer day, shaded by pines. In winter, it was a divine length of undisturbed snow.
We descended to Cranberry Pond. About a quarter mile past the campsite, we left the Appalachian Trail to return to the trailhead. The biting winds of the higher elevations were long behind, now just a heavy whisper coming over the peaks. The evergreens were replaced by birch, and the sun was setting behind the shoulder of the Crocker Mountains. We stopped periodically to watch the changing light, the last rays streaming between tree trunks and forest floor. The last
few miles were as mellow as they had been when we began. The silhouette of the Subaru came into view, still alone in the parking lot, as the stars began to glow above us. The North Pole had tilted as far away from the sun as it would do in any year, and my brother and I had hiked fourteen winter miles together. The solstice set in.
John Bohorquez ’13 is a marine conservation specialist, third-generation Sugarloafer, and former member of the Bowdoin alpine ski team. He lives in Colombia, South America.
PHOTO: JOHN BOHORQUEZ ’13
West Peak summit sign, Avery Peak and Little Bigelow in the distance. Bigelow Preserve, Eustis.
Toby Kiers ’98 digs deep to map the global fungal diversity that’s critical to life on Earth and measure the complex interactions between plants and their underground symbionts.
BY PAUL TULLIS
ILLUSTRATIONS
BY SARAH SAMPSON
Opening spread: Kiers casts off extra soil from a sample in the Gobi Desert, Mongolia. To determine which fungi live where, SPUN takes soil samples in a particular location and then extracts the environmental DNA collected from the soil.
Mushrooms (Panaeolus) emerging from belowground mycelium in Tierra del Fuego, Chile.
Kiers and Chilean mycologist Giuliana Furci measure out a sampling grid in Tierra del Fuego, Chile.
Mycelium revealed under leaf litter in the Apennine Mountains, Italy.
The video shows what looks like a close-up of veins or arteries—something carrying blood— or maybe a computer simulation of bad highway traffic. There’s a lot of red. The strands form a rough triangle, and the red patches move along the sides of the triangle—now speeding, now slowing. It looks pretty normal for something organic and alive.
But then the red patches in the strand on the right behave unlike either blood in a body or cars on a highway: They suddenly reverse direction. They were going down; now they quickly travel upward. Then they reverse direction again.
The video is part of Toby Kiers’s 2020 TED Talk and comes from a paper published the previous year in Current Biology—one of the most
influential peer-reviewed scientific journals— that came out of her lab at the Free University of Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit). The strands are half a millimeter or so of a mycorrhizal network, systems of fungi that make associations with plants, often connecting roots underground. It is no exaggeration to say that they underpin all life on Earth. Using high-resolution cameras, Kiers’s team showed how these fungi move resources across their networks to their host plants according to cues received. It was a groundbreaking demonstration of the complexity of mutualism and symbiosis among species, bolstering recent developments showing how life on Earth is interconnected and interdependent and establishing that a species without a brain has evolved “trading strategies” on par
From left:
with sophisticated market economics in order to maximize its resources and get by with providing as little as possible to its trading partners.
“You’re watching them calculate and make decisions,” Kiers tells me with excitement in her apartment on the top floor of a nineteenthcentury tenement building in Amsterdam, just outside the canal ring. Collecting samples for her studies has taken Kiers to some of the most remote places on Earth, from the Gobi Desert to the South Pacific to the rainforests of Ecuador. “It’s like studying a primate, [because] you can watch its behavior in real time and you can do all these things to it, and it reacts. We’re trying to understand how fungi regulate those flows and how they use that to process information about their environment.”
This might sound like the acute, immaterial inquiries of an obscure corner of biology. Far from it. Fungal-plant symbiosis has existed for 450 million years; the two evolved together, each providing the other with something it could not produce itself but needed to survive. Between 70 and 90 percent of all plant species are now interacting with mycorrhizal fungi, making the symbiosis among the planet’s most ubiquitous, and underlying the food webs that are the basis for much of the planet’s life. Largely invisible—when we hear “fungi,” we think “mushrooms,” but mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of these organisms, and the majority of fungal species do not produce them—they are essential ecosystem engineers comprising up to 30 percent of soil; if all the
mycorrhizal fungi in just the top ten centimeters of soil worldwide were laid end to end, they would stretch half the width of our galaxy. They have evolved the capability to reshape themselves as needed, foraging for nutrients essential to plants—up to 80 percent of the phosphorus in plants goes through fungal networks—which they deliver to the plants in exchange for carbon. This they deploy to build their networks, which then act as a scaffolding, holding soil together, fighting erosion, and retaining water. The carbon they contain and transport adds up to about 75 percent of all the carbon in the ground—far more than is aboveground in all the rainforests in all the world—making soils an essential carbon sink without which the planet would heat to unthinkable levels. “It’s just a
major component of the carbon cycle that had been ignored,” Kiers says, until she and colleagues quantified it in a second paper for Current Biology, published in 2023.
Since around the turn of the century, the field of biology has undergone a revolution as scientists learn more and more about the relationships between species—how they influence and interact with one another—and study these relationships per se, instead of just looking at a plant, animal, or microbial species independently. One of the sparks that ignited this fire was a paper concerning mycorrhizal fungi published in 1997, when Kiers was about to embark on a semester at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama during a gap year from Bowdoin. But she hadn’t heard of the paper when she decided, at nineteen, to try to find out whether certain tropical trees on the institute grounds preferred their own soils (and, by extension, their own fungi) or whether they grew just as well with soil and fungi that had developed beneath a different species of tree. The result: There’s no place like home. The research she conducted in Panama was accepted for publication a few months after Kiers graduated from Bowdoin in 1999.
“That everything in ecology is happening as species are interacting with one another—Toby recognized that really early,” says Zoe Cardon, senior scientist with the University of Chicago’s Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts and onetime assistant biology professor at Bowdoin. In the time they overlapped at the College, Cardon encouraged Kiers to take a year off and recommended the Smithsonian internship to her. “I could see she had the potential and the initiative—the drive—to really be able to make the most of opportunities that might
be overwhelming to other people,” Cardon says. “You really got the sense that this was someone who was going to try very hard in their life to make a difference.”
MANY ARE the parents of adult children who have said that the character, accomplishments, or interests of their offspring could be gleaned very early. Soil scientist Kiers would seem to have been one of those children. “I was a very dirty kid,” she says, describing how she vehemently spurned shoes from an early age. Often playing in the woods that bordered her home in northwest Connecticut, she and her sister became adept at hunting morels, the mushroom with a cap resembling a brain that is treasured by chefs. After a semester at the Mountain School in Vermont, Kiers graduated (barefoot) from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in 1994 and started at Bowdoin the following fall.
The College supported her interests, she found, even if they weren’t widely shared. “It was very open,” she says, to unorthodox scholarly pursuits. “We did an independent study on homesteading in Maine,” which has long been a refuge for people who want to live off the land. “There were lots of outdoor programs. I wanted to open a toothbrush factory; I wanted to be a sheep farmer. I made a canoe!”
Classroom work, however, she found less thrilling. For someone interested in biology, that’s going to be frustrating, just because of the sheer volume of basic knowledge that must be acquired before one can literally get their hands dirty. “It’s a lot of lab work to be able to get a chance to go out into the field,” she says. Fortunately for mycology, Cardon’s year at the College coincided with Kiers signing up for
botany. “Toby was always asking good questions, very curious about the material and not just memorizing stuff,” Cardon recalls. But she could sense Kiers’s frustration with being stuck in the classroom, and she connected her with a colleague at the Smithsonian research station.
The institute maintains an island in the middle of the Panama Canal to study tropical forests as they existed before they were disturbed much by human presence. Of all terrestrial ecosystems, the tropical forest ecosystem hosts the greatest species diversity, but for all the bats, cats, birds, and trees that could be seen as she wandered through the dank terrain—as Kiers had explored the Connecticut woods by her home a decade earlier—it was the ground beneath her feet that captured her fascination.
“I was struck by the fact that there are these immensely diverse tropical ecosystems, and nobody was paying attention to what was happening under them,” Kiers recalls. Her supervisors at the institute encouraged her to develop her own research focus, and she decided to look at the fungi in the soils that formed the literal base of all the island’s biodiversity. Fungus was still a largely unexplored domain.
“When I started in this field, it was sort of like, ‘What are they doing? Are they parasites?’” Kiers says. “Fungus still was kind of considered a pathogen. I mean, when you see something that’s penetrating into a cell, it’s not usually a good sign.”
Once she took a look at her research samples, she was hooked. “I think that what blew my mind is you could see them inside the root,” Kiers recalls. “I was really always into dirt, but I don’t think I thought of it intellectually until I went to Panama. You see these beautiful filament structures that are penetrating through the
roots, and they make these structures that look like little mini trees inside the cells, which are the sites of nutrient transfer, and that was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen under the microscope.”
After graduating from Bowdoin, Kiers embarked on a PhD path at the University of California, Davis—one of the top universities in the world for studying ecology and evolutionary biology. She became interested in the idea of cheating in nature and wrote her thesis on the give-and-take between partners in symbiotic relationships. Transactional relationships had been observed in nonhuman primates— chimps, bonobos, and gorillas trade grooming for food, and when food availability rises, less is required to “purchase” the same amount of grooming—but similar practices had never been established in organisms without a brain. “I’d read many of those biological market theory papers and wanted to try establishing that in the plant-mycorrhizal system,” Kiers says. She designed an experiment to determine whether a plant with multiple colonies, which themselves have multiple colonizers, could sense whether certain partners were taking more resources and, if so, what, if anything, it would do about it. Kiers describes the essential question as, “Even if they don’t have cognition, can organisms sense and evaluate how good you are?” She found that fungi that were receiving carbon without delivering nitrogen in return were cut off: “When you have these two sides and they’ve each got multiple partnerships, you’ve got potential to trade with different partners so more of these market dynamics emerge.” The dissertation—drawing on lab work conducted in part at Bowdoin–—was published in Nature in 2003; in the scientific world, this would
be akin to a debut novel being nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
At UC–Davis, Kiers began a relationship with a student in international development who is half Dutch, and as they neared the end of their studies, he encouraged her to apply for a grant from the Dutch Science Foundation so they could live together in the Netherlands. Later, they wed, and she accepted an offer from Free University. The years since have seen a whirlwind of research expeditions: Corsica. Mongolia. Kazakhstan. Lesotho. “She’s like a tornado swallowing everything and integrating things, really crossing borders of disciplines very often, which is remarkable,” says Jan Jansa, group leader at the Institute for Microbiology at the Czech Academy of Science and a research partner of Kiers’s. Even on a paper with more than a dozen coauthors, says Jansa, “everyone has to contribute, which is really important and not that common. It tells something about her integrity and fairness. She’s not publishing hundreds of papers, but every one is a jewel.”
Much of the travel Kiers undertakes is to document the biodiversity of mycorrhizal networks while there’s still time. Deforestation, agriculture, and urbanization are destroying these networks before scientists can race to document them, or fully understand their significance. Cutting trees removes mycorrhizal network partners. Concrete severs their connections. Tilling introduces selection pressure for fast-growing fungi that don’t produce long-lived networks. This is doubly damaging because the mycorrhizal networks protect nutrients that crops need. Synthetic fertilizers, moreover, provide crops with what they had been getting from the fungi, enabling the plants—just as Kiers had shown in her PhD dissertation—to cut off the fungi’s
carbon supply, dooming them to an early death. “What we’re worried about is the loss of unique communities associated with different ecosystem types,” Kiers says.
In 2023, Kiers was awarded the Spinoza Prize, sometimes referred to as the Dutch Nobel. The prize money will help her further develop, in concert with biophysicists at the Fundamental Research on Matter Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (known by its initials in Dutch, AMOLF), part of the Dutch government’s research council, an imaging robot to see how fungal networks change in response to different induced scenarios. She compares it to Google Maps for microbes: “You can see all the road systems, then you can zoom in and you can look at the traffic patterns inside the network.” When two streams were observed moving in opposite directions simultaneously inside the same tube, she says, the biophysicists were flummoxed. “They were like, ‘We have no idea how this is happening,’” Kiers recalls.
Machine learning is speeding these efforts. With 25,000 soil samples collected from around the world, a model is fed hundreds of geographic information system layers, such as temperature, altitude, and precipitation to predict where biodiverse fungal communities can be found. It turns out the biodiverse communities belowground can be inversely correlated with species diversity above. “That’s what surprised us,” Kiers says. “The very rich places can be in almost any ecosystem.” Considering the enormous role these fungi have in sequestering carbon that Kiers established last year, the results could have huge implications for the global climate: “Can you use these maps to identify carbon drawdown hot spots? And can you protect those the way that we’re protecting
From left:
As desertification across the region increases, SPUN traveled to Mongolia to look at how desertification is affecting mycorrhizal biodiversity. Here, Kiers uses a soil core to collect fungi in the Gobi Desert.
Kiers and biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World, Merlin Sheldrake, atop a peak in Yendegaia National Park, Tierra del Fuego, Chile.
An unknown mushroom found during an expedition in Kakum National Park, Ghana. SPUN sampled coastal and rainforest ecosystems, which are predicted to contain some of the most biodiverse communities of underground fungi on earth.
the Amazon? What would it look like to manage an ecosystem for fungal biodiversity?”
Kiers’s career has provided what she longed for back at Bowdoin, when she itched to get into the field, but collecting the samples necessary for her research can be perilous. At the Palmyra Atoll, she waded among reef sharks and endured crabs that steal equipment and leeches that attach to your eyes. It’s one of the most remote patches of land in the world—in the event of an injury, no help can reach you for seventy-two hours. In Corsica she needed to lug coolers full of dry ice into the field.
But perhaps the biggest challenge has been to advance her work while maintaining a family. “It’s just very hard to be a field biologist with kids,” she says. So she and her husband, who has
a somewhat portable career as a poet and IT professional, decided to just bring them along. Either that or she would need to be away from her family for weeks at a time, several times a year—a compromise she found unacceptable.
“It was both necessity, and then also: Is there a way to make it work? Is there a way to not be shy or somehow apologetic about it?” Initially, Kiers felt she needed to justify her children’s presence to the other scientists in order to overcome their apprehension that it would impede their work. But, considering the high rates of women dropping out of scientific professions after motherhood, she was determined to normalize the practice. Colleagues have become more welcoming; her children’s schools are less enthusiastic, however, about their being out of class for long
periods. (Their grandparents, Kiers says, “are in a place of acceptance.”) She wrote about her “act of academic defiance” for The New York Times.
In 2021, Kiers and her colleagues launched the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks [SPUN] to expand Kiers’s mapping efforts and to advocate for fungal conservation. “One of the reasons that I started SPUN was frustration that scientists have been sounding the alarm on the destruction of underground ecosystems, and no one was listening,” Kiers says. The alarms had come in the form of academic research that wasn’t making its way into public awareness. “It’s hard to talk about those data with journalists or with policymakers because they want a very simple take-home message,” Kiers says. But the comfort with uncertainty that scientific
rigor requires isn’t widely shared outside the world of science. This has been the challenge facing climate scientists as well. “And so how do you distill that message while still staying true to the rigor of the science that you believe in?
I think that’s the most difficult part,” says Kiers. “But I really felt that it was important to try to move between those two worlds.”
There remains much to determine. The currency used in the market transactions of nutrients for carbon—could it be chemical signals?—is still unknown more than ten years after Kiers first established their existence in 2011. But the fascination, and the urgency, drives her on, any eyeball leeches be damned.
“What’s so interesting about working with this particular symbiosis is that it affects climate,
it affects agriculture, it affects restoration— and that’s mostly because of its ubiquity. If we really care about the Earth’s diversity, the places that house really important hot spots of underground biodiversity are not currently being protected. And we don’t even, in many cases, know where they are.”
Paul Tullis is an Amsterdam-based freelancer whose work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, NYT Magazine, Businessweek, Scientific American, Nature, Wired, and others.
Sarah Sampson is a hand-lettering designer and illustrator who serves as senior designer at 2communiqué. She earned her BFA in graphic design at The College of Saint Rose.
Watson fellows are expected to make connections and be resourceful, independent, and bold—and they do, and they are. But they are also told to expect ups and downs and that they might even fail. The achievements, the challenges, and most of all the uncertainty, make for lessons of a lifetime.
IN EARLY AUGUST, a group of travelers flew into Portland, Maine, from destinations around the world. Jet-lagged and toting worn luggage, they found their way to Bowdoin’s campus. They were returning Watson fellows, recipients of one of the most unique and potentially life-changing fellowships available to recent college graduates. Each year, forty or so intrepid seniors from forty-one partner institutions, including Bowdoin, are awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. They receive $40,000 and one instruction: they must travel outside the United States for one year exploring the project they described in their proposal.
When the year is done, the Watson Foundation calls back its fellows, bringing them together for four days on a college campus in the US. For the past two years, this conference has been held at Bowdoin. The gathering gives fellows a chance to share their stories and reflect with people who can best understand the inspiring, eye-opening, frustrating, empowering, and sometimes lonely experience they’ve just undertaken “to engage their deepest interests on a global scale,” as President Safa Zaki put it when she spoke to them.
Chris Kasabach, the executive director of the Watson Foundation and a former Watson fellow himself, says the conference helps fellows make sense of their voyages and begin the process of “bridging” their year of travel to their next steps. “We want to acknowledge the distance traveled personally, professionally, and culturally,” he said. “We also want the fellows to know that the Watson hasn’t ended, it’s just begun—all the confidence and perspective they’ve developed is a renewable resource they can carry into their next opportunities.”
As the cohort of explorers converged on campus, I wanted to hear more about this renewable resource and learn how a Watson year impacts the transition between classroom and career. What happens to young adults after twelve months of roaming the world, pursuing an itinerary based on pure curiosity and a dab of idealism? How does that experience reverberate as time passes?
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
In conversations with almost a dozen Watson fellows from Bowdoin who graduated between 1975 and 2023, it is immediately obvious how different each Watson fellowship year is. Their research topics are diverse, the approaches to exploring these topics vary widely, and the countries traversed are literally all over the map. But some basic commonalities emerge from the many threads of their itinerant narratives all the same.
Clara Benadon ’23 put her finger on one. During her year abroad, she studied climate change and the fiber industries of Scotland, Norway, the Faroe Islands, Argentina, Portugal, and New Zealand. When we spoke, she had just flown in from New Zealand to attend the returning fellows conference. Asked about a theme that runs through the Watson program, she said, “I think it would be connection. I had to be more intentional about connecting each time I landed in a new place.” Though she admitted this never ceased to be daunting, she said she always succeeded in finding people to talk with, to befriend, and to help her make progress on her project.
The Watson fellowship is unique because it asks young people to take on the role of the stranger, not just once but over and over again. As soon as they get comfortable living in a village in Indonesia, or they make friends with a rugby team in Calcutta, they might need to depart. They develop strategies to cope with repeatedly being in this position, and as the year progresses, they become more adept at making new and varied connections.
Plus, the essential nature of the program— unstructured, free, unfettered from requirements to earn money or credits toward a graduate degree—opens fellows up to the unexpected. Though they follow an overarching trajectory of their own devising, they are really questing for months on end. While their objective is somewhat concrete (they have submitted a written proposal with a goal, after all), it is also abstract and internal, since it is just knowledge and self-knowledge they’re seeking.
Kasabach says this is purposeful: “The reason it is so important for us not to require
an end product is because even very wellconceived projects change when you engage with others in another culture,” he said. “We want them to remain explorative, curious, and open to reframing their project and questions.” This puts fellows in an ideal place to form relationships with people who are very different from them and to take the risk of initiating connections and conversations with uncertain outcomes.
As former Watson fellows described their journeys, several brought up anecdotes about meeting someone along the way and having a discussion that so burrowed into them that many years later they could still recall it. For some, these encounters elucidated larger themes about what they gained from their trip. For others, the interactions created a moment when their ideas about themselves and the year they had planned suddenly shifted.
THE WATSON FELLOWSHIP IS UNIQUE BECAUSE IT ASKS YOUNG PEOPLE TO TAKE ON THE ROLE OF THE STRANGER, NOT JUST ONCE BUT OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
“I WANT TO LEAD A LIFE LIKE A WATSON FELLOW—TO BE EXCITED, TO PIVOT, TO TRAVEL, AND TO TRANSITION TO SOMETHING NEW THAT ALIGNS WITH MY GOALS AND VALUES.”
—MARY
Connecting with others along their journeys means fellows must take risks, confront new ideas, experiment with different tactics to approach and relate to others, and brace themselves to be disappointed or discombobulated at times, as well as delighted or comforted. To talk with someone, especially a person who doesn’t know you or quite understand what you’re up to, requires focused engagement, self-knowledge, solidarity, and trust—and in turn becomes a wellspring for deepening that engagement, self-knowledge, solidarity, and trust.
Hailey Wozniak ’20—a film and TV assistant for a small entertainment firm in Los Angeles— traveled to Argentina, France, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Korea, India, and Turkey to study “how people cultivate their identities, react to their environments, and break boundaries through fashion.” She reflects that she rarely regretted the decision “to ask someone a question, even something as benign as directions,” she said, “because often that direction would come with a little tip or hint, and that is something you will never get with technology. That is why the Watson will always exist.”
STREET TALK
Brandon Morande ’19 traveled to London, Cardiff, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Auckland, and Santiago to study the ways people experiencing homelessness support one another. “I have a family history and personal history with homelessness and housing insecurity, so that is what motivated it on a personal level,” he said.
When he left on his journey, he was determined “to get a sense of how peers create spaces that allow people to fight the isolation, loneliness, and stigma of living on the street.” He watched the World Homeless Cup in Wales and hung out in a café in Auckland that employed unsheltered people. “I was interested in how these peer-led groups allowed people to occupy spaces they might otherwise be excluded from—whether it is sports, journalism, or art—and to tell a different story about who they are and what they are doing.”
Though energized by his subject and buoyed by traveling, Morande hit a wall after a few months on the road. He remembers shivering in the cold and dark of wintertime Copenhagen, discouraged by the language barrier—many of the city’s homeless were immigrants who didn’t speak English. “I was struggling to do my project and struggling to be motivated to get on the streets and speak with people,” he said.
One day he ran into an older man living near the train station, panhandling and playing music. He was an immigrant who spoke English, and the two began talking, initially about the man’s life. Then Morande remembers letting the conversation flow in a new direction. “At that moment, I was looking for support and for someone to talk with,” he said. “It became a space for me to express how I was feeling. It was a space where we were able to share.” In the relief that followed, Morande said he realized, “I need to do more to allow two-way relationships. It became obvious to me that I also needed support and community, which is what the project was about!”
As the year went on, Morande said he strengthened his skills at both listening and sharing a “piece of himself” with others. “That is something I grew to be able to do, which definitely helped in speaking with strangers in spaces I wasn’t familiar with,” he said. When he returned to the states, Morande got a job with a street outreach program in North Carolina. Today he’s pursuing his PhD in sociology at the University of Washington, with the goal of one day teaching and producing public scholarship that helps shape policies and programs to help those who are homeless.
ME, HAVING CONVERSATIONS
Two months into her trip, Mary Nzeyimana ’22 described a moment of catharsis following a low period—and a conversation. After she had spent time in Tanzania, she traveled to South Africa to volunteer with Arise, an NPO that works with children, parents, and caregivers to provide support and be a place for children to feel safe, loved, and find a sense of belonging. Nzeyimana was born in wartime Burundi and grew up in a refugee camp in East Africa. She immigrated to the United States with her mother when she was eleven years old and, because her English was stronger than her mother’s, took on much of the responsibility of managing the household. Despite maturing at Bowdoin, she said there was still a part of her that was “closed off” as she set out on her Watson. “I was not adventurous; I was very timid and not comfortable within myself.”
One day in South Africa, she was having “a rough day,” she said, and broke down in tears. The two women directors of the program asked her to tell them what was wrong. “One had this aura of, ‘Speak to me.’ They were very inviting. So I said, ‘This is my life story,’” she explained. “Speaking to them was lovely.”
Something then worked free inside of her, she said. “I came to a space of acceptance.” She felt her resentment about her upbringing begin to dissipate, replaced with compassion. This unburdening continued as she carried on traveling. “The Watson allowed me to build my relationship with my mom, and coming back, I was so happy to see her. Our relationship
post-Watson has been the best it’s ever been,” she said.
As Nzeyimana spoke about her time in Tanzania, South Africa, India, Thailand, England, Scotland, and Sweden exploring women caregivers, and eventually men caregivers as well, she described a continual process of becoming freer and braver.
The first thing that happened to her, in Africa, was an unloosing of the daily stress of racism. She can speak Swahili, so in Tanzania she was not considered so much of an outsider. She also began to release herself from the strain of achieving, a weight she had lived with for years and which only grew heavier at Bowdoin.
“The Watson gave me the space to breathe,” she said, “where all I had to do was exist.” The only thing being asked of her was to talk to people. “Me, having conversations, that was it—that was me doing my project. That was so freeing. I didn’t feel pressure to produce, and once I realized that, it took off from there.”
She went on adventures in the jungle and in the mountains, sleeping in villages where she knew no one. She toured temples, signed up for paragliding and skydiving, and ate adventurously. She initiated conversations everywhere she went. She even met her life partner during her Watson year.
Today she is a clinical research coordinator in Boston working on studies for older Black adults with chronic pain. After her Watson year, she said she no longer wants to be a doctor; instead, she wants to work in public health.
“I want to lead a life like a Watson fellow—to be excited, to pivot, to travel, and to transition to something new that aligns with my goals and values,” she said.
DOESN’T NEED TO BE THIS DEEP THING
Nzeyimana is quick to point out that Watson encounters can happen with the lightest of touches. “There are many different ways we can connect to people, and it doesn’t need to be this deep thing,” she explained. Sometimes she stopped people on the street to tell them she liked their dress or to ask what was happening
across the road. “I used anything to connect with people, even just that we’re in the same physical space, like a café, or we’re connecting being women, or foreigners, or having moms.”
As Emily Oleisky ’20 journeyed from country to country, she found that her Watson topic made an easy opener. Now in medical school, she focused on studying how people in Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico, Italy, Switzerland, Turkey, and Israel think about health and the ways they practice well-being in nonclinical settings.
“Everyone has some definition of health or wellness in their own life,” she said. “That is a topic you can connect with someone over no matter where you hail from. That was a beautiful part of the project.”
Rodrigo Bijou ’14 won a Watson to explore a subject that perhaps knits the world together like no other—hacking. He set out to research “marginalized and powerful online communities” that are practicing post-national forms of power. In just a few months, he became enough of an expert to give a TED talk in London on borderless cyber warfare. Today he is a security engineer with a tech company in San Francisco.
“The title of my project was ‘Trust in Technology,’” he said. He traveled to Buenos Aires, London, Bangkok, and Singapore, and in each place had to figure out how to earn some trust with secretive groups. It didn’t help that his apparent lack of a motive or agenda was viewed with suspicion.
“As an American, it is immediately assumed you are part of the CIA, especially me, as it appeared I was pretending to be on a strange fellowship from a foreign country,” he said. “It was for a lot of people a huge turnoff and an immediate reason not to trust me, so I had to demonstrate value through technical competence and find ways of being useful without being too political, mercenary, and commercial.” His solution? “Going over data breaches together in a bar was a very nerdy and good way to ingratiate myself.”
Today he’s still good friends with people he met on his travels. Many of them he initially reached out to online and then earned their faith face-to-face. “I’d message them on the internet and then meet them in a bar. It was ‘trust in the world’ a little bit.”
Wozniak said one of the high points of her Watson year happened at the Cannes Film Festival. After being awarded a special pass for young filmmakers, she readied herself “for two weeks of running into people and making connections.” With some research and forethought, she managed to intercept a producer on his way to his film premiere and established enough of a connection to get a temporary job in his production company in Italy.
“That is the way the Watson and being fearless can bring you places,” she said. As she figured out how to communicate with people around the world, she found being overly friendly didn’t always work as well as simple straightforwardness.
Phui Yi Kong ’15 also said that simplifying her intentions worked best. She spent her year in Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Australia, studying how martial arts, physical theater, and somatic psychotherapy can spur people to civic action. “People often didn’t understand my project when I tried to explain it in its entirety, so I made it straightforward. I would say, ‘I want to be a student in your class, or I want to participate in your practice.’ And then continually showing up and showing interest also helped.”
As with Nzeyimana, the Watson provided Kong an avenue to “just exist,” where she could practice communicating her intentions without filtering for others expectations. “The Watson pushed me
TRAVELERS BECOME ATTUNED TO THEMSELVES AND THEIR SURROUNDINGS, CONNECTING WITH AND LEARNING
NOT JUST FROM PEOPLE BUT ALSO FROM THE PLACES THEY ARE IN.
to express my true interests in the wider world,” she said. “I was suddenly free of being someone for somebody else or an institution, and could instead pursue my own questions.”
INVITING IN STRANGERS
Ellen Baxter ’75, H’05—an early Watson fellow— didn’t hop from country to country but lived instead in a single place, the small Belgium city of Geel, where she bicycled ancient streets and visited with families. Since the fourteenth century, residents of Geel have welcomed people with mental illnesses into their homes and cared for them.
Baxter arrived with a question born from her uneasiness observing people in the US living on the streets or sent away to institutions. “I was curious about why people get thrown away or set aside, and I wanted to know what motivated the welcoming understanding and kindness in Geel toward people who are not well,” she said.
Baxter remembers spending hours chatting with families and their “boarders.” She liked to time her visits during the late morning as families were preparing their lunchtime meal— often peeling potatoes in keeping with the national addiction to French fries. She often jettisoned her planned interview questions to pore over photo albums and listen to reminiscences of weddings, vacations, and family get-togethers. The albums always included photos of boarders sipping piña coladas or lying in lounge chairs with the rest of the family.
In these conversations, Baxter began to understand that the boarders, no matter their
eccentricities and oddities, were accepted, if not quite as family, certainly as integral members of the community. In particular, she remembered speaking with one woman whose American family had shipped her off to Geel years earlier. Her host parents eventually aged and passed away, but the boarder remained—there was never any question about it. “She was the queen of the household,” Baxter recalled.
Baxter wanted to find a way to bring Geel’s humane tradition back to the United States, a determination that led her to found Broadway Housing Communities in New York City in 1983. After four decades, the housing development now includes seven residential buildings, two early childhood centers, three community art galleries, and a museum. Today, about a third of the residents in the housing complex have a mental illness.
“In Geel, I learned how tolerance is something that happens over time,” Baxter said. In her New York buildings, neighbors learn to adapt to one another. “Someone might do odd things or give you a dirty look in the elevator. They just shrug and say ‘hi’ and keep going. Accepting that people come out in so many different forms is the smoothest path forward.”
ENCOUNTERING UNKNOWN PLACES
While the Watson year is by design very social, it also includes solitary exploration in a busy, crowded world. There is a lot of alone time. Travelers become attuned to themselves and their surroundings, connecting with and
learning not just from people but also from the places they are in.
David Bruce ’13 challenged himself to learn about manmade and natural solutions to sea level rise—like levees, dams, floodgates, dikes, and mangrove swamps—through observation and making art. Though he conducted interviews with government officials, architects, and engineers—and joined local rugby teams everywhere he went—“the year was about drawing,” he said.
It’s a habit he maintains today. “It has become integral to me; it has become a daily practice,” he said, both for his own art and for his work as an architect. “When there is so much trying to grab your attention,” he continued, “there is a stillness in that creative process; it feels very grounding. I don’t think that would have become a part of my life if I hadn’t been granted this incredible opportunity to do nothing but draw and explore.”
He also appreciated the chance to learn in a tangible, hands-on way. “When you go to a place with a particular set of questions, interests, and things you enjoy, you get a totally different experience than just researching something in the library,” he said. “Putting your body in a particular space—feeling it, hearing it, smelling it, seeing it—there is a fuller understanding.”
Rebecca Goldfine, senior writer, works in the communications office doing research, writing, editing, photography, and video for the College.
Luke Best is an illustrator based in London, England. In addition to figurative work and animation, he experiments with abstract compositions, exploring line quality, shape, texture, and color.
BY IAN ALDRICH PHOTOGRAPHS BY GRETA RYBUS
Preserved but not precious, lovely and a little bit haunting, Pettengill Farm sits filled with memories and even molecules from lives lived over centuries, just eight miles from campus.
A Past Present
TThe old house needs to breathe.
It’s a Friday in early September, and Audrey Wolfe, the collections and education manager for the Freeport Historical Society (FHS), has just opened the side door to the Pettengill farmhouse, an early nineteenth-century salt box that is a rarity even in a state chock-full of history-laden homes. It’s been a few weeks since the building last hosted visitors, and Wolfe wants to set expectations before our group is welcomed inside. After she pushes the big door open, Wolfe pokes her head inside and laughs.
“It’s a little musty at the moment,” she says, turning around to face the group. “So, I think we’ll just wait for it to air out.” Then, to set the scene just a bit more, she adds, “It also doesn’t hurt to know your pests, because we may very well see a few.”
Accompanying Wolfe is FHS’s executive director, Eric C. Smith. Together they are leading a private tour of the farmhouse that includes me and a pair of longtime Bowdoin educators: Tess
Chakkalakal, an associate professor of Africana studies and English whose many books on American literature include an upcoming biography of the nineteenth-century Black writer Charles W. Chesnutt; and Brock Clarke, a widely published essayist and novelist and the College’s A. Leroy Greason Professor of English. The two also host the podcast series Dead Writers, an entertaining boots-on-the-ground look at the houses of famous American authors, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Made in partnership with Maine Public Radio, the show debuted its inaugural seven half-hour episodes this summer, and plans are in the works to produce a second season.
The Pettengill farmhouse hasn’t housed a writer on their list and so isn’t slated for the podcast, but Chakkalakal’s and Clarke’s interest in the property stems in part from the home’s proximity, personally and geographically, to Bowdoin. Various owners have had direct ties to the College, and over the last half century FHS’s
stewardship has opened it to the public, making it a favorite for anyone up for the ten-minute drive from Brunswick.
The appeal is obvious: Spread out over 140 acres, this retired saltwater farm is a scene of open pastures, hiking trails, old apple trees, even older stone walls, and a landscape that drops down to the tidal Harraseeket River.
At the center of the property is its circa 1810 farmhouse, a simple and small white-clapboard building whose front door gazes out at land that leads to the sea. Tours are limited, and those expecting to find something out of Old Sturbridge Village are greeted with something else. Like a little must and maybe some pests.
“What you’re going to find,” explains Smith as we wait outside the doors, “is a scene that reflects the choices that have been made by others who lived in the house. We are just the inheritors of those choices. Part of what we’re showing is not any one time frame, because different families lived in this house and used it differently. And so we refer to it as a study house, because you can see the different layers of that living.”
Wolfe then steps into the house and motions for us to follow her. “I think it’s ready for us to come in.”
THE STORY of Pettengill Farm begins in the late 1790s, when brothers Aaron and Joseph Lufkin began buying property along the Harraseeket. Aaron—whose namesake nephew was an early graduate of the Medical School of Maine, a part of Bowdoin for more than a century—bought out his brother in 1801 and built the current house nine years later. But not long after its completion, Aaron fell ill and died, and over the next half century, the farm passed through the hands of several different owners.
In 1877, Charles Henry Pettengill, a farmer and former sea captain, bought the house and merged the surrounding land with adjacent properties he’d spent the previous two decades acquiring. Eventually, the farm came under the ownership of Charles’s son Wallace Pettengill, who with his wife, Adelaide, raised three children—Ethel, Frank, and Mildred (“Millie”)—on the property.
The oldest, Ethel, died when she was a teenager. For Frank and Millie, neither of whom ever married, Pettengill Farm became the only home
they ever really knew. The two inherited the homestead from their parents in 1925, and for the next four decades lived in much the same way as their predecessors did. While the world around them embraced the modern conveniences that came with the advent of electricity and refrigeration, the Pettengills hauled water from a well more than one hundred feet from the kitchen, lit their home with kerosene lamps, and made use of an outdoor latrine. Their livelihood was made possible by an increasingly diminished dairy operation that produced milk and butter.
A lifeline of sorts came in 1955, when preservationists Lawrence and Eleanor Houston Smith, longtime friends of the Pettengills and founders of Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment—a sustainable coastal farm in
Opening spread:
A view of the Pettengill house from the place where a barn had stood until it fell down after Hurricane Carol struck Maine in 1954.
Above:
Side view of the house. The window in the lower left is the room in the eaves that FHS refers to as “Millie’s room.”
Opposite page:
This room was originally the kitchen, the hearth used for cooking, but the Pettengills converted it to a sitting room.
Freeport—purchased the property with a leaseback arrangement for Frank and Millie. At a time when large seaside tracts were being chopped up into smaller house lots and lavish second homes, Pettengill Farm represented something that was quickly fading from Maine’s southern coastal landscape, and the wealthy Smiths were committed to preserving what remained. Even after Frank died, just a year later, Millie continued on at the farm until 1965, when declining health forced her to move in with family up north.
“It was finally determined that it was just too much for her to live here, when she was found one winter morning camping in the kitchen area, huddled around a kerosene lamp and the teapot frozen to the stove,” says Wolfe of Millie, who died in 1981 at the age of ninety-eight.
The simplicity of Millie’s domestic life is evident throughout the house. Wolfe and Smith lead us through the kitchen area, which consists largely of a sink, the remnants of a milk separator, and a butter churner, and into a front room framed by peeling wallpaper, exposed ceiling lathe, and worn linoleum that overlays a portion of the home’s battered wide floorboards. Above, someone has scratched “Buck Was Here” into the ceiling plaster in large letters.
“I’m trying to imagine this person as a Bowdoin student who had to mark his territory in the ceiling,” jokes Clarke. “If you were to break into a house, would you really want to advertise you were here?”
Chakkalakal shakes her head. “No, I would not,” she says.
Over the next minute, the professors banter about Buck and his possible intentions. Their riffing is easy and free flowing, a pair of curious minds well-seasoned in the art of keeping the attention of a classroom. Not unlike the homes they visit for their podcast, the Pettengill farmhouse greets its visitors with a sensory overload, and I ask Clarke and Chakkalakal how they process their observations of the houses they visit.
“For me, it’s about taking notice of the things that don’t belong,” says Clarke. “Like that graffiti from Buck. You don’t come into a place like this and think, I’m in it for the graffiti.”
“What is so compelling for me is imagining its owners,” says Chakkalakal. “Here, we’ve heard the history of the Pettengill family, their social status and isolation and how much pleasure they took from reading in their rooms, by the stove, in the rocking chair, on the little spring bed in the attic. You can still feel the presence of active imaginations. That’s true in all the places we go, but so strongly here.”
Chakkalakal is also intrigued by the condition of the place. “I’m looking at the history of the house and the decision you guys came to of not restoring it to any one period but to, you know, just let it rot,” she says.
Wolfe laughs. “I call it arrested decay.”
“But it’s kind of aspirational, too,” Chakkalakal continues. “Like, this is what would happen if you just let yourself go to the point where you just wouldn’t fall apart any further. The decisions around that are really interesting.”
Above:
An avid observer and collector of objects in the natural world, Millie collected these shells during her daily walks.
Opposite page, top:
A rocking chair in the sitting room. The couch, which had been Millie’s grandmother’s, had to be brought by boat to the house.
Opposite page, bottom:
The room under the eaves was Millie’s favorite place to read and listen to the rain on the roof.
THE DRIVEWAY into Pettengill Farm runs about a half mile and is gated at the entrance, which means most visitors to the property have to arrive on foot or bike. But the time it takes to cover that distance is part of the experience. There’s an almost meditative quality to the journey. For much of it you’re surrounded by forest. It’s off the grid. There are no power lines running above you; big hardwoods are your companions. It can feel as though you are stepping away from the world. Maybe you are.
And then the pathway bends to the left, and the landscape opens up to a wide expanse of pastures. In the distance, perfectly sited to face the water, sits the farmhouse. It’s not uncommon to have the property to yourself, even on a prime summer day, and amid the quiet and all that open land it can be startling to think that the buzz of Freeport’s downtown scene is just two miles away.
“The choice the Freeport Historical Society made in the early eighties in agreement with the town was also to essentially stop vehicular traffic into the farm,” says Smith. “And that creates this sort of transitional phase of leaving your vehicle and leaving the pavement behind to make your journey here. There’s some tension around that, because it does limit access and accessibility. But some of that is also a choice that we’ve made toward the preservation of the property. At the same time, it’s open 365 days a year, dawn to dusk, and there’s no charge. As long as you’re willing to put the effort in to come down the road, it’s open.”
What gives the Pettengill farmhouse its particular sheen is that it’s not a polished tourist experience. The surrounding grounds aren’t manicured with prim gardens and lavish lawns. The apple trees have been allowed to grow into old age, while big conifers have grown in front of the water views. There are no reenactors to showcase the lives lived here, no regular guides to explain the place. Scattered around the grounds are a few placards and signs that explain a little of the farm’s history, but to visit the property is to experience the landscape that the Pettengills inhabited. Here is the cedar tree Millie planted from a sapling she dug up on an island in Casco Bay; there is that lilac that Frank placed near the back of the house by request of
“You can still feel the presence of active imaginations.
That’s true in all the places we go, but so strongly here.”
—TESS CHAKKALAKAL, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF AFRICANA STUDIES AND ENGLISH
his sister. These are the fields they worked; this is the driveway Millie walked nearly every day to go into town. It feels less like a history lesson and more like a retreat into what came before.
“This has been a part of the community now for nearly fifty years, and I think what that’s created is a real sense of ownership by the community for this farm,” says Smith. “You see people out here with their dogs, you see parents out here with their kids. They can see the house, and they can see that cedar tree Millie planted years ago and have their own connection to the last person who lived here.”
“STUDY HOUSES are paradoxes,” writes historian Howard Mansfield in his 2000 book The Same Ax, Twice. “Preserving a house by not preserving it. The house exists in all its contradictions.
…No one has attempted any resolution. The house has not been dressed up as 1676 or 1870 or any one year or period. Rather, the house speaks in the mingled, confusing voices of years of habitation—changes, additions, ceilings raised, walls moved, doors nailed shut and opened again. Rooms painted green, then black, then red and yellow.…Time is the hero in this house.…Life flowed through here and like a glacier left its marks upon wood and plaster.”
There is beauty, in other words, in the simple passage of life. And there are unexpected treasures to discover. Wolfe and Smith lead us upstairs to a trio of bedrooms whose views look toward the water. In two of the rooms reside maybe the most unusual findings in the house: a series of maritime-themed sketches in the wall plaster that historians believe date back to the early 1800s. A folk art known as “sgraffito,” the drawings are remarkably detailed, including a few that accurately depict some of the threemasted frigates from the War of 1812. There are also other scenes—of a sailor shooting a large sea bird from one ship and of monstrous sea creatures below the decks of another. They are intricate and thoughtful, no doubt the product of hours of imagination put to work.
Both Chakkalakal and Clarke are taken aback by the art and the mysterious stories that may have spawned their creation. Were they the result of tales of grandeur that had traveled to this farm? Had Maine’s proximity to the war as
a shipbuilding center heightened the presence of the battles in the young minds who lived in this house? Did the drawings simply emanate from a natural human desire to dream about a bigger, more adventurous world?
Clarke points to one of the simpler sketches. It appears to be a tombstone with the number seven on it. He chuckles. “This reminds me of when your kids are in elementary school, and you go into their classroom and you see the drawings of all the kids,” he says. “Some are quite remarkable, and then there is your kid’s drawing, and it’s like that.”
Chakkalakal laughs and nods in agreement. Beyond a shared dry wit and a command of
Above, top:
A view of the house with fall wildflowers in abundance.
Above, bottom:
One of the scratched drawings in what Millie called “one of the boys’ rooms.” The Pettengills had covered the drawings with wallpaper that was removed when the Smiths learned of the drawings from Millie after they had purchased the house.
Opposite page:
A door in the sitting room that leads to the front entry. Cooking demonstrations using the hearth to the right took place in the 1970s and ’80s.
Through the windows of that small house came a glimpse at a world that extended far beyond the farm’s shores. It must have felt grand and magical.
language, the strength of their podcast partnership is a result of their differing appreciations for history. Clarke, whose 2007 novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, in which the homes of several famous authors are set on fire, isn’t one to fawn over the ties between a writer’s work and their home. You want to know their writing, he says, go study their writing. “It’s not that I think preserving these old homes is foolish,” he tells me. “But visiting them has always seemed kind of school trip-ish to me. What I care about more are the people who care about those places and their stories. The people who work there and make it their life, that’s fascinating.”
Chakkalakal, meanwhile, oversaw Bowdoin’s restoration of the Brunswick house where Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the early 1850s. She packs an appreciation for writers’ homes that gives weight to the legacy of what was created there without overlooking their sometimes touristy standing. It’s why she playfully refers to them as “the Disneyland of literature.”
In the upstairs bedroom Chakkalakal lingers at the sgraffito. “We wouldn’t feature this house as an episode on our show,” she says. “But maybe we should place more value on this kind of art, the kind of art people make when they’re at home, because it’s not always appreciated or celebrated in the same way. You look at what’s here, and it’s a reminder that art can be made by anyone.”
It’s also a reminder of their fragility. Its creators, whoever they were, most likely never imagined that strangers would marvel at their drawings two centuries later. That they’d be analyzed and studied by art historians. Or that any sort of value would be associated with them. In homes across New England, more often than not, these unexpected creations were lost. Updates and renovations spelled their demise. Even Millie Pettengill, the person who may have loved this farmhouse more than anyone, didn’t necessarily assign much meaning to the sgraffito on the plaster. For years, she had the drawings covered by wallpaper. But then that wallpaper began to peel, and a whole new chapter of the home’s past revealed itself to FHS. In not pegging the house to a particular point in history, FHS has been able to explore more of what its history means.
As we move through the small upstairs rooms, Clarke takes stock of the largely empty spaces. There is little furniture or much at all in the way of things that would reinforce the story of the generations of families that lived here.
“Is there ever a temptation to bring in stuff that wasn’t here as a way to tell visitors that this might have been in the home during a certain time period?” he asks.
“Oh, is there ever,” says Wolfe. She laughs. “But it raises a lot of interpretative questions and requires you to make a lot of interpretative choices about what those objects are and who they represent. In keeping the home the way it is, our interpretative choice is to show the farm’s entire history rather than just a part of it.”
BY TODAY’S STANDARDS, the Pettengill farmhouse is tiny. There are only six rooms, and a tour of the building takes at most an hour. It’s also isolated and remote, and at first blush leads to the conclusion that its occupants were confined to what was immediately in front of them.
But that’s not really true. Millie had a huge capacity for learning. Her walks into town always included a stop at the library; she was a noted amateur geologist, whose rock collection is still on display in the front entry; and her extensive
diaries and photographs of the farm detail a curiosity about a slice of life that was very much connected to the larger world around her.
Maybe that curiosity was embedded in her in part by the house itself. Like any old Maine seaside home, the orientation of the Pettengill farmhouse is to the water. There’s a practicality to that, of course: When it was built, there was no driveway through the woods. Arrival to the property would have come via the Harraseeket River and the Atlantic just beyond.
And through the windows of that small house came a glimpse at a world that extended far beyond the farm’s shores. It must have felt grand and magical, says Smith. “As you sit in these little rooms and look out there, the world must have seemed very big outside,” he says. “What could be waiting for you when you leave that room? There were all these possibilities. Life was not confined to some screen that you held in your hand, but something larger, just outside your door.”
Ian Aldrich is the deputy editor at Yankee Magazine in Dublin, New Hampshire
Greta Rybus is a freelance photojournalist based in Portland, Maine. Find her work at gretarybus.com.
Above:
A view of the house showing the two sheds: the milk shed in the foreground, where the Pettengills processed and stored milk from their dairy cows, and the larger privy shed. There has never been electricity or running water at any of the Pettengill Farm buildings.
Opposite page:
A view of the Harraseeket River from the property. Frank Pettengill cut ice from the river in winter to store and use for refrigeration.
In a biology career driven more by the techniques and ways of thinking in science than a narrow focus of research, Jacob Blum ’13 has found satisfying work connecting and communicating.
Curious Science
What are you working on?
I just finished up the Stanford Catalyst program. We’ve been working on a big idea that we think will open up new types of therapeutics to fight disease. We are focused on rethinking and optimizing the process of cell engineering for cell therapies, ranging from making neurons more resilient to disease to helping train the immune system to attack cancers.
Wow, that would be a big deal.
It’s a big idea. In the past decade, the FDA has approved new therapeutics that are effectively cells programmed to target cancers as a foreign pathogen, called CAR-T therapy. That was kind of the big aha moment, where people realized, “If you can train cells to go and attack cancer, that’s a much better way than nonspecifically killing all dividing cells in the body, like chemotherapy does.” It uses cells as the substrate for medicine, a slightly different angle into problems people have been trying to solve for a long time. We are working on a technology that allows for more precision and specificity in the set of instructions that is delivered to a human cell.
Does it seem promising?
Very. I mean, it’s still early. We have honed the engineering platform. But developing therapeutics to treat disease involves many steps, and we are at the beginning of our journey.
What were you investigating in your PhD research on ALS?
ALS specifically affects motor neurons in the spinal cord. It’s the selective death of neurons that control your movement. My goal was to figure out which genes motor neurons express in the healthy spinal cord, and how they
respond to the threats and insults caused by ALS pathology.
Is it true that ALS research is poised for kind of a breakthrough?
I hope so. ALS is a heartbreaking disease with no cures or treatments that meaningfully extend lifespan, which needs to change. But it is also an inherently difficult problem. You have a certain set of neurons from adolescence, and those have to last you forever. In ALS, motor neurons die prematurely. If you want to cure ALS, you’re tasked with trying to prevent death, which is just very hard. That said, there’s a lot of excitement in ALS research right now. I think as we learn more and more about what motor neurons normally look like, what the pathological process of ALS does to motor neurons, we can figure out how to intervene in a way that prevents them from dying and retains their function.
What drives you?
Deeply researching an open biological question, coming up with the most efficient way to solve it, and executing. The precise problem is less important than the process, though I prefer to work in fields that could positively impact patient lives in the future. My first real taste of the scientific process was working with Professor Jack Bateman studying this interesting phenomenon that happens in fruit flies, where you get gene activation from one chromosome to another. Going through the process of designing and executing an honors thesis really set the stage for my career.
Is AI part of your future?
We have gotten really good at making tons of observations about biological systems very
efficiently, which is mostly a gift but sometimes a curse. Biological research is all about ingesting a massive amount of information about a system and synthesizing it into a reasonable working model that other scientists can wrap their heads around. In the human body we have fifty trillion cells and tens of thousands of cell types, so if you want to move toward a comprehensive understanding of biological systems, you kind of have to have some measure of artificial intelligence.
How can a person make the most of college?
I would tell them to never be afraid of any class or any fields that interest you, regardless of which “path” they put you on. For instance, I’m a scientist, but my entire life would be different had I not followed my passion and taken Italian literature classes in college. That led me to Europe with my wife (Kacey Berry ’13) after college for several years, which ended up sculpting us into the people that we are now. That’s the special thing about liberal arts.
You were a DJ at WBOR. Does music still play a role in your life?
I have a two-year-old, so I listen to Raffi songs now. [Laughter] On days where you just have to grind, music plays a huge role. Like, there’s one specific Shins album that makes me think of being in Jack’s lab at Bowdoin over the summer, passaging flies. It just brings me right back.
Jacob Blum ’13, who just completed his PhD at Stanford, is a postdoctoral fellow and co-leading a startup project that will guide cell state transformations to program therapeutic cells.
For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.
Jacob Blum ’13 operates a liquid-handling robot in his lab at Stanford University.
Whispering Pines
Overwritten, But Still Present
Reusing parchments by scraping off old ink and writing new text opens the door to understanding landscapes and memories.
ARCHAEOLOGISTS OFTEN use the term “palimpsest” to describe traces of earlier human occupation and activity that may be preserved beneath a modern landscape. The word is derived from the Greek word palimpsestos (literally, “scraped again”), referring to the practice of scraping ink from a parchment in order to write new text. However, scraping and overwriting does not obliterate all traces of the original text.
The demolition of a house in Brunswick last spring was a reminder that a neighborhood may be altered by new construction, but traces of an earlier building are never completely erased. The house was built in 1802 as a tavern and stagecoach stop, and for more than forty years stood by the Bath Road/Maine Street intersection, a stone’s throw from Massachusetts Hall. It was a depot for mail and package delivery, a meeting place (with food, drink, and lodging) for travelers and members of Bowdoin’s governing boards, and a tempting destination for unsupervised students (Nathaniel Hawthorne was fined for gambling there). In 1842, the College purchased the tavern and used it as a student rooming house for several years. The building was then sold, dismantled, and reassembled on Noble Street, where it was a private residence for nearly 180 years. Soil layers, handwrought nails, and fragments of brick and glass are reminders of a history that a bulldozer could bury but not erase.
Any document, book, work of art, or other object may, over time, acquire new layers of meaning and value, without undergoing any physical transformation. For example,
a canceled check signed by Joshua Chamberlain, nearly worthless after it was cashed in the 1870s, is now a highly valued autograph, to be framed with a print of Chamberlain at the battle of Gettysburg or the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. For some scholars, this illustrates how a new primary “identity” can be overwritten on an object, relegating its original purpose to secondary significance.
While a parchment might be repurposed long after it had been created originally, rules, traditions, and historical precedents have a lifespan that can perpetuate yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems. Hawthorne’s copy of The Rules of Bowdoin College from 1824 proscribed what students shouldn’t do (but were doing) and prescribed what they should do (but weren’t doing). The list illustrates the challenges of regulating student behavior. The Bylaws of the Town of Brunswick, Maine from 1831 established regulations and fines “to prevent boys from sliding down hill [on streets], or taking hold of the back part of carriages.” Thus, the actions of unnamed individuals prior to 1831 (daredevil boys and peeved carriage owners) could lead to consequences for future town residents.
Viewing historical and archaeological landscapes as palimpsests constitutes a small metaphorical leap, but it may also be useful for illuminating how people make sense of personal experiences, narratives, and memories. To suggest that we are the sum total of all that we have seen, heard, read, felt, or done would be an oversimplification, but, by the same token, memories and experiences are an ever-expanding reservoir that we may draw upon in navigating life’s journey through a landscape of social interactions and relationships. Figuratively, the archiving of memory and experience is an active, ongoing process that involves selection, editing, reinterpretation, and “overwriting,” although traces of the original experiential “text” may still remain.
When he received the Bowdoin Prize in 1963, journalist W. Hodding Carter Jr. ’27 remarked that the most important thing he learned at Bowdoin was what he began to unlearn.
A son of the Deep South, Carter credited Bowdoin faculty and students with challenging him on his own racial prejudices. No doubt any former undergraduate can recall late-night discussions with classmates from different backgrounds and perspectives—about campus issues, national and international news, future plans, personal relationships, and past experiences. Then and now, an open mind and a willingness to learn creates a nimbleness in adding, reevaluating, and “overwriting” narratives, a gift that can last a lifetime. We may never know how far ripples may extend outward from our actions, no matter how small, or our interactions with others, no matter how brief.
John R. Cross ’76 is secretary of development and college relations.
INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER
With no career plan and a major in biology and Romance languages, I headed to the University of Wisconsin for a master’s in Latin American studies. At Wisconsin, both of my roommates were agriculture grad students, and listening to their “shop talk” got me excited about using my training in biology and Spanish to pursue a career in international agriculture. I knocked on many doors, and finally a plant pathology professor took me under his wing.
After working at research centers in Central America, I worked for multinational food companies, where I developed expertise with potato farming (I was a “spud guy”) and eventually landed at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). For four decades, I bounced around country roads in pickup trucks to serve farm families in over forty countries, including long stretches in Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Mexico, the Philippines, and Turkey.
My eleven-year-old son’s exploits in tournament tennis and travel soccer have become my primary retirement project, though I have also taken up pickleball and enjoy long bike rides into the Michigan countryside. I may also learn to fish for walleye!
My buddies on the Bowdoin tennis and squash teams became friends for life. The laughter was endless, and the road trips were insane. Even they don’t know, though, that I was once crowned national squash champion of Costa Rica (not much of a “superpower” in squash, but it is kind of cool to be national champion in something!).
For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.
Connect
PHOTO: NICK HAGEN
JOHN BOWMAN ’76
John Bowman ’76 retired in 2022 after a career leading projects in agricultural research, development, and trade in more than forty countries.
ALUMNI NEWS AND UPDATES
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Dick Cutter, David Humphrey, Gerard Haviland, Mason Pratt, George Gordon, Lyman Cousens, Joel Sherman, David Carlisle, David Ballard, Dick Glover, Peter Gribbin, Jim Dunn, Charlie Bridge, and Ted Fuller were a united front from the Class of 1961 during a lunch at the Royal River Grill in Yarmouth, Maine, in August.
Alan Baker ’51 and his nephew Tony Stais ’87 smile during an event celebrating Alan’s 95th birthday and the long list of accomplishments that accompanied that milestone. Tony said, “He remains an inspiration to his wide circle of friends— and to me!”
Tom Keith ’71 reflects on the history and legacy of Joshua Chamberlain at the 20th Maine Infantry Monument on Big Round Top in Gettysburg National Military Park. He says, “It’s an experience I recommend for all.”
Bob Porter, John Costello, and Tom Pierpan—Theta Delta Chi brothers from the Class of ’66—met up in June for lunch at John’s place in Massachusetts. Tom attested that “a good time was had by all.”
1951 Alan Baker ’51 celebrated his 95th birthday at the Baker Center at Woodlawn in Ellsworth, Maine, in August (see Tony Stais ’87).
1958
Ken Carpenter: “Shetlanders by Penny Post: The Mathewson Family Letters, 1850–1880 was published in July by The Shetland Times. To celebrate publication, my wife and I went to Shetland with family members, where I gave a lecture related to the book at the Shetland Museum and Archives. The book is based on 1,800 letters of an ordinary family (not mine) and provides an exceedingly rare view into the minds of people before the modern era.”
1959 Zeke (Channing) Zucker: “Tidewater Council of the Boy Scouts of America in Virginia and North Carolina annually recognizes the young men and women who achieved the rank of Eagle Scout in the previous year. A council scouter, who is an Eagle Scout, is designated to deliver remarks to the new Eagle Scouts. I was accorded the honor this year. I explained how scouting’s tenet of service has resonated with me throughout my life and encouraged the newest Eagles to continue rendering it in the near future and into adulthood.”
1964
Rodney Porter: “Hi, all. It has been an interesting sixty years. I have not earned and saved or invested much money over those years, but I intend to make up for that over the next twenty-five or so years. I have been blessed to share my life with Wendy Huish for the past forty-five years. About thirteen years ago, I turned my life around healthwise. I lost seventy pounds and have followed
a successful vegan diet and have kept it off ever since. In my life I have never taken medication except for maybe five times taking a ten-day antibiotic treatment for infection. I have no chronic illness, nor have I ever had any chronic illness that I know of, except that for the past couple of years or so I have a little stiffness in the ring finger of my right hand. Easily managed. Only meat I ever miss is steamed red hot dogs. I plan to spend my remaining twenty-five or so years spreading the good news about what I have learned from that experience and the rest of my life. Happy 60th!”
1966
Thomas Pierpan: “Bob Porter and I drove from Harpswell down to Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, and had lunch with TD brother and ’66 classmate John Costello. John and his wife, Sandy, moved to a senior living facility two years ago in Shrewsbury, outside of Worcester. What a gorgeous place. A good time was had by all.”
1971
Tom Keith: “Joshua Chamberlain wasn’t the towering figure he is now during my Bowdoin years. In fact, I don’t recall having heard of him as an undergraduate. Now he’s one of the best-known and most admired graduates of the College. I recently spent a few quiet moments on the summit of Big Round Top and was newly inspired by his heroism and that of the men he led at Gettysburg. It’s an experience I recommend for all.”
1973
From Alan Christenfeld: “Alan Christenfeld and his wife, Bonnie, traveled to Juno Beach, Florida, in July 2024 to celebrate the 100th birthday of Judge Marie Santagata,
Remember
The following is a list of deaths reported to us since the previous issue. Full obituaries appear online at: obituaries.bowdoin.edu
Stanley F. Dole ’47
May 4, 2024
Robert A. McQuillan ’52
July 25, 2024
Richard E. Getchell ’53
July 26, 2024
Richard Dale ’54
May 23, 2024
Stephen A. Land ’57
August 2, 2024
Delcour S. Potter III ’57
April 30, 2024
Robert W. Cornelli ’58
June 14, 2024
Steven H. Frager ’59
May 22, 2024
Henry J. Tosi Jr. ’59
April 26, 2024
Raymond Bucci Jr. ’60
July 26, 2024
David E. Foster ’60
July 16, 2024
Norman J. Gould ’60
May 29, 2024
Jon T. Staples ’61
August 4, 2024
William H. Beekley ’62
July 28, 2024
Reuben D. Slotsky ’62
May 17, 2024
Leslie E. Korper II ’63
June 27, 2024
Frank A. Nicolai ’63
July 6, 2024
John A. Lovetere ’64
August 2, 2024
John W. Wilson ’66
July 4, 2024
Theodore E. Davis ’67
July 19, 2024
Ruwe Halsey ’67
September 28, 2023
Charles G. Gianaris ’68
June 1, 2024
Kenneth H. Payson ’68
May 26, 2024
Joseph A. Calareso ’70
April 28, 2024
Peter C. Wilson ’70
June 18, 2024
Joel Beckwith ’71
June 15, 2024
Michael H. Walsh ’72
May 18, 2024
Thomas S. Mulligan ’73
June 3, 2024
Linda P. Nunn ’75
May 11, 2024
Monica J. Kelly ’78
May 3, 2024
David N. Lawrence ’78
August 1, 2024
Anthony G. Palmer ’81
April 28, 2024
Leon B. Levin ’86
June 18, 2024
Douglas W. Kreps ’91
June 18, 2024
Crystal L. Welch ’04
May 11, 2024
Kathryn L. Deneroff ’12
February 13, 2024
HONORARY
William R. Cotter H’87
March 9, 2023
GRADUATE
James T. Rowe G’63
June 30, 2024
Elliot C. Rowsey G’69
May 14, 2024
FACULTY/STAFF
Albert R. Smith
June 9, 2024
William C. Watterson
May 1, 2024
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.
Ben Snyder ’80, Sarah Dickenson Snyder ’77, Alec Lee ’80, and Mike Carman ’80 paused to pose during a cycling excursion in Portugal. Sarah said, “We had a wonderful bike trip!”
Alan Christenfeld ’73 visted with Marie Santagata, mother of his late classmate Kenneth V. Santagata ’73, to celebrate her 100th birthday in Juno Beach, Florida.
Arnie Rosenthal and Dayl Ratner Rosenthal ’77 spent a “second annual fun-filled evening” together with Kathy and Peter Karofsky ’62 on August 2 at Nakoma Golf Club in Madison, Wisconsin.
Jac Arbour ’07, Gary Stone ’83, Laurie Lachance ’83, Harry Lanphear ’83, Chris Jerome ’83, Mary House ’93, and Jason House ’93 gathered to celebrate Harry’s retirement from a decades-long (and distinguished!) career with the state of Maine and several nonprofits. Harry said, “It was so awesome
the mother of our late classmate Kenneth V. Santagata. Alan has remained close to the Santagata family for more than fifty years. He reports that, a century on, Marie is as mentally sharp as ever and a physical marvel. She inspires all who have the pleasure to know her with her wisdom, intelligence, and wit. Alan and Bonnie look forward to rejoining Marie next year for her 101st birthday!”
1976
From a Chicago Health online news story, October 12, 2024. Charles Bouchard, current chair of Loyola Medicine’s ophthalmology department, recently returned from Guatemala, where he has traveled with a dozen volunteers once or twice a year since 2009 in the name of Loyola’s ambitious vision to treat cataract and pterygium, common causes of preventable vision loss and blindness. The tradition stretches back to 1963. During the most recent trip, the team spent twelve-hour days performing fifty-five cataract surgeries and fitting people with eyeglasses. They also removed ten pterygia—a raised, fleshy growth over the white part of the eye caused in part by radiation from the sun that can reach the cornea and obstruct vision. Many of the rural residents work in sugar cane and coffee plantations in intense sunlight, which can increase the risk of cataract and pterygium formation. In 2012, the Loyola global eye health program started a partnership with Humanity First Gift of Sight, an international not-for-profit. Then, in April 2023, Loyola entered a formal relationship with Humanity First and the state-of-the art Nasir Hospital, built in 2018 by Humanity First USA. The hospital currently has a part-time retina surgeon and an optician and is planning a mobile
clinic to provide medical services, in which Bouchard expects to incorporate vision screening services to make eye care even more accessible. He is also working with Nasir Hospital leadership to set up a health data science center to better understand the need for low-cost eye care in Guatemala. Bouchard says that the patients, most of whom don’t speak English, tend to be very stoic during the surgical procedures. But the smiles on the faces once they can see again need no translation.
1980 Reunion
From a Brunswick Times Record article, July 14, 2024 Leanne Robbin of Brunswick, Maine, was recognized by state and local officials as the longest-serving member of the Maine attorney general’s staff and received a statewide award from the Maine Prosecutors’ Association. Robbin has served as an assistant attorney general for forty-two years. From Meredith Woo: “Meredith Jung-En Woo stepped down from the presidency of Sweet Briar College in June 2023. Meredith joined Sweet Briar shortly after the announcement of its intention to close and successfully turned it around. In recognition of her commitment to women’s education, Simmons University in Boston awarded her an honorary doctorate this year. Meredith also delivered a commencement speech at its graduation. Currently she is on the faculty of Arizona State University and helps design universities within and outside the United States.”
1982
Dora Anne Mills has been honored by the Alumni Council with the Alumni Footprints Award. Established in 2004, this award
all the Bowdoin folks could attend.”
recognizes a volunteer who has left, in the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “footprints on the sands of time” through professional, academic, and/or volunteer activities, demonstrated leadership for the common good, and a commitment to serving others. Mills’s work on initiatives for the health of Mainers epitomizes the common good. As chief health improvement officer for MaineHealth and through her previous work as the director of Maine Center for Disease Control, she helped to develop a statewide public health infrastructure and Maine’s response to the H1N1 influenza pandemic, and she has implemented systems to address chronic disease prevention and environmental health hazards. During some of this time, she served simultaneously as the state epidemiologist. On campus, she shares her time, talents, and knowledge with the Bowdoin community through speaking engagements and in other ways. She had a tremendous influence on the lives of her peers as a pioneer of coeducation at the College, and Bowdoin is grateful for her participation in Fifty Years of Women at Bowdoin
1983
From a Washington, DC, Governing magazine story, June 10, 2024. Linda Nelson, director of economic development in Stonington, Maine, has been named co-chair of Governor of Maine Janet Mills’s Infrastructure Rebuilding and Resilience Commission, established by executive order in May 2024. Made up of twenty-four individuals involved in environmental protection, engineering, construction, planning, economic development, and other areas, the commission represents private interests
and government agencies and is charged with helping the state respond to recent disasters and developing a long-term plan for infrastructure resilience.
1984
From a Trinity College press release, May 22, 2024. Garth A. Myers, the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Urban International Studies at Trinity College, received the college’s teaching award during commencement on May 19, 2024. The honor was announced during Trinity’s 198th commencement ceremony on its campus in Hartford, Connecticut. Myers earned a master’s from the University of California, Los Angeles, in African area studies, with geography and urban planning as the major and minor fields, and a PhD from UCLA in geography with an allied field in urban planning. He now leads Trinity’s Center for Urban and Global Studies. Myers’s teaching philosophy rests on a belief in student engagement—he has conducted research in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Senegal, South Africa, Finland, China, Trinidad, Jamaica, and the UK over the past thirty years, as well as the US—and sees strong feedback loops between research and teaching, in both directions.
1987
From Kimberly Hansen Cashin: “Terri Bsullak, Kimberly Hansen Cashin, Virginia Pardo, Laurie Zug Quimby, and Amy Yount gathered in New Hampshire during the summer of 2024 for a fun-filled Bowdoin mini reunion. Terri lives in Lexington, Virginia, and is a retired mental health therapist who currently runs an outdoor recreational program for
On July 4, Everett Billingslea ’83 ran his forty-second Mountain Marathon in Seward, Alaska, with Kristine Hoyt ’83 cheering him on. Kristine said he was “making Bowdoin proud for the forty-second time!”
Andrea Phipps Tracy ’83, Nick Pilch ’83, Shawn McDermott ’83, Susan Abbattista ’83, Louisa Boehmer Wickard ’85, Brett Wickard ’90, Kirk Petersen ’83, David Jordy Houston ’84, Dianne Fallon ’84, and Leo Tinkham ’83 showed some Bowdoin spirit while cruising on Sebago Lake in August.
Amy Johnson ’84 and Lia Scharnau ’26 showed how Bowdoin pride bridges all class years at a mini-reunion in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, this summer.
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people with mobility impairments. A New Hampshire educator since graduating from Bowdoin, Kimberly also continues to ski New England mountains and out west as much as possible. Virginia lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she is a water utility industry professional who enjoys keeping active in the outdoors. Laurie, who is married to Peter Quimby ’89, head of school at The Governor’s Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts, lives on campus there with 400 teenagers, hosting them every Friday night in their home. She is a family medicine physician working in urgent care in Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. An Episcopal priest and longtime school administrator, Amy also enjoys volunteering as a puppy-raiser for Warrior Canine Connection in Maryland.”
Tony Stais: “Spent time with my uncle Alan Baker ’51 in August for Alan’s ninety-fifth birthday celebration at the Baker Center at Woodlawn, in Ellsworth, Maine. His friend, Maine senator Susan Collins, shared her tribute to Alan, which was read into the Congressional Record. Alan has stayed busy after ‘retiring’ at fifty as vice chair of MacMillan Publishing—moving back to Maine, serving in the Maine House of Representatives, and as longtime owner and editor of the Ellsworth American and founder of the Mount Desert Islander. Alan continues to be active in the Orrington, Maine, community and is an inspiration to his friends and family!”
1989 Asher Miller:
“I was named Eugene V. Thaw Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where I have worked since 2001.”
1990 Reunion
From a Rosie’s Place press release, June 25, 2024. Sue Chandler has been named chief external relations officer for Rosie’s Place, a multiservice community center for poor and homeless women in Boston, Massachusetts. She will serve as the primary fundraiser for the organization and will oversee the development, communications, community engagement, and public policy departments. Founded in 1974, Rosie’s Place is the first shelter for women in the nation. Fifty years later, it is much more than a shelter. Providing meals and groceries, education, and expert employment, housing, legal, and mental health support, Rosie’s Place turns hope into help for more than 12,000 women every year
Eric Foushee has been honored by the Alumni Council with a Polar Bear Award. Foushee has served as a longtime class agent and reunion committee chair, using his fundraising knowledge and expertise to generate significant donations to the College. He has also served on the Alumni Council and, as a Bowdoin parent, offers a unique lens into his volunteer work that deepens his connection to and engagement across campus.
1993
John Vegas has been honored by the Alumni Council with the Foot Soldier of Bowdoin Award. This award was created by the Alumni Council in 1999 to honor “one who exemplifies the role of a foot soldier of Bowdoin through his or her work” for the College. It was created through the generosity of David Z. Webster of the Class of 1957. Over the years, Vegas has served the College in a broad range of capacities—as an admissions volunteer, Alumni Council
Andy Meyer ’85, Joanne Majka ’85, and David Criscione ’85 took advantage of a beautiful summer day in July to connect and set sail for a cruise around Casco Bay.
Terri Bsullak, Kimberly Hansen Cashin, Virginia Pardo, Laurie Zug Quimby, and Amy Yount—five Class of ’87 classmates from five different states— gathered in New Hampshire during the summer of 2024 for a fun-filled Bowdoin mini-reunion.
Scott Wilkin ’90, Maddie Wilkin ’26, and Liisa van Vliet ’00 pose on the rooftop of St. John’s College Chapel in Cambridge, United Kingdom, with the Kings College Chapel in the distance as part of the spectacular backdrop—a special spot not typically open to the public. Liisa is a fellow at the college and was able to get access for the group, which also included Amy Wilkin P’26 (who snapped the photo), during a tour around the city.
member, Sophomore Bootcamp volunteer and speaker, Bowdoin Career Advisory Network (BCAN) advisor, reunion committee member, and most recently through his work with the Association of Bowdoin Latinx Alumni (ABLA). He’s helped to guide the College through the creation and implementation of ABLA, of which he is now the inaugural president. His leadership is transformational, and his impact on the College will be felt for generations to come.
1996 From Hathaway Pease Russell: “Global law firm Foley Hoag LLP recently announced the selection of Hathaway Pease Russell as managing partner. Russell is a senior partner in the firm’s intellectual property department, practicing in the patent prosecution group and life sciences industry team. She will work alongside the current managing partner as part of the firm’s five-member executive committee.”
2000 Reunion
Janetta Lien: “While attending a regional conference for admission, enrollment, and financial aid professionals, I discovered a critical mass of Bowdoin College alums—Andrew Bastone ’22, James Ha ’10, Leovanny Fernandez ’14, Esther Nunoo ’17, Wellesley Wilson ’08, and Megan Reitzas ’01. Wellesley was a keynote speaker at the conference, and her wise, thoughtful, and reflective session resonated with us all.”
2001 From a Rectify Pharmaceuticals press release, July 15, 2024. Bharat Reddy has been appointed to the role of chief business officer at Rectify Pharmaceuticals in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rectify is a biotechnology company developing small molecule disease-modifying therapeutics that restore and enhance ABC transporter function. Reddy is an accomplished biopharma leader with deep experience in corporate affairs, strategic partnerships and collaborations, and academia. He most recently served as vice president, strategy and business development, at Kelonia Therapeutics, where he designed and implemented a business strategy plan and fostered a multiyear collaboration and licensing agreement with Astellas Pharmaceuticals. Reddy holds a PhD from the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University.
2002
From a bowdoin.edu/news story, May 7, 2024. Jay Caspian Kang, a staff writer for The New Yorker, was named a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in the commentary category “for original columns that force us to reexamine popular narratives and reframe such critical topics as affirmative action, racial politics, and the portrayal of gun violence,” reads the Pulitzer Prize description of his nominated work. The winners of journalism’s top honor were announced on May 6 at Columbia University. As finalist, Kang earns an honorary mention along with Brian Lyman of the Alabama Reflector. The category’s winner was Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Washington Post contributor. In addition to his work for The New Yorker, Kang is also an Emmy-nominated documentary film director and the author of The Loneliest Americans A history major at Bowdoin, he was previously an opinion writer for The New York Times. Kang’s work has appeared in The New York Review of
BEYOND THE RIDGELINE
Chris Yager ’89 spent thirty-five years in experiential education—a lifetime’s work of daily exploration and discovery.
I WAS FIRST DRAWN TO EXPEDITIONARY LEARNING after participating in a NOLS wilderness course when I was sixteen. A month in the mountains, seeing no other humans, left me with a profound love of all things natural.
E.B. WHITE BROUGHT ME TO BOWDOIN. Growing up in California, I read a collection of White’s essays about the Maine landscape. I made a fall visit, and that sealed the deal.
WHILE WORKING WITH OUTWARD BOUND, I met a Nepalese Sherpa and began a conversation about taking kids to Nepal and Tibet. At twenty-five, I threw my savings into promoting the programs. After a year, I had managed to sell my program to just three students. And so it went: When I married Ali, a classmate, we had less than $300 between us. I took many wrong turns and made many mistakes. But every year we got better. By the time I sold the business, twenty-five years after my first scouting trip, I had thirty full-time employees and over a hundred field instructors.
AMONG THE MOST EXCITING AND EDIFYING CHALLENGES for me has been helping guides develop trust in their own abilities and in one another. Every day of my work I learn something new and often profound about the world around me and about myself. I love finding the next thing, something beyond the near ridgeline.
For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.
PHOTO: ALI YAGER ’89
Chris Yager ’89
Catching Up
Janetta Lien ’00, Andrew Bastone ’22, James Ha ’10, Leovanny Fernandez ’14, Esther Nunoo ’17, and Wellesley Wilson ’08 formed a strong contingent of Bowdoin alumni at a regional conference for admission, enrollment, and financial aid professionals, where Wellesley was the keynote speaker. Also in attendance but not pictured: Megan Reitzas ’01.
Proving that class year is just a number, Hannah Baggs ’17 and Jenna Woodbury ’95—who graduated from Bowdoin the year Hannah was born— volunteered together for the after-school club Moab Youth Cycling in Moab, Utah, this spring.
Rebecca Tannebring Tucker ’05 and her daughter, Sierra Tucker, are all smiles as they get ready to head out on Sierra’s first whale-watching trip. Rebecca is the director of corporate engagement at the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation, where she works to advance their Blue Whales Blue Skies (BWBS) ambassador initiative.
Chester Eng ’11 met Alan Casey ’24 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, after Alan’s mother, Amila Masic-Casey (left), spotted Chester in a Bowdoin cap at a local café and introduced the two alums. They had quite a scenic backdrop for the occasion!
Books, This American Life, and The New York Times Magazine. His film, American Son, premiered in 2023, as part of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series.
Sarah Lovely has been honored by the Alumni Council with a Polar Bear Award. Lovely embodies the best characteristics of a Bowdoin volunteer with her incredible presence, ability to lead and rally peers, kindhearted and thoughtful communication, and an eagerness to try new approaches to challenges. She has been a class agent since her graduation, has served as reunion committee member or chair, and has generously donated her time to the admissions office as a member of the Bowdoin Regional Admissions Volunteer Organization (BRAVO) and to the Office of Career Exploration and Development.
2003
Joanie Taylor has been honored by the Alumni Council with a Polar Bear Award for her service as a true ambassador for the College. Her longtime service as class agent culminated with her role as chair of the alumni fund directors. She served as a reunion committee chair, BCAN advisor, BRAVO interviewer, and Bowdoin Invitational Golf Tournament committee member—and still made the time for singular celebrations like Leaders in All Walks of Life: Fifty Years of Women at Bowdoin and the retirement celebration for MaryBeth and Bob Mathews.
2005 Reunion
Rebecca Tannebring Tucker: “In June, I joined the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation as the director of corporate engagement, working to further develop the
Blue Whales Blue Skies (BWBS) ambassador initiative, expand program and public awareness, and grow conservation impact. In this role, I will be advancing partnerships and engagement with key stakeholders, including brands, cargo owners, and companies that rely on maritime trade, working to materially reduce their environmental impact and inspire better supply chain responsibility and disclosure.
The BWBS voluntary vessel speed reduction (VSR) program incentivizes shipping lines to reduce speeds during peak whale migratory periods in particular zones to reduce the risk of fatal ship strikes in California waters that threaten endangered whales and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air and noise pollution.”
2008
Catherine Chin, Andrew Fried, and Abe Sharma have each been honored by the Alumni Council with the Polar Bear Award. Established in 1999, the award recognizes significant personal contributions and outstanding dedication to Bowdoin, honoring a record of service rather than a single act or achievement. Sharma was acknowledged for working to build community in places geographically distant from Bowdoin’s campus— most recently in the Bay Area, where he partnered with the Office of Development and Alumni Relations to connect area Polar Bears in and around San Francisco. Fried has been a longtime class agent and reunion committee chair, linking his classmates to each other and to Bowdoin. He has supported LGBTQ+ initiatives, promoted alumni engagement in New York, and made an imprint on many other areas across campus, using his gifts as a skilled connector
and natural leader. Chin has demonstrated broad support for Bowdoin athletics, serving on the Polar Bear Athletic Fund (PBAF) Committee, the Hall of Honor selection committee, and the Bowdoin Invitational Golf Tournament host committee, and by engaging with and promoting the Bowdoin softball community. Having served as an Alumni Fund director, event host, reunion committee chair, and class agent, she is a leader among her peers.
From a Washington and Lee University online news story, June 20, 2024. The American Humor Studies Association (AHSA) announced that Diego A. Millan, assistant professor of English and Africana studies at Washington and Lee University, will receive the Jack Rosenbalm Prize for American Humor for his article “Joking at the Limits of Protest in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go,” which appeared in the September 2022 edition of the journal Studies in American Humor The prize is awarded to the best article on American humor produced by a pre-tenure scholar, graduate student, adjunct professor, or independent scholar published in a peer-reviewed academic journal or a book. Millan, a core faculty member for the Africana studies program, has been with the university since 2018 and recently received tenure and promotion to associate professor effective July 1, 2024. He earned a master of arts and PhD in English literature from Tufts University.
2011Joe Comizio: “I am currently living in Bentonville, Arkansas. I am the cofounder of HIGHWAY Ventures, a startup studio and venture fund focused on building startups from technology developed within the federal lab ecosystem. Surfing
never stuck when I lived in San Diego, so I decided to trade the board for a mountain bike and try my hand at the next adventure in northwest Arkansas.”
Kyle Dempsey: “I moved to Boston after graduation to attend medical school and business school, and I’m still living here. I currently work at a health care investment fund that helps to grow innovative health care companies. On the personal front, I got married recently (in India!).”
From Chester Eng: “Alan Casey ’24 and Chester Eng met in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on September 1, 2024, after a chance encounter between Chester and Alan’s mother, Amila MasicCasey, at a popular Sarajevo café on Amila’s birthday (July 6) proved to be a most delightful present. Luckily, Chester chose to wear his Bowdoin hat that morning. Chester was grateful that he met Amila just before he moved to Banja Luka (Bosnia’s second-largest city) the next day. Meeting Alan alone made the return trip to Sarajevo worthwhile.”
From Rachel Gang: “Rachel Gang now calls Israel home. After making aliyah six years ago, she lives in the southern city of Be’er sheva with her husband, Tomer Stokelman (Ben Gurion University, 2017), and their rescued dog and cat. Rachel is a clinical social worker and maintains a private psychotherapy practice. She enjoys hiking in the Negev desert, traveling, and open-water swimming—to date she has completed four open-water races in Israel.”
From Coco Gille: “Coco (Sprague) Gille is living in Memphis with her husband, Andy, and their two-year-old, Tom, who loves his polar bear stuffed animal, golf, and eating vegetables. She has been a public defender at the law office of
Something in the Water
An impressive number of faculty and staff honor the College with planned gifts and endowed funds—most recently, biology and neuroscience professor emerita Patsy Dickinson and her husband, Greg Anderson P’14, established the Patsy S. Dickinson Neuroscience Research Fund in support of student neuroscience-related research. Another retired professor has put a planned gift in place to establish a fund in the future that will support faculty research in the humanities.
A career at Bowdoin that is so rewarding that it prompts a special resolve to be part of Bowdoin’s future makes you wonder: Is there something in the water?
Liz Armstrong in the Office of Gift Planning can help you become a member of the Bowdoin Pines Society and create your legacy at Bowdoin.
207-725-3172
giftplanning@bowdoin.edu
bowdoin.edu/gift-planning
INTO PLACE
New York Times editorial assistant Tenzin Tsagong ’16 calls finding a college she had never heard of through Bowdoin’s Explore program one of her life’s many happy accidents.
I NEVER IMAGINED A CAREER IN JOURNALISM. I didn’t write for the Orient, didn’t take creative writing courses, didn’t intern for media companies. But I found myself living in India, unsure what I wanted to do, having insights and experiences I wanted to write about.
A TIBETAN-AMERICAN, I wanted to write about exile, statelessness, the Tibet-China conflict, and Buddhism from a personal lens. I didn’t know how to get that out in the world or have the courage to try. Some friends encouraged me to apply to journalism school. I enrolled at NYU, and everything fell in place. I LOVE GOING INTO AN ENCOUNTER WITH ONE PERSPECTIVE AND LEAVING IT WITH A COMPLETELY NEW ONE. So much of being a journalist is being okay with asking dumb questions! GROWING UP IN NEW YORK CITY, I was not outdoorsy, so I dreaded my biking pre-Orientation trip. I didn’t even remember putting it down as one of my options! Biking around the city to prepare, I got into an accident. On the trip, slower than almost everyone, I found myself alone for long stretches, the memory of my accident still fresh. I smile thinking about that version of me, terrified I might get into another accident, terrified about what four years of college might entail. She is almost unrecognizable to me.
For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.
the Shelby County public defender since graduating from Texas Law in 2017, where she and Andy met. She hopes to make it back to campus this summer!”
From Jason Guzmán: “Jason Guzmán is still living in Minneapolis, which has been home since he graduated from Bowdoin. In those thirteen years, Jason met his now-wife, Annie (married in 2018), and became a father to two girls, Penelope (four) and Luisa (two). More recently, Jason has also enjoyed connecting with fellow Polar Bears Noah Buntman ’08 and Adam Marquit, as they have become residents of the Twin Cities.”
Zulmarie Hatch: “Marshall Hatch Jr. (Bates ’10) and I welcomed our second child, Elijah Jackson, this past February in Chicago, and he has been getting some love from his Class of 2011 aunties and uncles, including Dhaujée Kelly, Yaritza Peña, Martha Clarke, and Josh Magno I recently connected with some alums during the Chicago presidential welcome event. Professionally, I am continuing to work in the college success space supporting high school and college students.”
Youle Kang: “After Bowdoin and eight years in Hong Kong, I finally settled in Montreal as the new home, and a huge step closer to Bowdoin and lovely Maine. What’s not to love about a snowy Quebec winter day with Ollie?”
From Randy Kring: “Randy Kring and his wife, Sarah Kaleko (Franklin and Marshall ’11), welcomed their first child, Jackson Miles Kaleko, on January 30. Watching him grow has been simply awesome. Randy is an emergency physician and works at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts, and part-time at Maine Medical Center in Portland— Maine continues to be a great
part of life for them. Running remains Randy’s favorite hobby. He has run the Beach to Beacon 10K race and Maine Half Marathon nearly every year since graduating from Bowdoin ”
From Khalil LeSaldo: “Khalil LeSaldo is an actor and writer, working nationally and internationally. He has an upcoming return to Maine in Portland Stage’s The Play That Goes Wrong this August and September.”
Mika Matsuuchi Lindsley: “I am completing my second year of residency in general surgery at Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Burlington, Massachusetts. I will be taking the next one to two years off from clinical duties to complete research related to surgical education. I spend my free time with my sweet and wild toddler, Ada, who will soon turn three!”
Kara Wilson: “I am working for the Embassy of Austria in Washington, DC, as a public diplomacy officer for the Austrian Press and Information Service. Fostering Austrian American diplomatic relations and cultural exchange would not have been possible without my German major at Bowdoin playing a key role in my career path, including my four years in Austria after graduation. Special acknowledgment as well to the Italian department for making sure my relationships with colleagues at the Italian Embassy are especially strong in Washington due to a shared language and five years living in Italy. After almost a decade abroad, I have found my home in the states in the DC European bubble.”
From Linda Wilson: “Linda Wilson is currently working in Washington, DC, as a paralegal for the federal government. She returned to Sicily in the summer of 2023 and
Tenzin Tsagong ’16
Catching Up
PHOTO: ESLAH ATTAR
has been getting back to Europe as much as possible to maintain her French and Italian language skills. She just joined DC Dutch, the club for those with Dutch citizenship or ancestry in the Washington area. Dutch is her fifth language.”
2012
From Colleen Maher: “Colleen Maher and David Kowarsky (Harvard University ’05) were married on June 8, 2024. The reception was held in Colleen’s childhood hometown of Chappaqua, New York, at the restaurant and inn where she spent many birthdays and holidays with her grandparents, including the late Dick Burns ’58 Her husband, Dave, had the pleasure of attending the 2022 Bowdoin reunion and was thrilled to meet so many of her friends, many of whom stem from her time playing on the Bowdoin rugby team. The Bowdoin wedding photo was subject to a friendly photobomb from Colleen’s uncle Paul and cousin Peter, both Colby graduates.”
From a Savoy Magazine feature article, Summer 2024. Justin Nowell has been named a rising star on the Savoy Magazine list of “2024 Most Influential Lawyers,” a “powerhouse roster whose legal prowess and commitment to excellence inspire the highest levels of corporate and legal leadership.” Nowell, senior managing associate with Sidley Austin LLP in New York City, is described in the piece as “the essence of a rising star—a trusted advisor for public and private companies and boards of directors, who combines his strong legal acumen with pragmatic business solutions.” Savoy Magazine is the leading African American lifestyle magazine focusing on fashion, business, technology, and style.
2015 Reunion
Jean-Paul Honegger has been honored by the Alumni Council with the Young Alumni Service Award. Since graduating nine years ago, Honegger has stayed connected to his class as an associate class agent and to the College through initiatives with the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. He also helps the College more broadly by serving as BRAVO chair for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Additionally, he organizes and hosts events for the Bowdoin community in Europe.
2016
From a bowdoin.edu/news story, July 3, 2024. Actor, comedienne, and playwright Maggie Seymour returned to Maine in July to perform at the Camden Shakespeare Festival. The English and theater double major starred in The Comedy of Errors—a tale of mistaken identity sparked by the presence of two sets of twin brothers in the same town, each unaware of the other’s presence. Seymour performed the role of one of the main characters, Dromio of Syracuse, twin brother of Dromio of Ephesus. “I am absolutely thrilled to be back in Maine, doing Shakespeare and doing this show specifically. It is one of my favorites,” remarked Seymour, who is already very familiar with The Comedy of Errors. Several years ago, when they were still students, Seymour and her frequent collaborator, Olivia Atwood ’17, produced a modern, two-woman take on the play called 15 Villainous Fools, which went on to enjoy considerable success on the fringe theater circuit. Since graduation, Seymour has been busy working more with Atwood and teaching theater in New York City, where she has also “really enjoyed clowning
a round in a handful of improv groups.” Most recently, Seymour earned an MFA in international theater at the highly prestigious Rose Bruford College in London, England.
2017
From a bowdoin.edu/news story, June 7, 2024. Olivia Atwood lived out her dream this summer as she traveled the fringe theater circuit to perform her newest comedy show, Faking It. Straddling genres, Faking It is not quite stand-up comedy, nor is it traditional theater. It’s not straightforward storytelling, either. “I’m somewhere in between all those things,” Atwood said. “I don’t tell jokes, I don’t set up punch lines—it’s storytelling. However, I came from a theatrical background, so there are more voices, there’s more physicality—it is a blend of many things, and it doesn’t have a home under any one roof.” That is why, she added, the show is perfectly suited for fringe festivals, which take place in cities around the world to offer a stage to emerging, unique artists in theater, comedy, dance, circus, cabaret, opera—the gamut of performance art. Faking It was inspired by Atwood’s yearslong job in New York City as a USP, short for “unannounced standardized patient”— specifically during the COVID crisis. Hired by hospitals, she pretended to be a patient with a mysterious ailment and met with newly minted doctors in their first year of residency. The physicians never suspected she was an actor, though later they were sent her anonymous feedback to help them hone their listening and diagnostic skills. Her director, James Jelin ’16, has described Atwood’s play as a bildungsroman, “a comingof-age story, a journey of someone finding herself while doing these undercover jobs,” Atwood said.
Justin J. Pearson has been honored by the Alumni Council with the Young Alumni Service Award. Since his graduation, Pearson has continued to give back to many areas and initiatives across the College, including work with the Office of Career Exploration and Development’s Sophomore Bootcamp, McKeen Center programs, and through speaking opportunities, most recently in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to Bowdoin.
2021
From a Boothbay Register article, August 25, 2024. Sam Betts and his father, Brad, were recently featured in a story highlighting their family-run coffee shop, Color Field Coffee Co., and the beans they roast and brew there. The company takes its name from the color field art movement: abstract paintings characterized by large areas of solid color placed with bold brushstrokes. It’s a fitting name for a company run by the father-son duo, who are both artists. The style is a way to minimize a message on canvas so a viewer can interpret the art in emotions. A similar idea resonates in their vibrant coffee bags. Sam, who grew up locally, said a lot of his inspiration came from being away. After graduating, he moved to Santa Barbara, California, to be nearer his brother. There, he said he was struck by the culture, aesthetic, and ambie nce of the coffee scene. He also lived in Brooklyn, New York, but eventually returned to Maine. Starting off using a popcorn maker, Brad said he began roasting just for fun. He eventually bought dedicated equipment and then, after ten years, decided to share the flavors as a business. They opened last November and hosted a one-year celebration September 20.
Celebrate
1. Maggie Bland ’18 and Ella Ross (Bates College ’19) were married on June 8, 2024, in Milton, Massachusetts. Pictured: Lauren McLaughlin ’19, Leigh Fernandez ’18, Jess Gluck ’18, Juliana Fiore ’18, Sofia Llanso ’18, Jeremy Chimene-Weiss ’18, Kayla Kaufman ’18, Caty Hanson ’19, Austin Stern ’18, Maura Friedlander ’18, Todd Bland ’90, Mariah Rawding ’18, Ella and Maggie, Erin Jeter ’18, Will Forrest ’24, Sarah Kelley ’18, Edward Bland ’87, Richard Bland ’95, Katherine Cavanagh ’19, Greg Piccirillo ’17, and Cirkine Sherry ’18.
2. Jasmin Mahabamunuge ’15 and Pieter Martino ’17 were married on September 4, 2023, in Newport, Rhode Island. Pictured: Malik McKnight ’15, Colin Meehan ’17, Cyrus Nassikas ’17, Mike Paul ’17, Pieter and Jasmin, Jono Harrison ’19, Rebkah Tesfamariam ’18, Natalie Smid ’15, Jackie Maher ’15, Yaya Julien ’15, and Sam King ’14.
3. Colleen Maher ’12 and David Kowarsky (Harvard University ’05) were married on June 8, 2024, at Kittle House in Chappaqua, New York.
Pictured: Lena Midney ’12, Althea Cavanaugh ’13, Kendall Schutzer ’18, Megan Maher Welsh ’16, Allison Dupont ’12, Andres Botero ’13, David and Colleen, Paul Burns (Colby College ’85), Peter Allfather (Colby College ’11), Rafaela Uribe ’12, Everett Nelor ’14, Chad
Dufaud ’12, Rachel Turkel ’11, Brittany Johnson Farrar ’12, and Katie Mathews ’12.
4. Gabby Lubin ’14 and Mike Lachance ’13 were married on August 19, 2023, at Camp Skylemar in Naples, Maine.
Pictured: Debbie Perou ’78, Taylor Voiro ’14, Amanda Howard ’15, Elizabeth Owens ’14, Catherine Yochum ’15, Elise Sanchez ’14, Jordan Lantz ’15, Gabby and Mike, Harry Lanphear ’83, Laurie Lachance ’83, Pam Tait ’84, Charlie Cubeta ’13, Carl Spielvogel ’13 and his son, Calvin, Casey Grindon ’13, Dan Ertis ’13, Anna Bradley-Webb ’16, Ryan Larochelle ’13, and Hernan Molina ’13.
5. Kate Paulsen ’17 and Shreyas Sudhakar (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign ’17) were married on August 26, 2023, in Rolling Hills Estates, California. Pictured: Ana Garcia-Moreno ’17, Will Gantt ’17, Jade Willey ’17, Kate and Shreyas, Charlie Gerrity ’17, Jason Greenberg ’17, Alice Kim ’17, and Jonathan Cho ’16.
6. Jonathan Freedman ’08 and Amber Quintana (Georgetown University ’12) were married on April 6, 2024, in Boca Raton, Florida. Pictured: Michael Bamani ’08, Lynn Freedman ’13, Amber and Jonathan, and Andrew Freedman ’12. In attendance but not pictured: Jonathan’s father, Alan Freedman ’76.
7. Elizabeth Miller ’18 and John Bodkin (Lehigh University ’17) were married on July 6, 2024, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Pictured: Zach Duperry ’18, Osa Fasehun ’18, Elizabeth, Kara Lopez-Lengowski ’18, Nate Forlini ’18, Clayton Rose, Phoebe Thompson ’18, Ava Alexander ’18, Nickie Mitch ’18, and Noah Verzani ’18. Former Bowdoin president and uncle of the bride Clayton Rose officiated the ceremony.
8. Maggie Brenner ’10 and Nicholas Mirsky (Wesleyan University ’09) were married on September 23, 2023, in Harpswell, Maine. Pictured: Jin-Kyung Kim ’10, Sofia Siegel ’10, Tom Wakefield ’10, Caroline Ferrari ’10, Alyssa Phanitdasack ’10, Jayme Woogerd ’07, Clare Ronan ’10, Nicholas and Maggie, Talia Cowen ’16, Dzenana Lukovic ’09, Paul Landsberg ’10, and Ben Freedman ’09.
9. Jade Willey ’17 and William Gantt ’17 were married on May 11, 2024, in Bristol, Maine.
Pictured: Frank and Jane Connors (Jade’s Bowdoin host family), Ana Garcia-Moreno ’17, Bertrand Garcia-Moreno ’81, Katherine Bryan ’17, Andrea Wunderlich ’17, Alex Poblete ’17, Rubi Duran ’16, Jade and William, Kate Paulsen ’17, Aidan Penn ’17, Alice Kim Cho ’17, Jonathon Cho ’16, Emma Bezilla ’20, and Ben Bristol ’17. Jade and William both took the surname Walden when they married.
Maine is known for lobster, clams, blueberries, and potatoes for good reason— they’re delicious, and there are festivals all over the state to celebrate that. After you’ve had your fill of the justly famous, check out some of these other Maine feasts.
Blueberries and Beyond
FIDDLEHEADS
In an April food festival held at the University of Maine at Farmington, you’ll find the Maine delicacy of fiddleheads, the curled fronds of the ostrich fern, in all kinds of creative dishes. If you have any doubts about how to safely prepare this coveted spring edible with a super-short growing season, you can learn how in an atmosphere made festive with food trucks and live music.
SEAWEED
During Seaweed Week, more than seventy businesses along Maine’s coast serve a bounty of seaweed dishes, from burgers to specialty cocktails. Maine waters support more than 200 varieties of seaweed, but the festival week is timed to coincide with the spring kelp harvest, during which a million pounds of kelp are cut.
POUTINE
Poutine was invented in the Canadian province of Québec and migrated to Maine with many Québecois who came to the state. You can try it—it’s French fries with cheese curds and gravy, if you’re wondering—at the Poutinefest held at Portland’s Thomas Point.
RED HOT DOGS
Maine locals love their “red snappers.” The Red Hot Dog Festival, a 2016 brainchild of the Dexter Development Association, attracts some 5,000 people to a one-day orgy of dogs manufactured by W.A. Bean & Son of Bangor.
WHOOPIE PIES
In 2011, the Maine legislature designated the whoopie pie, two chocolate cake rounds with cream filling, as the official Maine state treat. Attendees at the Dover-Foxcroft festival are given wooden nickels with which to purchase whoopie pies baked by some twenty different bakers. Maine set the Guinness Book record for creating the longest line of whoopie pies—2,121—on June 9, 2023.
MOXIE
Moxie, the official soft drink of Maine that gets its distinctive bitter aftertaste from gentian root extract, was invented in Massachusetts by a Maine native, but the state’s association with the bittersweet beverage is largely due to the late Frank Anicetti, who turned his Kennebec Fruit Company store in Lisbon Falls into a Moxie showcase.
PLOYES
Ployes are buckwheat flatbreads of French-Acadian ancestry, and they are still very popular up in Maine’s St. John Valley. “A ploye is less sweet and a little more fluffy than a pancake,” explains Amber Rankin of the Greater Fort Kent Chamber of Commerce. “And you don’t flip a ploye; you only cook it on one side.”
OYSTERS
At the third annual Maine Oyster Festival in Freeport, held in June, 40,000 oysters from thirty of Maine’s 150 or so oyster farms were shucked. The Pemaquid Oyster Festival in Boothbay Harbor, which has been around since 1986, is held in the fall, explains oyster farmer Smokey McKeen (who plays accordion and guitar in a band aptly named the Oystermen), “because the meat plumps up and gets sweeter” as the water gets colder and the oysters enter a dormant period.
BREAD AND GRAINS
The Maine Grain Alliance puts on a conference in Skowhegan that attracts some 250 bakers, millers, farmers, and brewers to thirty workshops, and the conference ends with the Artisan Bread Fair, where close to 3,000 people break bread to celebrate what Maine Grain Alliance executive director Tristan Noyes ’05 calls “the grain renaissance in Maine.”
since
each
Wild blueberry festivals abound in Maine. At the one in Machias, which has been around
1976, some 5,000 people turn up
summer to buy and eat berries and watch the pie-eating contest, road race, and a locally produced “blueberry festival musical comedy.”
