Bowdoin Magazine, Vol. 92, No. 3, Spring/Summer 2021

BOWDOIN COLLEGE

SPRING/SUMMER 2021 VOL. 92 NO. 3

ISSUE 20XX VOL. XX NO. X

LET’S GO TO THE MOVIES!

Contents SPRING/SUMMER 2021 VOL. 92 NO. 3

28 Grasping Hate

Linda Kinstler ’13 talks with Bowdoin faculty and alumni about sources of and possible solutions to our deep divisions, and ways to contextualize and understand the extreme and destructive emotion of hate.

34 Coming Soon

20 Seeing Me

Beset by crippling pain and fatigue that puzzled doctors, Sarah Ramey ’03 embarked on a journey of hope and resilience that represents an all-too-familiar experience for many marginalized people—not being believed.

Bowdoin cinema experts discuss movies and what film means to them.

Photographer Séan Alonzo Harris sets the scene in favorite Maine theaters.

48 Q&A

Lindsey R. Baden ’87, principal investigator for NIH-Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine trials, talks science, philosophy, and ethics.

Forward 5

Positive Influencer: Scott Fujimoto ’00

mentors through social media.

7

Dine: A classic strawberry-rhubarb pie recipe

by biology lecturer Stephanie Richards.

8

Drifting Off: Norah Simpson ’00 on the essential nature of sleep. Illustrated by María Medem.

11

UV Light: Professor Dale Syphers and Joyce Bor ’22

fight viruses with physics.

16

By the Numbers: The retirement of three legendary coaches marks the end of an era.

Column 18

First Impressions: Artists and parents

Cassie Jones ’01 and Professor Mark Wethli marvel at the honesty, freedom, and natural creativity of children.

Connect 53 Kai Wise ’18 keeps park visitors safe.

54 Norm Cohen ’56 talks fifty-five years of friendships.

62 Carolyn Brady ’19 on being Miss Maine.

In Every Issue 4

Respond

52

Whispering Pines

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A MOMENTOUS OCCASION Maine Governor Janet Mills (on the big screen) gave the traditional Greetings from the State to open Bowdoin’s 216th Commencement on Saturday, May 29, 2021.

The College conferred 467 bachelor of arts degrees to the Class of 2021 in the outside ceremony on the Quad. Colder-than-normal temperatures and rain (that lessened as the morning went on) could not dampen spirits of the graduates, visitors, and volunteers at the first in-person graduation the College has held in two years. Following a rigorous campus testing program throughout the academic year and the successful nationwide rollout of vaccines—and in accordance with the latest guidance issued by the US CDC— Bowdoin’s graduating seniors were able to invite an unlimited number of guests to celebrate with them.

Photo by Michele Stapleton

Respond The SS Robert E. Peary ready to launch at Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California, on November 12, 1942.

MAGAZINE STAFF

Liberty Ships KATHRYN MILES IS TO BE COMMENDED for her superb, concise history of these remarkable vessels. The Bowdoin connections were a special treat. Two of those 2,710 Liberty ships still with us may be visited. SS Jeremiah O’Brien is berthed in San Francisco and SS John W. Brown in Baltimore. Both are operational and conduct one-day nostalgia cruises. I was pleased to see the record-breaking construction of SS Robert E. Peary featured. Ms. Miles noted the Navy destroyer escort named for the admiral. That was DE-132, in service from 1943 to 1947. There were two others: the destroyer D-226 in commission from 1920 to 1942, and the frigate (FF-1073) from 1972 to 1992. Currently supporting the Navy’s

Atlantic Fleet is the Military Sealift Command’s USNS Robert E. Peary (T-AKE 5), a dry cargo and ammunition ship. With a little imagination, one might think of her as an incarnation of her namesake Liberty. The other mass-produced World War II cargo vessels were the 531 Victory ships. They were slightly larger and capable of higher speeds than the Liberty ships. One of them was the SS Bowdoin Victory. Two others were named for our CBB rivals: SS Colby Victory and SS Bates Victory. Three of them remaining are museum ships open for tours. They are SS American Victory in Tampa, Florida; SS Lane Victory in San Pedro, California; and SS Red Oak Victory in Richmond, California.

Channing M. Zucker ’59, Executive Director Emeritus, Historic Naval Ships Association

ARCTIC CHARM My wife, Deborah (special student 1972–1974), and I were charmed by the “All Things Arctic” illustrations of Kelsey Oseid, which nicely complemented the text. We hope to see more of her work in future issues.

Editor Matt O’Donnell P’24 Consulting Editor Scott Schaiberger ’95 Executive Editor Alison Bennie Associate Editor Leanne Dech Designer and Art Director Melissa Wells Design Consultant 2COMMUNIQUÉ Contributors Ed Beem P’13 Jim Caton Doug Cook Cheryl Della Pietra Rebecca Goldfine Scott Hood Micki Manheimer Tom Porter On the Cover: Popcorn photograph by Vesna Jovanovi / EyeEm. Movie tickets at the Colonial Theatre in Belfast, Maine.

Photograph by Séan Alonzo Harris.

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.

James Nicholson ’73

facebook.com/bowdoin

@BowdoinCollege

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@bowdoincollege

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: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Forward FROM BOWDOIN AND BEYOND

SCOTT FUJIMOTO ’00

POSITIVE INFLUENCER Isolation often leads to burnout, and many health care professionals will tell you they started their social media presence in an effort to combat burnout in their professional lives— there is comfort in sharing stories and struggles with peers over social media. However, I often tell others to take a social media hiatus as a form of self-care. Disconnecting from our phones and the constant pressure of being “accessible” can be quite therapeutic.

My original goal was to use social media to educate [people] about my often misunderstood specialty of interventional radiology. However, I saw early on that it was a great way to connect with medical students and premed students, and it allowed me to expand my mentorship platform. I had great mentors at Bowdoin, namely swimming coach and legend Charlie Butt. A great mentor does not just teach you the material or coach Xs and Os; they take personal interest in their students’ lives. Charlie did that, and that’s the kind of mentor I strive to be.

During this pandemic, it became clear that I should share vetted and accurate information regarding COVID-19 and the vaccines. Racial inequality is a public health concern as well, however everyone should be vocal against racism—not just those with a certain number of followers or degrees in medicine or sociology.

I never thought of myself as an advocate. But I’ve realized with everything going on in the world that I’ve been given this platform, so I might as well use it to make a difference.

Whether that comes in the form of combating vaccine misinformation or raising awareness of anti-Asian racism, I want to be a positive influence, especially when it revolves around issues that I am particularly passionate about.

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

PHOTO: NATE HOFFMAN, COURTESY OF FIGS

Scott Fujimoto ’00, a residency program director at Loma Linda University, has more than 13,500 followers on Instagram (@docfuji), where he mixes educational content and a little bit of fun. “I found that my followers really appreciate authenticity and vulnerability,” he said. “It makes you more relatable, and that’s what I want to be.”

Forward Alumni Life

Community

Zach Burton ’14

The Manic Monologues

A CASCADE OF OPPORTUNITIES Early in the spring semester, President Rose made an appeal to the Bowdoin community, asking alumni and family members for job or internship leads for graduating seniors. Offers poured in almost immediately and, in the end, more than three hundred people responded.

One of the family members who offered positions was Dr. Jerome Kim P’24, director general of the International Vaccine Institute (IVI) in Seoul, South Korea, who leaped at the chance to establish a new summer internship program at the institute. He initially suggested hiring four Bowdoin interns—the institute ended up taking nine. They’ll work in the areas of global affairs and communications, health economics, epidemiology, and public health.

“We’re excited for this pilot program and hope that it will stimulate interest and raise enthusiasm for work in global health,” Kim said.

The United Nations galvanized the formation of the IVI in 1996 to create safe, effective, and affordable vaccines for developing countries.

“As an international organization (like the WHO) that does grant-driven research (like a university) and develops actual vaccines (like a biotech) for the protection of people in low- and middle-income countries, IVI offers a broad view of the possibilities in vaccine diplomacy, policy, science, and business,” Kim said.

IN 2017, while completing a PhD at Stanford University,

Zach Burton ’14 suffered a bipolar breakdown. During his recovery, he struggled to find relatable accounts of his illness, other than a “barrage of horror stories,” he said. “There was not a lot of hope out there.” Inspired by the true stories featured in The Vagina Monologues, Burton and his friend Elisa Hofmeister decided they would fill the void in a similar way, and the pair wrote The Manic Monologues, a play about mental illness. Despite the fact that they had no previous theater experience—Burton is a scientist and Hofmeister a medical student—they opened the play at Stanford in 2019 to a packed house and rave reviews. Additional universities and organizations began producing the play, but Burton’s aspirations to share the production more widely with expanded live performances were scuttled by COVID-19.

Enter producer Debbie Bisno, from the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey, who decided to make a virtual version of the play. That version, which can be viewed at mccarter.org/manicmonologues, debuted online in February and has been nominated for a Drama League Award for outstanding digital theater. “I felt so fortunate to have a large support network of family and friends and loved ones,” Burton said. “Writing this play felt like a duty—like, who was I to recover and be happy without helping others?”

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PHOTO: COURTESY OF ADVENTHEALTH; ILLUSTRATION: KEITH NEGLEY

Dine

StrawberryRhubarb Pie Recipe by Stephanie Richards Strawberry-rhubarb pie is a New England classic, and June in Maine means you can find local rhubarb in the stores and farmers’ markets all around. This version has a touch of orange and, if you want, a hint of warm spice from the cardamom, and the tapioca helps the slices stay together neatly.

Makes one ten-inch pie.

3 ½ cups strawberries, hulled and quartered 3 ½ cups rhubarb, cut into ½-inch dice 2 tablespoons minute tapioca ½ cup white sugar ½ cup light brown sugar 1 teaspoon orange zest ¼ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon ground cardamom (optional) 1 egg white, beaten with 1 tablespoon water and a pinch of salt 2 ten-inch pie crusts demerara sugar for sprinkling

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Place the strawberries and rhubarb in a large bowl and then gently mix in the tapioca, sugars, zest, salt, and cardamom (if using) and let the mixture sit while you roll out your pie crusts.

Roll out the bottom crust to a minimum of twelve inches in diameter, place it in your pie plate, and let it rest in the refrigerator while you roll out the top crust to the same size. Remove the pie plate from the refrigerator, brush the bottom crust with the beaten egg white, and mound the strawberry-rhubarb mixture on top of the bottom crust. Place the top crust over the fruit, trim the edges as needed to make them even, and then crimp them together. Cut several small slits in the top crust, brush the top crust with the egg white, and sprinkle the pie with the demerara sugar (regular sugar is fine if you don’t have demerara).

DID YOU KNOW? Rhubarb is a strange stalk.

It’s one of the weirder things that we persist in baking into pies, and it’s one of the only foods in the world that you can actually hear grow—in England’s “Rhubarb Triangle,” a nine-square-mile area between the West Yorkshire towns of Wakefield, Morley, and Rothwell, rhubarb plants are moved into pitch-black “forcing sheds” after two years out in the fields. The plants think that they’re just underground, so spend all their stored-up root energy by growing taller at a fantastic rate. If you’re quiet in a shed, you can hear the rhubarb cells crackle in the dark as they reach up and up, sometimes doubling in height in the span of a day.

Place the pie pan on a baking sheet to catch any juices that escape and bake for thirty-five to forty-five minutes, removing it when it is golden brown. Let the pie cool for two hours before slicing.

Stephanie Richards, a lecturer in biology at Bowdoin who earned her BS at Bates and her PhD at the University of Vermont, is on Instagram as piecrastinator. “My mom made pies,” she says, “and now I do too. I grew up in Portland, and my mother would take us strawberry picking every year. I love this pie because it tastes like summer.”

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Forward

The more we study sleep, and the more data we have about not getting enough, the more we learn how integral sleep is to nearly every aspect of human life.

Research subjects who stayed awake for twentyeight hours performed on a series of tests as they would with a blood alcohol level of 1 percent, over the legal limit to drive.

In a study of college basketball players, those who lengthened their sleep improved their free throw and three-point shooting accuracy by 9 percent.

Did You Know?

Drifting Off Norah Simpson ’00 tells us a story about the essential nature of sleep.

Illustration by María Medem An expert in sleep, Norah Simpson ’00 is fascinated with the ways sleep is central to our health and well-being. Simpson is a clinical associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine and is the associate director of the Stanford Sleep Health and Insomnia Program. She studies sleep problems and the ways that sleep deficiencies connect to other disorders, and she offers us here some information and expert advice on the fine art of getting a good night’s rest.

Watching TV (something calm!) is better than laptops or phones or iPads. There’s less blue light, and you are farther away from the screen.

Where you sleep should be dark, cool, and quiet— but probably the most important thing is to go to sleep with a quiet mind.

Sleep deprivation can negatively impact immune function. In a study, people who slept less than seven hours a night were three times as likely to develop a cold after being exposed to a cold virus than people who slept more than eight hours.

Studies explain why sleep deprivation can lead to obesity and heart disease over time through changes in brain activity and in levels of hormones that affect hunger and satiety.

Everyone knows caffeine interferes with sleep, but not how: caffeine blocks adenosine receptors, and it is rising levels of adenosine that naturally make you feel drowsy.

One of the best recommendations is the least well-received: put away personal devices an hour before bed, since we know the blue light they emit delays sleep and reduces melatonin, a sleep-promoting hormone.

Make sure you wind down and let go of daytime activation and alertness before you get into bed— reading, gentle yoga, and meditation are all good ways to help you float off to sleep.

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Forward

Game On

SAFE! When Maddie Rouhana ’21 scored in the second inning of an April 18 victory over Colby, it was one of eleven times she crossed the plate in a stellar senior season. An infielder from Falmouth, Maine, Rouhana batted .395 and led the team with seventeen hits, three home runs, and nineteen runs batted in. In a shortened campaign, and with a roster of eleven players (and only two pitchers), the Bowdoin softball team posted a 5-7 record, capping the season with a 14-7 home victory over Trinity on May 8.

Softball was one of a handful of teams that participated in intercollegiate play this spring, and was the only team to compete in NESCAC action, where they finished in a tie for second place.

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PHOTO: BRIAN BEARD

Academics Katelyn Cox ’21 cheers on Maddie Rouhana ’21, who slid safely into home on a sacrifice fly by Ruby Siltanen ’21 in the second inning of a high-scoring, 15-10 victory over Colby on April 18 at Pickard Field.

UV Light WHEN THE PANDEMIC HIT in March 2020, Professor of Physics Dale Syphers was in the middle of his sabbatical, researching forensic physics. He “turned on a dime” and threw himself into the study of how ultraviolet (UV) light can be deployed in the fight against COVID-19 and other viruses. Exposing personal protective equipment, like N-95 respirators, to shortwave ultraviolet light clears them of active viruses, allowing health care workers to safely reuse the gear. But over time, repeated exposure to UV light can degrade the mask materials, making them ineffective.

With research assistant Joyce Bor ’22, Syphers has been investigating the shortest amount of time respirators need to be exposed to UV light, and at what level, to render viral loads inactive. While 99 percent of the viral load on a mask is killed within the first few seconds of UV exposure, the remaining 1 percent takes twenty times longer to become deactivated. As UV beams penetrate a mask, photons bounce off the fibers of the filter layers. Some of the UV light bounces backward before doubling back and piercing the mask, slowing the deactivation process. In collaboration with a virologist at the University of New England, Bor and Syphers conduct their UV exposure experiments in a box constructed specifically to deactivate viruses on N-95 masks. The intention is to send these boxes, with assistance from international relief agencies, to clinics around the world.

“In the long run, we believe the UV box under development could be especially useful in areas of the world with limited means, allowing N-95 respirators to be reused safely up to twenty-five times, and probably useful here in the US for everything from EMTs to doctors’ offices and hospitals,” Syphers said.

Additionally, the findings Syphers and Bor have made into how UV light bounces off mask fibers could lead to better-designed masks that can be reused even more often—perhaps hundreds of times.

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Forward Sustainability

Alumni Life

Celebrating Our Community Even in the face of a virtual-only format, Reunion 2021 did not disappoint. Classes that were slated to celebrate a reunion in 2021 and 2020 were offered a wide array of online programming opportunities—a mix of nearly twenty all-inclusive and classspecific events, both live and prerecorded, that was available starting in April. Live events ranged from discussions with medical and life sciences experts on the impacts of COVID-19 to a conversation with artist Shaun Leonardo ’01, a talk about the Bowdoin endowment, and a presentation on how to make the perfect lobster roll. Many of the offerings were open to all alumni, including the Convocation celebration of alumni award winners and a prerecorded conversation between President Clayton Rose and Bowdoin trustee and editor-in-chief of Yahoo! Finance Andy Serwer ’81, P’16, P’20. Both of these events, and a good selection of nearly all of the programming—including a variety of campus tours—can still be accessed at bowdoin.edu/reunion.

Archives

BOWDOIN STORIES Last spring, when campus life shifted in response to the pandemic, the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives invited the community to participate in Bowdoin Stories, a program first launched in 2015 that encouraged students to engage in short interviews and become part of the College’s history while they were still on campus. The new version of the initiative welcomes students, faculty, staff, and alumni to contribute accounts of their experiences with COVID-19 in the interest of fostering connections and preserving a record for posterity.

Submissions may be made on paper or digitally, and can take the form of prose, poetry, art, or anything that helps reflect current lived experiences. To contribute, or to read what has been collected so far, go to bowdo.in/covid-stories.

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Green Tea Originally brewed as a WBOR radio program, Green Tea became a popular podcast steeped in sustainability and the environment.

WITH TWENTY-SEVEN EPISODES now available on Soundcloud and iTunes, the recent fourth season of the Green Tea podcast was hosted by Holden Turner ’21 and Juliette Min ’22, and “explored new angles of sustainability,” covering topics from plant medicine and ecological anthropology to coral ecology and eco-feminism. The latter two subjects were addressed together, by Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology Justin Baumann, who was a guest on the show.

Diego Velasquez ’20 and Marie Caspard ’20 launched Green Tea in fall 2019, first as a radio show on WBOR. They expanded it to a podcast as a way to explore sustainability through personal stories, and arranged interviews with students, faculty, staff, and community members. Velasquez and Caspard also wanted to convey hope about a subject that is often grim, and provide information and inspiration to compel action. “Positive inspiration is one of our goals,” Velasquez said.

Turner joined Caspard last fall and took over with Min this spring. They’ll continue as cohosts through next autumn. “The show is a great excuse to speak with people I’d never meet otherwise,” Turner said. “Especially now, you can’t have casual meet-ups where you simply hear stories from students and professors around campus. Green Tea fills that gap a little.”

ILLUSTRATION: BRIAN STAUFFER

Athletics

On the Shelf

LINKING UP WITH LINK

Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing

He may have retired nearly thirty years ago, but Mike Linkovich—known by generations as “Link”—still looms large on campus. The former athletic trainer, who came to Bowdoin in 1954, is someone whose dedication, sense of humor, and charisma have made him part of the fabric of the Bowdoin community, says Assistant Athletic Director Kevin Loney. Pre-pandemic, Link could be seen socializing at football games, in regular lunches at Thorne, and working out in the fitness center. Decades of Bowdoin athletes have a Link anecdote up their sleeve.

With Link incapacitated after losing a toe in a 2019 car accident and unable to receive many visitors, his extensive network of friends found a way to stay in touch. For several months now, Loney has organized regular Zoom chats, enabling Link, now ninety-nine, to catch up with alumni from around the country, most of them athletes from the 1960s through the 1980s. “Link loves these weekly conversations,” Loney said. Every week, a handful of alumni reminisce with Link, comparing war stories and injuries.

“Link remembers everything—his mind is still sharp as a tack. They don’t make them like him anymore.”

Former athletic trainer Mike “Link” Linkovich is a timeless Bowdoin personality.

CHRIS BAIL ’02

(Princeton University Press, 2021) In this data-driven explanation of how social media platforms polarize us and how individual users can make changes that will make the platforms more tolerable, Chris Bail—professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University—argues the problems that plague social media today have a deeper cause, and he lays out new ideas and technologies to make changes.

The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art

I, Grape; or The Case for Fiction: Essays

PEGGY WANG, associate

BROCK CLARKE, A. LeRoy

professor of art history

Greason Professor of English

(University of Minnesota Press, 2020)

(Acre Books, 2021)

Drugs and Thugs: The History and Future of America’s War on Drugs RUSSELL CRANDALL ’94

(Yale University Press, 2020)

Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan SHENILA KHOJA-MOOLJI,

assistant professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies (University of California Press, 2021)

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Forward Student Life

Stamped with a Smile The Mail Art Collective encourages students to reach out to members of the community by mailing hand-painted postcards.

“I FIRST TRIED THE IDEA in my Painting I class last fall to build a sense of community beyond our Zoom meetings,” writes Mary Hart, a visiting assistant professor of art. “At first, I had the students send the cards to each other. The idea grew, and now we have a partnership with Mid Coast Senior Care Center so students can connect with residents there. I like the idea that art is something everyone can do, and it’s free!”

Launched by two of Hart’s students, Elena Sparrow ’22 and Dalia Tabachnik ’21, the initiative now involves around sixty students. “With so many people being isolated both geographically and in their day-to-day lives due to the pandemic,” says Sparrow, “we hoped that creating this community and mode of communication would be helpful to keep people connected and supported.”

“There are so many ways to fill a blank postcard as far as how you decorate it, but also as far as what you communicate with it,” writes Tabachnik. “With these postcards I feel like we each give a stranger on the other end a piece of ourselves, which sparks joy in both parties and brightens someone’s day when it arrives in their mailbox.”

Above: Elena Sparrow ’22 and Dalia Tabachnik ’21 collaborated on this postcard for the Mail Art Collective’s theme “happy accidents.”

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Sound Bite

“You don’t see the man-made boundaries. There is simply one planet. Feeling this interconnectedness, and knowing that all humans, despite the differences we like to bring up, we really are all in this together. I wish I could share that perspective with everybody on Earth.”

—NASA ASTRONAUT JESSICA MEIR H’21 IN HER MAY 26 “FIRESIDE CHAT” WITH THE BOWDOIN COMMUNITY, DESCRIBING THE PERSPECTIVE OF LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM SPACE

Campaign

Access and Affordability The support and generosity of alumni, families, and friends, in combination with the performance of Bowdoin’s endowment, enabled the College to make two significant changes recently to its financial aid policies. First, the summer earnings contribution requirement—which had typically been $2,300—has been eliminated for students whose family income is less than $75,000.

Second, the College has adjusted its financial aid calculation methodology in ways that increase support for both low- and middle-income families.

These moves will increase Bowdoin’s financial aid budget by roughly $3.5 million annually. “This increase to the aid budget reflects Bowdoin’s steadfast commitment to need-based aid and to equitably addressing affordability and the needs of our families,” says Whitney Soule, Bowdoin’s senior vice president and dean of admissions and student aid.

Bowdoin is need-blind—that is, a family’s ability to pay is not a factor in admission—and the College meets the full determined financial need with aid packages that include grants, not loans. Bowdoin is one of only nineteen colleges in the country that are able to offer this need-blind, meet-full-need, no-loan approach. The From Here campaign aims to provide $200 million in new endowment for financial aid and, as of May, is about 60 percent of the way toward reaching that goal.

PHOTO: ELENA SPARROW ’22

In Season

TAKING THE PLUNGE Reading period began with a splash on May 19 as students took the opportunity to get outside in the warm spring sun for some carnival-like fun before diving into finals. It may have been nearly 80 degrees on the Quad, but as President Clayton Rose can attest, the water in the dunk tank was still chilly!

PHOTO: ANDREW ESTEY

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102

Forward

Consecutive seasons (fall, winter, and spring) coached since fall 1987

494 Men’s basketball wins

34 Years at Bowdoin (1987)

LYNN RUDDY Associate director of athletics for facilities and assistant coach of track and field

129

All-Americans, and five NCAA Champions

598

Total victories (men’s basketball and men’s soccer), the most wins of any coach in Bowdoin’s history

36

Years at Bowdoin (1985)

Wins as head volleyball coach; first coach in program history (1986–2000)

NESCAC Championships

PETER SLOVENSKI Director of track and field and head coach of men’s and women’s cross country

TIM GILBRIDE Head men’s basketball coach, assistant men’s soccer coach, and assistant director of athletics for coach development

7

212

45

8

Years at Bowdoin (1976); the second full-time female coach hired at Bowdoin and currently the longest tenured member of the athletic department

Bowdoin programs coached (women’s and men’s indoor and outdoor track and field, women’s and men’s swimming and diving, softball, volleyball)

By the Numbers

THE END OF AN ERA A coach’s impact is measured in individual relationships, not in statistics—especially for the generations of Bowdoin athletes coached by Tim Gilbride, Lynn Ruddy, and Peter Slovenski, all of whom announced their retirement this spring. But these coaches, among the last of those hired by the legendary Sid Watson, have become legends in their own right, and their impressive numbers are worth noting, even as they tell just part of their long and successful stories.

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2,548 Total combined number of athletes coached by the three coaches

On View

Campus Life

Wicked Smart

A New Perspective Re|Framing the Collection: New Considerations in European and American Art, 1475–1875 THE BOWDOIN COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART draws on its permanent collection in its latest exhibition to newly examine four centuries of work and consider how the growth of empires shaped global networks from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Re|Framing the Collection, curated by Elizabeth Humphrey ’14, curatorial assistant and manager of student programs, and Laura Sprague, senior consulting curator, “explores what we can learn when new questions are asked of the Museum’s collection,” commented Museum directors Anne Collins Goodyear and Frank Goodyear. “The artworks presented here coincide with the expansion of Euro-American cultures and empires in the New World. The show demonstrates how works of art created in a European tradition reflect worldviews compatible with colonization that undermined Indigenous communities and perpetuated the enslavement of Africans and others,” they added.

The Goodyears noted that Re|Framing the Collection includes work created by Indigenous people and enslaved Africans, not only pieces by artists of European descent. “By capturing this dynamic exchange, this exhibition incorporates new perspectives to tell more inclusive stories of our shared histories.”

When Tina Chong, assistant director of the Baldwin Center for Learning and Teaching at Bowdoin, launched a new program called Wicked Smart Groups last fall to help students improve their study habits, the two most popular groups were focused on procrastination and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

(The “wicked” in Wicked Smart comes from typical Maine use of the word to emphasize the intensity of something—e.g., “It’s wicked cold out.”) After seeing what students found most helpful, Chong increased the number of offerings this spring.

With Lisa Flanagan, another advisor at the Baldwin Center, Chong provides many practical tips and solutions in the Wicked Smart Groups. But she and Flanagan also want students to shift the way they think about themselves and their relationship to work.

In the ADHD group, Chong discusses strategies for better time management and organization. She also explores the positive side of the condition, which includes the ability to hyper-focus. “We can look at this like it is a gift,” she said. “We want students to know there are benefits to ADHD.” In the procrastination group, she and Flanagan encourage students to consider the reasons behind their stalling, and to practice self-compassion. “I think if people can understand why they procrastinate—that it is not a personal failing or a moral deficit—they’re better off,” Flanagan said, and they are able to tackle the issue more effectively.

View the exhibition online at bowdoin.edu/art-museum.

Above: Wabanaki Birchbark Covered Box, 1834, birchbark and split spruce root,

by Ambroise St. Aubin family, known as the Bear Family, American, Wabanaki.

Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

PHOTO: DENNIS GRIGGS; ILLUSTRATION: BRIAN STAUFFER

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Column

First Impressions Artists and parents Cassie Jones ’01 and Mark Wethli marvel at the honesty, freedom, and natural creativity of children.

FOR THE PAST SIX YEARS, we’ve had the joy of

watching our children, now ages four and six, create images from both their imaginations and the world around them. It’s been a special experience working alongside them for us, as artists and educators, seeing how their ideas and abilities have grown, and reflecting, from time to time, on the nature of children’s art in general.

Children’s art plays a celebrated but unusual role in the world of creative expression. Many of us delight in the things children create but don’t expect to find their work in a museum.

Likewise, while most parents have an affection for their own children’s art, their appreciation rarely extends to that of others, and they rarely display it in their homes other than on the refrigerator door or the walls of the playroom.

This might have to do with yet another paradox of children’s art—while any one example might be thrilling for its inventiveness and originality, there are thousands more just like it being produced every day, all around the world.

Nevertheless, we’ve all seen children’s paintings that could be mistaken, at a glance, for the work of any number of artists from the past hundred years—a relationship that runs both ways. As Picasso famously put it, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to paint like a child.” The flip side of his remark, of course, is the classic response from the general public that “my kid could have done that.”

While it’s understandable that some viewers might prefer artwork that demonstrates high levels of technical skill, for others, children’s art, like a great deal of modern art, is equally or more engaging for its honesty, immediacy, inventiveness, and unfiltered expression.

Just as artists from Picasso’s time to our own have looked to other cultures, the subconscious, and subjective experience in search of truer forms of expression, they have looked to children’s art as well. When pop artist Claes Oldenburg, famous for his oversize sculptures

of ordinary objects, was asked where he got his ideas, he answered, “Everything I do is completely original—I made it up when I was a kid.”

If modern art has been about anything, it’s been about freedom and truth to oneself—and there are no freer and truer artists in the world than the ones age seven and under.

When the pandemic first hit, it took us a while to reconnect with our work in the studio.

We were so distracted, overwhelmed, and exhausted by negotiating the pandemic, as well as being physically cut off from our studio spaces outside the home, that we couldn’t bring ourselves to make art or even imagine how we might begin. But we were also spending much more time with our children, and seeing how freely they made their work reinspired our own.

We might be at Popham Beach, for instance,

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watching them draw in the sand, or at home building cardboard spaceships, and somehow their guileless joy in creating things (and not being overly concerned about the outcome) brought us back to our own love of making.

As far as fostering their creative abilities, that’s the one thing we haven’t worried about. Our only ambition has been to provide them with the space, time, materials, and tacit encouragement to let them do as they please. As artists, we’ve been fortunate to have a ready supply of various art materials on hand, so it’s no surprise how much they enjoy trying a new kind of paper, an actual canvas, or the latest paint pens.

But this is not to say one needs professional art materials to bring out children’s inner spark.

More often than not they’ve been just as happy working with markers, construction paper, and glue sticks on the embarrassing amount of cardboard that has come into our home over the past year.

It’s also been gratifying to see how art projects naturally focus their attention, teaching them by means of their own example about tenacity and the value of making steady progress toward a

Left: “Alexander Hamilton,” by Wren Wethli, age six. Ever since the film version of Hamilton came out last summer, Wren has watched it numerous times, listened to the cast recording many times more, and painted numerous images of the characters from the musical, like this one of Hamilton.

Opposite page: “Blueberry Bush,” by Reed Wethli, age three. Painted from imagination—having never seen an actual blueberry bush—this painting is a good example of how a child’s painting can remind us of work by more established contemporary artists.

goal—particularly a goal they didn’t necessarily have in mind before they started. They’re often happy working on their own, of course, but we also like to work alongside them to help them see that making things doesn’t have to stop at age six or seven. Even if we’re just drawing stick figures, doodling in a margin, or working on a coloring page together, we think it means a lot for them to see their parents working with their hands, making creative decisions, and taking one step at a time, the same way they do.

Our daughter fell in love with the musical Hamilton last summer and made a series of paintings and drawings of the main characters.

Her fascination with all things Hamilton (she wants to visit his grave for her seventh birthday) also points to another aspect of their

PHOTOS: CASSIE JONES ’01 AND MARK WETHLI

art-making—we don’t distinguish it from other interests, so that exploring the natural world, gardening, learning about current events, or writing and illustrating stories overlap and work together, rather than as separate activities.

At one point in his career, during a debate about child welfare, Sir Winston Churchill was challenged about the basis for his expertise on children, to which he purportedly replied, “Well, I was one once.” As we all were, of course, but almost everything about our childhood, including the art we made and how it made us feel, is too easily forgotten, except for the faint reflections of it we see in the art of our own children.

Years ago, we were telling our niece, Jane Urciuoli ’23 (age six at the time), that Mark taught drawing and painting at Bowdoin, to which

she replied, “Well, I don’t need that kind of class. I’m already an artist.” Which was quite true, as it is for all children. When it comes to kids and creativity, they are as close to being artists as they’ll ever be. Our main job is making sure they don’t forget it. And in a year as challenging as this one has been, making sure that we don’t forget it either.

Cassie Jones ’01 is a painter who earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Mark Wethli, a painter and the A. LeRoy Greason Professor of Art, has taught courses in drawing and painting for over forty years. Each of them is a MacDowell and Yaddo fellow, and their work has been widely exhibited and included in major public and private collections.

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BY JENNIE AGG

SEEING ME SEEING PHOTOGRAPHS BY JULIUS SCHLOSBURG

Beset by crippling pain and fatigue, Sarah Ramey ’03 took nearly fifteen years to write her memoir, The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness. Told by the medical establishment that there wasn’t anything wrong, that her symptoms were psychosomatic, Ramey dove deeply into primary research so she could more thoroughly understand her situation. What she learned led her on a journey of hope and resilience that represents an all-too-familiar experience for many marginalized people, including women—not being believed.

The afternoon before her life changed irretrievably, Sarah Ramey ’03 took a swim in Walden Pond.

It verges on cliché to write that someone has barely a care in the world just before disaster strikes, but for Ramey it is hard to remember that afternoon any other way. She was about to start her senior year at Bowdoin. She was living with her childhood best friend in a summer rental. As the cool water lapped at her skin, if she was thinking about anything, it was staging ideas for Into the Woods—the musical she was looking forward to directing when the semester began.

In the quieter reaches of the Concord, Massachusetts, pond, away from the snorkelers and day-trippers, Ramey floated on her back, staring up at the wide blue sky. Everything was ahead of her. A creative life in New York, perhaps. Interning at a magazine. Or submitting demos of her music. Almost certainly some waitressing on the side. She was, she says, “planning on making plans.”

What happened instead started innocuously enough. She came home from Concord with a urinary tract infection that a following course of antibiotics did not touch. It should have improved within twenty-four hours, the emergency room doctors told her. In fact, as Ramey explains in the introduction to her memoir, it did not go away for six months.

This story might start in Thoreau’s backyard, but it quickly crosses over into the topsyturvy realm of Lewis Carroll. Back home in Washington, DC, for the Christmas holidays, Ramey made an appointment with a top-notch urologist, who decided then and there to make a tactical rip in Ramey’s urethra—a disastrous decision—to “break the cycle of pain.”

Shortly after, she developed sepsis—a systemic overreaction to an infection that can lead to organ failure. Ramey recovered from the sepsis, but now there were new problems. Aching.

Daily fevers. Itching. Excruciating “broken glass” pelvic pain. Intestines that felt like they’d been piped full of cement. Brain fog. Fatigue.

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After the winter break, “it all fell apart,” Ramey says. She returned to Bowdoin with painkillers and a portable IV for more antibiotics.

But she got worse, not better. She saw a nurse and doctor on campus, who both said her case was too complicated to treat locally and that she needed the help of her specialists back in DC. In her memoir, she writes: “I was on so many medications and getting so sick so fast, it was like a rabbit hole had opened up beneath me—that I was falling slowly past the clocks and candlesticks, and that my parents and doctors were peering over the edge, quietly watching me float down and away.”

So began Ramey’s eighteen-year voyage of baffled specialists, inconclusive tests, and many invasive and ultimately unsuccessful procedures.

She would be prescribed medications to do one thing and her body would do the complete opposite. Over time, she would be told—both by conventional medical doctors and alternative practitioners—that because they could find no cause for her illness, it must be in her head. She just needed to try a different antidepressant. Or a more positive mental attitude. She dutifully tried both. She kept getting worse.

Ramey kept falling: out of a normal life of beach trips, boyfriends, performing, and spontaneity; out of sight, confined first to the house and then eventually to her bed; out of medical answers. But—as she puts it, with wry defiance—“they sent the wrong girl down the rabbit hole.”

Today, Ramey is not just an author but a successful singer, known as Wolf Larsen (her Nebraskan grandfather’s name). The daughter of two doctors and the granddaughter of a pioneering, feminist endocrinologist, she was better equipped than most when it came to navigating the underworld of modern medicine.

As a writer, she also had the skills to report what she found there.

It is not a straightforward story to tell. There were several false dawns, a panoply of diagnoses, and absolutely no miracle cures. Ramey still lives with a constellation of complicated and poorly understood chronic conditions, including complex regional pain syndrome, myalgic encephalomyelitis (sometimes referred to as chronic fatigue syndrome or ME/CFS), and postural tachycardia syndrome (POTS—a disorder of the autonomic nervous system, which controls unconscious bodily functions, such as blood pressure and heart rate).

Yet her health is tangibly better than during what she terms her “Great Crash” of six years ago. At that lowest of low points, she could barely move, had to use a wheelchair, and spent

most of her day on the bathroom floor, curled in a nest of blankets. Her digestive system could only tolerate broth and juice, which often had to be fed to her by her mother. Anything but total isolation was too much for her.

Today, Ramey is well enough to sit at a desk and write, she can sing (“my old standby medicine for the soul”), eat real food, do gentle yoga, and very occasionally visit a museum or café. But she still has to be careful in ways few healthy people could imagine. “I have to budget my energy like the stingiest miser,” she explains.

It is far from a soaring, sunlit recovery.

Ramey’s vision—and mission—is bigger, though.

While she says it is “an absolute victory that I got out of that deepest, darkest hole,” the

true purpose of her writing is to make a whole spectrum of mysterious conditions better understood; to make the invisible visible.

Through painstaking research presented alongside her own painful experience, Ramey attempts to connect the dots between apparently disparate chronic conditions, such as the pain disorder fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, post-treatment Lyme disease, non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and various shades of autoimmune disease, such as lupus, the bowel condition ulcerative colitis, and Hashimoto’s (a disease of the thyroid gland).

Fifty million Americans have some kind of autoimmune disease, according to estimates by the American Autoimmune Related Diseases

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Association. It takes, on average, consultations with five doctors before a correct diagnosis is made. Meanwhile, ME/CFS has been labeled “America’s hidden health crisis” by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, affecting as many as 2.5 million people.

What such conditions tend to have in common is that their key symptoms—pain, debilitating fatigue, and clouded thinking—are hard to measure in any objective way. They have no biomarkers. They cannot be scanned or biopsied. They’re also not necessarily visible from the outside: a common refrain for patients is, “But you don’t look sick!”

It’s a phrase Ramey has heard often, one that gives away how narrow our view of illness can be.

In fact, in the early days of Ramey’s mysterious illness—pre-crash—people often commented on how well she looked, in part because of changes she’d made in an attempt to heal herself: no sugar, no dairy, no gluten, lots of yoga and green juice. It was, as she writes in the book, perhaps “the most complicating factor of all. Not only was I slightly radiant but, because of the pain in my central cavity, I was always, always in some kind of flowing, pretty dress. More than a few doctors implied that, whatever seemed to be the problem—it suited me.

“There are a lot of illnesses that are very serious but invisible,” Ramey says. This cloak of invisibility—the veneer of wellness—means they are overlooked, underestimated, and underfunded. She gives the example of ME/CFS, which was found by a 2020 study to be the single most neglected disease relative to the condition’s burden. The authors suggested that NIH research funding into the illness would have to increase fourteen-fold to be in line with the severity of impact on ME/CFS patients’ quality of life. Speaking from experience, she says: “At its most severe, you just feel like every hour you’re going to die. You can’t move. You can’t eat anything. It’s almost like a living death.”

Yet Ramey’s book is no misery memoir.

She never lets the reader stay in darkness and difficulty for too long. There are bemused, self-deprecating jokes and strategically deployed puns. She christens the many, many doctors she sees with nicknames like “Dr. Vulva,” “Dr. Bowels,” and “Dr. Oops.” She actually began

writing in “a more typical memoir voice: this wistful, sad, unendingly sorrowful retelling.”

She threw those early drafts out. “I thought: this was not who I am. And it doesn’t work for the material.” She thought a story like hers—“that has these difficult, confronting, vaginal, pooprelated things”—needed the “leavening agent” of humor. She also saw it as an act of kindness to her readers, many of whom she assumed might be similarly sick. “I wanted to be honest and unflinching about the really bad stuff, but to take care of the reader also, and make sure that they’re not being too brutalized, triggered, or traumatized.”

For readers, the jokes serve as kind of a nod to camera, a knowing eyebrow that says, Listen, I know how mad this all sounds. Because possibly the strangest facet of illnesses like Ramey’s is not a lack of detailed, evidence-based understanding, although that’s true—it’s that many physicians still don’t believe they exist at all. Or they remain convinced the symptoms are psychosomatic.

Ramey recalls in her book how she was warned by doctors not to say she had fibromyalgia. “Fibromyalgia, they explained, is just code for ‘crazy.’” A survey of primary care physicians in Connecticut in 2010 found that half did not “believe” in the concept of chronic, post-treatment Lyme disease. Even Ramey’s own doctor parents were skeptical about some of the diagnoses and experimental treatments at the beginning of her health crisis.

Why, though, should such skepticism exist on an apparently industry-wide scale? Why are certain kinds of illnesses downplayed and dismissed? According to Ramey, this is the least mysterious thing about these conditions.

“It’s because they really disproportionately affect women,” she says. At least 75 percent of autoimmune disease patients are thought to be women. ME/CFS affects four times as many women as it does men. Between 80 and 90 percent of people with fibromyalgia are female.

There is also some evidence—albeit limited— that post-treatment Lyme disease may be more prevalent in women.

Medicine has a long tradition of ascribing physical symptoms to women’s instability. From the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks, who believed

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she falling: kept kept falling: she

unexplained illness in women was caused by a “wandering womb,” to Freud, who gave us the idea that psychological disturbance could cause physical symptoms, hysteria has been used as a diagnosis to cover all manner of mysterious and inconvenient female complaints, from difficulty swallowing to a swollen stomach. The term wasn’t completely expunged from medical textbooks until 1980.

“It’s really difficult for me to imagine these patients being male and it being shoved into a closet,” Ramey tells me. “I just don’t think that would happen.” Later, she reflects: “I don’t think doctors realize how damaging it is psychologically to sense that your doctor thinks you’re lying to them. You can’t blame the patient because you don’t understand something.”

HOW RAMEY’S LIFE HAS CHANGED since Bowdoin is something she thinks about often. She sang in an a cappella group. She directed a musical.

She wrote for the Orient. She kayaked on the weekends. “Bowdoin was the best time of my life,” she says. “I made wonderful friends. I was super active. I have the fondest memories.”

And now? “I do feel very, very different to the person I was in college. It is a strange disconnect. I walked through the wardrobe— through the mirror—into a different world.”

She likens her medical odyssey to witnessing a war. To then have to “drop back into regular society feels strange.”

Something about this piece feels different from other press coverage for her book, she tells me—more exposing, perhaps. “I so long to just be the person I was on track to be,” she explains. “Thinking about this story in the context of Bowdoin is a wistful, sad feeling.

Because I remember exactly what I thought was going to happen. I know everybody’s life turns

sight. out of of out a spontaneity; normal and life performing, of boyfriends, beach trips, trips, beach boyfriends, of performing, life and normal spontaneity; a out of of out sight.

out differently to how they anticipated, but usually not like this.” She laughs easily as she says it—as is her habit—but “this” encompasses a lot of near-unimaginable pain and trauma.

Having nerve-stimulating wires embedded in her pelvis by one doctor without her knowledge or consent, for one thing. (That would be “Dr. Oops.”) “But then, in a lot of ways, I am still the same,” Ramey adds. “I’m making music and writing—those were the two things I wanted to do in college. I cannot believe I ended up doing both of them.”

In the early days of being unwell, creativity was an outlet for Ramey when there was little else available. Despite being unable to tour, or even to perform with any regularity, an album Ramey made from her bedroom in 2011, Quiet at the Kitchen Door, has been listened to more than 50 million times on YouTube. In her book, she describes the peculiar sadness of watching her Wolf Larsen avatar go viral, in lipstick and heels, while she was back in the house she grew up in, rarely out of her nightgown. “From an invisible cage, I gripped the bars and watched as my windup-self took on a life of her own and moved on without me,” she writes.

Now, though, her creative life and the reality of her illness seem to have found more of a symbiosis. Ramey recalls how Joan Didion once said in an interview that writing was the only way she could be aggressive, as a physically slight, quiet person. Ramey tells me her equivalent is that the page allows her to feel safe in a way that real life often doesn’t.

“I feel like I can say what is true for me, and it won’t boomerang back on me in a negative way—the way it might at the doctor, or with an acquaintance who doesn’t believe in ME/ CFS. On the page you have plenty of time to say exactly what you mean, and say it as forcefully as you like.”

A striking feature of The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness is its generous use of white space; the text fragmenting into short paragraphs, lists, and single-line phrases. The effect is poetic and punchy. And it’s a creative decision that’s a direct consequence of Ramey’s physical symptoms, as the terrible brain fog she has makes it hard for her to read dense, unbroken passages of text.

“I started breaking things up because it helped me to not get overwhelmed,” she explains.

“And then I realized I liked that style—it actually made it read faster and that would be helpful for somebody like me: to break it up as much as possible, to keep that narrative motor running.

That’s the only type of book that I can read anymore, something that’s really fast-paced.”

It works. Her book is described by Publishers Weekly as both “hilarious” and “illuminating,” and has been lauded by Chelsea Clinton and Ann Patchett, among others. However, as Ramey has discovered, there is a certain irony to acclaim that comes from writing a manifesto on invisible illnesses that people don’t take seriously: it can mean people don’t take your own invisible illness as seriously.

“The thing I struggle with the most is to make my actual reality legible to other people,” she tells me. Visible professional success tends to work against this. “It creates this exterior picture that things are great,” she says.

The reality is that she could only write for an hour a day. After that she could do little else but sleep for the rest of the day. “I often felt like I was making myself worse in order to write about my illness,” she says. She wrote the book from bed, on an elaborate arrangement of pillows to keep the pressure off of the “whitehot pain in the spine, bladder, ovaries, rectum, vagina, and left leg.” While writing, she was also competing in what she calls the “Bowel Olympics,” running to the bathroom every ten minutes. “This is a sub-optimal way to write a book,” she quips.

Ramey also resists the idea that her exterior success somehow makes everything she’s been through worthwhile. “The things that people say are just wild,” she says. “‘Aren’t you glad you went through all of these horrible things so that you could make this new record, so you could become Wolf Larsen, so you could write this book?’ And the answer is a hard no.”

She later clarifies: “There is no doubt I have grown in many ways because of my illness—I have more empathy, I have more perspective, and I am stronger. But would I do eighteen almost unbroken years of severe suffering over again? Absolutely not. Would I wish what has happened to me on a single human being, in

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the name of growth? Absolutely not. This is the tyranny of positive thinking—that everything has to be good, golden, inspirational, and everything has to happen for a reason.

“There is so much pressure on the disability and chronic illness communities, narratively speaking, to fight, to overcome, to be the winner—or alternatively, to be the most grateful, the most accepting, the most serene. For some, this is very empowering and I deeply respect that. But from my perspective, it’s also empowering to say, ‘No, thank you. I don’t accept this, and I don’t want it. Not for me, and not for anyone else.’ It can be empowering to draw meaning from the struggle to change the systems that cause us harm, even if we can’t change our own illness.”

WHEN RAMEY AND I SPEAK for this interview—

the old-fashioned way, on the phone rather than over Zoom, because she finds screen-free more manageable—it’s been just over a year since her book came out on March 17, 2020.

right. up is is left down and and down left is is up right.

“We were right in the middle of confirming appearances on big TV shows and a feature on NPR when it became clear that the world was about to change, and all those appearances were canceled. Having worked on the book for [so many] years only for it to come out at that moment was gutting.” (Although, she jokes, it felt “very on-brand” to have a book about mysterious, overlooked illnesses dwarfed by a global pandemic.)

For Ramey, day-to-day life has been “almost exactly the same” under COVID-19. “It’s so strange to have had this one year where all of a sudden everyone has had all these things in common with me,” she says. “But there’s also sadness there, because they will go back to all of the things that they do in their life. There’s a long goodbye coming for the rest of us that have to stay behind.”

Of particular interest to Ramey is the socalled long COVID, where people apparently recover from the initial viral infection but continue to have debilitating symptoms like joint or muscle pain, extreme fatigue, unexplained fevers, and brain fog. It has been surreal, she says, watching the long COVID story play out in real time and seeing how these patients—with mysterious, unexplained, and chronic symptoms that feel instinctively familiar to her—have been treated. “The acutely ill [with COVID-19] are treated as a huge emergency, of course, which is as it should be,” she says. “But the post-COVID people are treated pretty poorly. If you have COVID-19, everyone is doing heroic work to take care of you and to make you well. And suddenly you walk through the mirror: you’ve got long COVID and you’re in a complete shadow-land where everything is different. Up is down and left is right. Nothing is making sense, nobody is trying to help you. And you can’t figure out what is wrong with you.

“It’s a very disorienting experience—as I’ve obviously experienced—because you’re the same person that was being treated like an important person a month ago, and now as this liar, malingerer, hypochondriac. But you’re not acting any differently as a human being, you’re not hysterical, you’re not reporting things any differently, you’re not using a different tone of voice.

nothing you. is help making to sense, trying nobody is is nobody trying sense, to making help is you. nothing

“It’s just that the stigma of this kind of illness is so incredibly strong it doesn’t matter how you behave,” she says. Ramey’s hope is that the intense spotlight provided by the pandemic will mean that a more unifying understanding of chronic illnesses emerges. A good start is the $1.15 billion that’s been allocated for the NIH to research long COVID. “It’s hopeful,” she says. “Because it’s such a large, loud influx of patients all saying the same thing, I think it’s more difficult to dismiss.”

Jennie Agg is a UK-based freelance journalist who specializes in women’s health. She is working on her first book.

Julius Schlosburg is based in Tucson, Arizona.

See more of his photography at jpopphoton.com.

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GRASPING HATE

BY LINDA KINSTLER ’13 ILLUSTRATIONS BY KAJSA NILSSON

Hatred is not new. But it has felt weighty and present in this moment in our lives, and the need to understand and grasp its roots and meaning has felt deeply urgent. Bowdoin faculty study and share with their students the reasons for and results of hate, the sources of and possible solutions to our deep divisions, and ways to contextualize and understand this extreme and destructive emotion in history and in ourselves—in order to move away from its violence, toward virtue.

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EARLY THIS SPRING, a curious envelope with my name stamped on it in bold black letters arrived in the mail. The return address indicated that it had been sent to my home in Washington, DC, by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), in Montgomery, Alabama, a nonprofit legal advocacy firm dedicated to protecting civil rights. I had been selected to participate in their “2021 Fighting Hate in America National Survey,” a nationwide poll designed to help the SPLC figure out “how to overcome the hate, racism, white supremacy, and intolerance that is poisoning our country.” A map of 838 active hate groups in the US in 2020 accompanied the survey.

Each group was labeled according to its specific brand of rancor: anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ, white nationalist, and “general hate” groups. The map showed them clustering around cities east and west: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tampa, New York, DC. The survey asked me to answer a series of multiple-choice questions about my experiences of hatred: “Have you ever observed hate group activity in your community?” “Have you or a family member been a victim of a hate crime?”

“Are there any Confederate monuments or public buildings or streets named after Confederate leaders in your community?” “Would you participate in a boycott of internet companies that refuse to stop racists from using their platforms to organize, raise money, and poison the minds of children?” Did I think social media companies were doing enough to combat hate online?

Did I think they should be subject to stricter regulations? Did I want the federal government to do more to investigate hate groups in the US? These are some of the most pressing questions of our time: Why is there so much hatred, and what can we do to mitigate it? Who should be held accountable for its spread? How do we acknowledge and mark the horrors of the past while also building toward an equitable future? Open the newspaper or switch on the television, and invariably these questions will be broached. Over the past several years, I have engaged with these issues in conversations with colleagues, students, and friends. I have interviewed social media executives about their efforts to remove hate speech from their platforms. At Berkeley, I helped convene a conference on our new memorial culture, where architects and scholars presented ideas about how to preserve the relics of our nation’s dark past once they have been removed from their pedestals, and what kinds of public monuments should be erected in their place. Concrete, actionable solutions were few and far between, and hateful incidents continued to disrupt public life across the country. On January 6, I watched as rioters slowly made their way back from the US Capitol, some of them carrying Confederate flags over their shoulders, many of them clad in military camouflage. It was a terrible day for the nation, and a grave indicator of just how wide and deep the hatred runs.

Hatred is an intractable problem in part because it is so difficult to describe. David Hume said that it is “altogether impossible to define.”

The Stoics described hatred as “a desire for something bad to happen to another, progressively and continually.” Aristotle, in On Rhetoric, defines hate only by what it is not: it is not philia, meaning love or friendship, and it is not anger or spite, which, he wrote, “derives from what happens to oneself.” He saw that while anger

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is directed at individuals, hatred is directed at entire groups and categories of beings.

Anger would heal over time, but hatred was “incurable”—violent and unfeeling, forever. In ancient Greek, the verb ekhthairô, “to hate,” is linked to ekhthros, the word for personal enemy.

To inquire into the roots of hatred, then, requires probing the impulses, imaginations, and desires that draw people together and pull them apart and asking what pushes people to categorize individuals and groups as friends or enemies.

Bowdoin students, faculty, staff, and alumni have been hard at work doing precisely that across a variety of fields. The past several years have made it abundantly clear that we are facing a critical moment for global democracy, a time of unprecedented challenges and rising hatreds. The faculty has risen to the moment in a variety of ways, putting together new courses on race and identity politics, the origins and mutations of discrimination in ancient and modern times, and the fault lines of hatred in the US and Asia, South America, the Middle East, and more. If it is true, as the Roman philosopher Seneca claimed, that “the liberal arts do not conduct the soul all the way to virtue, but merely set it going in that direction,” then these new curricular additions and research areas are aimed toward that end. A Bowdoin education is designed to attune students to the awesome, inspiring, and sometimes dangerous powers of discourse. No matter what language or alphabet students work with, or whether they become fluent in mathematical equations, computer algorithms, or Chinese script, they must learn about the ways that biases, stereotypes, and blind spots can worm their way into their work.

Professor Krista Van Vleet, chair of the anthropology department, has for many years asked students in her course Language, Identity, and Power to participate in an exercise designed to do just that. “One of the things that I have students do is record an everyday conversation.

Ask permission, record, and then go back and analyze the ways in which people are talking.

Even if they’re not explicitly talking about race or gender, sometimes they’re able to pick up on the ways in which those identities are

being mobilized in a conversation,” Van Vleet explained. We tend to take the language of the everyday for granted, skipping over its nuances, inflections, and unarticulated assumptions.

Her students are asked to parse their everyday interactions, to analyze the subtext and context of their own speech. They are amazed, she said, by what they come to hear in their own words.

“What does a microaggression actually look like as it’s in play? What about a joke? Sometimes jokes rely on unspoken stereotypes,” said Van Vleet. “Helping students see that helps move us toward dismantling it, so that people can become a little bit more comfortable interrupting a conversation, or perhaps moving it in a different direction, if they become aware of the ways in which these implicit assumptions might be playing out.” Anthropology is an exercise in making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. The discipline, Van Vleet says, “is continually pressing us to recognize the ways in which we are all embedded in these systems of oppression. Even as we recognize them, and try to dismantle them, we are still a part of these cultural assumptions.”

Why is there so much hatred, and what can we do to mitigate it?

How do we acknowledge and mark the horrors of the past while also building toward an equitable future?

Across campus, in Kanbar Hall, Assistant Professor of Psychology Zachary Rothschild researches how even subtle changes in the framing of political issues can stoke and stymie hatred, how efforts to create neat categories and to identify scapegoats can worsen social divisions. “We are really motivated by a fundamental need to see ourselves as good people, as part of a meaningful, coherent world,” Rothschild said. “When bad things happen, it’s a threat.” Pandemics, plagues, famines, and all kinds of disasters have, throughout history, led political leaders to try to restore order by pointing fingers. Identifying a scapegoat, Rothschild explained, can allow violence and vitriol to masquerade as a moral good. “I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on moral outrage, about what happens when we experience anger

when people do wrong, or act unjustly, and understanding that oftentimes the things we do in the name of justice may be motivated by our own moral concerns,” he said. Remind someone of their own wrongdoing, and they become more likely to punish others for doing wrong.

His recent research suggests that some people experience hatred as a profound source of meaning: “It’s an expression of their beliefs, values, and justice—they feel that they are doing a good thing,” said Rothschild. “People actually can feel more meaning in their own lives by expressing hostility at perceived wrongdoing.”

Just as psychology can help diagnose the source of the problem, it can also help identify solutions. Rothschild’s research suggests that expressions of affirmation and opportunities for constructive reflection can mollify the spread

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of hatred and its corrosive effects. If you “boost their sense of value or control,” people need to lash out less, he argues. In one experiment, Rothschild asked subjects to reflect on what makes them a good person, about the ways large and small that they are good to others and to their communities. “The idea is just to reaffirm their belief that, ‘I am a good person.

I don’t need to compensate by lashing out at these other people to prove that I am good.’”

In another instance, prompting participants to consider the chaotic and uncontrollable nature of the world mitigated feelings of hostility. “If the underlying problem really is a threat to the fundamental need for control, for a positive identity, then if I can attenuate those threats in

other ways, I can reduce the need to resort to scapegoating or outrage,” he explained.

But opportunities and avenues for critical reflection—moments when individuals are invited to consider their relationships to others, to history, and to themselves—can be few and far between. In the spring of 2020, amid an uptick in anti-Semitic violence in the US and around the world, English professor Marilyn Reizbaum and religion professor Todd S. Berzon teamed up to offer a new course, A History of Anti-Semitism. It would be a nonlinear history, an exploration of anti-Semitism’s appearances in film, tragedy, dialogue, and scripture, and an attempt to trace its mutations and contexts across the centuries. The class investigated manifestations of anti-Semitism

Our reliance upon technology as a primary method of communication has exacerbated and accelerated the spread of hatred both online and off.

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and responses to it in works ranging from the Bible to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to Larry David’s sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm. “In many of the courses I teach, I regularly assign students texts from the ancient world that can only be described as anti-Jewish. Students would always engage with the text seriously and carefully, and would invariably draw connections to more modern discourses of anti-Semitism,” Berzon explained. “It was the students, and their desire to see how these ideas unfolded across history, that led me to propose a stand-alone course dedicated to the topic.” Reizbaum added that the course arose from a desire to acknowledge and respond to a critical moment in culture and politics and to allow students to reflect on the origins of hatreds past and present. After the COVID-19 pandemic forced the course to transition online midway through the semester, current events interceded into the classroom in new and forceful ways.

In the history department, Assistant Professor Sakura Christmas takes a similarly long-term view of the evolution of cultures of exclusion and racial difference. Her first book investigates ethnic determinism and Japanese-led ethnic cleansing in Inner Mongolia and how the Japanese imperial project produced a narrow understanding of ethnicity, autonomy, and belonging. Before she began her PhD, Christmas spent a year teaching English as a Princeton-in-Asia fellow, working with students in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous region, where it is now estimated that more than a million Uyghurs have been interned in Chinese government-run detention centers. “It was a phenomenal experience, but it was also a really tragic one, in the sense that I experienced firsthand the kind of structural racism that was already built into the system in 2008 and 2009, well before the internment camps that were built two or three years ago,” Christmas said.

She saw how her friends and acquaintances were forced into bilingual education and were shut out of particular disciplines, departments, and economic opportunities because they were Uyghur. “The groundwork was already there, in terms of ideology. You just needed to add the infrastructure,” she said. At Bowdoin, she teaches courses in environmental history and on power and territory in Asia, exploring the origins and causes of the racial and economic hierarchies and extractive logics that define the region. On several occasions, the classroom conversation has turned to the contemporary crisis in Xinjiang, a conversation that the realities of remote instruction have made more difficult than ever before.

“We’re all on Zoom this year, and I always teach a number of students from mainland China. I understand, to a certain extent, how Chinese surveillance works—I have a big file, myself—so I have found it very difficult to broach these sensitive subjects in a way that might have endangered them.” Students based in China may not know the extent to which they are being surveilled, and as a result may find themselves having to make difficult decisions about which conversations to participate in, and which ones to be absent for. “It’s been really difficult,” said Christmas. She has avoided

engaging in conversations that might jeopardize her students abroad in any way. “Having been surveilled myself when I lived in China, almost fifteen years ago, I know that the surveillance mechanisms have only gotten more sophisticated since then.” The very conditions and power relations she teaches in the classroom have presented themselves in the classroom.

Even when the pandemic finally recedes and Zoom meetings are more a convenience than a necessity, we will still have to reckon with the fact that our reliance upon technology as a primary method of communication has exacerbated and accelerated the spread of hatred both online and off. For the past several decades, Christopher Wolf ’76, senior counsel emeritus at the law firm Hogan Lovells, has dedicated himself to combating the spread of hate speech online and working with governments and technology companies to come up with actionable solutions. In the early days of the internet, he decided to volunteer with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which monitors the spread of extremism and hate of all kinds. “We discovered that extremists and haters were early adopters of technology,” Wolf explained. They used dial-up networks to coordinate activity and manipulated static webpages to advance discriminatory beliefs.

Since then, their methods have become more sophisticated, accessibility has spread, and the velocity of online speech has hit a breakneck pace, leaving lawmakers rushing to figure out how to regulate online discourse.

“Law is not the most effective tool—it is a tool, but it is not the most effective tool,” explained Wolf, a pioneer of online privacy law. “Even in countries outside of the US—where there is no First Amendment, and where free speech is not as robust and there is the ability to regulate speech—we have not seen a precipitous drop-off in hate speech.” He recently led a comprehensive, cross-jurisdictional survey of global regulations governing online hate, in partnership with the global nonprofit PeaceTech Lab. The goal was to compile existing policy remedies to hate speech in order to help governments decide which options to pursue going forward.

Fernand de Varennes, UN special rapporteur on minority issues, called it an “invaluable

compendium” that “suggest[s] that there is no single approach to hate speech, and quite often none specifically adapted to the particular nature and challenges of hate speech in social media.” Neither law nor language lend themselves to simplified solutions.

A few hours after we spoke, Wolf participated in a virtual workshop run by the National Academy of Sciences on the subject of potential amendments to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which grants internet companies immunity from being held accountable for things that are said or written on their platforms. “The platforms have a big role to play, and also a big responsibility,” Wolf told me. “These services are becoming like public squares. They aren’t a public utility, but they’re edging very close to that. They are not common carriers; they’re a hybrid. They play multiple roles in people’s lives.”

Ultimately, Wolf thinks the problem of online hatred is not going to be solved by legal amendments, or government regulations, or more aggressive take-down policies, but by a combination of approaches. “It has to be a multipronged, collaborative effort, and it needs to start in the schools,” he said. “We do not have any standards for teaching kids how to use technological tools to protect themselves, to filter content that they’re seeing, to teach them to be better citizens. That starts at home. We need to get civil society involved, we need to get governments involved, and we need to get companies involved. Everyone has a shared responsibility.”

He feels buoyed by the unprecedented support the ADL and like-minded organizations have recently received: “It’s exciting to see the level of support for the activities of the Anti-Defamation League over the past couple of years, in the wake of the anti-immigrant movement, Black Lives Matter, and anti-Asian hatred in the wake of the coronavirus. You see a lot of people coming out and wanting society to do better,” he said. “People are constantly saying, ‘How do I get involved?’ ‘What can I do to help?’”

Linda Kinstler ’13 is a writer and PhD candidate at UC Berkeley. Her work appears in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and elsewhere.

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House lights dim, and the room vibrates with palpable anticipation. The air is sweet, buttery, familiar. Movies unite us with shared experiences and connect us to moments, often important occasions from our lives, whether we realize it at the time or not. Moviegoing is an almost singular experience in that it works for groups, families, a date, or time alone; it is as malleable as the art form itself.

And, of course, summertime and trips to the movies are inextricably linked for many of us—this summer, especially, as we emerge from the pandemic lockdown and look forward again to such activities we once took for granted. We asked faculty, students, and alumni to talk to us about film and what it means to them.

Photographer Séan Alonzo Harris visited a few of Maine’s movie houses to set the scene and found them in a state of suspended animation between then, now, and what is coming soon.

Ready? Let’s go to the movies.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY

SÉAN ALONZO HARRIS

“I love Rosemary’s Baby’s lullaby. It’s been my ringtone for years. And I may or may not have hummed it to my kids when they were babies.”

Aviva Briefel WHEN I FIRST MOVED to New York City from Paris as a little girl, my parents took me to watch the original Star Wars. I was still learning how to speak English, but somehow I understood everything, and I was enthralled.

Or rather, I’m not sure if I understood everything, but I realized that Princess Leia was the best thing ever, and I couldn’t stop talking about her afterward.

My favorite summer movie experience is going to a super-air-conditioned movie theater on a really hot day and watching a horror movie. There’s something really visceral about the combination of fear and relief (from the AC). And when the air conditioning gets to be too much, as it inevitably does, I wrap myself in a sweater and pretend it’s winter.

Most recently, I would have to say Jordan Peele’s Us has the best surprise ending. I’m not going to include any spoilers, but I didn’t see it coming, and I think it’s a brilliant twist.

Ever since the start of COVID, I’ve been dreaming about returning to the movies. I miss the darkness, the particular intimacy of watching a film with strangers, the popcorn (even the stale popcorn at this point), the strange feeling of stepping out into the world at the end of the film. I also really miss going to the movies with my kids. We watch tons of things at home, but going to the movies still feels like such a great escape.

Aviva Briefel is Edward Little Professor of the English Language and Literature and Cinema Studies.

Built in 1916, the Alamo Theatre in Bucksport is one of the oldest surviving movie theaters in New England. It was converted into a grocery store in 1956, went through many other business iterations, sat vacant for many years, and was rebuilt by the Northeast Historic Film group in 1992. It is filled with historic movie artifacts, including a vintage popcorn machine (above right).

Camila Papadopoulo ’20 FOUR YEARS AGO, my answer to “What movie could you watch

over and over and never tire of?” would have been the Lindsay Lohan version of The Parent Trap. I grew up watching this film with my grandmother while munching on guavacoated cookies every time we visited the Dominican Republic.

It is one of the first movies I recall watching from beginning to end. For my screenwriting professor, this sentimental excuse wasn’t enough to win “favorite film.” Four years later, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot is one of the many movies I continue to watch over and over. I watched it for the first time sophomore year. It forced me to rethink the silent section of H-L [Hawthorne-Longfellow Library] as my preferred

viewing spot—other studious classmates were not pleased with my loud guffawing a few cubicles over.

The Sixth Sense has the best surprise ending. This film was one of the reasons I signed up for Professor Briefel’s Horror Film in Context class. I was a bit squirmy about the genre. I now consider myself a growing horror film fanatic with many more movies to see and study! Build up the courage to watch this movie!

Camila Papadopoulo ’20 is a graduate student in the film and television production program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

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“Whether the movie itself is good, bad, or mediocre, if you see it in a theater, it’s a memorable event. It’s the planning involved in deciding which movie and where and what time and who with, the smell of the popcorn when you arrive in the lobby, the choosing of the seats that meet everyone’s approval, the giant screen.”

Bart D’Alauro ’95 I FIND SOMETHING NEW TO ENJOY every time I see

The movie offerings at Frontier Cinema, part of Frontier Café in Brunswick’s Fort Andross Mill complex, are as eclectic as its space—primarily independent, foreign, and art films, and documentaries.

the Coen Brothers’ third film, Miller’s Crossing.

It has an extremely complex plot that is easy enough to follow on a surface level the first time through, but really requires repeated viewings to notice all its twists and turns and seemingly minor characters who actually have major significance. It’s darkly comic, with terrific hardboiled dialogue, bravura “How did they do that?” sequences, shocking bursts of violence, compelling questions of ethics, and dense symbology involving hats that I interpret differently with every viewing. It’s my desert island movie.

Starlet, an earlier film by Sean Baker, who made Tangerine and The Florida Project, has one of the best surprise endings I’ve ever seen in a non-genre film. It’s just a quiet indie drama about a young woman who strikes up a friendship with an older woman very different from herself, but the unexpected revelation at the end really packs an emotional wallop and makes you rethink the nature of the whole dynamic between the two characters.

My favorite romantic movie couple is Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Pierrot Le Fou. It doesn’t end well for those crazy kids, but every moment they’re together on screen is magic— two of cinema’s most watchable stars, playing off each other perfectly.

The Black Stallion at the Hellman Theater in Albany, New York, in 1979 is the first moviegoing experience I have a vivid memory of. I went with my friend and his dad to a matinee, and it was the combination of going somewhere without my parents and the intensity of the movie’s fiery

opening scene that have forever lodged it in my brain. I saw it for the first time since not too long ago, and it’s still a great movie!

I’ve watched The Graduate at various periods in my life, and my response to it is always different, but it never fails to make me connect to the exact moment in time in which it was made—several years before I was even born. It perfectly captures the existential crisis of “Everything is possible, so now what?” that permeated American youth culture around 1967 and was kind of a rallying cry for all those who felt lost and confused thanks to an emphatic generation clash that aimed to break down all of society’s rules and structures but left many feeling directionless as a result.

I’ll never forget the feverish excitement I felt when The Empire Strikes Back came out in the summer of 1980. My every waking and dreaming moment was focused on how awesome it was going to be. It was a carefully planned outing with the neighbors across the street, with tickets purchased well in advance, but some unexpected delay caused us to show up late and Luke was already hanging upside down in the ice cave when we got to our seats. It was a couple of weeks later before I finally got to see it again and catch the beginning.

Bart D’Alauro ’95 is former owner of Bart & Greg’s DVD Explosion in Brunswick; editor of “Cinema Explosion,” a weekly guide to what movies to watch in the streaming age; cohost of Cinema 60, a podcast tour of films from the 1960s; and an assistant in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library.

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“David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive has the best surprise ending. I could watch it a hundred times and still be stunned by its twist!”

Allison Cooper VITTORIO DE SICA’S MIRACLE IN MILAN is a movie

I could watch over and over and never tire of. It shares some characteristics with De Sica’s famous neorealist films Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D. in that it focuses on the plight of the poor and disenfranchised in post-World War II Italy, but it does so with so much goodwill, creativity, and generosity of spirit that it is a pure joy to watch.

It is a film that lifts its characters up (literally, in the film’s ending sequence!) but that also lifts the spirits of anybody who watches it, and we could all use a little of that after this year.

I was teaching in Italy in the summer of 1996 when The English Patient, a romantic war drama, was released. I had my very first experience of cinema all’aperto (open-air cinema, an Italian summer tradition) when I went to see that film in the public gardens of a beautiful villa in the hills outside of Florence. The gorgeous setting couldn’t have matched the film’s setting and cinematography more perfectly—it was magical!

The original Star Wars debuted in 1977, when my brothers and I were all still in elementary school. My mom knew that it was going to blow our minds and made sure that we’d never forget it. She packed us into the station wagon and drove us to Hollywood, where she got us front-row seats for the show at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. She was right—it totally blew our minds! We were utterly transported for two hours, lost in the story and the worlds it created onscreen. My love for cinema was born that day.

The Colonial Theatre in downtown Belfast opened on the same day the Titanic set sail, and is known for its colorful marquee and life-size rooftop elephant, whose name is Hawthorne.

Allison Cooper is an assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures and cinema studies.

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Above: The projector in Bucksport’s Alamo Theatre is a circa 1950 Super Simplex with a Brenkert carbon arc lamphouse.

Opposite page: Brunswick’s Frontier Cinema was renovated with many recycled materials and features vintage seats from the old Biddeford City Theater in Biddeford, Maine.

Shu-chin Tsui ORSON WELLES’S CITIZEN KANE is the film that I could watch,

analyze, and appreciate all the time. This film taught me so much about film narrative and cinematic language. Seeing Citizen Kane prompted me to think about majoring in film studies, and I have used the film in my classes throughout my teaching career.

Back in my early days in China, we had no movie theaters.

Films were shown in public, open spaces, and we had to take our own stools to sit and watch. These summer movie viewings were happy times, as we rarely had a chance to see a film in those days.

A turning point in my higher education occurred one day, as I clearly remember, when I passed by an auditorium and heard a professor talking about a black-and-white

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Hollywood classic on the screen. The visual images on the screen and the professor’s words drew me to a different world, one where I saw the beauty and power of motion pictures. I started my PhD program in film studies shortly after that.

We should not forget the many wonderful films outside of mainstream films and Hollywood productions, such as independent documentaries and world cinema. Take foreign films, for instance. Parasite, by a South Korean film director [Bong Joon-ho], won the Oscar for best picture in 2020, and Nomadland, by a young Chinese woman director [Chloé Zhao], won best picture this year.

Shu-chin Tsui is a professor of Asian studies and cinema studies.

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Finn McGannon ’23 A MOVIE I COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER is The Way Way Back. Definitely a go-to summer movie for me, with the familiar themes of a coming-of-age story done uncommonly well.

Great cast also, with highlights of a surprisingly hateable Steve Carell and an unsurprisingly lovable Sam Rockwell.

Anytime I’ve been to the Dreamland Theater on Nantucket counts as my favorite summer movie experience! Seeing a big new release in the middle of a packed, energetic summer crowd—doesn’t get any better than that.

Junior Mints are really in a league of their own at the concession stand.

Emily Staten ’22 JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI gets love from everyone who has watched it (and rightly so), but I really wish it was more widely known. It’s beautiful, and such a careful look at a very interesting man. It might be my favorite documentary film of all time.

The best surprise ending has to be The Usual Suspects. The way the whole story comes together—how all the small details are accounted for—made me immediately want to rewatch it and find everything I had missed.

Seeing that last ten minutes for the first time was probably one of my favorite movie-watching moments of all time.

Pitch Perfect is my favorite guilty-pleasure movie. My family only had about three TV channels for much of my life, and for some reason Pitch Perfect would always come on around nine o’clock on Friday nights. My dad and I must have watched it about fifty times, even though we would never admit we love it.

Cinema Paradiso! I absolutely love this score (and this movie), and it always makes me feel at home. The love theme is probably my favorite piece of movie music of all time.

Also, Junior Mints. I love Junior Mints.

The Bangor Drive-In opened on June 7, 1950, with You’re My Everything and Rusty Saves a Life. The drive-in closed on July 23, 1985, with Rambo: First Blood Part II and, after being shuttered for thirty years, reopened in July 2015.

Finn McGannon ’23 and Emily Staten ’22 are leaders of the Bowdoin Film Society (BFS).

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“Coming out of the theater on the dreamlike high that the suspension of disbelief has created, and being bathed in warm air, and sometimes warm moonlight— it sustains the feelings of magic and rebirth and escape for just a little bit longer.”

Anthony Walton FOR ME, the best surprise or twist ever was the

Among its Bowdoin connections, Eveningstar Cinema in Brunswick opened in 1979 in a former Goodwin Chevrolet garage (prior to the Tontine Mall construction). The late Frank Goodwin ’60 headed Goodwin Chevrolet for nearly sixty years. Eveningstar is currently owned by Shaun Boyle, who is married to Michele LaVigne, associate professor of earth and oceanographic science.

ending of The Sixth Sense. I’ll never forget the day it opened, being in line to go into the theater, seeing folks come out of the screening in shock, then some of them getting in line to buy another ticket, go back in, and immediately watch it again. They needed to try to figure out how they had been “deceived,” and after I watched the film I felt exactly the same way.

I have two favorite movie quotations, which are variations on the same idea: “We all got it coming,” from Unforgiven, and “Everybody has his reasons,” from The Rules of the Game. I remember being stunned by the compressed truth and the generous compassion of each statement. Each of those lines revealed new retroactive insights on the characters and story, and changed how you saw the rest of the film. And each line in context is profoundly moving—and beyond, the film is a tremendous lesson for human life.

I would say Chinatown is the best screenplay.

The way that Robert Towne utilizes a form that we think we know (private-eye story) and exploits every convention of that form, while also using our knowledge of the form against us as we watch. It’s full of jokes, sly asides, mean wisdom about our society, and heartbreaking truths about the relations between men and women—the ways they fool each other, and in so doing, fool themselves. In a more purely mythic realm, I think David Webb Peoples’s screenplay for Unforgiven is one of the greatest achievements ever by an American writer in any genre—film, poetry, fiction, or theater.

It’s Shakespearean in its epic truth about our

society, then and now; and about the private lives of men, how much men need women but also treat them with the most casual and brutal cruelty. And, like all great literature, that script contains more truth now, in 2021, than when it was written.

It is crucial, for any number of reasons, that our film and television industries continue to open up to African Americans and all other people of color, whether in terms of who they employ, or what stories are created and featured. The careers of Spike Lee, Chloé Zhao, Edward James Olmos, and Denzel Washington are examples of what is brought to film and television when it is open to everyone.

Anthony Walton is senior writer in residence at Bowdoin. A screenwriter himself, he teaches Character, Plot, Scene, Theme, Dream: The Fundamentals of Screenwriting, a course cross-listed between the cinema studies program and English department.

For each participant’s full response, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

Séan Alonzo Harris is an award-winning commercial, fine art, and editorial photographer living in Waterville, Maine. See more of his work at seanalonzoharris.com.

We talk with Dr. Lindsey R. Baden ’87, principal investigator for NIH-Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine trials, about the historic development of vaccines during this pandemic, the renaissance it’s spurred, the role of media messaging, our social contract, and the intersection of science, philosophy, and ethics.

Follow the Science Can you talk about the value of published research for the science community?

As a New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) editor, I’m always on the lookout for the next infectious diseases threat, globally. In the nearly twenty years that I’ve been doing this, we had SARS-1, MERS, H1N1, H5N1, H7N9, Ebola, Marburg, Zika, and now SARS-CoV-2—we’ve had a major outbreak of concern every two or so years somewhere in the world. Even today, there are probably twenty of these going on. As an infectious diseases person, I try to think, how does a bug work? Which of these organisms should we worry about? And how do we, at the NEJM, help to properly identify real threats in a timely manner and then share them with the global community in a scientifically rigorous manner?

Back in December [2019], a pneumonia of unclear etiology was described. Many of us in the infectious diseases community were asking, “What does this curious cluster of cases in Wuhan, China, mean?” Soon, a clinical syndrome was characterized, there appeared to be personto-person transmission, and a potential pathogen was identified and published in the NEJM [at the end of January 2020]. Shortly thereafter, we published a cluster of cases in Germany suggesting that asymptomatic/presymptomatic transmission may occur—a worrisome finding

if it were common. At the time there was much skepticism about this observation—especially given the implications. Debate about this issue has not helped us in the response. Highquality scientific information, whether we like the answer or not, should be the basis upon which we determine how best to respond to an emerging pathogen.

Despite the prolonged debate about whether asymptomatic transmission happens, how can you not take into consideration the observation that there is substantial transmission of SARSCoV-2 across broad geographically distributed communities? It is overwhelming. Another challenging aspect of SARS-CoV-2 has been the politicization of the response. Why is face mask use viewed as a political issue? It’s a health issue.

A respiratory virus spreads like a respiratory virus. I think that what we’ve learned in this last year is that infusing politics into science doesn’t serve us well as a community. It has been to all of our detriment. Politics and science have to work together, they have to inform each other, they have to be respectful of each other. But science should be science. Facts are facts. We need to decipher what the facts are and then respond to them with respect. Gravity is not going away. No matter how much I might argue about it, every day I will be responsive to gravity.

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As you and your colleagues examine different pathogens and try to determine which one might be the next big thing, what is the red flag, where you say, “Now, we know. We have to do something.”

I’m going to reframe your question. What I hope we’ve learned from the different pathogens that have led to large outbreaks over the last twenty years is that we are a global community. We are all connected. SARS-CoV-2 reminds us that what happens anywhere in the world can affect us everywhere in the world.

And, to be responsive, we have to be connected with scientists everywhere to start contributing to the identification of a problem and a response. We need to do it proportionately and thoughtfully so that we illuminate facts as quickly as possible, and then we need to decide what those facts mean.

It’s very hard to say what is the line that a pathogen can cross to create global concern.

Zika, being mosquito-borne and teratogenic, creates a different set of issues than SARSCoV-2, which is a respiratory virus that is mild in most cases but severe in some. Ebola has a different set of parameters, being spread by physical contact and having a high associated lethality. There isn’t one red flag. One needs to look at the different features of each potential

PHOTO: CIDGY BOSSUET

We are all connected. SARS-CoV-2 reminds us that what happens anywhere in the world can affect us everywhere in the world. pathogen and ask, “At what point does the constellation of features raise enough concern that we as a community need to respond?”

What I hope can happen from the current pandemic and the toughness, the sadness it’s caused for all of us, is for us to realize that we’re really in this together. When I say that, I mean globally. A new flu virus that emerges in country X affects all of us. A new coronavirus that arises in country Y affects all of us. We have to understand that and then position ourselves as a global community to be rapidly responsive. That’s one of the things that happened with SARS-CoV-2 in the last year—we’ve never responded as quickly as we did with any other pathogen, particularly with multiple vaccines that are highly efficacious being developed in under a year, but many would say we didn’t respond fast enough. I think there’s truth on all sides.

Regarding response time, these vaccines were developed quickly relative to the usual development for a vaccine. What is it about this situation and the science that made that different?

One, is the enormity of the tsunami. In early 2020, we were able to see the rapidity of spread and illness in other parts of the world. For example, the speed and severity of illness in Italy and then New York City in February 2020.

In Boston, we were just watching the two-week delay as the virus spread up the East Coast. We had colleagues in Italy saying that patients were dying in the hallways because they didn’t have enough ventilators. As the weeks went by, it was sad confirmation in different cities as this virus rapidly spread. People realized that this was a big deal because it affected them directly. That was the galvanization of the societal response,

that this really required immediate and largescale action.

Another element that accelerated the response was the previous scientific work that had been done on the basic biology, structure, function, and vaccine development for other respiratory pathogens. Thus, once the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was known, it could be placed in context with what was known about other coronaviruses. That meant we could jump right into developing a vaccine, because the inferred biology, which of course was being confirmed at the same time, saved us months.

We were able to pivot the scientific infrastructure to address this challenging pathogen. There was a confluence of resources that was prepositioned scientifically that could respond immediately and didn’t require us to build a car from scratch, where we first have to spec out how to design the manufacturing plant.

Part of moving quickly was also ensuring that the efficacy trial (phase three) was inclusive of all at risk for infection. This is important not only for equity but also efficacy considerations.

For this vaccine to be accepted, the person making the decision to get it or not is going to say, “Did you study me? Did you study my community?” If we didn’t study your community, then you are in a position to say, “How do I know if it works in my community?” Whether it’s a genetic background or social, socioeconomic, racial, ethnic considerations—it was important the studies engage the broad diversity of communities across the US and elsewhere. That was critical, especially given the increasing vaccine hesitancy in some communities. More work needs to be done on these issues.

An issue we’re facing across the nation is the question, “It was done too fast. Can I trust it?”

50 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

That is a complicated tension because, on the one hand, there are some who think it was done too slowly because we have had more than 500,000 deaths, and climbing, in the US alone.

On the other hand, others are concerned that it was done too quickly. With the Pfizer and Moderna trials, we have had two independent phase-three, thirty- to forty-thousand-person studies, with the same findings and similar-based scientific technology. The efficacy looks uniform across all the different populations in these two trials. This reassures us that the key findings on efficacy are correct. I’m harping on this because I do worry that across the nation there are those who are still asking, “Can I trust this?” That question has to be offset by the fact that we have thousands of deaths each day from wild-type SARS-CoV-2 infection and we don’t see a safety signal among hundreds of millions of individuals dosed with the mRNA vaccines to date with all of the different monitoring processes in place.

How can we improve communication from scientists to the public?

A novel pathogen means all of us are at risk and all of us can be bioreactors who can amplify and spread it to others, particularly the most vulnerable among us, such as older individuals and those with weakened immune systems. I do think the media has a responsibility to affirm the veracity of findings, but the media also has a responsibility to not be sensationalistic when that can mislead the community in understanding the health concern. If they are, the consequences of that should not be a surprise, which is swaths of people who refuse to be vaccinated. Those communities will then suffer when the virus finds them and spreads.

The incentives for the media are in the shortterm gain of a headline tonight versus the question, “What’s the right way to frame something so that we do the appropriate checks and balances and keep the health of the public in mind?”

There’s some philosophy in there, but I think there is a lot to be gained by checks and balances.

Can you talk a little more about the intersection of philosophy, morality, and science?

It’s been front and center this past year; we’ve had to make lots of very difficult choices in our COVID response and our COVID management. We had to come up with plans for when our hospitals get overrun and we don’t have enough ventilators. Who gets the ventilator?

Massachusetts came up with a plan for that because we expected to run out of ventilators, as New York did. And we witnessed this with the news stories about what was going on in New York with the freezer trucks as makeshift morgues. It’s been a very complicated year in terms of how to respond and how to respond as new information emerges. As I get new information and use the new information to inform action, it doesn’t mean I was an idiot yesterday. It means I used the best information yesterday—and, today, when there’s better information, I use the better information to inform what to do. In a pandemic, where we are learning as we go, it is important to continually recalibrate the response based on the latest, best observations.

How long is the immunity to SARS-CoV-2?

If you get wild-type infection, how long are you immune to it? We’ve only been studying SARS-CoV-2 for eighteen months. How can one comment on anything longer than what we’ve actually had on the planet? And then for the vaccine studies, they really had heavy enrollment in August and September, so the follow-up of six-month immunity will come out soon. Oneyear immunity has to wait until this fall. That doesn’t mean vaccination doesn’t have one-year immunity. It means we can’t measure it until we get there temporally. What we have to realize as a community and ask ourselves is, “Would we rather wait until we have all of the information perfectly? Wait until we have five-year follow-up, five-year durability, five-year everything?” Then

nobody gets the vaccine until 2025, 2026. Yet, if we deploy now, as we are doing, then as new data emerge, we need to incorporate this knowledge as we go. It makes sense scientifically, but it is very difficult from a consumer perspective.

That is where the media and science and communication have to work well together to say, “The data we have today are the best we can have given the temporal parameters we face.

There are no markers of concern, but there is no way we can say what happens at a year until we get to a year.” How do you communicate that to the public without the public saying, “Should I trust it?” How do we communicate that transparently so people understand the strengths and the weaknesses of the available data and can make informed decisions?

A tricky part to this discussion is that if I make a bad decision—meaning I don’t get vaccinated or I don’t wear a mask—it can lead to me getting infected, and then I spread it in my community, and the eighty-year-olds then die. Do I have a responsibility or not? That is a complicated issue because of individual rights, freedoms, and consequences of restrictions. With a highly communicable infectious disease, I am infecting my community—my parents, my grandparents, my friends, people who worship with me, colleagues, my college friends. I feel strongly that we do have a social contract and we should think about, “Am I getting vaccinated for me or for you? Or is there a little bit of both?” I’m a believer in that social contract. I’m a believer in science. The issue, for those who are not vaccinated, is that they put the rest of us at risk. How do we think about that in terms of caring for each other? I worry that misinformation and disinformation has emerged as a substantial problem in this pandemic. A real challenge with vaccines is that those of us who did not get infected will not know that this bad thing did not happen to them. Thus, it is difficult to appreciate on an individual level the illness avoided.

It’s very destructive to let nonfact-based information guide discussion. We can’t come to a common approach because we’re not dealing with facts. What it doesn’t mean, though, is that we have all the answers. The risks and benefits need to be carefully weighed as facts emerge to guide our discussion.

Another piece here is that some communities, particularly our Black and Latinx populations, have been poorly treated over the years. So, there’s a certain amount of distrust. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to build trust in these communities—to participate in research, and also to participate in the benefits of research.

That’s been an ongoing struggle, and I can understand why certain communities don’t trust the establishment. The obligation is on us to build that trust.

What does the successful generation of COVID-19 vaccines mean going forward?

Science works—if we bring rigor, if we bring the right approaches, built upon many different groups debating about how to do the best science. But if we follow the science, it works.

This experience in 2020 may change vaccinology going forward for many other pathogens for which we want vaccines. We now have a playbook on how to make vaccines rapidly that are highly potent as long as we understand the key biology of the virus. I think we are in a renaissance of changing how vaccinology and vaccine development occur, and hopefully can extend this to a lot more pathogens. If we can get the immune system to do its job through a vaccine versus through natural infection, avoiding the associated illness, isn’t that amazing? And it’s exportable to the whole world. You don’t have to be a rich person, or in a rich country. I just think it is so cool.

The fact that the scientific community was able to pivot and move quickly, with the same scientific principles that we’ve been working on for decades—using the latest technology, and again, at the speed that was proportionate to the problem—was, to me, a bright spot in this past year of darkness. And, it’s a bright spot now, as we sit here on the precipice of what we can and should do next.

Lindsey R. Baden ’87 is director of the Center for Clinical Investigation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, director of infectious diseases at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a deputy editor at the New England Journal of Medicine, chair of the antimicrobial Drug Advisory Committee for the US FDA, and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

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Whispering Pines

Very Respectable in Its Infancy Accounts of Bowdoin’s first Commencement revealed resilience and tenacity.

BOWDOIN’S FIRST COMMENCEMENT, in 1806, has been recounted

in histories of the College but bears repeating here, as Bowdoin celebrates its second year of graduation ceremonies under circumstances imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Class of 1806 consisted of seven undergraduates (an eighth had died at sea during his first year); all were from Massachusetts, although four were from the District of Maine (before Maine’s statehood in 1820). Twice as many honorary degrees were granted ad eundem at Commencement than undergraduate degrees, following a nineteenth-century practice that allowed graduates of other institutions to receive an honorary degree at a Bowdoin Commencement if they paid a five-dollar fee. Eleven Harvard graduates (three of whom had also picked up honorary degrees from Yale) and individual graduates from Brown, Yale, and Dartmouth became ad eundem alumni of Bowdoin in 1806.

Harvard alumnus Leverett Saltonstall came by stagecoach from Salem, Massachusetts, to accept an honorary degree from the fledgling college. His eyewitness account and a summary by Alpheus Spring Packard of the Class of 1816, drawn from the experiences of attendees (including his father, an overseer of the College), form the basis for this retelling.

Packard describes travel from Boston to Brunswick in 1806—an Eastern coaster taking on passengers and freight in Boston would take a week to arrive; the biweekly mail coach made stops at every village along the way and could take four days. After the stagecoach crossed the Piscataqua River

52 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

at the New Hampshire border on a scow, passengers faced the “rugged, toilsome miles of Cape Neddick and Wells,” the “dense gloom of the Saco woods,” the bustling activity of Portland, and views of Casco Bay, before coming finally to “a single three-story edifice of brick, a plain unpainted chapel of wood, a church and spire yet unfinished, [and] a president’s house of most modest pretension.” He doesn’t mention that the main stagecoach stop was at Ebenezer Nichols’s tavern, located a stone’s throw from Massachusetts Hall at the northwest corner of the college grounds.

In Packard’s words, “The novelty of the occasion … attracted a large company of visitors; wealth, position, fashion, and beauty honored the infant college on its first gala day.”

Saltonstall arrived several days before the scheduled ceremonies on September 3. It began to rain on the afternoon of the second, and Saltonstall was grateful that George Thorndike of the graduating class had arranged “part of a bed” for him to sleep in. Guests arriving in the evening encountered “gullied and muddy roads.” General Henry Knox’s carriage, “with its company of gentlemen and ladies, was upset down the bank on the side of the bridge,” although no one, including George Washington’s chief of artillery, was injured.

It blew a gale on the third, tearing up trees and flattening fields of corn. Commencement exercises were postponed until the fourth. As more guests streamed in on the morning of the third, residents of Brunswick and Topsham scrambled to accommodate overnight guests. “Many people slept in hay mows & many others had no other than a blanket & ye floor,” according to Saltonstall.

The second meetinghouse of First Parish Church was an unfinished shell at the time but still served as the site of the Commencement exercises. President Joseph McKeen was forced to give his address under the cover of an umbrella.

Packard noted wryly that the experiences of the audience were not recorded. McKeen concluded his address with these words: “As instruction here commenced with you, on you, more than on any succeeding class, will depend the reputation of this infant seminary.”

Safely back in Salem, Saltonstall summed up the experience: “Several of ye graduates were sons of men of property & large and reputable connexions . . . had it been fair weather we should all have been much pleased . . . to have made Brunswick Commencement a place of fashionable resort—a little rain destroys ye whole gilding . . . This College is very respectable in its infancy & I hope it will grow in advantage & become a very important seminary.” The hopes expressed by McKeen and Saltonstall are renewed and reinforced with each graduating class.

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

ILLUSTRATION: ERIC HANSON

Connect ALUMNI NEWS AND UPDATES

KAI WISE ’18

CALLED TO THE WILD My main role as a preventative search and rescue ranger (PSAR) at Grand Canyon National Park was to educate visitors about safe hiking practices and respond to emergencies.

Grand Canyon has the highest number of search and rescues of any US national park; the canyon’s beautiful desert landscape can also be dangerously hot in the summer.

I started down this path in high school in Portland, Oregon, where I was a member of a county search and rescue team. In summer 2015, Bowdoin’s Delta Sigma Arts Fellowship funded an internship with the US Forest Service that gave me exposure to how a federal land management agency operates and provided me with the experience of assisting the public in a park setting. It helped me land my first position with the national park system as a backcountry ranger in Alaska.

Being a PSAR ranger requires a broad background in backcountry travel and emergency response. The most important skills to have are being comfortable traveling in the backcountry alone with limited resources and having the ability to remain calm and make good decisions under stress. PSAR rangers are also required to be EMTs. When I arrived at Grand Canyon in April 2020 the park was closed to the public due to COVID. That left a lot of time for training, and it was surreal to train on empty trails and overlooks that normally see thousands of visitors a day.

Living and working in a national park is an incredible privilege. I’d often look outside my door and see elk herds passing through, or go outside and see the stars because of Grand Canyon’s dark skies. I really felt like I was in the heart of the park.

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

PHOTO: ANDRÉ CHUNG

Early in their careers, national park rangers like Kai Wise ’18 work short stints and move park to park. “It’s a great way to meet friends and see new parks, but it’s hard to pack up your life into a car every six months,” he said. “In May, I moved to Virginia to start work at Shenandoah National Park.”

Connect Norm Cohen ’56, H’90, P’89, P’95

Catching Up

AGE IS NO BARRIER Norm Cohen ’56, retired attorney, Bowdoin trustee emeritus, and the College’s longest-serving class agent, helped lead the Class of 1956 in record-setting 65th Reunion giving.

THE COMMITMENT TO THE COMMON GOOD that Bowdoin

promoted while I was a student has always resonated with me.

The two class agents for ’56 had each served for five years when I was asked. It was difficult to say no to Bob Cross ’47, my freshman English professor and the head of the Alumni Fund—and besides, five years would be doable. Five has now turned into fifty-five years of fundraising and friendships.

Classmates I did not know well at Bowdoin became good friends, and my time as a fund director enabled me to appreciate the College even more.

THE COLLEGE HAS COME A LONG WAY FROM MY MEMORY—when it was all male, four Black students, and 3 or 4 percent who identified as being Jewish. Today, Bowdoin is a much more diverse and inclusive campus and is willing to acknowledge that a number of societal injustices have to be dealt with.

WHEN I AM NOT BUSY WITH VOLUNTEER ACTIVITIES, I like spending time with family and friends, keeping up with current events, going to the gym, taking walks, and just relaxing at my home on Cape Cod. Age is no barrier to contributing to society.

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

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1950

Dick Morrell has been honored by the Alumni Council with a Polar Bear Award in recognition of his significant personal contributions and outstanding dedication to Bowdoin. The award honors a record of service rather than a single act or achievement.

Dick has been a member of the Alumni Council; a volunteer for admissions, class reunions, and the Alumni Fund; and served as class secretary and as a member of multiple campaign committees.

As a member of the Board of Trustees, he sat on many committees, including chairing the physical plant committee and properties subcommittee. While these are the ways he has formally served the College, he has been a neighbor and a friend to Bowdoin in countless other ways.

1951

Reunion

Jack Daggett has been honored by the Alumni Council with a Polar Bear Award in recognition of his significant personal contributions and outstanding dedication to Bowdoin. The award honors a record of service rather than a single act or achievement.

Over the years Jack has served the Class of 1951 as longtime class agent, Reunion committee member, and class secretary. He is an important link for his classmates, to Bowdoin and to each other. He brings energy and enthusiasm to his work and always goes above and beyond by frequently sending personal letters and making phone calls to classmates for the purpose of supporting the Alumni Fund or simply to keep in touch. It is for these reasons that he is most deserving of this recognition.

1957

Ed Langbein: “To borrow the words of Barbara and David Ham, ‘’Twas the season to be’…oops.

‘Jolly’ doesn’t come all that easily for 2020, encouraging me to keep thoughts short and sweet—even though [2020] itself didn’t seem nearly short enough nor that sweet.

Sadly, our class family has lost three members: Lucy Eaton, MaryLou Wilson, and Shirley Fickett. Our sympathy to Jack Eaton, Dick Fickett, and all of their families.

On a brighter note, we welcome several great-grandchildren: Pat and Ralph Miller announced the arrival of their seventeenth, Sebastian; Ann Fraser sent a photo of Cora in Bowdoin regalia; and the Hams are receiving daily photos and videos of Jacob from Florida.

“Mimi and Russ Longyear virtually celebrated granddaughter Emily’s graduation from Denison University and were able to spend three months in the Berkshires before returning to Texas, where they set an example to all of us by decluttering closets and attic storage. Things unused for fifteen years have been cleared out, clothing sorted, and many trips to Goodwill. Equally productive has been Dick Fickett, who, assisted by two nieces and a nephew, assembled a family album to document the twenty-three living family members. He recommends all of us do such a head count to ensure everyone is accounted for.

Dick Davis is planning, once he has his COVID-19 vaccine, to drive to Brunswick and then continue to Prince Edward Island, where he and Marlean had spent many happy months. Joyce Hovey continues to acclimate to a retirement residence, which was marred by a fall (and fracture) followed by a mild case of

PHOTO: JUSTIN KNIGHT

Remember

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

Frederick Ferber ’56 August 5, 2020

Richard L. Winslow ’63 March 17, 2021

Holly D. Russell ’91 March 2, 2021

Leonard G. Plasse ’56 January 13, 2021

Joseph F. Porrino ’66 February 17, 2021

Sarah M. Jensen ’01 March 8, 2021

William Happ II ’46 April 18, 2021

Richard G. Davis ’57 March 2, 2021

Klaus Daweke ’67 March 28, 2020

David A. Bulow ’02 May 6, 2021

Donald F. Russell ’48 January 17, 2021

William B. Hird ’57 March 3, 2021

Frank W. Eighme ’67 March 3, 2021

Karl T. Nyangoni ’11 April 13, 2021

Philip A. Lord ’50 October 31, 2018

Mark C. Kapiloff ’57 February 10, 2021

Robert L. Jones ’67 January 9, 2021

FACULTY/STAFF

Stanley W. Merrill Jr. ’50 March 7, 2021

Klaus-Dieter Klimmeck ’58 February 22, 2021

Robert M. Saunders ’67 October 9, 2020

Helen L. Dow January 16, 2021

Ronald S. Potts ’50 January 19, 2021

David A. Conary ’59 February 10, 2021

Fal F. deSaint Phalle ’68 February 28, 2021

Jacqueline A. Minott March 3, 2021

Mack Walker ’50 February 10, 2021

Richard L. Fogg ’59 April 7, 2021

Arthur N. D’Souza ’69 January 3, 2021

Barry Mitchell January 26, 2021

Paul Hwoschinsky ’51 March 1, 2021

Brendan J. Teeling ’59 April 16, 2021

John D. Delahanty ’70 February 16, 2021

Judith R. Montgomery May 26, 2021

Klaus Lanzinger ’51 December 5, 2020

Edward B. Fillback ’60 April 21, 2021

Issoufou Kouada ’71 September 15, 2019

Clifton C. Olds April 8, 2021

Marcus L. Goodbody ’52 February 26, 2021

Jonathan S. Green ’60 July 13, 2020

Lewis D. Epstein ’73 November 10, 2020

GRADUATE

Elward M. Bresett Jr. ’53 March 11, 2021

Michael N. Pollet ’61 January 18, 2021

Hubert Hammond ’73 August 1, 2019

Elizabeth L. Bliss G’70 March 12, 2021

Bruce N. Cooper ’54 April 9, 2021

William T. Flint Jr. ’62 May 5, 2020

Roy T. Kimball ’73 November 12, 2019

HONORARY

Roland G. Ware ’54 January 27, 2021

James S. Rice ’62 November 17, 2020

Horace H. Lovelace ’73 May 12, 2020

Bernard Lown H’88 February 16, 2021

Edward M. Hay ’55 January 13, 2021

Bruce N. Leonard ’63 March 31, 2021

Martha M. Calmar ’80 March 29, 2021

Ved P. Mehta H’95 January 9, 2021

Frank A. Metz Jr. ’55 February 3, 2021

John K. Martin ’63 April 10, 2021

Nicolas K. Donarski ’87 March 25, 2021

Barbara C. Porter H’96 December 16, 2020

PHOTO: ARTIST_CREDIT

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

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

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE SPRING/SUMMER 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 55

Connect

Have you seen the first edition of Pine Notes?

If not, check it out at bowdo.in/secure and learn about how an unusual provision in James Bowdoin III’s will enabled the chapel to be built decades after his passing. You can also link to a video that will help you consider the elements you need to make sure your estate plan covers the bases. Additionally, Nancy Milam, director of gift planning, explains how her office can assist you.

Contact us at giftplanning@bowdoin.edu or 207-725-3172.

T H E C A M PA I G N F O R B OW D O I N

TH E CA M PA IG N FO R BOW D O IN

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the virus. Problems are now history.

Vicky and Harry Carpenter made it down to Florida (during the short window of travel opportunity) and now, from their porch, watch gators cruise rather than the swimming loons of Maine. They’re delighted that a son has just accepted a position with Maine Central Hospital in Augusta.

“Sharon and Gene Helsel and Sandy and Erik Lund joined a surprise Zoom birthday party to recognize Walter Gans reaching the four-score-and-five milestone.

Bob Kingsbury wrote that life is as normal as possible within guidelines, and John Humphrey waxed nostalgic about experiences as a member of Bowdoin’s precision marching band (aka Bowdoin’s precision drinking band), while Ruth has been more productive making quilts. Bill Gardener has focused on his painting, as evidenced by their Polar Bear Christmas card and a ‘Santa bear’ portrait he shared with Nancy and me. Bob Wagg enjoyed Christmas in Florida with his son and indicated that his prime activities are ‘rocking and reading.’

Del Potter and his youngest son look well, as does Elaine Howland, who keeps tabs (remotely) on five grandchildren between the ages of four and twenty-three. Sherrie and Logan Hardie are fully involved in gardening, golf, and the excellent neighborhood gym.

The household now includes Darby, a Tonkinese cat.

“Enjoyed a note from Shane Araujo ’23, our class scholarship recipient, who—rather than return to his hometown of New York City—spent the fall semester in New Hampshire. Pam and Dick Armstrong forewent their annual Thanksgiving reunion

for twenty-five family members.

Instead, separate celebrations were held 200 to 1,300 miles apart.

Ted Parsons is ‘back on the risers’ with the Gentlemen Songsters and participated in a virtual concert involving over a hundred former Bowdoin Glee Club members. And, he continues to volunteer at the TB clinic of Lowell General Hospital.”

Erik Lund: “Sandy and I have been living in our Woolwich home for more than a year during the pandemic. Her court hears— remotely—arguments on appeals from lower court decisions one week every month. Apart from keeping in touch via email with Bowdoin friends, I’ve been working on a book on what life was like growing up on a subsistence farm in Maine during the period of 1930–1950 with a woman whose family owned this farm for six generations, and have been consulting with Richard Geldard on this interesting project.”

1958

Ted Gibbons has been honored by the Alumni Council with the 2021 Alumni Service Award in recognition of his commitment to the College in the six decades since his graduation.

He has served Bowdoin in more than a dozen distinct volunteer roles, from the rarefied position as an overseer of the College for twelve years to the grassroots level as a Reunion committee member—and nearly everything in between. He has served his class as a class agent and associate class agent, and has served the College community as a whole, in addition to his leadership roles with the Board of Overseers and Alumni Council, in such varied capacities as a campaign volunteer, a

member of the Leadership Gift Committee, and a Bowdoin Alumni Schools Interviewing Committee (BASIC) volunteer. His work on behalf of the Bowdoin Rowing Association has drawn particular praise from his peers. A prolific and energetic fundraiser and advocate for the sport at Bowdoin, he is widely viewed as one of the most impactful supporters in that program’s history. To acknowledge his uniquely important role, the Bowdoin Rowing Association recently renamed its endowment in his honor as the Ted Gibbons Family Rowing Fund.

1970

Attorney Paul Batista is often consulted by CBS News as an analyst on important legal cases, and appeared on air several times during the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.

Recordings of the interviews are available on YouTube.

1972

Bobbitt Noel has been honored by the Alumni Council with a Polar Bear Award in recognition of his significant personal contributions and outstanding dedication to Bowdoin. The award honors a record of service rather than a single act or achievement.

For years Bobbitt worked tirelessly to create and maintain the Bowdoin community in Houston and throughout Texas. By suggesting interesting event ideas, sponsoring and hosting events in his home, and motivating the Polar Bear community to gather and celebrate, he has built a strong sense of community in an area where Bowdoin can feel rather far away. He always goes beyond the general charge of a volunteer by personally calling alumni

1985

Eric v.d. Luft is celebrating [twenty-five] years doing business as Gegensatz Press, publishing nonfiction books. Among the authors he publishes is the poet Deborah Boe ’76. He has completely revamped the website at gegensatzpress.com. Go ahead! Look around! Maybe you’ll find some deals. From an Eric v.d. Luft email, May 3, 2021.

Thom Wooten: “I am working with the 6th Regiment United States Colored Troop Reenactors to bring a Civil War museum to Trenton, New Jersey. In addition, I am supporting Wooten’s Woodland Creations: wootenswoodlandcreations.com.

Recommend Half the Story Has Never Been Told, by Edward E. Baptist; Robert E. Lee and Me, by Ty Seidule; and Closing the Courthouse Door,

by Erwin Chemerinsky.”

Todd Hermann has been honored by the Alumni Council with a Polar Bear Award in recognition of his significant personal contributions and outstanding dedication to Bowdoin. The award honors a record of service rather than a single act or achievement.

It comes as no surprise that Todd received a record five nominations for the Polar Bear Award. Staff members, a student, and alumni graduating nearly twenty-five years apart wrote in support of his nomination and to tell the Alumni Council the ways in which he has impacted them personally and served the College with great distinction. Formally, he has served as a chair and member of Reunion committees, as a class agent, and as a BCAN advisor. But equally as notable are the informal ways that he represents the College every day. He is a remarkable connector of people. He builds Bowdoin community everywhere he goes.

He has been described as a leader, advocate, coach, and treasure, and always goes above and beyond with unmatched enthusiasm. It is for these reasons that he is most deserving of this recognition.

1981

1988

and parents and encouraging them to participate. And he has ensured the ongoing success of his efforts by recruiting and mentoring fellow volunteers to continue his excellent work long into the future. He is the Bowdoin Club of Texas, and the Alumni Council is pleased to recognize him for his years of service to Bowdoin and his fellow Texans.

1974

Reunion

Michael Evans: “Hi, friends. I’m delighted to share with you that I have accepted the position of president of Peru State College in Peru, Nebraska. It’s a wonderful school with a great mission and a beautiful campus. I start there July 1, and Joanna and I will move into the president’s house in late June.

We love New England and will retire someday to our house in Belfast, Maine, but we are very excited by this new adventure!”

Kate Dempsey has been honored by the Alumni Council with a Polar Bear Award in recognition of her significant personal contributions and outstanding dedication to Bowdoin. The award honors a record of service rather than a single act or achievement.

For years Kate has been a leader, reaching out to Bowdoin students of diverse backgrounds and making important post-graduation connections for students interested in environmental studies. The

fellowships she has made available at The Nature Conservancy and the deep connections she has fostered with individual students for over a decade have made a significant impact on the Bowdoin community. Additionally, she has been a willing repeat speaker at College events, including serving as a keynote speaker at the dedication of the Roux Center for the Environment. For these reasons, the Alumni Council is pleased to recognize her service to Bowdoin in this way.

1989

Brad Olsen: “After fifteen years as a professor of education at the University of California– Santa Cruz, I’ve returned east.

I recently accepted a position as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where I’ll focus on research and policy analysis around education innovations in lowincome countries around the world.

As a result, I’m moving to DC. Hope to hear from Bowdoin folks in or near DC once the country opens up some!”

Teresa Vega presented a talk in April on the rise and decline of Hangroot, a Greenwich, Connecticut, community of Native and African Americans that preceded the 1640 founding of the town, and her extended family’s fight to save their cemetery in what is now Byram. Vega, a genealogy and cultural anthropology specialist, was part of two Zoom workshops sponsored by a partnership between the Witness Stones Project and the Greenwich Historical Society to shine a light on the history, humanity, and contributions of enslaved individuals who resided in Greenwich as early as the 1600s.

Founded in 2019, the Witness Stone

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Connect initiative seeks to teach school-age children about enslaved persons using primary sources like deeds, wills, and letters. The program culminates in the installation of a marker in the vicinity of where the person lived or worked. In less than four years, eleven schools and over 2,000 students have engaged in the Witness Stones curriculum, learning about the history of slavery in the North. From a GreenwichFreePress.com online article, March 9, 2021.

1990

Staci Williams Seeley has been honored by the Alumni Council with the 2020 Alumni Service Award in recognition of her continuing role as one of the most active and influential advocates for the College and for people of color within the College community. In her seven years as a member of the Alumni Council, she served as council president, chair of the multicultural and executive committees, and member of the awards and nominations committees, as well as an affiliate member of the Development and College Relations Committee of the Board of Trustees. She also served as a longtime BCAN advisor and BASIC/BRAVO volunteer and a host committee member for multicultural alumni gatherings.

As president of the Alumni Council, Seeley led efforts to welcome new students of color to the College, and continued her role as a leader and champion of diversity and inclusion at Bowdoin when she served as chair of the host committee of the 2019 celebration (AF/AM/50) of fifty years of Africana studies, the African American Society, and the John B. Russwurm African American Center.

1991

Reunion

Matt Rogers: “I was named to the Forbes ‘Best-In-State Wealth Advisors’ for the fourth consecutive year. I am senior VP and managing director for Raymond James in Portland, Maine. I also [stay connected] to the College as a volunteer assistant coach on the baseball team.”

1992

Chip Brewer: “I am very pleased and proud to share that I recently published my first novel, a thriller entitled Questions of Iron & Blood.

The first in a trilogy, the book asks the question, ‘What if the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013 was not an isolated incident but rather part of a much larger and more sinister conspiracy?’ I received a great deal of help and support from a number of fellow Bowdoin grads, including Dave Johnson, Tony Wion ’91, Jonathan Gardner, Trish Grinnell, Tad Renvyle, Matt Torrington ’93, Mike Appaneal, many other Bowdoin rugby alumni, and—of course—my wife, Elizabeth Brewer ’90.”

1993

Barbara O’Brien has been named to a task force on forensic science established by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The task force, created under executive order, will be an advisory body within the Michigan Department of State Police, made up of people in the medical, legal, and academic professions, government officials, private sector experts, and representatives from the Michigan State Police, Michigan Supreme Court, and Attorney General’s office. Their goal is to ensure that the state adheres to the highest standards

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of evidence and that practitioners throughout the criminal justice system understand how to apply forensic science properly. O’Brien was appointed to represent an individual from the private sector or from a university in the state who has published scholarship related to cognitive bias. From an Oakland Press online news story, April 3, 2021.

1995

Juan Bonilla has been honored by the Alumni Council with the 2020 Common Good Award for all that he has done to improve the lives of members of his home community in Lawrence, Massachusetts, through homeownership, economic counseling, and increased opportunity. He joined Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW) in 2004 as a homeownership counselor, later becoming director of homeownership, then director of the asset building department, and ascending to his current position as deputy director. He has received multiple awards in recognition of all he has done in multiple and significant capacities, most recently being named as one of five Neighborhood Fellows of the Tufts University Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning master of public policy program.

His considerable skills and expertise in personal finance, management, housing, and economic policy, as well as his passion for social justice and economic opportunity, have helped to provide a better life for the diverse low- and moderate-income population he serves.

2000

A couple of years ago, sculptor Ben Butler made a deliberate decision to almost entirely focus his career on public art. Today he’s

creating large installations around the country that he hopes kindle people’s curiosity about natural processes, scale, and time. Many of these works suggest a kind of boundlessness or endlessness; they take on forms that one could imagine might continue indefinitely into space. Butler repeated a comment he was told at a gallery opening: “Someone once said, ‘When I look at your work, I feel like I am staring through a lens, but I don’t know if it is a microscope or a telescope.’”

He liked the observation because “it implies ambiguity of scale.”

Public art is compelling to him, he continued, because he wants to create work that encourages people to interact with it spatially, to move through it, to meander. At the same time, public art comes with limitations—both physically, based on space constraints, and thematically, based on the need or mission of the organization. He appreciates these limitations. “It’s like an assignment or prompt,” he said, that pushes his imagination in different directions.Focusing on public art has changed Butler. It has transformed the way he thinks about art, how it is made and what it is for. “There has been a major psychological shift for me in telling this mythology around how art is made,” he said, in “that it is private and needs to be protected, that it involves a special process.” Instead, he now views it as improved by collaboration, conversation, and openness. “For years, I just told myself I am going to make what I want to make and find a place for it in the world, but I have turned that upside down,” he said, a turn he attributes in part to his age and to raising children (he has two, ages eleven and nine). “The first question I ask now is not, ‘What do I want to

make?’ But, ‘What is needed here, and how can I contribute?’” From a bowdoin.edu/news story, April 13, 2021.

“McMurdo Station, an Antarctic research base 2,415 miles south of Christchurch, New Zealand, is a strange place to ride out the COVID-19 pandemic. But it’s been a home of sorts for Pedro Salom since he took a dishwashing job there in 2001, when he was twenty-four. Now an assistant area manager with more than a dozen Antarctic deployments behind him, Salom has grown accustomed to the ebb and flow of life on the ice.

There’s the surge of excitement when new arrivals join the camp, the feeling of isolation from the rest of the world when earth and sea disappear in the endless night from April to August; and the joy when the sun finally appears behind the mountains once again. He’s also been around long enough to know that, as people reach the end of their deployments, many begin to struggle—whether they’ve been at McMurdo for over a year, or even just a few months. ‘One of the things I look for is dramatic changes in people’s habits,’ says Salom. ‘If somebody has been going to the gym every day at 6:30 a.m., and usually gets to lunch exactly at 11:45, and that person suddenly misses the gym, or starts taking food to go or doesn’t show up for lunch at all, that’s a serious flag in my mind.’

Researchers have a term for what Salom is describing: the ‘third quarter phenomenon.’ First named in 1991 by researchers studying people living in cold regions, the phenomenon (still theoretical) is characterized by mood shifts among people nearly finished with a long period of isolation.

Those affected often feel anxious,

withdrawn, and increasingly vulnerable. Researchers haven’t been able to definitively prove the phenomenon exists, in part because its effects can vary from person to person. But anecdotal evidence and research suggest it often strikes people beginning 75 percent of the way through an isolating event.

While researchers looking into the phenomenon have focused on explorers like Salom, what they’ve learned about it could now be applicable to a much larger group of people: those self-isolating during the COVID-19 pandemic, which, at least in some parts of the world, is potentially about three-quarters through—assuming vaccine rollouts proceed apace, and the shots perform as expected.… Salom’s time in the Antarctic has also given him a greater appreciation of the importance of mental health. It can be tough to speak up and ask for help, Salom says, but it’s essential to realize that psychological health is very much like physical health: ‘early intervention and engagement is much better than then trying to make up for lost time later on, when somebody gets in a really bad place.’” From a Time magazine article, February 21, 2021.

Tyson Weems, founder and CEO of the nonprofit 3Levels in Portland, Maine, was recently featured on WCSH-TV for his music video parody of the Police song “Roxanne”— created to raise awareness about vaccinating against COVID-19.

The video includes appearances by health care workers, state medical leaders, parents, faith leaders, coaches, teachers, students, civil servants, and others, who all share why they have been or plan to be vaccinated. 3Levels is committed to championing an age of connection and collaboration. According to

THE CAMPAIGN FOR BOWDOIN

Bowdoin is one of only a handful of colleges in the nation with a notably high percentage of engaged alumni. Alumni engagement influences job offers for graduating seniors, financial support, the College’s reputation and visibility, and many other facets of the Bowdoin community that create a vibrant experience for students and alumni alike.

For these reasons, continuing to strengthen alumni engagement is a core priority of the campaign.

Please help keep this momentum going by volunteering, registering for an event or program, or making a gift to the Alumni Fund. bowdoin.edu/fromhere

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Connect Weems, “central to that mission is facilitating transformative projects for learners in grades six and up.

Those involve research, reflection, and active engagement while centering on connection to self, communities, or nature (the three levels on which the organization’s name is based).” From a WCSH News Center Maine online article, April 25, 2021.

2002

Leroy Gaines has been honored by the Alumni Council with the 2021 Distinguished Educator Award for leading an “inclusion revolution” in the public schools of the San Francisco Bay Area, mobilizing schools and the community to ensure that classrooms are safe and inclusive places for all students, regardless of their race, gender, class, or sexual orientation. In 2010, Gaines ascended to the position of principal at Acorn Elementary School in Oakland, California, was recognized by the Human Rights Campaign in 2014 with a “Welcoming Schools Seal of Excellence Award,” and in 2019 became executive director of the Bay Area branch of New Leaders, a professional organization that develops and empowers principals and other education leaders to lift up students through policies and practices that foster inclusivity and academic achievement. Through that role and his leadership as chair of the board of Our Family Coalition, he continues to drive schools and educators to ensure that all students, particularly the most vulnerable, are able to reach their full potential.

Full Fathom Five, a photographic series by Todd R. Forsgren ’03, consists of several chapters that consider the issues facing oceans in the anthropocene as well as the nature of scientific specimens and imaging. Images such as Leptoseris gardineri (top), from the chapter “Ex. Ex. Colonies” are cyanotypes of coral specimens from the Smithsonian collection from 2019.

Oil on Water #03 (bottom) is from the chapter “Hydrophilic & Hydrophobi,” a series of images looking at the surface of water.

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2003

Todd Forsgren: “I’ve left Los Angeles and now live in Billings, Montana. I’ve been working on a series of 35mm black-and-white

landscape photographs for the past five years. I finished it on the eve of my fortieth birthday. The series is currently on view at the Rocky Mountain College art gallery and will be printed as an artist book this summer. Two prints from my Ornithological Photographs are currently available for auction to support two excellent Montana art museums—one at the Yellowstone Art Museum and the other for the Missoula Art Museum. I’m honored to report that two of my photographs are now in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. This is especially meaningful since I had so many profound art experiences there as a boy. Despite my move to Montana, I am continuing to work on my photos about the ocean, including a chapter of coral cyanotypes from the Smithsonian.

Another chapter of my series Full Fathom Five, on oceans and climate change, looks at water. I use a broad range of photographic tricks and technologies to depict water in as many ways as possible, and while I have a lot more work to do on this chapter, I’m quite excited about some of the results. I’ve been very into making books lately, with two new ones in the works and a few new ones since I last wrote.”

2004

Emily Blum has become the first practicing board-certified female pediatric urologist in Georgia, joining Georgia Urology—the largest urology practice in the Southeast and the fifth largest of its kind in the country. “Girls experience plenty of urological challenges,” explains Blum. “Female patients may feel more comfortable seeing a female provider. It’s important that patients and their families know they have the opportunity to choose.”

Board-certified pediatric urologists belong to a distinct medical group.

To become board certified in pediatric urology, a physician must be board certified in adult urology, too. Additionally, the physician must complete a two-year fellowship.

Blum’s fellowship projects focused on medical device innovations, which she continues pursuing today.

She serves as the medical director for the Global Center for Medical Innovations, a Georgia Tech affiliate institution. From a Georgia Urology online news story, March 4, 2021.

2007

Charles Whitmore has been honored by the Alumni Council with the 2021 Alumni Footprints Award, which recognizes a volunteer who, in keeping with the heralded words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Class of 1825, has left “footprints on the sands of time” through their demonstrated enthusiasm, initiative, and outstanding execution and achievement in organizing at least one event or program in the Bowdoin community across the globe during the preceding academic year. Charles has singlehandedly been the driving force behind building the Bowdoin community in Nashville and beyond.

He has been an outstanding and enthusiastic partner to the office of alumni relations in organizing gatherings for alumni, parents, and students. This was never truer than in spring 2020 at the beginning of the global COVID-19 pandemic and in the aftermath of devastating tornadoes in the Nashville area.

Recognizing that this was a time to bring people together, he was one of the first volunteers to host a virtual event for Bowdoin. His care for his fellow Polar Bears brought

the community together at such an important time. Additionally, he has served the Class of 2007 as a valuable member of the class agent team and member of past Reunion committees. It is for these reasons that the Alumni Council is pleased to recognize him in this way.

2010

Jessica Britt: “Ted [Johnson, Principia College ’07] and I were married at the Loring Greenough House near our home in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, on October 3, 2020. The wedding was officiated

by Sarah Lord White and attended by our families and a few close friends who quarantined ahead of time. Many others attended our pandemic wedding via Zoom!”

The year 2020 was a record-breaking one for financial trader Oliver Kell. The former government major and football quarterback aced the United States Investing Championship, posting annual gains of 941 percent in the “accounts under a million dollars category,” the best ever recorded in the competition’s history. Kell is no overnight success, however, and his rise to the status of market wizard has been hardwon. “I’ve been trading for ten years but didn’t make any money for the first six.” Nevertheless, once he found his rhythm, Kell was regularly posting annual gains of 70 to 90 percent. Then came the stellar heights of 2020. When the pandemic-induced market slump happened early in the year, he was “all cash” and therefore well placed to profit from the rebound. A lot of his success, though, is, of course, due to his ability to pick winning stocks. This year also looks promising, with Kell’s portfolio up around 40 percent by mid-March. What’s

his secret? Apart from the knack he’s developed for reading the ups and downs of the stock market, Kell’s strategy involves seeking out new, innovative companies to invest in, with strong growth numbers and a resilient share price. “I look for stocks that hold up the best during a correction, stocks that don’t want to go down.” From a bowdoin.edu/news story, March 24, 2021.

Cecilia Sun has been honored by the Alumni Council with a Polar Bear Award in recognition of her significant personal contributions and outstanding dedication to Bowdoin. The award honors a record of service rather than a single act or achievement. Since graduation Cecilia has consistently served alumni and students in the Bowdoin Club of Asia. Her nominator said that she has built a “friendly and inclusive atmosphere” for all, bringing people together to connect professionally and socially. The ability to build Bowdoin community with such enthusiasm and dedication so far from Brunswick is truly remarkable.

It is for these reasons that she is most deserving of this recognition.

2011

Reunion

Dominique Johnson has been recognized with the Foot Soldier of Bowdoin Award, which 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, and made possible through the generosity of David Z. Webster ’57. Along with the award, a scholarship is designated in the recipient’s name to a deserving Bowdoin student through the Foot Soldier of Bowdoin Scholarship Fund. Dominique has been a tremendous partner to the staff in

Bowdoin’s Career Exploration and Development office, creating opportunities for students and making a lasting impact on Bowdoin’s newest alumni now entering the professional world. Over the past year she connected Bowdoin students to nine available positions. A remarkable number in any year, but especially this year and for the Class of 2020.

From these nine positions, two students have since been hired full-time.

This important internship pipeline between Bowdoin and the Center for Policing Equity, where Johnson is currently working, will benefit Bowdoin students and alumni for years to come. It is for these reasons that the Alumni Council is pleased to recognize her in this way.

2014

Sharon Kasasa and her sister, born in Uganda and raised in the United States, have launched Mutima Coffee, an online retail company offering high-quality coffees grown in the East African country. The Mount Elgon region of Eastern Uganda near the Kenyan border is the specific area of coffee focus for the sisters, who seek to highlight the efforts of smallscale farmers producing specialty Arabica coffees. As third-generation female entrepreneurs now based in the Washington, DC, area, the Kasasa sisters are particularly motivated to shine a light on the work of women at the farm level.

Pre-orders for Mutima’s roasted coffee opened on International Women’s Day in March. In its first week, the company sold more than 200 bags of a single-origin coffee they call Spiced Chai for its pronounced natural notes of ginger, cocoa, and molasses. The coffee business is just one of the channels through which the Kasasa sisters

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Connect Carolyn Brady ’19

have been working to empower more underserved communities throughout each of their personal and professional lives. From a Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine article, March 23, 2021.

2016

Catching Up

OUR MISS MAINE As Miss Maine, Carolyn Brady ’19 focused on social impact initiatives in the state. In the fall, she’ll begin pursuing a master’s of science degree in foreign service at Georgetown University.

MISS MAINE HAS GIVEN ME THE PLATFORM to meet and serve many

more people in many more ways than I could ever have anticipated. Over the course of my two years in the role, I have been able to travel to almost every county and interact with Mainers in important and meaningful ways—from local fairs to female empowerment conferences, from outdoor adventures to working on COVID relief efforts. Notable pre-pandemic events included hosting a Thanksgiving dinner to provide community for those new to Maine or who are food insecure. COVID events have included cofounding a national education video series with Miss Kansas and working to combat vaccine hesitancy within the Black community.

WHILE I COULD NOT HAVE FORESEEN THE RACIAL JUSTICE MOVEMENTS OF SUMMER 2020 when I competed for Miss Maine in 2019, those events gave me the opportunity to expand my role.

I was selected to represent everyone who calls Maine home, and being the first Black Miss Maine has given me the chance to change public perception around what it means to be Black in Maine, especially as a Bowdoin graduate.

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

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Reunion

Maddy Livingston has been honored by the Alumni Council with the Young Alumni Service Award in recognition of distinguished and outstanding service to Bowdoin. The award honors a record of service rather than a single act or achievement and is given to a graduate of the past ten years. During her short tenure as an alumna of Bowdoin, she has distinguished herself as a steadfast and reliable volunteer with a seemingly endless enthusiasm for all things Bowdoin.

She has connected to her class as an associate class agent and as a member of her Reunion committee.

Additionally, she has served the College as a BCAN advisor, Sophomore Bootcamp volunteer, and a truly exceptional regional chair of BRAVO. Maddy has been described as a “legendary” volunteer for her professionalism and organization. She connects prospective students and alumni from across the globe and provides a warm and welcoming introduction to the Bowdoin community. It is for these reasons that the Alumni Council is pleased to recognize her dedicated work to the College with the Young Alumni Service Award.

2018

Adaiah Hudgins-Lopez has received a Gates Cambridge Scholarship for Graduate Studies, one of approximately eighty-five international students selected to

receive the funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She will start at the University of Cambridge next fall, pursuing a master’s of philosophy in social anthropology.

Hudgins-Lopez is the first Bowdoin student to win the award, which was established through a gift of $210 million from the Gateses in 2000 to support academically gifted scholars from outside the UK who are committed to improving the lives of others. From a bowdoin.edu/news story, March 15, 2021.

Trevor Kenkel: Springworks aquaponics greenhouse plans to add more than 500,000 square feet of space to its operation, increasing its growing capacity more than twenty times over. The company’s third greenhouse will be completed in May 2021, adding an additional 40,000 square feet. The rest of the expansion is expected to be completed by 2026.

In a news release, Kenkel, founder of Springworks, attributed the expansion to a growing need for locally sourced organic produce following disruption in supply chains during the pandemic. They are now the sole supplier of organic green leaf lettuce to Hannaford supermarkets, additionally providing produce to Whole Foods Market and wholesale food providers. Springworks is the largest aquaponics greenhouse in New England, and one of the largest in the country. The farm was started in 2014 by Kenkel while he was a freshman at Bowdoin. His first greenhouse on the 168-acre parcel in Lisbon, Maine, was just 6,000 square feet, a third of the space currently in use. From a Lewiston, Maine, Sun Journal article, April 9, 2021. Kenkel and Springworks were the subject of a Bowdoin Magazine cover story in fall 2018: bowdoin.edu/magazine.

PHOTO: MATT BOYD PHOTOGRAPHY

Celebrate

1. Jessica Britt ’10 and Ted Johnson (Principia College ’07) were married on October 3, 2020, at the Loring Greenough House near their home in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Pictured: Paul Comerford ’77, Joan Comerford Britt ’79, Sarah Lord White ’10, CJ Bell Rossi ’10, Ted and Jess, Libby Wilcosky Lee ’10, and Eric Lee ’08.

2. Jeff Emerson ’70 and Vicky Anne Lorant were married on March 5, 2021, at their home in Portland, Maine.

3. Abby Roy ’16 and Samuel Mayne ’16 were married on September 28, 2019, in Franconia, New Hampshire. Pictured: Bowdoin Director of the McKeen Center Sarah Seames, who officiated the ceremony, Tara Palnitkar ’16, Tracey Faber ’16, Victor Leos ’16, Abby and Sam, Kath Mixter Mayne ’79, Grace Bilodeau ’20, Matt Cooper ’16, Coco Faber ’16, and Ben Pallant ’16.

1

2

3

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Here

BY EDGAR ALLEN BEEM P’13

“This step toward returning to normal is simply thrilling. I am awed by how quickly biomedical researchers were able to produce and validate vaccines, impressed by the rapid mobilization and rollout of vaccinations by public health experts, and thankful to community members who have gotten vaccinated and brought us closer to reaching herd immunity. Personally, I was eager to get vaccinated, and receiving the second dose of the vaccine was the most exciting part. I cannot wait to spend unfettered time with my family, friends, colleagues, and students once again.

In short, I feel immensely thankful and hopeful!”

“It was emotional for me to get vaccinated. I lost my father [not to COVID-19] in the early months of the pandemic, and getting my vaccine meant that I could finally hug my brother, my mother, and other family members safely. It has allowed us to finally celebrate and grieve him together.”

—SARAH CHINGOS, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC SERVICE IN THE MCKEEN CENTER FOR THE COMMON GOOD

—DANIELLE DUBE, PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY AND BIOCHEMISTRY

This spring, the College partnered with Mid Coast Hospital to make vaccinations available to the Bowdoin community. Wherever they received their shots, students, faculty, staff, and others felt a keen sense of change.

“I felt so relieved when I was eligible for the vaccine and received both shots. I have missed the Association of Bowdoin Friends and the programs we had planned for the community. I missed the museums, walks on campus, the gym, the library, and seeing students.”

“It’s been going on so long, it still hasn’t hit me, even though I’ve had my second shot. It’s bigger than just me. It’s the whole country. Every interaction involves risk, but in choosing to help myself I am helping others too. Being vaccinated, there is less anxiety. I was always thinking about the risk and taking some precautions, but now I’m not worried all the time. This is such a big moment.”

—ANDREW MOORE ’21

“I feel a sense of relief having received the vaccine. My hope is that with the shared vulnerability people around the world face, humankind will become more human and more kind.

This pandemic robs us of much of our humanity. To be human is to touch, to smile, and have those smiles be seen.”

—FRED FIELD, PHOTOGRAPHER WHO FREQUENTLY DOCUMENTS LIFE AT BOWDOIN AND CONTRIBUTES TO BOWDOIN PUBLICATIONS

—JEANNE D’ARC MAYO, LONGTIME BOWDOIN ATHLETIC TRAINER AND FORMER CHAIR OF THE ASSOCIATION OF BOWDOIN FRIENDS

“I am hopeful for the fall semester, and excited that soon we will be able to see each other in person, and for the new ‘normal.’

When I asked a colleague what she was up to this weekend, she said she was getting together with friends for the first time in months—it’s a time of renewal.”

—SARA SMITH, ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT IN BOWDOIN’S OFFICE OF COMMUNICATIONS AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS

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PHOTO: MICHELE STAPLETON

OPENING UP Students relax on the Quad shortly after the requirement to wear masks outdoors was lifted.

The only giveaway of continued strangeness may be the many takeaway lunch bags from Dining.

As the world slowly emerges from the quarantines, lockdowns, and closures of the coronavirus pandemic, the swift development and distribution of vaccines against COVID-19 hold the promise of a return to something usual—whatever “usual” might turn out to be.

Bowdoin Magazine Bowdoin College Brunswick, Maine 04011

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