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Book Club: Emily Cohen ’20 and classmates started a virtual book club to stay in touch. In the end, they were surprised where it took them.
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Book Club
At the beginning of the pandemic, Emily Cohen ’20 and a group of classmates started a virtual book club simply to stay in touch. In the end, they were surprised where Book Club took them.
ALMOST EXACTLY TWO YEARS AGO, I graduated from college. I sat in my childhood home and watched my name scroll past with my classmates’, the cast of the cursed Class of 2020. A friend of mine glibly compared the ceremony—the list of our names and a montage of pictures—to an “in memoriam” segment of an awards show. It’s not that I’m still bitter about the virtual commencement, or even about just getting my diploma in the mail. Looking back on it now, two years into the pandemic that changed everything, it was the best Bowdoin could do for a while. But we didn’t know that yet.
It felt silly and surreal to end my time in college in such an anticlimactic way. I Zoomed with my friends afterward and we commiserated about it, but also reminisced and gossiped and laughed for hours, as we would have if we’d graduated in person. We did a lot of that back then: simulating face-to-face gatherings and interactions to stay in touch and, more fundamentally, to give us something to do.
Like many people, one way we did this was through the formation of a virtual book club. Ours had its first meeting in August 2020; we read The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, taking inspiration from the bookshelves filled with paperbacks we hadn’t touched since middle school. At first there were only a handful of us, but after the first successful meeting we extended the invitation to about a dozen of our classmates. We weren’t all friends, necessarily, though we all had Bowdoin in common as well as a desire to replicate some sense of community that we’d been missing those last few months.
Not that I had been part of a book club before then. I’d have been hard-pressed, in fact, to name the last book I had read for fun, meaning not for school. It had probably been something I read while on vacation, liberated from the papers and tests and Blackboard discussion posts that had for four years dictated and current events, like mass shootings and the January 6th insurrection. But I always felt like I was talking about these things with people who didn’t get it, who could never get it, not fully.
Intentionally or not, we talked a lot about America in Book Club. In our discussion after reading Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, we disagreed about loyalty in the face of grave injustice. We read Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and wondered how the experiences of first- and second-generation Americans have changed over time, with three of our members being secondgeneration themselves. We debated the merits of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Maybe I was seeking to understand my home better now that I was asked to explain it. Maybe I was just homesick.
I returned to the US over the summer, in part so I could attend the celebration for the Class of 2020 that Bowdoin held for us in August. In Book Club we talked excitedly about seeing each other in person; it would be the first time in over a year for some of us. The weekend was busy and overwhelming and fun—and sufficient. By the end I felt ready to move on from Bowdoin. I hadn’t realized before that I wasn’t.
Book Club fizzled out, our group chat growing more and more dormant as people got busier, started new jobs, and moved to new cities. Back in Austria, I moved into a new apartment and started work again. In a more open phase of the pandemic, I had less free time, less time to read. It was sad, but not surprising. Book Club couldn’t last forever; this we knew from the outset. Indeed, in the first email inviting people to join our virtual meetings we called the club the “Fall 2020 Book Club.” Some things last longer than we expect them to.
But, I missed Book Club. More than the incentive to read again, more than the quasiintellectual stimulation, I missed my friends. And more than the ability to access dozens of places beyond my own, occasionally bleak, one, I missed my home. It was then that I realized that my friends and my home were one and the same.
A few weeks ago I opened up the Book Club group chat for the first time in months and started to type. “Hey, friends, it’s been a minute...”
what, when, why, and how much I read. More than that, I’m a nerd who enjoys school and I’d insisted I was reading “for fun.”
But then I picked up The Outsiders again and was transported to the gang-riddled streets of a 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma, evoked so profoundly by its teenage author. Next, we went to colonial West Africa in Yaa Gyasi’s sprawling Homegoing, following the story to antebellum Baltimore to Reconstruction Birmingham to revolutionary and independent Ghana and back again to modern day. After that, we went to a dozen distinct scientifically advanced worlds in Exhalation: Stories by the inimitable Ted Chiang. It wasn’t always fun, but I was reminded, for the first time in a while, of the unique ability of literature to engross and move, emotionally and seemingly physically, too.
As a collective, Book Club was keenly aware of distance and location. Our members at one point spanned ten time zones, from Alaska to Kenya. I was in Austria, teaching English somewhere in the space between lockdowns with Microsoft Teams meetings and masked classrooms with the windows open. Like many people during that first dark pandemic winter, I was lonely much of the time, and I was probably a bit depressed too. I filled my time by cooking, going for walks. I watched all of The Good Place, The O.C., and New Girl—that one twice.
And, thanks to Book Club, I read a lot more than I had in years. Finding times to meet that worked for all of us was no small feat, and we didn’t always succeed. But when we did, our discussions flourished, taking up space, sometimes upwards of two hours, because of our enthusiasm, and because what else did we have to do?
Those Zoom calls connected me not only to my friends but to my home as well. I have never felt more American than I do in Austria, in a job where I’m often asked to share my perspective as an American on some uniquely American issues Emily Cohen ’20 is a writer and English teacher in Vienna, Austria.
HOOK, LINE, AND SINKER
BY TOM PORTER • PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALEX CORNELL DU HOUX
’06
Pickard Theater returned to life this spring with a vibrant and beautiful musical based on the myth of a water creature who assumes human form. Adapting Ondine for 2022, director of the production Davis Robinson says, meant “centering the narrative on the true power of the natural world and the failures of the civilized world to listen to its warnings.” Despite its serious theme, its sets and staging were dazzling and wildly creative, and its lyrics and dialogue are full of laughs, heart, and permission to fall “helplessly, hopefully” in love.
CAST Lyle Altschul ’23 Jacqueline Boben ’22 Journey Browne ’22 Louise Cummins ’23 Henry Jodka ’24 Jonathan Li ’25 Emma Paterson-Dennis ’24 Angelica Peña ’22 William Rackear ’22 Molly Richardson ’25 Wilder Short ’22 Cloe Tarlton ’23 Vincent Tran ’25 Joosep Võrno ’22 Lauren Waters ’22
CREW Ben Allen ’23, fly rail Alison Ambrosio ’22, wardrobe crew Hailey Aronson ’22, wardrobe crew Lexi Ashraf ’24, assistant stage manager Bryant Blackburn ’22, sound board operator Lorenzo Hess ’23, light board operator Grace Kellar-Long ’21, follow spot Chun Ko ’25, assistant stage manager Emmy Lawler ’22, stage manager Lily Smith ’23, follow spot Lou Sydel ’22, choreographer Gianna Turk ’24, assistant stage manager and video operator Chris Zhang ’25, assistant director
Opening spread: In the opening scene of the musical, the company performs “Lake Frolic,” an underwater dance set to a jazz waltz that portrays the idyllic—but also comic and tragic—life of the naiads (nymphs) and other creatures of the lake.
Opposite page: The company sings “Crème de la Crème”— a song about the tendency to turn willfully away from hard truth and a reference to the blind eye humans turn to climate change— at the end of Act 1.
AFTER MORE THAN FOUR YEARS in the dark, Pickard Theater came back to life as a new musical hit the stage. Bowdoin’s department of theater and dance taps a wealth of in-house talent for Hook, Line, and Sinker. Inspired by a European folk tale about a water nymph who falls in love with a human, the piece resonates on many levels, says director and theater professor Davis Robinson.
Hook, Line, and Sinker is a musical adaptation of the French play Ondine, written in 1938 by Jean Giraudoux, which in turn was based on earlier myths about a knight called Hans who falls for a water nymph called Ondine.
The play was translated and turned into a musical by Bowdoin staff member Delmar Small, who, as well as being concert, budget, and equipment manager for the music department, is a talented musician, writer, and theater producer.
Small says the project was born out of a discussion he had with Robinson in November 2019, on the closing night of the Cole Porter musical revue. “I said to Davis I would really like to write a musical, and if I did, would he direct it? He was really keen on the idea and suggested I base it on Ondine.”
The result was an energetic two-hour show with a cast of fifteen students who filled a variety of roles. As well as acting, they were also singing and dancing, playing music, and dealing with costumes and puppets. Three years ago, Small was composer-in-residence at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut and worked with all sorts of puppets.
“It was so much fun,” he adds, “that I immediately thought of puppets when I started working on this show, which features shadow puppets, hand puppets, stick puppets, and marionettes.” To help with that side of the production, adjunct theater lecturer and puppet designer Libby Marcus came on board. The impressive design team also included Lily Prentice ’10, who is responsible for the costumes, and set designer Judy Gailen. “Our highly professional designers have really gone all out to create a wonderful imaginary world and bring this parable to life,” says Small.
When it came to composing and orchestrating the score, Small went for a more classical set-up, eschewing the drum kit and double bass typically found in a musical theater pit orchestra.
“The performance is quite ballet-like, with some dance routines included, so I went for more of a chamber group sound, with flute, horn, violin, cello, piano, harp, and miscellaneous percussion. This is my second musical, and it’s by far the largest production I’ve been involved with.”
Hook, Line, and Sinker has, quite literally, many moving parts, said Robinson, and is the biggest show to hit the Pickard stage since The Threepenny Opera in 2017. “This was originally supposed to be performed in either the fall of 2020 or the spring of 2021, but, of course, the pandemic happened, and we lost a couple of years!”
The legend of the water nymph, known as the “selkie” in Celtic and Norse mythology, can also be found in Greek and Native American myths, says Robinson, as well as more modern iterations on the stage and the big screen.
“There was recently a German expressionist movie, called Undine, that was based on the legend. A few years earlier there was a film with Colin Farrell, also called Ondine, about an Irish fisherman who falls in love with a selkie. Then, of course, there was Splash.” Robinson is referring to Ron Howard’s 1984 romantic comedy, starring Daryl Hannah as a love-struck mermaid and (very) loosely based on the legend of the selkie. The enduring appeal of the tale, explains Robinson, is the contrast between the purity and innocence of the water nymph and the cynicism and immorality of the human world.
“The relationship between Hans and Ondine is doomed from the start,” he says. “On one level, the story is a parable about the human soul. What does it mean to be human? Can nonhumans have a soul?”
This production explores other themes too, he explains, notably the way mankind abuses nature. “It’s a perfect parallel for where we are now with climate change. The earth is getting hotter and drier… and the worst thing is that we know it’s happening but seem unable to stop it.”
Despite such weighty topics, says Robinson, delightful moments of comedy shine through the play, such as a TV game-show scene featuring shadow puppets, an actor in a horse costume, and giant dancing lily pads.
To watch the production, visit bowdo.in/hook.
Thank goodness we’re us and not them!” “We will turn, we will turn, we will turn up our noses.
—“CRÈME DE LA CRÈME,” ACT 1, SCENE 7
is a poorly written play that suffers from a lack of direction. ” “When you are as old as I am today, you may see that Life
—“THE CHASE,” ACT 1, SCENE 4
Opposite page: The Old One (Jacqueline Boben ’22), seated on the right, prepares to warn Ondine about what it will mean for her to marry a human, saying that if Hans betrays her, he will die.
Left: Hans’s horse (Joosep Võrno ’22) singing “Curse of the Wittensteins”: “A curse is a curse, and who’s the worse? Until I’m there pulling the hearse, the hearse. What’s worse, you ask, or more perverse? It’s the curse of higher ed.”
Below: Walter the poet (striped pants; Vincent Tran ’25) appears before the judges in the trial of Ondine, who is accused of having an affair with him. The judges are played by Emma Paterson-Dennis ’24, Journey Browne ’22, and Lyle Altschul ’23.
Above: Henry Jodka ’24 plays Theseus, the mythic warrior, here taking part in an ecologically themed TV game show called “Best That Quest,” in which he gets to slay the centaur after spinning the “wheel of misfortune.”
Right: Musicians for the show included Kayla Stuhlmann ’22 (horn); Joshua Lin ’22 (harp); Ari Geisler ’23 (cello); Jimmy Song ’25 (violin); and Jeff Christmas, faculty (piano). Not shown here: K Zhan ’25 (percussion); Anya Workman ’25 (flute); and Charlie McLarnon ’24 (clarinet).
Opposite page: Curtain call. The company performs the show’s theme song, “Hook, Line, and Sinker.”
Hook, line, and sinker—that’s the only way to fall in love. ” “Helplessly, hopelessly, head over heels in love.
—“HOOK, LINE, AND SINKER,” CURTAIN CALL
2022 HONORARY DEGREE RECIPIENTS KATHERINE BRADFORD RAQUEL JARAMILLO LAURIE GAGNON LACHANCE JANET LANGHART-COHEN JOAN BENOIT SAMUELSON
FOR THE SAKE OF HONOR
(Honoris Causa)
On May 28, for the first time in 217 Commencement Ceremonies, the College presented all of this year’s honorary degrees to women as part of its celebration of fifty years of women at the school. Accomplished across all different fields, these five women inspire not only with their achievements but also with their graciousness, generosity of spirit, and grit. Accepting challenge after challenge, each called upon in her own way to find courage and determination, they all remained, as writer Kenny Moore once put it, “unharmed by victory.”
BY TASHA GRAFF ’07 ILLUSTRATIONS BY LYNE LUCIEN ’13
KATHERINE BRADFORD
Katherine Bradford upended her world to live and work as the artist she wanted to be, making paintings filled with feeling.
KATHERINE BRADFORD’S PAINTINGS are full of color and emotion. Androgynous and often faceless subjects swim, dive, dance, and embrace; they float in bodies of water and in outer space. Her singular style is as bold as it is unassuming, and her paintings are instantly recognizable.
Over the course of six decades, Bradford created a body of work that transformed her from a new painter who first began making art after moving to Brunswick, Maine, to one of the state’s most iconic and beloved contemporary artists. Her paintings are shown in galleries and museums across the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. Approximately forty of her paintings will be on display at the Portland Museum of Art throughout the summer in the show Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford.
Bradford’s grandfather Jacques André Fouilhoux was a famous architect, a profession her brother also took up, but Bradford’s mother encouraged her daughter to follow a more traditional path: “I think she thought being an artist meant that you would lead a desolate life, and she wanted other things for me, like all mothers,” said Bradford.
Born in 1942 in New York City, Bradford grew up in Connecticut and left home in 1960 to attend Bryn Mawr, where she earned a BA in 1964. She married Peter Bradford soon thereafter and gave birth to twins in 1969. Her life became the traditional one her mother wanted for her: an educated wife and full-time mother. Something was missing, though Bradford had not quite figured out what. It wasn’t until the early seventies in Maine that she discovered a community of artists, and her world was upended.
The artists she met in Maine shaped her future: “The way they lived their lives and questioned the system appealed to me so much. It finally clicked with me that being an artist was a way of going through life, a whole worldview. I could relate to that.” By 1975, she had cofounded the Union of Maine Visual Artists and began reviewing art for The Maine Times.
Even so, life as an artist did not come easily. She broke from conventions of the time to pursue painting. “By the time I admitted to myself that I wanted to be not just an artist, but a good artist, nothing was in place. I was living in Maine, we had a woodstove and an organic garden, and it took me a long time to turn my life around and live as an artist—including getting divorced. The big thing was that the grandmothers wanted me to be there raising the kids.”
Bradford moved to New York with her children despite her family’s disapproval. Asked what made her “take the leap” to become an artist, Bradford replied, “It wasn’t a leap. It was one step after another.” In an interview with her son Arthur years later, Bradford explains how the move impacted the twins: “When we moved to New York, you both were distraught, but in time each of you in your own way thanked me for introducing you to city life. I needed New York. The language of painting is spoken so fluently and so beautifully there.”
Bradford began generating a tremendous amount of work. In 1987, she graduated from SUNY–Purchase with an MFA. She began to exhibit in galleries and, slowly but surely, began to attract attention and recognition in the art world.
In the beginning, Bradford had thought of herself as a maker of marks, an abstract painter. But she began to see forms in her work even as she did so. “Because the surface was made using many thin layers of paint,” she said, “small shapes and glints of light would appear, sometimes suggesting something underwater.” After a while, she realized maybe she wasn’t an abstract painter after all, that the fields of color could lead to landscapes and expanses of ocean.
In an interview with The Brooklyn Rail in 2007, Bradford said, “If you want to ask me pointblank why I stopped being an abstract painter and reintroduced images into my work, I can tell you. It was because I wanted more emotion and I wanted to tell stories.” In 2010, Bradford received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a year later she received a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. She has also received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Rappaport Prize.
Bradford describes finding her voice in a 2017 interview with New American Paintings: “I think [we artists are] trying to speak a language, a visual language, and it takes a long time to develop a very personal vocabulary. It certainly took me years and years to find my own voice. And I wouldn’t say it has anything to do with age; it had to do with sticking to it, and doing it a lot, like an athlete.”
She works on paintings in her studio, where they are surrounded by all her other paintings, and she has said that “the characters I work with, like divers and soaring superheroes, travel to neighboring paintings in my mind,” creating worlds where swimmers float along in outer space or figures in capes soar above the sea. Admitting that it’s expensive to have so many unfinished paintings around, she says, “Sometimes I line them up here and take a brush, like a doctor visiting a ward, and I try to save the ones that are dying.”
But none ever seem to be dying. Artist Anna Kunz describes Bradford’s work as being “akin to poetry in its attempt to turn fleeting emotions into something concrete and thinkable,” and said, “More than anything, I like Bradford’s paintings because they are so unequivocally what they are: unpretentious and joyful, at times discomfiting, and at times just plain funny.”
Bradford works to create community with her audience.“I have two paintings which are somewhat about identity,” Bradford said. “They’re figures with choices of different heads. I’m exploring who we are, how we fit in, how we fit in together visually, how we all stand next to each other, and there are quite a lot of options for how to look and be with one another.”
Riders of the New York City subway can view Bradford’s work in an unlikely spot: the L train station at the intersection of First Avenue and East 14th Street. Commissioned by the MTA and unveiled in September 2021, the permanent installation consists of five glass mosaic murals depicting her whimsical characters. There are superheroes, a man in a ball gown in a garden of white flowers, and figures dancing across an expanse of blue. Two at the entrances can be glimpsed from the street. Bradford said at their unveiling, “Once someone steps into the subway area, we become travelers, and my hope is that these artworks will transport you to another place.”
Her most recent exhibition, Mother Paintings— which collects works that Bradford created during the pandemic, when she said she was thinking of comfort and caregiving—has been called “a heartfelt meditation on raising other beings—children, paintings—and being raised oneself,” by critic Jason Patrick Brooks, who went on to say: “Bradford also grapples with her own legacy and with the legacies of her predecessors, be they relatives or fellow artists, asking vital questions about what it means to be remembered and to leave a mark.”
In her eighties, Bradford is still painting, still giving talks, still hosting studio visits. She and her spouse, Jane O’Wyatt, whom she met in 1990, split their time between New York and their home in Maine. “Now I’m surrounded by an entire community of artists, and not too many of them had to fight as hard as I did to become an artist. And in a way, I think it’s why I’ve stuck with it. When I wake up in the morning, I’m not going to fool around, I’m going to get to the studio.”
RAQUEL JARAMILLO
Illustrator and best-selling author Raquel Jaramillo—R. J. Palacio to her readers—wrote a “little, quiet book” that launched a Choose Kind movement.
RAQUEL JARAMILLO P’18 is a writer, illustrator, and graphic designer who writes under the pen name R. J. Palacio. Her parents emigrated from Colombia to New York City, and Jaramillo was born in 1963 in Queens, where her parents raised her in a home surrounded by books.
Her mother, formerly part of a literary circle in Baranquilla, Colombia, loved Latin American literature, but was particularly passionate about Oscar Wilde and William Faulkner, and the bedtime stories she read to Jaramillo were the short stories of Oscar Wilde and de SaintExupéry’s The Little Prince. Her father preferred historical tomes: Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, and Will and Ariel Durant’s eleven-volume Story of Civilization. The whole family loved the epics so popular in the 1970s—Clavell’s Shogun, Michener’s Centennial, and the like. Growing up in that environment, Jaramillo was destined to be a reader, and her mother always told her she would be a writer.
Jaramillo went to elementary school in Flushing, at P.S. 22, and graduated from the Manhattan High School of Art and Design in 1981. She earned her BFA in illustration at the Parsons School of Design in 1985 and spent her junior year studying at the American University of Paris in France. “I’d always sort of toggled back and forth when I was in my late teens and early twenties with ‘Do I want to make a living as a writer, or do I want to make a living as an artist?’” she said. “Ultimately, I chose to make a living as a graphic designer because I’m totally fine illustrating someone else’s stories, but I didn’t want to ever have to be told what to write.”
After graduating from Parsons, Jaramillo began her career as a freelance illustrator, publishing her artwork in The New York Times Book Review and The Village Voice. She then took a job as an art assistant at Scribner’s, which marked the beginning of a twenty-five-year career in publishing. She left Scribner’s for Henry Holt, where in her seventeen years as creative director she was responsible for an estimated one thousand books, including the works of Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie, Louise Erdrich, Hilary Mantel, and many others, before moving to the other side of the table to become editorial director and creative director of children’s publishing at Workman Publishing. Along the way, she illustrated classics like Peter Pan and The Night Before Christmas and created board books like Dream, Baby, Dream.
While the world wouldn’t know Jaramillo as a writer until her debut middle-grade novel, Wonder, was published (as R. J. Palacio—Palacio being her mother’s maiden name) when she was forty-eight, she always wrote for herself. When she was eight and in the third grade, her school newspaper published her poem “The Winged Steed.” “I actually have been writing my whole adult life—bits and pieces of novels, lots of stories, and mostly ideas for books, screenplays,” said Palacio. “But I never carved out the time I needed to have to follow through on these ideas. I’m so glad that I had all those years to quietly hone the craft.”
The idea for Wonder, the story of ten-year-old Auggie Pullman, a boy with a severe facial difference who attends school with other children for the first time as a fifth grader after being homeschooled by his mom, came to Jaramillo after an incident with her own children. “I was in front of an ice cream store with my two sons, and my younger son, who was only three at the time, saw a little girl that had a very significant craniofacial difference. He got a little scared and he started to cry.” Jaramillo whisked her boys away quickly so as not to upset the girl and her mother, but she could not stop thinking about what the girl’s experience with the world must be and what Jaramillo might have done differently—and compassionately—as a parent. She decided to write.
Jaramillo’s only time to do that was in the middle of the night, when her family was asleep. She began to write from midnight until three in the morning and, after a year and a half, she had completed a draft of the novel that would change her life. Wonder not only became an instant bestseller, it also spawned an international Choose Kind movement, with school programs, community reads, and other events that nurture respect, compassion, and civility.
“I really had just set out to write a little book—a quiet, simple book,” said Jaramillo. “There are no vampires or wizards. It’s really just a book about kindness: the impact of kindness, the choice to be kind.”
Made into a movie starring Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson in 2017, Wonder has been translated into fifty-five languages and has spent more than nine years on The New York Times bestseller list, with 199 weeks in the number-one spot. Wonder and its companion books, Auggie and Me, We’re All Wonders, 365 Days of Wonder, and White Bird, have together sold more than 13 million copies. White Bird, which features the character Julian from Wonder, is set during World War II, and is about Julian’s grandmother—then a young Jewish girl hidden by a classmate and his parents in Nazi-occupied France. A film version starring Gillian Anderson and Helen Mirren is set to be released this fall.
Jaramillo describes the reaction to Wonder as “well beyond my wildest dreams—and anyone who knows me knows of my capacity to dream big,” but says that it’s the reaction of readers that moves her most. It’s “the librarians who have taken Auggie Pullman into their hearts and want to share his story with their students… the teachers who share their stories about the intensity of their classroom discussions after their daily Wonder read-aloud…but most of all, it’s the kids who have said or written to me,
tweeted, or even blogged that reading Wonder made them want to be kinder people. Kids wanting to be kinder people?” she said. “Can it get better than that?”
Jaramillo believes in the importance of tackling difficult topics in children’s literature. “Children understand and perceive everything,” Jaramillo has said. She wants to use her books as a way to spark reflection and conversation about serious topics and about things happening in the world, whether directly to children or to children and adults they see in the news. “In my mind, the willful ignorance of others is the one thing writers and artists can actually address. Writers and artists can make looking away from hard truths impossible.”
Her latest novel, Pony (2021), is her first book with characters set outside of the Wonder universe, and Jaramillo describes it as a “big departure.” Set in America of the mid-1800s, Pony is the story of Silas, a twelve-year-old boy on a journey to rescue his father, with a ghost as his companion and a mysterious pony as his guide. The action is gripping, even scary at times, and the book tackles the very big subjects of love and grief. “As a parent,” Jaramillo said in an interview, “I take my job as an author for children really seriously because I know that they can’t read everything their kids read and they don’t want their kids to be traumatized. But challenged is a different thing. A little bit of pushing them to think in terms of the universe and mysteries and accepting big, life things— that’s okay.”
More than a thousand classrooms are “certified kind” through the Certified Kind Classroom Challenge, and Jaramillo has visited dozens and dozens of them, giving talks and meeting with students and teachers. “I am so impressed by the kids I meet in schools. I’m blown away by their beautiful desire to do good,” Jaramillo said. “I know that I’m only seeing one side of them during these school visits, which are usually arranged after the kids have read Wonder, so they’re perhaps more primed to act a certain way.” But, she says, “I’ve always thought that most kids are truly noble to their core and that, when given a chance—and a push—nobility can manifest itself in the most surprising times and ways.”
LAURIE GAGNON LACHANCE
A leading economist for decades, Laurie Lachance caps a career serving the home state she loves with a Maine college presidency.
LAURIE GAGNON LACHANCE ’83, P’13 grew up in rural Maine in the town of Dover-Foxcroft, which has a population of about 4,000 people and is bisected by the Piscataquis River.
Dover-Foxcroft might seem like an unlikely starting point to produce a future state economist, the first woman to hold that position, but maybe there was something in the water. Just over one hundred years before Lachance graduated from high school, a local named Mary Mitchell Birchall (1840–1898) left Dover to become the first woman to earn a bachelor’s degree in New England, graduating from Bates in 1869.
Lachance too has gone on to make history, becoming the first woman to hold not only the position of state economist but other positions of power in Maine, from head of the Maine Development Foundation to president of Thomas College, a role she still holds today. She has never forgotten her rural roots and has spent the latter half of her career championing first-generation Maine college students like her.
Lachance was the youngest of the three daughters of George and Mattie Gagnon. Her father was a grocery store manager, and her mother a registered nurse. While neither of her parents went to college themselves, they wanted a different future for their daughters. Lachance remembers her mother managing the family’s budget by distributing cash from her father’s paycheck into nine labeled boxes to pay bills. One box was for her daughters’ college fund. “There were times growing up that she’d only put in a quarter or whatever they had, but money went into that little box every time a paycheck came in. Then she’d deposit it in the bank for us. We didn’t have much saved, but it
was very intentional, and it was an expectation. All of us went to college.”
She describes her father as “hard-driving,” insisting that his daughters have goals. He was sick for a time when she was a child and had to miss work. In an interview, she described what stood out to her from that time: “It put the family in financial peril. If my mother had not been working, our story might have been different. As a young woman, I always felt that I needed to make sure I could contribute to my future family, always felt that drive for safety for the family I hoped someday to have, and to be a true partner in the financial part of that.” Lachance channeled her drive into academics, athletics, and extracurriculars in high school, serving as class president, playing three sports, and being inducted into the National Honor Society. Yet, like many first-generation college students, she didn’t know what to expect from college.
“When I think back to how I ended up at the college I did, it seems like a miracle to me,” Lachance said, describing visiting her thenboyfriend’s family in Brunswick during her senior year of high school. “I had a chance to walk around Bowdoin. I thought it was a pretty place, so I applied there and was accepted, having absolutely no concept of what this was all about or what it would offer to my future.”
Lachance remembers the culture shock she experienced when she arrived at Bowdoin in 1979, feeling out of place and somehow not good enough to be there. But she knew she wanted to make the most out of her experience as she “quickly realized the power of higher education.” She got involved in campus activities, playing women’s basketball for three years and joining and later directing the swing band. Along the way she decided to become an economics major, a subject she hadn’t heard of before Bowdoin: “I just fell in love with economics, which seemed to apply to everything.” She remembers her time at Bowdoin fondly and with pride, but she also carries with her a memory of that feeling that she didn’t belong, and it fuels her current passion for helping students succeed at Thomas, where nearly two-thirds of students are the first in their families to attend college.
After graduating from Bowdoin in 1983, Lachance took a job as an economist for Central Maine Power (CMP). She enrolled in graduate school at Thomas to pursue an MBA while working full-time. At CMP, Lachance met her husband, David Lachance, and the couple married in 1989 and later had two children. She finished her MBA in 1992 and, just a year later, was tapped to be the Maine state economist.
In that role, Lachance had the distinction of working for three governors from three different political parties over her eleven years— Republican John McKernan, Independent Angus King, and Democrat John Baldacci. During her work, Lachance became interested in policy and its impact on the people of Maine. Known for restoring trust in economic forecasting, she also focused on human capital and advocated for the potential of innovation that resides within each individual as an added value to the economy.
This heightened focus on the people of Maine served her well when she became president and CEO of the Maine Development Foundation (MDF), where she worked from 2004 to 2012. Again the first woman to hold the job, Lachance saw it more as an opportunity to expand the belief that had grown inside her since her time at Bowdoin that higher education can unlock human potential. Throughout her career, Lachance had always given back to Maine, winning awards for her community service and serving on boards. During her time at MDF, Lachance joined two boards in the University of Maine system and another at Thomas College.
Her name came up as a reference check during the search for a new president at Thomas, and the search committee asked her to consider applying. She was surprised—“There is nothing in my résumé that says, ‘That woman should be a college president,’” she has said—but very interested. In 2012, she became the college’s first alumna and, for the third time in her career, the first woman to be selected for the post. At the helm of Thomas, Lachance successfully completed a $12 million capital campaign a year ahead of schedule. “When it comes to positively influencing students and inspiring our faculty and staff, I believe in a down-to-earth, welcoming approach. I treat every person I meet with dignity, respect, and optimism.”
Lachance’s optimism is a trait that those who know and work with her recognize. In her nomination letter for the Maine Women’s Hall of Fame in 2014, former governor of Maine and current US Senator Angus King H’07 wrote, “To each opportunity she brings the same abundant enthusiasm and unflagging optimism.” Cheryl Miller of MDF added, “For those who know her, she is consistently one who inspires, empowers, and affirms all those she touches.”
Reflecting on her career, Lachance acknowledges that her journey may not have been straight or predictable, and she remains humble in the face of so many accolades and milestones. “It’s been a wonderful path,” she says, “but it wasn’t anything like my father tried to teach me, which was to set a goal and go for it.” Lachance did not set out to overcome barriers, but through her sense of purpose, hard work, and trademark optimism, she forged new paths, allowing other women to follow in her footsteps and inspiring all those around her in the process.
When Lachance has time to take a deep breath, it is usually at her family camp on Sebec Lake in her hometown. “I can find a path through anything as long as I have that chance to nurture my soul,” she says. “That’s where I read all my books and dream the dreams for the college and work everything out on the dirt roads.”
JANET LANGHART-COHEN
Janet Langhart-Cohen made history as a broadcast journalist, but she calls her time as “First Lady of the Pentagon” the most transformative of her life.
JANET LANGHART-COHEN was born on December 22, 1941—at a tumultuous moment in a nation that had just declared war, in a time when being Black in America meant having rights and opportunities that were restricted—and her life has been shaped and changed by politics, race, and social activism. She was raised by her single mother, a domestic worker. “I learned of racism as early as seven years old. My parents had to tell me about it because my life depended on it,” Langhart-Cohen said.
Despite these challenges, Langhart-Cohen became first a successful fashion model and then an award-winning television journalist, anchor, commentator, author, and playwright. She is known for her interviewing skills, which she has used with celebrities and politicians ranging from Louis Armstrong and Marian Anderson to George Wallace and David Duke to presidents, foreign leaders, and actors. Throughout her celebrated career, she broke barriers both as a woman and as a person of color.
Growing up in Indianapolis, Langhart-Cohen lived on-site where her mother worked, in different boarding houses, and ultimately in a segregated housing project. She attended Crispus Attucks High School, named for the Black and Indigenous man considered by historians to be the first person to die in the Revolutionary War when he was killed at the Boston Massacre. Crispus Attucks High was the only public high school in Indianapolis designated specifically for Black students when it opened in 1927. Despite the passage of state and federal desegregation laws, the school remained functionally all-Black because of residential segregation, and it was that way when Langhart-Cohen was a student there, playing flute in the band and competing with the debate team.
“At Crispus Attucks, I learned pride from some of the most dedicated, best-educated people I have ever known. These were professional academics who were qualified to teach at the college level but were barred from doing so by the unwritten race rules that governed,” she said. When she graduated in 1959, she matriculated at Butler University on a scholarship.
When her scholarship money expired, she left Butler to pursue a “dream” she said she had repressed when she entered college. She enrolled at an agency and school run by Black model Cordie King, and in 1962 she auditioned for and won a spot with the Ebony Fashion Fair, which helped raise funds for Black charitable causes around the country. Modeling the clothes of designers like Oscar de la Renta and Bill Blass on the runway, recognized by people who had seen her photographs in magazines, and meeting people like Joe Louis and Marilyn McCoo along the way was both exciting and, as Langhart-Cohen writes, “hard work.”
After a sixty-two-city tour with Ebony, she moved to Chicago, where Cordie King had arranged for her to stay with the famous gospel singer Mahalia Jackson when she arrived in the city. At Jackson’s home, she was introduced to people like Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and Martin Luther King Jr. “[It seemed that] every prominent Black person in the country either lived in Chicago of visited frequently,” said Langhart-Cohen. “It was an amazing place for a wide-eyed, ambitious twenty-four-year-old.”
She had steady work, appearing in advertisements and on runways, and she became the first Black woman to be featured as a bride in Marshall Field’s bridal fashion show. In 1966, she was crowned Miss Chicagoland.
She was hired as a weather girl first at WCIU in Chicago and then at WBBM, and at the same time hosted an early morning interview program in Indianapolis called “Indy Today,” which meant going back and forth between cities every week by Greyhound bus. “I know all the drivers on the run,” she said at the time. “They call me the Queen of Interstate 65.” A few years later, she became a morning talk show host for Boston’s “Good Day!” which was syndicated across the US. She was the first Black woman to host a nationally syndicated show, and Langhart-Cohen went on to work on shows for all the major TV networks, including ABC, BET, CBS, and NBC, and, over the course of a twenty-five-year career in broadcast journalism, interviewed many of the most influential newsmakers in the world.
She met William Cohen ’62, H’75 when she did a long-distance interview with him when he was a member of the House. The two became friends after they met in person at a later interview, and they married in 1996, just before Cohen, a Republican, was appointed by President Bill Clinton as secretary of defense. She became known as the “First Lady of the Pentagon,” and those four years shaped her philanthropic and community service and her view of America. “The military, with all its diversity, its mission, and its unique culture enabled me to reach past my rage and to embrace my country,” she has said. “During the years at the Pentagon, I journeyed all over the world and discovered the soul of America—the courage, strength, hope, and integrity of its people.”
She and Cohen cowrote a memoir about romance, race, and religion in 2007 called Love in Black and White, followed by a book they edited together, Race and Reconciliation in America.
Langhart-Cohen has also written a lauded one-act play, Anne and Emmett, in which she imagines a conversation between Anne Frank and Emmett Till, teens who were both murdered as the victims of discrimination and hatred. Langhart-Cohen’s play, which premiered in 2009 and has been produced at schools and theaters around the country, is an
extension of her life’s work to raise awareness around issues of race and reconciliation and to spur thoughtful conversation that can lead to a new national dialogue about race and equality in America.
Langhart-Cohen describes a combination of anger and hope about race relations in the United States. In her 2004 memoir, From Rage to Reason, she writes, “I have known a country of profound prejudice, but one of equal promise. While I continue to burn whenever I see evidence of bigotry and injustice, I also know that America is the only country that is willing to expose and openly confront its failures and seek to overcome them.”
The title of the book comes from something one of her mentors, Boston community activist Melnea Cass, said to her when Langhart-Cohen was criticized for speaking out about the school busing crisis in Boston in 1974, when Boston public schools were ordered to desegregate. Cass said to her, “You have to move from rage to reason.”
Langhart-Cohen credits various mentors for helping her throughout her career, providing both counsel and opportunity. She recounts arriving at the Chicago Freedom Movement Rally excited at the chance to meet Sidney Poitier and accidentally spilling soda on Martin Luther King Jr. instead. “Little did I know that Dr. King would become one of the key mentors of my life. It seemed that destiny was conspiring to have me learn at his feet.” She spent time with him throughout the last two years of his life and learned from him “that outrage is not the same as rage, and that strategy is important in getting what you want in life.”
More than fifty years later, Langhart-Cohen’s optimism and hope for a better, more just world remain strong. She reflected on her own mentorship as well as what she has been able to achieve in her lifetime: “Dr. King predicted that one day I would claim my throne. His prophecy has proved true. I have claimed a throne—not as a queen or a princess, but as a patriot. Each day there is a new barrier broken, a new beginning made, and the frontiers of the human heart expanded. I truly believe that the two Americas that I have known will soon become one.”
JOAN BENOIT SAMUELSON
Joan Benoit Samuelson is the rare athlete who can dominate her sport, exemplify toughness, and be fiercely competitive—all while being “unharmed by victory.”
MAINE’S COASTLINE runs for about 228 miles, and when you include all the nooks and crannies of the iconic rocky shore, the mileage swells to 3,748. Whichever measurement you choose, neither comes close to the estimated 150,000 miles (and counting) that Joan Benoit Samuelson ’79, P’12 has run in her lifetime.
To put such a number into perspective, if you laced up your sneakers in Samuelson’s hometown of Cape Elizabeth, jogged the 240 miles east to catch the first sunrise in the nation in Lubec, ran northwest for 260 miles to reach Maine’s northernmost village of Estcourt Station, circumnavigated the globe six times, and then ran three marathons, you’d almost reach Samuelson’s lifetime running mileage. Somewhere in the middle of that you would have worn out your running shoes about 300 times. All those miles led to medals, shattered records, and honors over her astounding career, from standout high school and collegiate athlete to Olympian, from elite world-class runner paving the way for the future of women’s athletics to serving as inspiration for generations of runners. “Runners talk about Joan with a different tone of voice,” said a fellow racer. “She represents the ultimate athlete—someone who has been able to push herself to the limit.” Samuelson began running in high school, but her first love was skiing. “I had aspirations of making it to the Olympics or into a world championship as a ski racer. My dad [André Benoit ’43] brought us up on skis, my brothers and me, about the same time that we were learning how to walk. He had a real passion for skiing and had served in the 10th Mountain Division during the war. And he wanted his
kids learning how to ski as early as possible. That was one of the few sports that I could do as a young girl.”
In tenth grade, Samuelson broke her leg skiing on Pleasant Mountain. During her rehabilitation, her doctor recommended running to strengthen her leg muscles. The perseverance and stamina she harnessed at sixteen would become hallmarks of her career. It helped that she happened to find running “easy and fun.”
She soon became the only female runner on the Cape Elizabeth High School team. At the time, girls’ track teams weren’t given varsity status, and girls weren’t allowed to run for more than a mile. Samuelson was known to skip study hall in favor of running a four-and-a-half-mile loop around her school, and several boys recruited her for a race when another school arrived with female competitors.
Samuelson won her first road race, the Great Pumpkin Classic in Sacopee Valley, in 1973 at the age of sixteen, a year after Title IX had been signed into law, granting equal access to girls and women in athletics. “Oftentimes, I think of myself as having been in the right place at the right time for many of my accomplishments,” Samuelson said when describing the doors that opened to her in high school after Title IX, a legislation that she describes as “transformative” and which she credits for her career as a runner and the opportunity to be an Olympian.
Samuelson matriculated at Bowdoin in the fall of 1975. There was no women’s track team at Bowdoin either at that time, so she spent a year at North Carolina State to focus on training. Samuelson, who has said, “I’ve never left Maine without wishing I didn’t have to,” came back to Brunswick to earn her diploma at Bowdoin.
In April 1979, still a student, she entered the Boston Marathon. She had run just one other marathon, which she happened to do in Bermuda in a fast enough time to qualify for Boston—and she was not only a relative unknown, she had never even seen the course. She had to park far away and run two miles just to get to Hopkinton, and she just made it in time for the start.
But, wearing a Bowdoin singlet—and endearing herself to Bostonians by adding a Red Sox cap for the last few miles—she won, beating the previous record by eight minutes. When she returned to campus, she received a standing ovation from her classmates in the dining hall. She remembers being moved by the applause and also surprised—running was something she did to challenge herself, not something she talked about or thought anyone much cared about.
Samuelson is no stranger to adversity. An emergency appendectomy kept her from running the Boston Marathon in 1980. In 1981, she had Achilles surgery that kept her from running for ten weeks, and she was diagnosed with asthma in 1991. But her most famous comeback was in 1984, just seventeen days after knee surgery, when she won the Olympic trials. Her coach, Bob Sevene, said at the time, “Her willpower is unreal. She’s the greatest athlete I’ve ever been around. The toughest I know. Her wheels will have to literally fall off to stop her now.”
She would go on to win the gold medal in the inaugural Olympic women’s marathon with a gutsy, risky performance. The executive director of the Women’s Sport Foundation said of her win, “She never slowed, she never faltered. She ran with a determination that from beginning to end never wavered. It closed the book on whether women were made of the right stuff in distance running.”
In 1984, she held the American record for four events: ten miles, the half marathon, the 10K, and the 25K. That was also the year she married Scott Samuelson ’80, whom she had met at Bowdoin her sophomore year. The Samuelsons live in Freeport, where they raised two children—a daughter, Abby, and a son, Anders (Class of 2012). “I think about the lack of opportunity I had before Title IX, and then the opportunities that I had, and then I look at the even greater slate of opportunities our daughter had, and I hope it’s even a bigger canvas for our granddaughter, whether it’s running, the arts, the sciences—whatever field it is that she wishes to pursue.”
She ran the Boston Marathon in 2014 with both her children, and, in 2019, she and Abby ran Boston together. Samuelson finished first in her age group, achieving a personal goal of finishing within forty minutes of her world record forty years after her first win; she wore another Bowdoin singlet for the occasion.
While perhaps best known for her own running feats, Samuelson has also worked to make running available for others. She founded the Beach to Beacon 10K road race in her hometown in 1997. When describing the race from the sidelines, Samuelson said, “I love watching the elites come in. But I also love watching the people in the very back come in, because they’re the ones that surprise themselves and find great pleasure in doing something that they never really thought they would do.”
This speaks to Samuelson’s passion: keeping pace, breaking her own records, and inspiring people around her in the process. She has spent her life giving back, sharing her passion, giving motivational speeches, and serving on boards ranging from the Friends of Casco Bay and the Freeport Recreation Committee to the board of trustees at Bowdoin. With all her honors and accolades, Samuelson remains, as one journalist put it, “unharmed by victory.” When she received the Bowdoin Prize, the College’s highest honor, in 1985, she said, “We all face challenges. We are all called upon to have courage. Those of us who survive and prosper from both success and defeat are the lucky ones, and I am very happy if my running proves to anyone else that whatever needs to be done can be done. But it makes me extremely uncomfortable to be given credit for the fact that someone else has found strength. No matter how you find it, it belongs to you.”
GROWING
BY DAN COVELL ’86
From coach’s son to undersized lineman to professor of sport management, author Dan Covell ’86 has been steeped in the New England Small College Athletic Conference. As he publishes his new book, The New England Small College Athletic Conference: A History, on the heels of the conference’s fiftieth anniversary, Dan reflects on his education in “the sweatiest of the liberal arts.”
NESCAC
WWHEN SOMEONE LEARNS that I’ve just completed the manuscript for my book on the history of the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC), I’m often asked, “How long were you working on it?” “Since August of 1969,” I reply, only slightly in jest. I don’t remember the precise date, but the image of the moment when I began is clear. After a decade of success as a high school baseball and football coach at Orono [Maine] High School, my dad, Wally Covell, moved the family to Waterville to take a position as assistant football and baseball coach at Colby. (Yes, back then NESCAC coaches coached multiple sports, as well as taught physical education classes. Many Bowdoin alumni will recall that Phil Soule probably coached every sport offered at one time or another.) In 1969, at age six, I arrived in the middle of Colby preseason football double sessions at the front of Colby’s then-brand-new state-of-the-art field house. Sitting on one of the benches attached to the Brutalist concrete slab near the front entrance, gathering himself after a sweaty day in the trenches, was six-feet-six, 235-pound offensive tackle Luthene “Luke” Kimball, from Cape Cod. Luke was big by late ’60s standards, and gigantic to me. I’m told I’d been going to my dad’s practices and games since birth, but I have no clear recollections of any such moments until this one, when Luke said “Hi.” I’m not sure what I said in return, probably nothing, as I was in awe. By all accounts, Luke, who died too young from pancreatic cancer in 2004, was a great teammate and a better guy, and uniquely gifted to serve as an effective bouncer at his fraternity parties. I had encountered my first NESCAC giant. That moment began my more than half century (and counting) association with NESCAC athletics. Prior to my matriculation at Bowdoin in the fall of 1982, I had spent a great many hours at practices and games, traveling across New England, to New York, and to Florida—my first flight was with my dad and the Colby baseball team on its southern spring break trip in 1973—and sitting in on coaches’ meetings and recruiting visits. I kept the scorebook for Colby baseball when my dad became head coach—the coldest I’ve ever been in my life was during a doubleheader at Trinity on a frosty, blustery, early-April day in the mid-1970s, my own personal “Ice Bowl,” when I couldn’t move my frozen fingers to finish scoring—and called the game stories in to the local newspapers (occasionally having to make up opposing players’ first names if they weren’t on the lineup card). So many of my father’s players spent time at our house laughing, eating, and telling stories. Wins were celebrated, losses were mourned. Assistant coaches lived in our finished basement, while another lived across the street. In short, there was no distinction between the goings-on associated with NESCAC athletics and our family—to wit, my two sisters are both married to former NESCAC athletes.
From this context, I was able to view players, coaches, and administrators not only as role models, but also as subjects of interest as they carried out the functions associated with their jobs—and these were jobs, not just educatory avocations. These stakeholders wanted to win, and NESCAC dicta such as the team sport ban on NCAA postseason play, as discussed in the book, was a seminal issue in the evolution of the conference. The ban was widely if not universally reviled as unfair and restrictive, as individual sport athletes like swimmers and cross-country runners were able to compete in NCAA championships, but team sports were barred.
My time at Bowdoin allowed me the chance to experience NESCAC from the participants’ perspective. While I played football at Bowdoin, I didn’t come to Bowdoin to play football. I was hardly recruited after a prep school postgrad year, and I’d be shocked to learn that my name was on any coach’s list provided to admissions. Football at Bowdoin was fun and fairly serious— the team won the Colby, Bates, Bowdoin Championship (CBB) in ’84 and ’85—but it was by no means the defining aspect of my undergraduate experience. Preseason lasted three days, as opposed to the two weeks of double sessions I had in high school. If you wanted to work out in the off-season, that was your call. I do remember practicing long-snapping on Whitter Field the summer I worked on the campus grounds crew, with my then-girlfriend
Left: Ten-year-old Dan Covell ’86 (lower left with back to the camera) on the Colby sidelines at Whittier Field in 1973, watching his future brother-in-law Don Joseph receive treatment from medical staff. Bowdoin won the game 28-20.
Right: Covell (left) with friend Grant Booth ’86 in front of the old Longfellow School during their senior year at Bowdoin.
Opening spread: Bowdoin football players loom large on the Whittier Field sideline (undated photo).
fielding the snaps. That must have been quite an image to passersby on Pine Street. I was a studio art major, but I spent much of my time and energy associated with WBOR, serving as music director for my last three years (interrupted by a wonderful term abroad in London the spring of my junior year), and my enduring friends from that time are invariably those with whom I worked at ’BOR. I failed second semester Greek my freshman year, as that’s what happens when you skip class for three straight weeks. Professor John Ambrose did me a great favor in giving me the grade I deserved. I did letter in football junior and senior years, and unsurprisingly, won no academic awards. Bowdoin allowed me to fail and to succeed based on what I put into the experience. That was an important lesson and one that I impart to my current students every day. By the way, on the first day of each class I ask my students what position they think I played in college. Most probably think kicker, but they usually say “running back” or “safety.” They are genuinely surprised when I respond with “center,” as my current six-foot, 195-pound frame belies the fact that I played at only twenty-five pounds heavier, which was fairly average for linemen back then. All of this was, I think, a typical NESCAC experience.
My career in teaching began thanks in part to art professor Kevin Donahue, who allowed me to serve as an informal student teacher in his spring term introduction to painting class. I was looking at prep school teaching and coaching jobs (after all, education was the family business; my mom, Janet, was a lifelong early-childhood educator and helped launch one of the first-ever Head Start programs in Maine), but I didn’t have any formal teaching experience, so I asked Kevin if I could work with him to gain some. After graduation, I secured a job teaching, coaching, and living in a dorm at a private school in Minnesota, and I headed west for four years. I became head football coach for one year—and went winless. (I don’t blame the players.) After I married Pam Safford in 1988 (in a Bowdoin Chapel service, with a reception in Cram Alumni House), we moved back to New England in 1990, and I became athletic director at a public high school in Vermont. In 1994, I entered grad school at the University of Massachusetts with the intent of becoming a college athletic director (AD) like my NESCAC mentors.
It was during my time in grad school when I opted to move toward the teaching side of higher ed. More specifically, it was during my internship in the athletic department at Harvard (where my supervisor was future Colby AD Marcella Zalot—NESCAC mentors, again) when, in addition to other responsibilities such as running special events and NCAA rules compliance, I was named the interim aquatics director, a position for which I was only nominally qualified. The main part of the aquatics job was being present in the office and at the pool to supervise the students who were lifeguards and taught swimming lessons. As any facility manager knows, many bad things can happen in pools, and these roles students were filling
Right: Dan’s father, Wally Covell, coaching from the Colby sideline during a Bowdoin-Colby football game at Whittier Field.
Below: The athletics department staff as pictured in the 1985 Bowdoin Bugle. First row: Mort LaPointe, Sid Watson (director), Ed Reid, Phil Soule. Second row: Harvey Shapiro, Lynn Ruddy, Sally LaPointe, David LaPann. Third row: Howie Vandersea, John Cullen, Terry Meagher, Jim Lentz, and Charlie Butt.
(and filling well) were serious endeavors geared toward avoiding those bad things. Connecting with these talented students reminded me of my interest in aiding other future sport managers, so I returned to UMass the next fall to begin work on a doctorate in sports management.
Two years prior to my return to UMass, Sports Illustrated had published an article titled “Pure and Simple,” by staff writer Douglas Looney. The magazine had just celebrated its fortieth anniversary, and while it had ceded some ground to the likes of burgeoning media giant ESPN, according to a later historian, SI was still the “authoritative surveyor of the American sporting scene to its many readers.” Given the magazine’s status and its dedication to covering sporting events and personalities of both national and international import, the overwhelmingly positive article was a tremendous boon for the cultivation of the ideal image of NESCAC. The piece—complete with over a dozen full-color photos of NESCAC fall sports action—served as a landmark homage and touchstone for NESCAC stakeholders around the world.
Reading Looney’s article, the tone and content of which couldn’t have been more laudatory if drafted by a think-tank of NESCAC publicists, one might take the author for an intercollegiate athletics naif. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Looney, who had been writing for SI since the early 1980s, was an experienced investigative reporter. Perhaps Looney was smitten with the imagery encountered in researching the NESCAC story, given what he’d seen and experienced covering the big time. After all, in the wake of a critical piece he’d written on University of Colorado head football coach Chuck Fairbanks, Looney commented that he got a lot of negative letters, but that “most of them are in crayon because they don’t give these people sharp things.”
Looney rhapsodized about the idealized campus settings in which NESCAC athletics reside. “The Amherst College campus is too collegiate,” he writes, “the ambience too New England, the whole picture too Norman Rockwell. The grass is cut, and the flower beds are weeded. There is no trash. The sky is true blue.” He cites the experiences of a Middlebury football player who “spent many a fall afternoon looking out
over Vermont’s Green Mountains, resplendent in the fall red produced by sugar maples, and pondering the Middlebury experience.”
While Looney concedes that “of course, NESCAC schools aren’t very good in most sports,” he identifies this perceived shortcoming as an attribute. “But they are not very good only if you measure the Colby football team, for example, against Miami’s; the Bates basketball team against Arkansas’s. And such comparisons miss the point… Insofar as sports are concerned, things are perfect, or pretty close to it.” That vein allowed Amherst (and former Trinity) president Tom Gerety to contextualize NESCAC in lofty philosophical terms: “Sports fulfill the natural drive to test oneself against others. It’s our greatest ritual, short of war. I don’t have much trouble justifying them, but that’s only in this kind of setting. It seems everywhere else, sports are a distorting force.” Gerety then sought to bring athletics into the liberal arts rubric when he commented: “Be it poetry, acting, philosophy or athletics, any youngster has more to give than what is called for in a traditional class … [Athletics is] the sweatiest of the liberal arts.”
Looney’s piece signaled to me that NESCAC now felt like something different from what I knew. The challenge NESCAC managers faced and continue to face is how to keep things pure while they have become decidedly less simple. It now seemed like a national intercollegiate athletics brand, and I wanted to learn what that meant. For my dissertation, I sought to investigate the meaning of athletics to three important institutional stakeholder groups: faculty, student-athletes, and presidents. I sent a then-high-tech email message to Bowdoin AD Sid Watson, who was chair of the NESCAC ADs committee, to ask if he had any interest in my study and if he would like to help in the collection of data. I had never met Sid during my time at Bowdoin, but I figured he knew my dad from his Colby years and that he might be willing to help out an alum. Sid agreed, and I was able to gather extensive survey information that became the core of my dissertation research. For that I am forever grateful, and in the dedication of the book, I make specific mention of this NESCAC giant’s assistance.
Dissertation completed and doctorate in hand, I started teaching in the Department of Sport Management in the School of Business at Western New England College (now University) in Springfield, Massachusetts. Several years ago, when consultants instructed the school to pursue university status because “most people think colleges are not as academically rigorous as universities,” I responded, with an arched brow: “Really? What about Bowdoin? What about Amherst? What about Williams?”
Along with helping students gain entry to their careers in sport, my research revolved around the issues I had encountered as a high school AD and as a ward of the NESCAC. When I received a sabbatical in 2010, I decided I wanted to dive into the archives in HawthorneLongfellow Library and see what I could find concerning the history of Bowdoin athletics and its place in the NESCAC. Pam and I had purchased a house on Coombs Road in Brunswick (the first house we viewed turned out to be the Watson family house on Longfellow Avenue), and I could decamp there for the fall and into the reading room in Special Collections. My time at UMass had shown me the dedication and creative problem solving of reference librarians and archivists. They were the angels on the shoulders of we grad students, and the same was true at H-L, especially Caroline Moseley and Kathy Peterson. I was not a historian by trade or training, so sifting through the letters, memos, reports, and studies of Bowdoin luminaries such as Mal Morrell, Roger Howell, and Casey Sills with their guidance was both illuminating and instructive. These documents were the portal through which I first learned and developed many of the lines of inquiry outlined throughout the book. By the end of the first week of the sabbatical, I’d already spent more time in H-L than I had during my entire undergraduate tenure.
After penning a few academic journal articles on the topic of Bowdoin and NESCAC, I felt it was time to compose a full-length book study. One of the salient issues I found was when Union College was kicked out (or left, depending with whom one speaks) over recruiting violations by its head men’s ice hockey coach. On this topic and several others, I turned to another giant, the world’s foremost hockey historian, Steve Hardy ’70, former ice hockey cocaptain with his twin brother, Erl ’70. Steve, who also coached at Amherst and worked for the ECAC (Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference), brings the book to life with firstperson observations about how Union built its hockey program and would eventually run afoul of conference rules. Other NESCAC figures added their invaluable insights, such as former Amherst AD and men’s soccer coach Peter Gooding, former Williams men’s basketball coach and AD Harry Sheehy, former Middlebury president Ron Liebowitz, former Hamilton president Eugene Tobin, and former Williams president John Chandler. But Steve Hardy was the keystone, and he wrote the foreword for the book, in which he recounts his son Ben’s time as a men’s soccer player at Middlebury.
It is often said that if we see further, it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Writing this book made this abundantly clear to me. Because of giants like Kimball, Watson, Hardy, and so many others, I am forever grateful that I was able to grow up NESCAC.
Dan Covell ’86 is a professor of sport management at Western New England University. His book, The New England Small College Athletic Conference: A History, is due out this spring.
Amid the COVID doldrums and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Preston Anderson ’22 skippered an ambitious national initiative— The Inclusivity, Diversity, and Equity (TIDE) task force—that is changing collegiate sailing.
Sea Change
Can you explain how TIDE came to be and the work it’s doing?
TIDE is a national task force within the ICSA (Intercollegiate Sailing Association). [Bowdoin assistant coach Cori Radtke is its chair.] One of the first projects we worked on was a framework to guide teams in discussions about race and inclusivity, really any DEI issue within our own teams. We put together a program that focused on team culture and launched it in New England, then took feedback to develop a three-part education series at the national level. The first part focused on setting groundwork, on team culture, on ways we can have discussions as a community to foster an inclusive environment within college sailing. The second part was more specific, holding discussions on things like microaggressions and derogatory language. The third part was about how to recruit diverse team members and on community outreach and retention. The national TIDE group designed the template, and then individual conferences have their own TIDE committees to focus on what’s needed for their teams and their conferences.
What made you decide to be the one to effect change?
Starting out, we didn’t know what this was going to turn into. When George Floyd was murdered, we were having a lot of conversations on campus—the Bowdoin Athletes of Color Coalition (AoCC), Black Student Union, Black Men’s Forum—about how to make changes and how to support each other. The AoCC wanted to start working with NESCAC on DEI issues, and that got me thinking about ways to bring our sailing teams together around this because our conference consists of so many different kinds of teams—Ivy League teams, club teams, varsity teams. I had conversations with my friends and my coaches [head coach Frank Pizzo ’06 and coach Radtke]. We were like, “Okay, we want to make change. We all want to work together.” Frank is involved with NEISA (New England Intercollegiate Sailing Association) and Cori is involved with the ICSA, and we were able to network with other coaches and sailors. I just started organizing meetings, started sharing my thoughts—I feel like my experiences in junior and high school sailing gave me a unique perspective.
I’ve always wanted to find ways to create change in our sport. My grandparents, Charles and Marian Oldham, were huge civil rights activists, and they inspired me. If there are opportunities to create change to create better opportunities, what are ways that I can do that within a sport that historically hasn’t been diverse or inclusive?
I’ve had a lot of fun networking with incredible collegiate sailors, incredibly smart sailors, and have developed a lot of friendships. I’ve had more fun than feeling a lot of pressure.
What are some of the things you’ve learned?
How to be a lot more patient. Being able to push for change and being able to continue to push and be patient—about how to do that appropriately and effectively. This experience has given me a lot of hope and a lot of excitement for our sailing community to see where the sport can go in five to ten years.
What’s next for you?
I’m going to grad school at Georgetown for sports management. I hope to stay involved with sailing. I’m currently doing diversity inclusion work for US Sailing, the national governing body, chairing a subcommittee, and I’m still an advisor for TIDE. I hope to find ways to continue sailing competitively, too.
Preston Anderson ’22 is a member of the New England Intercollegiate Sailing Association’s (NEISA) executive committee. The founding NEISA TIDE executive committee, including Preston (undergraduate chair), Jonathan Chance ’23 (head of education), and Frank Pizzo ’06 (varsity coach representative), received the 2020 Robert C. MacArthur Service Award for exhibiting outstanding lifetime service to NEISA.
For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.
