Bowdoin Magazine, Vol. 94, No. 2, Winter 2023

PUSHING THE WORK FORWARD

Challenges and rewards in the Rose presidency

28 Hard, Wonderful Life

At Buckwheat Blossom Farm, Amy McDougal Burchstead ’98 and her husband, Jeff, nourish animals, forest, soil, and family in every season.

20 Portrait of a Presidency

Clayton Rose reflects on eight years of growth and progress at the College, the challenges and joys of leadership in times of tumult, and why now is the time to step aside.

38 Under Orion

Erica Berry ’14 writes about discovering that she, a nineteenth-century recluse and Bowdoin alum, and the wolves she was studying and writing about were all connected.

44 Q&A

Dean Eduardo Pazos Palma evaluates and adjusts Bowdoin’s social pendulum with the cadence of tradition.

5 Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity: Debra Sanders ’77 reflects on a career with the FBI.

7 Dine: Bowdoin Dining shares a warming poblano soup from the Just Like Home files.

8 Universal Language: From tiny wind instruments to the pipe organ in the Chapel, Bowdoin offers students hundreds of ways to play and learn music.

10 Searched and Seen: Art from Lyne Lucien ’13 was a featured Google Doodle during Black History Month.

17 A True Shaggy Dog Story: Ian Morrison ’24 helps tell the tale of a man and his dog.

18 Moments with Dad: Doug Stenberg ’79 reminisces on life with Terry Stenberg ’56—his memorable, musical father.

Winter scene of the campus, taken in 1894, looking southeast from a vantage point in the brand new Mary Frances Searles Science Building. The image is an albumen print, which uses egg whites to bind the photographic chemicals to the photo paper.

Photo courtesy of the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives

Name That Island

I love the cover shot on the Fall 2022 issue! What island is that? I looked around inside the magazine and didn’t see any identification.

Kirk Petersen ’83

Ed. That’s Seguin Island, about two and a half miles from Popham Beach and the mouth of the Kennebec River. A close look reveals Seguin Light, the second-oldest coastal lighthouse in Maine.

REMEMBERING PAT

I just read in Bowdoin Magazine [Fall 2022] that Patricia Grover passed away in June. I worked at the switchboard with Pat while I was a student at Bowdoin. I served on student government, was a campus tour guide, took classes across varied departments, and made a point of regularly eating lunch with people I didn’t know, but Pat still knew more people than I did and always seemed to know what projects they were working on. She had a positive effect on generations of Bowdoin students, and I lament for future generations of Bowdoin students who won’t know her. [To read the rest of the tribute to Pat Grover, see Jared’s comment on her obituary at bowdo.in/grover-obituary.]

Jared Liu ’99

BEAUTIFUL IMPERFECT

I read the article in Whispering Pines of Spring/ Summer [Vol. 93, No. 3] about Earl Gene Ramsey and was surprised and enlightened. I graduated in 1985. At the time it seemed to me that I was one of a tiny number of Bowdoin

students who had a disability. I have cerebral palsy, so I do not walk well. It’s funny how I would never think of asking for any accommodations. I did get a few, like being able to be late to classes, but there were no ramps and there was no accessible housing. I never even thought about accessibility. I remember kind of crawling up steps to class in the snow. When I came to Bowdoin, I did not feel as if I was anywhere near perfect, and most of the people I saw seemed rather perfect to me. I have grown so much in my view of disabled bodies and realizing that we are all imperfect and it is the “flaws” that often make us beautiful. Thank you for publishing that piece. It made me happy.

Liza Polakov-Colby ’85

SEND US YOUR NEWS!

If there isn’t a class news entry for a class year, it’s because we didn’t receive any submissions for that year. We want to hear from you, and so do your classmates! Email classnews@bowdoin.edu or fill out a class news form on our website, bowdoin.edu/magazine.

MAGAZINE STAFF

Executive Editor and Interim Editor

Alison Bennie

Associate Editor

Leanne Dech

Designer and Art Director

Melissa Wells

Design Consultant

2Communiqué Editorial Consultant

Laura J. Cole

Contributors

Mary Baumgartner

Adam Bovie

Jim Caton

Doug Cook

John Cross

Cheryl Della Pietra

Chelsea Doyle

Rebecca Goldfine

Scott Hood

Micki Manheimer

Janie Porche

Tom Porter

On the Cover: Illustration by John Jay Cabuay

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

Opinions expressed in this magazine are those of the authors.

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

DEBRA SANDERS ’77

FIDELITY, BRAVERY, INTEGRITY

I’ve always loved challenges. From being part of the second class of women to attend Bowdoin and helping establish the women’s sports program (I played field hockey, basketball, and lacrosse) to becoming a special agent with the FBI, I like going outside of my comfort zone and rising to the occasion.

The FBI had always intrigued me, but initially, I was set on the business world, and I started my career in commercial insurance. That changed when a friend read in the Boston Globe that the FBI was looking for candidates. He planned to go to the local FBI office to ask questions and, as a die-hard police-detective, murder-mystery, espionage book junkie, I told him I was going with him.

A couple of years later, I had passed all the rigorous testing requirements and was sworn in. During my twenty-eight years with the agency, I worked in offices in Boston, Tampa, New York City, Honolulu, and Houston, as well as assignments in Iraq, at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, and as part of the Technical Branch working the 9/11 investigation. My favorite assignments were the Joint Terrorism Task Force and working as a technically trained agent. I loved to call my friends from the top of buildings, bridges, and stadiums, where the wind whipped so strongly it could send you over the edge if you got too close, to see if they could guess where I was.

I retired over a decade ago, and my friends are disappointed that I still can’t tell them about all the cool things I did. Today, I am a background investigations contractor, but I still believe strongly in the FBI motto—Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity—and have always tried to live by it. I am proud to have been part of the dedicated, compassionate, ambitious, brave men and women who aspire every day to make a difference.

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

PHOTO: TODD SPOTH

As part of her role as a special agent with the FBI, Debra Sanders ’77 attended the New England Telephone School, bucket truck training, and classes in carpentry, plastering, and lock picking.

Student Life

A Haven in Crisis

Bowdoin has become one of eight colleges and universities providing a pathway to higher education for students affected by worldwide crises. Launched in response to the war in Ukraine and the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the Global Student Haven Initiative helps these students apply to US-based colleges and universities and find support when they arrive.

Bowdoin and other member institutions have committed to providing financial aid for all students with demonstrated need, and access to campus services ranging from housing assistance to mental health support, depending on individual needs. The aim is to help clear a path to higher education for qualified students who are displaced, refugees, or otherwise impacted by war, natural disasters, and other global crises. The goal is to help students overcome these barriers, continue their education, and prepare for eventual return to their home nations.

Maine

A Welcomed Visitor

ON AN UNTYPICALLY warm Saturday in February, ornithologist Nat Wheelwright experienced what most birders only dream of. While at a friend’s private camp along the Black River—far from a throng of avian enthusiasts—he watched a Steller’s sea-eagle fly his way.

“All of a sudden someone in our group gasped, and this bird appeared from out of the pine forest and soared right over our head. It was magical,” says Wheelwright, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Natural Sciences Emeritus.

With bald eagles on the bird’s tail, the first thing Wheelwright noticed was its sheer size.

“Normally in Maine, bald eagles rule the skies, but in the context of this gigantic Asian sea-eagle, they looked like little crows divebombing a predator,” Wheelwright continues.

Steller’s sea-eagles are about a foot longer and taller—and five pounds heavier—than bald eagles, which are among the largest flying birds in North America. They are also not typical in Maine, to say the least. Native to eastern Russia, some have flown as far east as western Alaska, but none had ever appeared near the Atlantic Ocean. None, until 2021.

Birders enthusiastically followed the seaeagle’s journey, from Alaska in 2020 to Texas, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, and then to Georgetown, Maine, where it first appeared on December 30, 2021.

“As a surprise to no Mainers, its stay in Mass. was short,” wrote Doug Hitchcox, a staff naturalist with Maine Audubon, on the organization’s blog.

This marks the second year the bird—whose sex has not been determined, though male raptors are smaller than females—has returned to Maine. Wheelwright and others find its return promising. It is normal for birds to travel

outside their typical range, an act known as vagrancy. Individual vagrant birds can survive in new territories, though not all do. For example, a red-billed tropicbird, which is normally found only in tropical oceans, has returned to the Gulf of Maine for over fifteen years, but Portland’s famous great black hawk, a native of Central America, lived in Maine for just a year before it got frostbite in its feet and lower legs and had to be euthanized.

“Generally, larger birds have higher survival rates than smaller songbirds, which can be approaching 90 percent mortality during that tough first year,” Hitchcox wrote in the same post.

Wheelwright, a trustee of Maine Audubon, joins many others rooting for the Steller’s seaeagle to thrive in the Pine Tree State.

“Now that it’s returned here, it could easily come back again next winter and do this for the rest of its life,” he says. “And we’re thrilled that it’s kindled an interest in the beauty of wild birds. At a time when we’re all distracted by the worries of the world, what a joy to have this bird come into our lives.”

ILLUSTRATION: MICHAEL AUSTIN; PHOTO: ZACHARY HOLDERBY, COURTESY MAINE AUDUBON

A Steller’s sea-eagle seen off Georgetown, Maine.

More than 5,000 miles from home, a Steller’s sea-eagle returned to Maine for the second time.

DID YOU KNOW?

If you asked a person from Mexico what color a poblano pepper is, chances are they would answer “green,” because poblano peppers are often used before they are ripe. As they ripen, poblanos turn bright red. A ripe, dried poblano pepper is called “chili ancho,” which means “broad pepper.”

Creamy Poblano Pepper Soup

Recipe by Bowdoin Dining

Food at Bowdoin is a big deal, and the cooks and bakers who work in Bowdoin Dining Services know how much food matters to students here. In years past, students would submit favorite home recipes to dining, and winning recipes were added to the menu rotations—this soup was one of them.

2 tablespoons olive oil

5 medium-size poblano peppers, diced

¾ cup onion, diced

¾ cup carrots, diced

1 to 2 cups potatoes, peeled and chopped

1 quart vegetable stock

¼ cup half and half or light cream

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon ground black pepper

¼ cup parsley or cilantro, chopped (optional)

Add the olive oil to a large saucepan. Add the poblano peppers, onion, and carrots and sauté over medium heat, stirring, until the vegetables are softened and the onions are translucent.

Add the potatoes and vegetable stock. Simmer until the potatoes are tender, reducing heat as needed. When the potatoes are fully cooked, use an immersion blender to purée until smooth. Alternatively, you can purée the soup in batches in a regular blender, using caution to blend the hot liquid. Add the half and half or cream to the soup in the saucepan. Season with the salt and pepper and heat gently (do not boil). Garnish each serving with parsley or cilantro.

Bowdoin Dining is committed to tradition, local sourcing, and scratch cooking. You can find more than fifty recipes from dining services to cook at home at bowdo.in/diningrecipes.

Dine

In the fall semester, four students were studying organ, and four were studying harp, both record numbers in the past twenty years.

Did You Know?

Universal Language

The College offers courses in many kinds of music and backs that up with the instruments to play all of it.

Illustration by Rose Wong

In a world of AirPods and ear buds and headphones of all types, Bowdoin’s campus is probably filled, at any given moment, with people traveling through their days to the music of their own personal soundtracks— Beyoncé playing in one carrel in the library and Beethoven in the next, or Harry Styles crossing paths with Kendrick Lamar on the Quad. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called music “the universal language of mankind” in Outré-Mer, his first published literary work, but surely he did not imagine such a multitude of dialects available all at once. Bowdoin’s music program gives students opportunities to learn and play through lessons offered to everyone from total beginners to accomplished performers. Instruments of every type are stashed in 125 storage lockers and just about every corner and closet of Studzinski Recital Hall and Gibson Hall, as well as throughout the office of concert, budget, and equipment master (and keyboardist and composer) Delmar Small.

About 150 students are taking lessons at any given time, and many more are waiting to get an opportunity.

Students can major or minor in music, take lessons, or participate in one of eight ensembles—Chorus, Chamber Choir, Concert Band, Orchestra, Chamber Ensembles, Jazz Ensembles, the Middle Eastern Ensemble, or the West African Music Ensemble—and more than a quarter of all Bowdoin students participate in at least one.

Students taking lessons in voice, guitar, or piano can choose from classical, jazz, and pop.

At least five Bowdoin faculty play the saxophone. And many perform—with professional chamber ensembles, the Bangor Symphony Orchestra, the Midcoast Symphony Orchestra, and the Portland Symphony Orchestra.

Lessons are open to all Bowdoin students and include bassoon, cello, clarinet, flute, French horn, guitar (acoustic and jazz), harp, jazz bass, oboe, oud, percussion, piano (classical and jazz), saxophone, trombone, trumpet, viola, violin, and voice (classical and pop/jazz).

The department has many specialty collections like ewe drums, handbells, a Chinese zither, and other international instruments, and Renaissance and Baroque reproductions, including a lute and a consort of krummhorns.

The oldest instrument is a clarinet built by Aston & Co., London, around 1796, and the College owns a recorder built by alumnus and music major Friedrich von Huene ’53.

Among the 596 instruments that Bowdoin owns are 123 drums, 49 pianos, 6 cellos, 4 drum sets, and 3 pipe organs.

The biggest, loudest, and most valuable Bowdoin instrument is the pipe organ in the Chapel, built by the Austin Organ Company in 1927. Two of the smallest are a siren whistle and a sopraninino recorder.

Bowdoin Goes West?

TRAVEL NEARLY 2,000 miles west from campus, and you’ll find yourself at another Bowdoin—Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge—in Montana. The similarity, though, ends at the spelling.

This Bowdoin is pronounced bow-doyne, and according to Lori Taylor, a curator at the nearby Phillips County Museum, is named after Louis Beaudoin, a surveyor for the Great Northern Railway, who suggested they call the lake the park is named for after himself.

“When it was recorded, they changed the spelling to ‘Bowdoin,’” she says.

The location was originally planned to be one of the stops on the famous rail line, on the same section that included other names inspired by places around the world and the Northeast, including Oswego and Nashua. It never came to fruition, though, which is good news for the more than 260 species of birds that have been documented on the 15,550-acre refuge, including piping plovers, willow flycatchers, and arctic terns.

Though merely speculation, we like to believe the spelling may be due in part to Bowdoin grad Paris Gibson, class of 1851, who was founder, first mayor, and namer of nearby Great Falls, Montana. Gibson was friends with Great Northern Railway founder James J. Hill and introduced Hill to the region—even convincing him to extend the northern line to his city.

Sound Bite

—TOSHI REAGON, BOWDOIN’S 2022–2023 JOSEPH MCKEEN VISITING FELLOW, IN A CONVERSATION ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES FACING THE PLANET DURING THE EVENT “MOTHER VOICES: TRANSFORMATIVE INTERGENERATIONAL JOURNEY.”

Alumni Life

SEARCHED AND SEEN

Google featured artwork by Lyne Lucien ’13 as its home page doodle on February 8, 2023. Lucien’s artwork celebrated Mama Ca-x, a Haitian American model and advocate for people with disabilities who challenged the fashion industry’s standard of beauty by proudly showcasing her prosthetic leg on the runway and was part of Google’s observance of Black History Month. Alumni also saw Lucien’s artwork closer to home recently in the spring/summer 2022 issue of Bowdoin Magazine.

“If there was ever a time to run out of your house flying toward the light, this is it.”

Other Bowdoins

President Franklin D. Roosevelt established Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge in 1936, originally as a migratory waterfowl refuge.

Orienting a Career

THE BOWDOIN ORIENT has a reputation for pursuing thorny topics that can put administrators on edge. Over its 150 years of operation, it has honed the skills of many cub reporters who have gone on to impressive journalism careers. An informal survey revealed that more than 120 Orient alumni who graduated between 1979 and 2020 are working as reporters for outlets like The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Boston Globe. (Scott Allen ’83, for one, oversees the Globe ’s famous investigative Spotlight Team.) Jane Godiner ’23, an aspiring journalist herself, recently interviewed a few of these alumni to ask how their time at the Orient influenced them.

ESPN sports analytics writer Seth Walder ’11, a former Orient sports editor and editor-in-chief, credited the student newspaper for helping to launch his career. “The Orient was a really foundational way for me to build skills. The fact that we were doing this paper every week, very much independently, forced me to learn,” he said. “When I left Bowdoin, there was plenty more to learn in the ‘real world,’ but I had built up skills from the Orient that were certainly helpful right away.”

Evan Gershkovich ’14, a former Orient contributor and current Russia-based reporter at The Wall Street Journal, said his time at the Orient was not only characterized by camaraderie, but by professional development. “I remember a friend of mine basically sitting me down and teaching me the mechanics of a news story, from the lede to the nut graf,” he said. “My friends at the Orient were very serious, driven people. They took what they did seriously, and they helped me learn more about what journalism truly is.”

Student Life Talk Therapy

In a recent episode of “Blooming Daily,” a wellness podcast that Ruth Olujobi ’25 started last year, she turns her attention to relationships. “We think about how our diet affects our health and how exercise affects our health, but how do relationships affect our health?” she asks—before conceding that, as a sophomore, she’s not quite an expert in this department yet. Olujobi, a pre-med student, launched the podcast to channel her passion and energy around health and wellness, particularly for young people and underserved communities.

“Blooming Daily” is one of two prominent student podcasts that focus on “what it means to be well, and not well, too,” said Bowdoin’s wellness director Kate Nicholson. Connor Lloyd ’23 began his show, “The Things I Haven’t Even Told My Therapist,” in 2021 to offer “semi-comedic and all-too-honest firsthand examination of what it means to navigate society, college, social life, and athletics when struggling with mental health.”

Kimberly Launier ’98, a producer at CNN who has also worked on documentary film and television productions with ABC News and HBO, said she appreciated the chance to work with fellow students who were “smart, empathetic, kind, and diligent.” She added, “I’ve been so lucky, and also worked incredibly hard, to have one of the most truly fun careers I ever could have imagined. I’ve had the time of my life having adventures with unforgettable people and creatures. And it all started at Bowdoin.”

Nicholson shared the two podcasts with the Bowdoin community during the fall semester, urging students to tune in. “I hope these voices and resources offer reassurance and good company in your remaining weeks,” she said.

For Lloyd, speaking into the microphone has been a healing exercise. “Making this show has been as therapeutic for me as I hope it has been for you,” he said.

Listen to “Blooming Daily” on Spotify and “The Things I Haven’t Even Told My Therapist” on Podbean.

Faculty

Nod from a Nobel

A FULL-CIRCLE MOMENT brought Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Danielle Dube to Sweden in December to witness the Nobel Prize ceremony. Dube was a PhD student of chemist Carolyn Bertozzi in the early 2000s at the University of California–Berkeley, where both worked on research into bioorthogonal chemistry (which refers to any chemical reaction that can occur inside of living systems without interfering with native biochemical processes) that later caught the attention of the Nobel Committee. Now at Stanford University, Bertozzi, one of three 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureates, invited Dube to Stockholm for the award ceremony, during which she thanked Dube for her direct contributions. “Celebrating Carolyn’s Nobel Prize was a highlight of my career and a once-in-alifetime experience,” said Dube.

Game On

THREE-PEAT

Bowdoin’s women’s rugby team outmatched the University of New England, 29-0, to win the 2022 NIRA Division III championship on November 19, 2022, at Dartmouth College. This is the third straight championship title for the Polar Bears, who also took the top spot in 2019 and 2021 (there was no championship in 2020 due to the pandemic). The women’s rugby team ended its season with eight wins and only one loss.

Connections

CULTURED LOAVES

Every Wednesday, Bowdoin bakers use a 125-year-old starter to make forty loaves of sourdough bread. The starter was a gift from Matthew Booker, an associate professor of history at North Carolina State University, during a 2019 visit to campus to talk about the Global Sourdough Project, which traces the genetic sequence of microbial organisms found in hundreds of starters—also known as cultures.

“Feeding sourdough that feeds us binds together and pairs human and microbial cultures in a multi-species community,” he wrote in a blog post.

The particular culture baked into the loaves served at Thorne and Moulton Union can be traced back to a culture Booker’s ancestors received from a prospector in Kodiak Island, Alaska, in 1898, and has since traveled to Oregon, Washington, California, North Carolina, and now Maine.

“It’s actually amazing when you think that generations of people have baked bread with this same starter,” says Adeena Fisher, associate director of dining. “Baking a loaf of bread is a labor of love, and we are honored to be part of this tradition.”

Campus Life

ArtChopped

Senior Class Dean Roosevelt Boone joined forces with Assistant Director of Student Activities Eunice Shin ’22 to develop a program that was fun and competitive, and that provided “an opportunity for student-athletes and nonathletes to come together in fellowship,” Boone said.

Inspired by the Food Network reality television show Chopped, the event featured four Bowdoin artists— two athletes and two nonathletes—competing to produce a winning piece of art from the same set of art materials and in a time frame of thirty minutes. Shin and Boone chose “glass ceiling” as the theme, hoping, as Shin says, “that students would take the theme and run with whatever creative force against barriers they were working to break through.” When time was up, each artist had a few minutes to explain their piece to a packed house, Thursday night audience in Magee’s Pub and to a panel of student judges. All four of the artists—Alfonso Garcia ’25, Katherine Page ’23, Shumaim Rashid ’26, and Carl Williams ’23—chose to paint, even though they brought strengths in different media to the event. Garcia came away the night’s winner, taking home a $50 gift certificate to Portland Pie.

ArtChopped was such a success that Boone and Shin are planning another iteration soon, possibly even before the semester is out. “The students were really enthusiastic about an opportunity like this that brought them [athletes and nonathletes] together,” Boone said. “They want more of that.”

Alfonso Garcia ’25

On the Shelf

Folly Cove Sketches: Remembering Virginia Lee Burton

JUNE VAIL

(Custom Museum Publishing, 2022)

In her new memoir, Professor of Dance Emerita June Vail paints a warm, honest portrait of her great aunt Virginia Lee Burton, the author and illustrator of the beloved midcentury children’s book Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.

On Stage

Enduring Racial Challenges

Guest director presents A Raisin in the Sun.

The Path to Successful Community School Policy Adoption

EMILY LUBINS WOODS ’95 (Routledge, 2022)

When the House Burns PRISCILLA PATON ’74 (Epicenter Press, 2023)

RENOWNED New York–based theater artist Craig Anthony Bannister was invited to direct the recent production of the groundbreaking 1950s play, A Raisin in the Sun, at the Wish Theater.

This is the first time Bowdoin has featured a Black-authored play with a Black director and a majority Black cast, says theater professor and department chair Abigail Killeen. “We’re so grateful Anthony chose to accept the offer to work with us. Bringing in regular guest directors and choreographers of color is a key component to fostering strong and inclusive learning in theater and dance,” she explains.

The first Broadway play written by a Black woman, A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, made an impact with audiences and critics when it premiered in 1959, dealing as it did with issues like racism and housing discrimination. The story revolves around the fortunes of an impoverished Black family in Chicago and their efforts to seek a better life.

Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip through the Living History of Black Resistance

ALVIN HALL ’74 (HarperOne, 2023)

In Search of Justice in Thailand’s Deep South

Edited by William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the

Humanities

Emeritus JOHN HOLT

(University of Virginia Press, 2022)

“Even in 2023 this play is still very relevant,” says Bannister. “As African Americans, we continue to grapple with questions like ‘Where do we belong?’ and ‘How do we achieve our dream?’”—questions, he says, that are central to the theme of the play.

Many of the cast members are new to the stage, explains Bannister, which is fine because this play is a “good entry point” for novices wanting to get into acting. “You don’t really need to have an incredible amount of acting technique to tell the story, because it’s so easy to relate to.”

Stage debut of A Raisin in the Sun, featuring Sidney Poitier, in 1959.

Faculty

PIECE OF MIND

Clinical and philosophical psychologist Barbara Held has opinions, and thanks to op-ed pages near and far, readers across the country are privy to her professional insights—no couch or copay required.

Held, Bowdoin’s Barry N. Wish Professor of Psychology and Social Studies Emerita, has opined about confirmation bias—that is, the tendency to accept dubious information if it supports preexisting beliefs—about morality and the cost of doing what is right, and about her own defensive pessimism, repressed Nutcracker memories, and lessons learned from Gus, her parakeet.

She has published nearly thirty pieces since the beginning of the pandemic in spring 2020, when isolation, an endless supply of cable news, and a love of writing converged to give rise to a series of 800-word platforms for her scholarship, experience, and direct, in-your-face approach.

“With all that time on my hands I became a bigger news junkie than I already was,” she said. “As soon as I heard a story that interested me and about which I had something to say, I would run to the computer to start typing.”

Held says truth and its exposition have been themes throughout her life and work, so it’s no surprise that, no matter what an op-ed’s topic, truth always finds a way into it.

“The more you’re scared to tell the truth, the more you need to tell it,” Held wrote in one of her op-eds. “If you don’t, you just might create a monster even scarier than the truth.”

From Oceania to Maine

An exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art highlights an 8,000mile artistic journey.

MADE LARGELY from natural fibers, shell fragments, and wood, these masks are fragile, says curator Casey Braun. She’s talking about the objects on display in the exhibition “Masks of Memories: Art and Ceremony in NineteenthCentury Oceania.” It highlights a number of masks collected in Oceania in the 1890s by Harold Sewall, of Bath, Maine. He then brought them back to the US—a journey of more than 8,000 miles—and donated them to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Sewall was US Consul General to Samoa at the time, and the artifacts were purchased in New Ireland, today part of Papua, New Guinea.

These masks, Braun explains, were each commissioned by family members of a deceased person to be worn at the funeral. “They were not designed to be kept and were

usually discarded or burned after the ceremony, which makes it all the more extraordinary that they found their way here.”

This also means Bowdoin has one of the few collections of such artifacts obtained in the nineteenth century, says Braun. As well as examining the cultural significance of the masks and their associated practices, she adds, the exhibition, which runs until July 16, explores the circulation of such objects beyond Oceania through the activities of overseas art collectors.

“This has led to some lively conversations about the way artifacts can be used to create myths about the non-Western world, and the place such objects have in American and European museums.”

Above: Mask, nineteenth century, wood, pigment, fiber, and shell, by unidentified artist, New Ireland. Gift of Harold M. Sewall, Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

ILLUSTRATION: JAMES STEINBERG; PHOTO: COURTESY BOWDOIN COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART

For a compilation of Held’s published op-eds, visit bowdo.in/held.

5th 475

100 20 5 7 45

6 500

LACING UP THEIR BOOTS

Finding a job—especially that first one—requires specific skills. For three days in January, the sophomore class returned to campus to take part in Career Exploration and Development’s (CXD) Sophomore Bootcamp, a program designed to equip students to land the kind of internships and first-job experiences that will catapult them into successful careers of meaningful work. Bootcamp, as the name suggests, is intense. From nine to five each day, students learn, workshop, and drill the skills they’ll need to enter the work force. They also learn to leverage the power of the Bowdoin network. CXD matches each sophomore with two alumni to start connections, if only in practice, toward networking conversations. Bootcamp’s mission is to impart both practical know-how and to convince students their dreams are in reach. “We hope every student leaves more confident about what they can pursue,” says Bethany Walsh, CXD’s senior associate director and advisor. “It’s really important to us that every student knows how to leverage this amazing Bowdoin education they’re getting in the way they want to.”

like networking, writing cover letters, and searching for jobs and internships. sophomore class, now participates.

Internships

A True Shaggy Dog Story

WHEN HE BEGAN his internship at the Massachusetts Historical Society last summer, Ian Morrison ’24 wanted to produce a podcast about some aspect of World War II, but had no intention of focusing on a dog. In fact, he had never heard of Thunderbolt. “Initially, I was drawn to the story of his master, Lieutenant Robert Payne, whose papers are in the MHS collections,” explains the history and Francophone studies double major.

Payne was a US bomber pilot flying out of England in 1943. “I am very interested in the Second World War,” says Morrison, “so I wanted to work with Payne’s papers to learn more about the war through his personal experiences.” As Morrison combed through the archives, he encountered the story of Payne’s dog, Thunderbolt, mentioned in letters, newspaper clippings, and other materials—it was a story that really captured the public imagination at the time, he says.

During the thirty-five-minute podcast, we learn how Lt. Payne befriends this scruffy, eighty-two-pound mongrel that had started hanging around the airbase. Payne names the dog Thunderbolt, in honor of the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter escorts that would accompany bomber crews like Payne’s on their raids over occupied Europe. Thunderbolt and Payne become constant companions, says Morrison. The dog even occasionally joins the crew on practice flights.

In November 1943, when Payne’s aircraft fails to return from his nineteenth mission, Thunderbolt is grief-stricken, waiting for days for his master’s plane to show up and sleeping on Payne’s bed surrounded by his possessions. Thunderbolt’s war is not over yet, however. The animal is eventually adopted by one of Payne’s fellow officers, following him to mainland Europe in 1944, where the dog was reportedly wounded in action.

There is a happy ending, at least for a while, says Morrison. Thunderbolt survived the war, as did Payne, who ended up in a German POW camp after being shot down. The two reunited in 1946, and Thunderbolt lived with Payne and his family in the US for five years, until the dog was hit by a dump truck and died.

“I now have a greater appreciation for the level of work that goes into making a podcast,” says Morrison. As well as poring through material in the MHS archives, he interviewed two historians about the role of dogs in human history. Morrison also had to learn audio recording techniques.

During his internship, which was funded by Bowdoin’s Office of Career Exploration and Development, Morrison came under the guidance of Bowdoin history graduate Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai ’03, director of research at the MHS. “It was great to connect with a fellow Polar Bear,” says Morrison, who intends to pursue a master’s in library science after Bowdoin.

Athletics

PASS IT ON

In a happy coincidence, all three head coaches of the women’s basketball teams on hand at Morrell Gym the weekend of National Girls and Women in Sports Day were former Bowdoin players—a testament to both the inspiration and the powerful network of former Bowdoin women’s basketball coaches Adrienne Shibles and Stefanie Pemper. All three are also Maine natives. Bowdoin’s head coach, Megan Phelps ’15, is from Southwest Harbor; Alison (Smith) Montgomery ’05, head coach of the Bates women, grew up in Stockton Springs; and Jill (Henrickson) Pace ’12, head coach for Tufts, is from Bath.

Payne and Thunderbolt

Meet Thunderbolt, a WW2 bomber pilot’s canine companion.

Moments with Dad

Doug Stenberg ’79 reminisces on life with his memorable, musical father.

AN OBITUARY can list the accomplishments of a man but rarely gets to the soul of his story, especially for the loved ones and friends he leaves behind.

My father, Terry Douglas Stenberg ’56, was profoundly driven, and his accomplishments are formidable. His 2,000-word obituary listed so many of them: His perfect pitch. Attending Bowdoin, where he was a Meddiebempster. Joining the military and rising to the rank of captain. A career in education, including twenty-four years as a headmaster—fifteen of them at Hawken School. A stint as director of the American Collegiate Institute in Izmir, Turkey, where he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Holding volunteer positions with various boards. Writing five major pieces for two different instrumental ensembles, including “Remembering Tilly.”

These accomplishments are in black and white compared to the technicolor memories I have of him—and of us, together. Reading a draft of the obituary the year before he died, I was reminded of how much time had been lost over the years, how many moments slipped through those lines. How many school evaluations, for example, did it take to make a life?

I wasn’t there for those, my memories hovering just around the periphery: The way he used to call out “Hi-o” when he came home from work, and my sisters and I would run to greet him. His returning home from active duty, and how I cried in his bedroom when I thought he might have to go to Vietnam. The faculty parties he and Mom hosted, where downstairs was full of upbeat cacophony, and I could make visits to the kitchen for chips and chocolate chip cookies.

The more vivid moments are the ones we shared together: Our unbridled joy when he taught me to ride a bike at Pine Manor. How

happy we were when I got into Bowdoin, and how he consoled me when, having lost a wrestling match at sectionals, I was at the end of my tether physically and emotionally. The times a few years before he died, when we would drive down to get lobsters in Cushing or when we would watch a Red Sox game together. Or toward the end, sleeping on the floor of my parents’ living room and waking to the sound of a cowbell, which Dad rang to call for help. We held onto each other as we inched our way across the rug, Mom still asleep in their bed.

The most vivid, though, are our conversations. Over the years, we had many about our shared alma mater. In talking about Bowdoin, in some ways, Dad and I were talking about something very close to our hearts. Even when talking about what was currently happening at the College, we were simultaneously reaching back into the past and toward a future.

Bowdoin was a liberating time for him. His family of origin were Christian Scientists, and Bowdoin was the place where he chose a different path. The most definitive experience for him

Terry Stenberg ’56 and his son, Doug Stenberg ’79, with their dog, Thor, circa 1975.

in many ways was touring US military bases in Europe with the Meddies. It allowed him to see the world in a brand new way.

I rarely saw him happier than when he got together with fellow alums. I grew up listening to recordings of fellow Meddie George Wheeler Graham’s solo of “Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas” and Norm Nicholson’s sublime rendition of “The Lord Is Good to Me.” Other members—and aspiring members—visited us while I was growing up. One year, Bob Keay ’56— one of the aspiring members—regaled us with “Nature Boy,” as we sat around our large antique dinner table. We all broke out into applause— my dad the most enthusiastic of all.

When he and Mom spent three years in Turkey, we communicated mostly by letters, except for when he was diagnosed with cancer. I was teaching in Seattle at the time, and I called him from a pay phone in a quiet café not far from the Northwest School. I told him that I loved him and that he would get through this, and the family would too. Mildly earnest patrons respectfully ignored me blubbering into the phone.

Life is all about mysteries and ironies. In the ’90s, we actually ran into each other at an airport somewhere in Germany—maybe Frankfurt or Hamburg. I was waiting for a connecting flight to St. Petersburg. Dad was running a school in Izmir or doing a school evaluation in Germany.

know I mentioned John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, but I did not dwell on July 4th, fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, when they both passed away. He died the next day. It’s very strange to think about that being a conversation, but it was still a form of communication. Of love.

I think sometimes that simple act of trying to have a conversation is the point. The Constitution was written to be a living, breathing document that evolves with us. Just like our relationships—if we make the effort for them to be ongoing and evolutionary. It’s worth it to find the stories we didn’t know, such as a photo found over sixty years later of a father reading to a son, when his memories are essentially of his mom doing that. Or the recollection of a particularly difficult meeting with a board member, who, when informed that my dad had to meet with me at a certain time, said “Sons can wait,” and my dad responded, “Mine doesn’t.”

Growing up, I picked up on what Bowdoin had meant to him. I originally was following his paradigm. I, too, joined Beta. I became a Meddiebempster. He was always proud of me for being involved in sports, and I joined the football team.

As the son of a headmaster, I was always very conscious of trying to toe the line. Oddly, failing a British history course while studying abroad in England was a crucial experience for me and allowed me to break away from his paradigm a bit. I failed history, but I took a course on a Shakespeare program in London. When I returned, I eventually did a two-man performance of Macbeth with Peter Honchaurk ’80 in the basement of Pickard Theater. Herb Coursen praised the production in Shakespeare Quarterly. I also focused on Russia to study the language and literature and then pursue grad school before becoming a teacher, in some way returning to the paradigm.

My memory is fuzzy on those details. What I remember clearly is seeing him sitting in a secluded gate that was mostly empty. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t allowed to sit with him, but we were able to be close enough to talk, and we had a good conversation.

I wonder sometimes if he had been wired differently or if I had been wired differently, if we could have had more moments like that, of natural, spontaneous closeness. I think he tried through his music. I tried through sharing movies. It wasn’t always easy, and communication wasn’t always consistent.

I called him for the last time on July 4, 2020. He was in hospice, and Nurse Diane held the phone to his ear. Apparently, he moved his hand at the sound of my voice. He couldn’t talk. I don’t remember much because I was just so conscious of knowing he was about to die and focused on the sound of his labored breathing. I’m certain I expressed my love for him. I

Reflecting back on our life together, there are plenty of things I wish we had both done differently. Now, I am able to more clearly see the outline of his life, and how for so much of his life he may have been trying to prove something to his biological father, Charlie McClain, who had been cut out of his life since he was four. He broke that paradigm for both of us. Though he had so much professional drive, I can’t say that I ever felt pressure from him. I felt more approval when I did certain things, but never pressure to achieve. Certainly, I was not like one of my classmates, who went on to be very successful but whom I found weeping in a dorm because his grades were average and his dad had said, “If you get four H’s, don’t come home.”

It’s all those moments—both remembered and discovered along the way—that get left out of the obituaries, no matter how detailed and impressive. They also happen to be the ones most worth remembering.

For roughly thirty years, Doug Stenberg ’79 taught in schools, colleges, and universities from Seattle to St. Petersburg, Russia. His favorite acting roles have been Macbeth, Caliban, Jaques, Feste, Bottom, and Scrooge. To read his father’s obituary, go to obituaries.bowdoin.edu/terry-d-stenberg-56.

I wonder sometimes if he had been wired differently or if I had been wired differently, if we could have had more moments like that, of natural, spontaneous closeness.

With just a few months to go as Bowdoin’s fifteenth president, Clayton Rose reflects on eight years of growth and progress at the College, the challenges and joys of leadership in times of tumult, and why now is the time to step aside.

PORTRAIT OF A PRESIDENCY

BOWDOIN: In your time as president, what’s changed at Bowdoin, what’s the same, and what are you most proud of?

ROSE: I’ll start with what’s the same. We deliver an outstanding liberal arts education. We prepare our students to be leaders in a changing world. Our faculty and staff are devoted to our students and dedicated to the mission of the College. Our alumni are fantastic in the way they support the College and one another. And the values of treating one another with respect, of kindness, of collaboration, of the notion that there is an obligation that extends beyond ourselves because we’re privileged to be here— all of that is the same.

INTERVIEW BY SCOTT HOOD

ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN JAY CABUAY

For change, I think the broad Bowdoin community—alumni, parents, faculty, staff, students—has a better collective sense of the big social and cultural issues that affect the College and the world. That’s probably the biggest change. A better understanding. Not that everybody agrees. In fact, it stirs the waters more, but a more transparent understanding of the cultural and social issues as they play out on campus.

What am I most proud of? There’s a lot—it’s not about me, though, because so many people are involved. We’ve improved and expanded

financial aid, strengthened the academic and curricular programs, and we’ve made real progress—with a lot more to do—on building a community where everyone has the opportunity to belong, to know they belong, and to pursue the same successes, outcomes, and lived experiences. And we’ve worked hard to advocate for and to create the opportunities for respectful engagement with ideas that challenge our own, and to have a variety of viewpoints represented on campus.

Applications are at a record high, career services for students are much stronger, and we’ve put amazing pieces together that position Bowdoin as a national leader in the teaching and study of the interconnected issues of the environment, oceans, climate, and the Arctic— something truly unique and relevant.

I’m also proud of the work we did to improve governance and restructure the board, of the work of our senior team, and the way the larger community has come together to make our campaign such a success and to support the College every year in a way that we see at few other schools. And then there’s COVID—not something any of us could have predicted, but the way the College pulled through the pandemic ought to be a point of pride for everyone.

BOWDOIN: Seems like a great time to be president of Bowdoin College. Why leave now?

ROSE: It is a great time. The College is stronger than it’s ever been across virtually every dimension. We’ve moved back into the regular rhythms of campus life, and there’s a real foundation in place from the work we’ve done over the last seven and a half years to build upon. It will take time to craft the next steps and then make them real. And that’s what makes now the time for me to step aside.

BOWDOIN: Does COVID have anything to do with it? Would you still be leaving if COVID hadn’t happened?

ROSE: It’s an impossible question to answer. Am I burnt out because of having to manage through COVID? No. It was hard, but it was hard for everybody around the world.

BOWDOIN: But the pandemic also caused a lot of people to step back and take stock of their lives and to think about where they want to be; how they want to spend their time.

ROSE: Sure, but there’s nuance to that. I do want to spend more time with my grandchildren. I have very close friends I haven’t seen for two and a half years. And this is a 24-7 job. So the recognition that the clock is ticking and that we’re not totally in control of our destiny, that’s a real part of the pandemic—a healthy part of reflecting on it.

The bigger thing for me is that there’s a great deal of work that we’re doing around the “K Report” [Report of the President’s Working Group on Knowledge, Skills, and Creative Dispositions], diversity, equity, and inclusion, the development of facilities around the oceans, Arctic, climate, and the environment, among others, that set the table for even bigger programmatic efforts. We’re at a place where we need to establish the next phase of work to take the College to the next level, and that requires another eight, ten, twelve years to really move the needle forward. So either I have to commit to be here for that time to see this work through, or I’ve got to get out of the

way and let somebody else come in and do the work, but not hang around the net for another couple years just to hang around the net. That makes no sense.

COVID created a natural break point. If COVID hadn’t happened, some of this work would have been pushed to the next level naturally and it would have been a different time frame. Maybe it would have been another three or four years.

I think a president has a responsibility to know when the moment comes. This is a hard one for Julianne and me personally. We love being here and being a part of the life of the College every day, but from an institutional perspective, it’s the right time.

BOWDOIN: When people look back at your time as president, the pandemic is going to be one of the “big things.” Earlier in your career, you managed people and organizations through emergencies or crises. Good preparation for leading the College through COVID?

ROSE: Sure, but I also think we ought to acknowledge that there are lots of leaders in higher ed who didn’t have that background but who did just fine.

BOWDOIN: But you were making decisions before most of the others. Bowdoin was one of the first colleges to move to remote learning.

ROSE: The level of uncertainty is similar to what I experienced earlier in my career. There’s a lot you don’t know, but potential bad outcomes could be really bad. And so, if you have an expected outcome or the probability of a bad outcome that’s higher than you would like and a lot of uncertainty, that’s when you want to err seriously on the side of caution and not assume too much, because you just don’t know. That was also true in some of the things I did before with serious financial and economic problems that weren’t about life and death.

You just gather as much information as you can from as many people as you can. You try to listen way more than you talk. And, ultimately, you have to use judgment. You’re not going to stumble on “the answer.” And there is no

perfect or optimal answer. There’s just the best path you can take at that moment.

BOWDOIN: You’re not a scientist or a physician. How did you synthesize everything?

ROSE: Lots of listening—the more the better. The more ideas, the better. It’s taking as much in as you can from people who are experienced and smart—recognizing that no one has the answer—and then making judgments.

The thing that I can do—that I have responsibility to do—is to decide how all of that matters in the context of our community and the goals we’ve set for ourselves in our community. Ultimately you make judgments. And you’re making some decisions about what you think is going to happen with the virus and where it’s going to go. The best example of that was [the] Delta [variant of SARS CoV-2]. I mean, in the summer of ’21 we had that magic three weeks where we thought everything was going to be great, and it’s all gone. And then we got whacked upside the head, and in very short order realized that we are back in it. You have to be prepared to change your mind and not let your ego get in the way.

BOWDOIN: And everybody’s looking at you for reassurance.

ROSE: Sure.

BOWDOIN: So you can’t freak out.

ROSE: No. You don’t have the luxury for that. And it doesn’t do any good anyway. You have to recognize that every time you’re on a Zoom call with a group or sitting in a meeting, whether it’s with the board or the senior team or the staff, they’re looking at you and looking for leadership, looking for honesty and transparency, and looking for hope. People want to know what the truth is, and they want to know there’s a way home, and even if you don’t exactly know the way home—that somehow you’ll get home. So, those are things to always keep in mind.

BOWDOIN: Did you ever feel that you were way out on a limb with some of the decisions?

ROSE: I felt comfortable with the decisions we were making. Having an anchor is really important. Why are you doing what you’re doing? What are you aspiring to? We were anchored on two things. One was the health and safety of the community. And the second was delivering the best Bowdoin education we could.

Those kept us focused. So, with those in mind, and given the uncertainties and the risks and so forth, I was comfortable.

BOWDOIN: How did the board react when you decided the College should move to remote learning?

ROSE: They gave me full support. I’m certain that individual trustees didn’t agree with every decision I made along the way because they’re human beings with different views, but they never flagged in supporting what I was doing or in giving me the latitude to make the decisions I needed to make. Part of the bargain was that I tried to keep them as informed as I could along the way.

Mostly they would question why this way and not that way and so forth. In those moments I’m sure there were times when I thought that was irritating because I was trying to juggle forty-three things. But it was perfectly fair, perfectly appropriate, and the job that they should do, which is to ask questions and make sure I’m thinking about things in the right way and then ultimately support the president. So, they were great.

And they were also a great resource to me. There was a lot of intelligence, insight, and data-gathering that came from the board that was really helpful. That’s equally true of our faculty and staff across the College—remarkable people and truly outstanding at what they do. And, just to say it, the senior staff at Bowdoin is the best group of leaders I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with some really good ones.

BOWDOIN: Did the College succeed on the second anchor—delivering a great Bowdoin education?

ROSE: We did. Our faculty—and the staff who work with them, particularly in IT [information technology]—did an amazing job. It doesn’t mean it was the same education students would

have gotten, but it was a great Bowdoin education and it pushed them forward. Now, they didn’t have the same set of experiences that they would have otherwise had. It was brutal being in your mom’s basement or whatever version of that they were doing. And so, it had a lot of costs.

But the ability of students to come together in a class to work the knowledge and the insights and the material and achieve, that’s very real. And the feedback we got on the BCQs [Bowdoin Course Questionnaires] from students at the end of each of the semesters was very strong. The two semesters where we had students doing virtual stuff—very strong. It blew me away, actually. It wouldn’t have surprised me if we had just gotten trashed, like “Thank you for trying, but this was a horrible experience.” There was none of that.

BOWDOIN: It’s not unique to Bowdoin, but the Class of 2020, and in particular the Class of 2021, had the rug pulled out from under them by COVID. They had worked so hard to get here but were never able to have a full Bowdoin experience. Do you worry about those classes disconnecting from the College?

ROSE: A little bit. And that would be completely natural. Now, in some ways you could argue maybe they’ll bond more over time. But their experience was different. It was less fun by a long shot. Scary. Uncertain. They didn’t spend nearly as much time on campus as they wanted to or expected to. So, yeah. I think we’ll have to work harder with those classes to make sure they feel really connected to the College. That said, we were able to hold Commencement exercises for both classes—the Class of 2021 in May as usual, on what was a cool rainy day,

and the Class of 2020 later that summer on a hot afternoon—and the joy and pride were amazing and palpable at both. They are great and historic Bowdoin classes.

BOWDOIN: What did you miss the most at Bowdoin during COVID?

ROSE: Oh, being in community with the students, for sure. Just being able to talk to students in a casual way or have lunch or whatever. And attend events that students created, whether it’s the art show or music or theater or sports. All of that. It all went silent. There were some creative ways to do some of it. But not most of it.

BOWDOIN: Any bright spots that came out of the pandemic?

ROSE: For one, we recognized you can get your work done from a lot of places. The whole flexible work thing has kicked in in a way that nobody anticipated. There’s the phone, there’s the meeting in person, there’s Teams, Zoom. They each have different things, but they’re all a powerful part of the toolkit, both internally and externally.

And our faculty discovered that there are some powerful lessons about how to incorporate technology into the way they teach. Many of them were just amazing in how they figured out how to adapt. I don’t think we’re ever going back on that. And that’s good.

BOWDOIN: So, COVID advanced the use of technology in the academy?

ROSE: Pushed it ahead in a way that would have taken far longer. That’s great, and I think we

“You’re not going to stumble on ‘the answer.’ And there is no perfect or optimal answer. There’s just the best path you can take at that moment.”

really have to embrace it, because if we’re going to ever get college costs down, we have to figure out how to get scale into what we do. I don’t know if technology is the only way, but it may be the only way. And if it’s not, it’s one of a handful of ways to scale a place like ours. Otherwise, we’re going to be charging $100,000 and more a year in the not-too-distant future.

BOWDOIN: Let’s talk about those costs. During your presidency, the number of students on financial aid has expanded. The College has increased its aid per student, expanded needblind admission to international students, and is working with ATI [the American Talent Initiative] to increase the number of low-income students. We recently replaced summer work obligations with additional grants

reasonable growth, not like the last twenty-five years, but something more historically normal, and we continue to get support from our alumni and parents, then yes, it’s sustainable. Not only can we do it—we should do it. We should do it because I think we have an obligation, a societal obligation that’s core to our mission, but also because we need socioeconomic diversity as part of the educational experience.

BOWDOIN: One of the constants of your presidency, beginning with your inauguration address in 2015, has been the need for open discourse, and your charge to every class of first-year students that they embrace what you call “intellectual fearlessness.” Discourse is important, of course, especially these days, but why has that been such a big deal for you?

driven by the real concern on the part of a large swath of people that their rights to power and privilege and resource were being deeply threatened by those who are different. That’s not something we’ve had to deal with in a long time. Then COVID came along.

That was a whole huge set of issues for any community to have to come to terms with, particularly a college community. And it created divisions within our various constituencies— faculty, staff, students, alumni, parents—that were true before, but had become even more unreconcilable. One of the things I came to terms with is that whatever decision you were going to make, it was impossible to find a place where everyone would agree. That actually became very clear to me at the end of my first year. So I had to be comfortable with the decision and learned to anticipate heat from every direction.

BOWDOIN: Some of that heat came after you spoke out on behalf of the College. Seems like a no-win proposition. You’ve got those who criticize the president for not speaking out enough on tougher controversial issues or after some tragic or alarming event. And then you’ve got people who firmly believe that it isn’t your job to weigh in on these topics. How have you navigated those competing views?

ROSE: It’s very much driven by values, at least for me. Are the issues I’m speaking about issues that are consistent with the values of the College and do they in some way matter significantly in what the College stands for, or do they have some direct impact on part of our community?

for low-income students and launched the Digital Excellence Commitment to provide equitable technology to all students. Meanwhile, the THRIVE program was established to support low-income and first-generation college students with their transition to college, and the number of first-gen students is up by 115 percent since you became president. All great but all expensive. Is this sustainable?

ROSE: It depends. If the markets have serial years of negative returns, then it will get trickier. But assuming that we have some stability and

ROSE: I’m a true believer in the notion that the critical mission of a great college or university is being a place where we really engage with ideas, all kinds of ideas. But in particular, ideas with which we disagree or don’t understand.

BOWDOIN: It didn’t help that partisan division in society seemed to explode early in your presidency. What did you make of that, and how did it impact the College and your job?

ROSE: We found ourselves as a society having to confront this beast of hate and division

You are seen as the leader of that community. And as the leader and someone who speaks not just for the community but to them, you have a responsibility to voice the values of the College at very difficult and challenging moments. There are always going to be questions about when you do it and when you don’t, and there’s no right answer to that. You do the best you can in figuring it out.

I think, to a large extent, we’ve gotten it mostly right, but not all the time. I can think of a couple examples of that—with the Tree of Life [shooting]. I didn’t name anti-Semitism,

“It wouldn’t have surprised me if we had just gotten trashed, like ‘Thank you for trying, but this was a horrible experience.’ There was none of that.”

specifically. I should have done that. In my comments on the George Floyd murder, I was not fine-grained enough in how I described the police. So you learn as you go along.

Then there’s the bigger question of when you speak up on issues of values. The one that always comes to mind for me is voting rights and the work that [former American Express CEO and chairman] Ken Chenault (Class of 1973, H’96) and [former Merck CEO] Ken Frazier did around the law that was passed in Georgia.

I wrote about that for two reasons. I felt that very little is more fundamental to democracy than the ability to vote. And we’re a quintessentially American institution that supports, defends, and teaches about democracy. We ought to stand up for that.

We also had a significant number of community members—Black members of our community, not just Ken [Chenault]—who were signatories to the [March 31, 2021] letter [to corporate America urging opposition to the voting legislation in Georgia]. And I thought, this is something that is really us, and we’ve got a valued group of our people [who are involved], let’s get behind them. That view wasn’t shared by everybody in our community, and I understand that.

BOWDOIN: But how do you set aside what might be a personal view and take on the voice of Bowdoin College?

ROSE: I agree that you have to set aside your personal views. But actually, you shouldn’t be in this job if your values don’t align with the values of the College. You can’t have a job like this if your own values are not tightly aligned.

BOWDOIN: Bowdoin hasn’t seen the kind of incidents over speech or “cancel culture” that have taken place at some of our peers. Is that just luck, or is the message about “intellectual fearlessness” getting through?

ROSE: I think we are lucky, and I’ll take that every day and twice on Sundays. But I think it’s more than that. There are a couple of things going on. First, I do think, interestingly, that the message is getting through. It has become

an idea that people talk about. Sometimes they joke about the phrase “intellectual fearlessness,” and that means the idea is being discussed and is resonating. That’s a gigantic win. I could never have imagined that.

Second, the work we do here has also been really good. It’s the work that goes on in student affairs. It’s the work our student groups are doing—Republicans, Democrats, the Eisenhower Forum, and others. And it’s faculty bringing folks to campus for thoughtful engagement.

But it’s a difficult issue here, as it is all over the country, and there are no guarantees that things won’t boil over somewhere. I’ve invited conservative speakers to campus and certainly had pushback. That’s why we need to stay on it. I’ve been clear about that, and we’ve worked it in a whole bunch of different ways to good effect, but we’ve still got a lot of work to do.

BOWDOIN: Let’s talk about another big part of your presidency—the efforts at Bowdoin around diversity, equity, and inclusion. You’ve worked on diversity in the business world and you earned a master’s degree and doctorate in sociology studying issues of race in America. But even with those credentials, someone might ask what a person of your background could possibly know about any of this or add to it.

ROSE: I guess I would say a couple things. The power structures in this country are dominated by older white men. So an older white man who understands the issues, both from a practical and intellectual perspective, has the opportunity to move the needle and to call out and call upon peers in a way that might be seen or experienced differently if done by a person of color. And I think there’s a unique ability and an obligation for those of us who are white, straight, older men to do this work.

Now, a critical necessity is that we don’t confuse that with understanding the lived experience. We don’t.

BOWDOIN: What do you hope the College can achieve with this work?

ROSE: That we can create for everyone a sense of belonging. Instead of this idea that you’re

being invited into somebody else’s house, it’s that this is our collective house, and we have to adjust that house to account for everybody— their backgrounds and their identities and their experiences.

We’re also trying to provide equity of opportunity—to have a great Bowdoin experience, whether you’re a student or an employee. It isn’t to provide an equality of outcome, that’s another trope that’s out there. But rather to have the equity of opportunity, to be able to participate in a way that gives you the opportunity to have as great an outcome as the person sitting next to you.

BOWDOIN: Of course, building a more inclusive community can be slow, difficult, and sometimes discouraging work. How can others stay optimistic and motivated to keep at it?

ROSE: First of all, I think there’s been enormous progress in this country and at Bowdoin over whatever measure of time you want. But let’s just take fifty years as one mark. For women, those of color, those in the LGBTQ+ community, among others, in both the numbers and in the experience, the influence, the engagement, and so forth, it’s better. It doesn’t mean we’re there because we’re not. But is it better? Yes.

We’re in a period of incredible tension and divisiveness in our country. And many people are unwilling to give anybody else grace or extend the notion of gratitude or separate intent from whatever actions are being taken. They assume the intent is either malicious or self-serving. Some of that’s true. But in many ways, good people are trying to get this work done, but they find themselves being challenged and denigrated from many sides, and that makes it hard. It also puts the work at risk—stopping it until the next tragic catalyst comes along. We have to be committed to pushing this work forward in a sustained way.

BOWDOIN: You recently asked the faculty to consider credit-bearing courses for low-income and first-generation students in so-called skillbuilding areas. Is that because a liberal arts education isn’t preparing students as well as it once did for what comes next?

ROSE: No. We require students to have thirty-two credits to graduate. Let’s say thirty of them are for whatever it is you want to do that may have no specific relationship to a job. Let’s say you want to go into business and you also want to be a religion major. Now, majoring in religion and thirty classes that form the core of our liberal arts education are incredibly powerful tools for success in business or anything else. And we talk about them all the time: critical thinking, the ability to write, to communicate, to reason well, to collaborate, to be “intellectually fearless”— those are powerful. But what we know about the way employers are making hiring decisions, the competition that our graduates will face from their peers who are doing those jobs and the expectations of those employers mean that students must have a certain core set of skills and tools for the workplace in order to land the jobs and do well in those jobs.

And so—and I’m making this example up— using two of those courses over the four years here to give our students those workplace tools doesn’t dilute the idea or power of a liberal arts education. It recognizes that we have to find a way to get those tools and those skills into the hands of our students. And if we leave it outside of the curriculum as extra work, as we do now, it seriously disadvantages our first-gen and low-income students, who already have to deal with enough extra stuff.

BOWDOIN: Speaking of jobs, one of your responsibilities as president is to raise money for the College. Do you enjoy that?

ROSE: I do enjoy it. You’re not just walking in and grabbing somebody by the scruff of the neck off the street and saying, “Give me some money!” You’re moving along a conversation about how to help the College, and in a way that matters to somebody. They’re great conversations. It doesn’t mean that it’s the right moment in life for somebody or that they can do this or that. Not every conversation results in either the thing that we’re asking people to do—which is fine, because sometimes it leads to another conversation—or the right moment in life for somebody to provide that kind of a gift. But sometimes you get surprised on the upside

as well. I’ve had a few people say, “It’s time to ask me for something.”

BOWDOIN: The ongoing From Here campaign is built on three core promises: that family income will never be a barrier to attending the College, that Bowdoin will continue to provide an enduring and transformative liberal arts education, and that we will give students the opportunities and resources to land their first great job. That last one seems like it’s long been assumed or taken for granted. You would think that if you graduate from a place like Bowdoin, you’ll get a great first job. Why so explicit on that?

ROSE: Two things have happened. The market for jobs hasn’t necessarily gotten tougher— there are moments when there are more open jobs and other moments when fewer jobs are open, depending on the economy. But over the last decade or more, the requirements for entry into those jobs have changed, and not in an insignificant way.

The second is that we have more and more students who come from family backgrounds where an understanding of the variety of employment opportunities out there and the path to those jobs are less well understood than before.

So it requires a very sophisticated career development effort, and very explicit work to be able to ensure that you can take all the great skills of a liberal arts education and the credential that comes from being at a place like Bowdoin and be able to translate that into a job.

I have to say that this is another area where we’ve made enormous progress. Where we are with that effort today is night and day from where we were before. That doesn’t mean we don’t have more work to do—because we do.

BOWDOIN: Like what?

ROSE: How we engage with employers, how we deal with the curricular skill-building issues that we’ve talked about, how we take the incredible enthusiasm and desire of our alumni to work with our students and maximize opportunities for our students. We do really strong work now, and really well-organized work, around all this.

BOWDOIN: Returning to your earlier comment about raising money for the College, just before you started as president, Dave Roux [trustee emeritus, P’14] told you that he and Barb Roux wanted to make a gift of $10 million to the College to support a priority of yours, and you suggested building a new home for environmental studies.

ROSE: Yeah. It’s a beautiful building in a prominent location with teaching spaces designed to be incredibly flexible. It’s also a physical manifestation of our commitment to environmental studies. It’s a huge winner because it makes a substantial statement to our community, to those interested in the College, and to the broader world that this is something really important to us.

BOWDOIN: The Schiller Coastal Studies Center came next.

ROSE: It did. The opportunities at the Coastal Studies Center had been present for a while. We had a wet lab, we had a barn that allowed for a few people to get together, we had a pier and a dock that gave us direct access to the Gulf of Maine and the ocean and the tidal waters there. All of that was great. And there was this opportunity to think about what could take us to the next level. How do we exploit—in the best sense of that word—our location there and its proximity to campus, to create something really great for teaching and learning, for research, and for the broader Bowdoin community to engage?

The study of the ocean is very important to [trustee] Phil and Kim [Gassett] Schiller [P’17]. And so the idea of crafting facilities out there that would really change the game on how we can use that remarkable location was a natural conversation, and they were terrific to provide us with a really generous gift to build out places to sleep, a place for gathering and teaching and engagement—the Living and Learning Center—and then a state-of-the-art dry lab to complement the wet lab, creating a true scientific hub out there.

We’ve had the Bowdoin Scientific Station on Kent Island in the Bay of Fundy in operation

for decades, and now we have the Roux Center and the Schiller Coastal Studies Center. Next up is the John and Lile Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies and moving the [Peary-MacMillan Arctic] Museum to create a physical manifestation of our commitment to the Arctic. John [Class of 1964 and trustee emeritus] and Lile are the parents of four Bowdoin graduates who have a long history of supporting the College and our programs, deep family ties to Alaska, and a passion for the Arctic. Their gift will really transform our multidisciplinary study of that region.

We have these four physical locations that deal with issues of climate, the environment, the Arctic, and the oceans in a very powerful way. The next big project is how we connect all the intellectual projects embedded in each facility into something that, as a whole, is bigger than the sum of the parts. That will be a project that will take place after I’m gone, but we’re already beginning to think about it and what it means. And it will be something unique among liberal arts colleges, and even among most research universities.

BOWDOIN: A point of pride for you?

ROSE: You bet. It’s a big deal. We got a lot done in a COVID-interrupted period, which I am proud of. Let’s also be very clear, there were many, many people who worked on this, it is not about one person.

It’s kind of obvious that we have an opportunity with these four locations to do something that nobody else does.

BOWDOIN: Any sage advice for your successor?

ROSE: You need to be careful about offering advice to somebody who doesn’t ask for it. If there is a question that’s asked, I’ll certainly answer it. If there’s something that the sixteenth president wants to know, I’ll be delighted to provide them with my insights. Always in confidence.

The one thing I tell folks is former presidents need to move on and let the new president do their job. So Julianne and I will head back to Boston and get on with the next chapter of our lives, and I will answer the phone, if and when a call comes in.

BOWDOIN: As you prepare to move into that next chapter of your life, what are the sources of gratification that accompany leadership in tumultuous times like these?

ROSE: It’s the right question, because there is so much about what goes on in this job that is incredibly gratifying.

People will ask me, “Is it a fun job?” I wouldn’t say it’s fun, but it is deeply satisfying. There are moments of great fun and great levity. Even in tough moments, we try to keep our sense of humor about us.

It is the privilege of a lifetime to be president of Bowdoin College, and there are a lot of things that are so satisfying. The first is the mission and being able to participate in and further strengthen a great liberal arts education and experience for amazing students, and to create the conditions for faculty to do their work as great teachers while also producing knowledge and art and performance and so forth. And then to think about the future and what it will take to continue to be one of the great liberal arts institutions, and to help to move the institution forward.

As I said, this isn’t about the individual, this is a collective effort. As president, you have a role to play in helping to move the institution forward, in teeing up ideas, in helping to think through ideas, in rallying others around ideas, and in finding resources for those ideas. It is a collective enterprise, and it’s an incredible opportunity and privilege to be doing that.

The second is the people. The Bowdoin community is amazing. It starts with the students. For me, the opportunity to spend time with our

students is the jet fuel in everything else. They’re amazing in their thoughtfulness, their smarts, their accomplishments, and their humanity.

This is also true of our faculty, staff, trustees, alumni, and parents. Amazing, wonderful, and fun people to be around.

And then there’s the engagement with the life of the College. Whether it’s the opportunity to teach—which I’ve had and am doing again this semester—going to concerts or performances, to dance and theater or the art show at the end of each semester. The sporting events. Going out to various clubs that students invite you to, or just simply being in the café or walking across the Quad.

Being a part of a life of the mind—all of the talks we have, the outside visitors who come in. All of them are interesting; some of them blow your mind.

I have to say—and I put this one in its own category—being in this job has given me a renewed hope. We’re in a very challenging time in the country and the world. We have a land war in Europe, hatred and division fueled by identity, the perils and reality of climate change, and a global economic model in place for at least a half a century that is under stress and attack, among other issues. But when I look at our students and I look at the work that goes on at the College, I have real hope for where we’re headed.

Scott W. Hood, senior

vice president for

communications and public

affairs

and former public radio news director and reporter, leads the team that tells Bowdoin’s stories and advances the mission and strategic priorities of the College.

“The next big project is how we connect all the intellectual projects embedded in each facility into something that, as a whole, is bigger than the sum of the parts.”

BY MEL ALLEN PHOTOGRAPHS BY GRETA RYBUS

Hard, Wonderf ul Li fe

At Buckwheat Blossom Farm, Amy McDougal Burchstead ’98 and her husband, Jeff, nourish animals, forest, soil, and family.

NOT SO MANY YEARS AGO, Amy McDougal Burchstead ’98 and her husband, Jeff, created a thriving CSA* farm in midcoast Maine. Using only draft horsepower, their Buckwheat Blossom Farm raised animals and produce on two leased tracts of farmland in Wiscasset while they slowly built their own homestead on 140 acres of forest that had not seen a family since the nineteenth century. At one time they counted 300 laying hens, 600 meat birds, and fifteen pigs, along with beef cows, sheep, lambs, and turkeys. They had a waiting list of apprentices who wanted to learn from them. With six acres of cultivated vegetables along with meat and woolen goods, they served a winter CSA, a summer CSA, and farmers markets in Portland and Brunswick. “We wanted people to eat from our farm,” Amy says today. “We just felt it was special.” She describes how beautiful the bounty looked when laid out like colorful still life paintings as she met customers who came from miles around to buy pasture-raised meat and produce from ground untouched by chemicals and tilled with not a machine in sight.

That was a decade in the past. On this early blue sky morning, one of the final ones of 2022, I turn onto Hidden Pasture Lane, not far from Wiscasset center. At the end of the narrow dirt road, bordered by forest and patches of open ground with sheep looking on from the other side of fencing, is the timber frame farmhouse built in 2009 by Amy’s Bowdoin classmate Ravo Vihman. Amy, Jeff, their three children, and Amy’s sister, Anna, live here, about a quarter mile from Amy’s mother and stepfather, whose own home was built on this land they bought together in 2002. Now, depending on the season, there will likely only be some twenty goats, two dozen sheep, egg-laying chickens. They still sell chicken and lamb, sheepskins, wool products, and apples at the Brunswick farmers market and wool goods, sheepskins, and goats from their website, but their children have grown up without people coming to their farm, and only their own family gardens to fill a root cellar, canning jars, and a freezer. In a time when many of us measure success with more and bigger and richer, and whether our social media followers have grown, I wanted to meet this farm couple whose value and meaning in their lives emerges, I will find, from a different sort of harvest.

When I walk in, the family is clustered by a wood cookstove. Amy is cooking a vegetable omelet, their border collie, Kit, and Mabel, a Chihuahua mix, stand by. Leah, thirteen, and Asa, ten, are homeschooled, while Ruth, seventeen, studies in an online curriculum, but this is school break. Asa is sitting on stairs, ball cap turned backwards. Ruth and Leah lounge on a sofa. Anna has already been picked up for her day at Spindleworks, the Brunswick art center for adults with disabilities. It is where Amy volunteered while at Bowdoin. “I missed my sister,” she says, whom she watched over while they grew up in New Hampshire. Anna tells people she has “Up Syndrome” and takes pleasure in selling her artwork at exhibits, as she thrives within the security of her big sister’s household. Socks hang on a line over the wood stove, drying. Sheepskins are draped over chairs.

Jeff walks in with an armload of wood. He brings worrying news. He found a ewe yesterday stumbling around, and when he looked this morning, she struggled to stand in her pen. He fears a parasite carried by deer that damages the spinal cord. They have worked with animals for nearly twenty-five years, and for the most part doctor their flocks themselves.

Amy and Jeff look at each other, saying little. They have seen life and death play out as naturally as the seasons change. One winter day they found a newly born lamb in a pasture, gray and still from hypothermia. For three hours Amy immersed it in a warm tub, trickling honey on its gums, massaging it until life returned. “You can’t ever forget a life coming back in your hands,” she says. They will keep checking on the ewe.

There is work to be done. Ruth will go for her daily run, Leah to her reading, Asa to wherever his father will go, especially if it involves a chance to drive the truck, which he has been doing since he was eight. There are horses to feed, wood to clear, hay to carry to sheep in the clearings among the trees, goats to milk in the hoop house, chickens to feed, sheepskins to dry, and—now that breakfast is over—a chicken and potatoes lunch to think about. They say that every day there is more to do than there are hours. They say, “The good stuff is part of the hard stuff.” Everyone goes to where they need to be, retracing steps taken day after day after day.

Opening spread: Amy McDougal Burchstead ’98 sorts wool, sifting chaff and impurities and categorizing the wool by its best use.

Opposite page, left:

Amy strains goat milk, which they drink and use to make yogurt and cheese, through a coffee filter.

Opposite page, right: The sheep are moved to different portions of the forest to manage the health of the landscape. Their thick wool makes them well-suited for winter months.

*community supported agriculture

They say that every day there is more to do than there are hours. They say, “The good stuff is part of the hard stuff.”

Above:

Amy sorts through a table of “grease wool,” which is greasy with lanolin, the oil that sheep produce to protect their skin and that makes the wool waterproof.

Opposite page, top:

A vest Amy made for Jeff before they married. She used a fleece from a pastured sheep and “spun it in the grease,” which keeps the variation of color and leaves the “good sheep smell” in.

Opposite page, bottom:

Jeff delivers hay to the forest flock. In the winter months, when there’s no access to forage plants and grasses, the family supplements with hay.

WHEN AMY AND JEFF tell their origin story, it becomes evident there was no way for them to be in this world without the other. For Amy it begins at Bowdoin, a junior year abroad. The yearlong study was called “Global Ecology,” part of an international honors program. A lifelong vegetarian, she had always cared about the environment, but living with families in England, Turkey, India, Thailand, and Mexico, seeing how they tended gardens no matter their status, how they made beauty from the natural world, opened her to possibilities. “It struck me how in touch with life they were,” she says, “and where their food came from, and where their resources came from. And how out of touch most of us are with that.

I came home wanting to learn about agriculture and how to teach others.” Her Bowdoin roommate Dana Pratt recalls Amy coming home and saying simply, “It’s all about the land.” Jo Horn, another former roommate, adds, “She came back as a person who had context and perspective on what she wanted to do with her life.”

After graduation, she became the education coordinator at the Morris Farm Trust in Wiscasset, a working heritage farm that invites the public to learn about sustainability and growing healthy food. She met Jeff Burchstead at a biodynamic composting workshop in Rockport. They discovered they each had loved Little House on the Prairie. “I thought, I am going to marry this man,” Amy says. Amy’s friends knew this was a different relationship for her when the devoted vegetarian began eating meat from the 250-acre organic farm Jeff managed in Gouldsboro.

By 2000 Jeff had taught himself the rudiments of shearing sheep—a technical and physical skill that requires dexterity, stamina, and the kind of coolness it takes to wrap your body against a sheep’s while handling powerful and sharp metal shears. There were only a handful of professional shearers left in Maine, and he had seen an opportunity. Amy went with him on one of his first jobs. “We were in a poorly lit barn,” she remembers, “and I was holding a big chart of positions he needed to put the sheep in. I read to him what the chart said. [Afterward] we were driving over the bridge to Edgecomb, and it was a beautiful sunset. We were covered in sheep poop, blood, urine, lanolin. We both reeked of sheep but we were excited that Jeff was figuring this out. And Jeff looks at me and says, ‘Will you marry me?’”

“I just figured if she could do that with me, then she could do anything,” Jeff says.

THERE MAY NOT BE many Bowdoin graduates who began married life living in a yurt on uncleared land without running water or electricity, but Amy knew with a certainty that this is the life she wanted. What they lacked in amenities they made up for with an abundance of hope and a plan. They would carve farmland and build a home from the thick woods with the running brook that Jeff had found in 2002 while walking in the forest. When he showed the land to Amy, they agreed: This is the place.

Tree by tree, they cleared enough open space for a road and for a pasture for the animals. When Jeff is asked how he knew he and Amy could do this, he replies, “I knew it had been done before. We’ve never taken the easy way.” When Ruth was born in 2005, she was nursed in the yurt, Amy swinging diapers around to dry. She slept between her parents, a wool hat on her head. They moved with Anna to a nearby farm and, slowly, surely, a clearing emerged, a road was made, and their house was built. Leah came, then Asa, and, as Jeff’s shearing business kept him on the road through much of spring and summer, the stress of doing everything wore both of them down. Then, five years ago, Ruth suffered her first epileptic seizure, and Amy’s goals shifted. “I knew I would be there for her,” Amy says. “I would put some of my work on hold and get her through this.”

Amy would continue to grow her wool business, and Jeff would keep clearing land. They would stay true to their vision of agro-forestry, which provides shade and shelter to flocks while keeping soil alive and nourished, but Amy now would focus more than ever on the children and their passions. French lessons, music lessons, photography lessons, weekly library visits for books on wherever their curiosity led them, being on site when Ruth competed in Nordic skiing. She would raise children filled with competence, able to be deft with their hands, to work with wool, sew and patch, make wreaths, grow their own vegetables, explore a forest, birth and love animals while knowing their nourishment also came from them.

IN THE MORNING Amy and I go into a hoop house where sheep and goats and chickens stay warm and dry in the winter, with hay underfoot. It smells farmy and fur-warm, as chickens cluck and goats and sheep let Amy know it is time to eat. To Amy, sheep are perfect animals, providing wool, meat, and milk in return for pasture and safety. They connect her, she says, to what she calls “agricultural memory,” to sheep farmers through centuries. “The strands of history are unbroken,” she says. “We are part of it.”

She carries fir brush and branches and throws them into the pens for the goats. “The tree roots go deep into the soil,” she says, “bringing up

Above:

Amy milks a goat in one of their hoop houses as her son, Asa, looks on and chickens roam around.

Opposite page, left:

Amy carrying water for the goats and chickens. In freezing temperatures their hoses can’t supply water, so they carry fresh water as part of their daily chores.

Opposite page, right:

Amy snuggles Grem, a Nigerian dwarf breed. During a labor last spring, Grem had three kids “in a bit of a tangle inside her,” and Amy had to assist. “At one point, she just leaned her forehead against mine,” recalls Amy, “as if to say, ‘Just know how hard this is.’” Amy helped untangle and pull out the kids, and all survived.

minerals that they don’t get from surface grasses. And that goes into the milk.” Milking goats is one of her favorite daily tasks. “These are some of my favorite animals on earth, and I sit peacefully with them while I milk. Usually no one is asking me to do anything other than what I am doing, which is a treat.” Her mom or the friends she calls while she milks are used to hearing the sounds of milking on the other end of the line.

We go into their greenhouse, where a dozen sheepskins dry on a long table. She once wrote that a sadness crept in when creatures she had nurtured left the farm, but she knew she was feeding family and neighbors with healthy meat from animals who never knew confinement in factory farms. When the skins are dry, she will send them to a tannery she found that uses no chemicals.

Before noon the family gathers for lunch. Money can be scarce at times, but their life is full of bounty. The table is set with chicken, potatoes, carrots sweet enough to be dessert, sauerkraut, watermelon radishes, goat cheese, applesauce, and apples from Amy’s aunt’s orchard in Fairfield. They practice thrift. They

wear sturdy clothes and when needed they patch and wear them some more. They barter when they can and know they can usually make something better than they can buy new. They make time for small delights, like Asa’s loose tooth that escapes at lunch with the crunch of an apple.

AFTER THE MEAL, the hours slide along into the afternoon. The warmth of the sun softens. Amy and Asa set up her skirting table in front of the wool shed. Inside, large black plastic bags pile atop one another, each filled with raw wool. Some from their own sheep, still more from farms where Jeff has sheared and the farmers are happy to give or sell the wool. Amy hauls out one bag at a time and empties the wool onto the mesh table. Her fingers comb through a handful at a time, and because it needs to be clean for spinners, she discards “the yucky stuff,” the fibers with speckles of manure clinging like burrs. Nothing is wasted. Scraps on the ground will decompose into mulch. Her hands become greasy with lanolin, the oil that sheep produce to protect their skin and that makes their coats waterproof. The bags in the shed are many, the

“My business plan is to have the family working together, each doing our own thing that we’re passionate about.”

daylight too short. Rain is forecast, and Amy has to get as much done as she can before it arrives.

She holds out a handful of clean wool and describes it the way a chef might speak of flavors. “See, this wool here is good enough to go into socks. It’s soft and it’s got some spring to it. It’s not going to slide off. It’s got memory, elasticity.”

Her fingers do not pause. The wool finds a home in a bag labeled “soft.” If she had not told me, I would not have known she was dealing with brain fog and tingling from tick-borne Bartonellosis, and that each day takes “a mountain of remedies.” This day is uncommonly warm, but when it gets cold, she wears mittens her mother made for her with holes for her fingertips. She gathers more wool. It is coarse, what she calls “britchy,” and she puts it in a bag that says “comforters.”

Many days she will skirt like this for hours. I ask where her mind goes while sifting. She smiles. The skirting table is like her studio, a chair in a quiet library. “In my house,” she says, “there isn’t a lot of space to just think. This is my time alone. Here is where I make plans, think about school or a challenge someone may be facing. I design houses in my head. I caught the bug when I designed our house. That’s what I do when I can’t sleep.”

She has brought along the award-winning Ox-Cart Man, a children’s book written by Donald Hall. It tells of an early-1800s farm family on a New Hampshire homestead. The farmer fills his oxcart with woolens, linens, apples, maple syrup, hand-wrought shingles, candles, brooms carved by his son, honey, and potatoes, everything from their land and hands, and he walks ten days to market, sells it all, including the cart, yoke, and ox, then walks home, and the family’s work begins anew.

“When I think of my family’s business plan, it isn’t growing five acres of vegetables to make $30,000,” Amy says. “My business plan is to have the family working together, each doing our own thing that we’re passionate about. Having it be something people can really use. Going to town, selling it all, coming home, and doing it all over again. I just love that. I have such peace with that idea.”

Jeff and the horses clop by, stopping down the road. We hear wood being thrown onto the wagon. Ruth, Leah, and Asa are reading inside

the house. In an hour Anna will return home from Spindleworks. I ask Amy about a typical day and she laughs lightly at the notion, as if there might ever be such a thing. If she made a list of what a day might hold—homeschooling, milking, feeding sheep and goats, making cheese, yogurt, and kefir from their milk, being with Anna, making farm plans with Jeff, preparing meals from scratch morning to night, packing orders for customers, scraping skins, skirting wool, washing yarn when it comes back from a mill— the list would seemingly not end. She tells about speaking at the New England Farm and Fiber Festival in Boston. She was on a panel of women sheep farmers. “I was asked what my biggest accomplishment was and what I was most proud of on our farm,” she says. “I said that every day felt like an accomplishment, a goal achieved. All the children and animals were in their place, fed and safe for the evening, all was quiet. And I had earned an hour or so to read and drink my tea.”

In a few days schooling begins. In two weeks, she and Ruth will spend a few days in a clinic monitoring Ruth’s sleep patterns to see if her now-quiet epilepsy might be affecting her sleep. Soon after, snow will settle on the farm, turning it into a wonderland, making Jeff and the horses happy as they pull logs along the trails. In the morning, Jeff and Asa and Anna will load the truck with coolers full of lamb and chicken and a basket of apples for the winter market in Brunswick, along with yarns, a rug Amy just finished crocheting, wool ready for hand-spinning and felting, comforters, and socks. Amy will stay home and catch up on things, knowing she will never catch up, and that that is part of the challenge and the joy.

“Most people when they drive up here, they’re like, ‘My God, it makes me tired. Just seeing everything you’ve done and everything you still have to do.’ It’s hard for people to understand,” Amy says, “but I like what I’m doing. I like the feeling of getting things done. I wake up each morning excited for my day.”

Opposite page:

Mel Allen is editor of Yankee Magazine in Dublin, New Hampshire.

Greta Rybus is a freelance photojournalist based in Portland, Maine. Find her work at gretarybus.com.

Above: Chorizo made from meat from their farm.

At the entrance to the shelter where Amy milks the goats and where the goats and chickens spend the winter.

UNDER

ORION

BY ERICA BERRY ’14

ILLUSTRATIONS BY TINA BERNING

In researching a thesis that would eventually become a book, Erica Berry ’14 found a night sky that connected her both to a recluse from the nineteenth century who turned out to be a fellow Bowdoin alum and also to the wolves she was studying and writing about. Lone, all of them, but also together under the Brunswick and Oregon sky.

I STUMBLED ACROSS the Bowdoin recluse while I was home in Oregon, researching wolf repopulation for my English-Environmental Studies thesis. I had just returned from a semester abroad, and I was missing my friends, eager to be back in Brunswick.

In one way, the story starts here: me, alone in a rural corner of my home state, thinking about Bowdoin—and about wolves.

In another way, my story with Harold Wilder— the recluse—had already started, though I didn’t know it at the time. It began during my first months of college, in fall 2010, when I received a friend request on Facebook from a Harold Mitchell. The profile picture was sepia, a historic image of young men in old-fashioned suits. I didn’t know any Harolds, but I soon learned that his name was a stand-in for our newspaper, The Bowdoin Orient, which I’d just joined as a staff writer. It turns out that my friend Toph Tucker ’11 had named the page after two Orient founders he read about in Louis C. Hatch’s A History of Bowdoin College.

Harold Wilder 1872 and E. P. Mitchell 1871 weren’t the only Orient editors, but they were the ones who had been struck by the brightness of the constellation Orion while walking across campus one night, brainstorming names for their fledgling paper. Inspired by the sun on the Bowdoin crest, they eventually riffed their way to the unlikely name of The Orient

Knowing what I know now about Harold Wilder, it’s hard not to read that pause to admire the stars as a clue. After all, maybe our futures are writ not in the résumé lines of college—in grants, grades, extracurricular triumphs—but in what leaks between. The zigzagging walks we take with friends, heads tossed back with laughter and haloed in frozen breath. Looking at the sky.

By the time I was a sophomore, I was walking across campus nearly every Thursday night around four a.m. The cold was often obscene, the stars often shocking. I was an Orient editor then, nearly 150 years after Harold. By senior year, I was a coeditor-in-chief. Sometimes we celebrated sending off the paper by going for hot donuts at Frosty’s, but mostly we tried to sleep. How could I realize, then, how rarely I would see this hour in the future, or that, when

looking back at being an editor, I’d remember those blurry walks between night and day as their own reward?

I play this out now because I wonder what Harold recalled about his Bowdoin nights. Decades later, when he stood on the cold floor of that Oregon canyon and tilted his gaze toward Orion, what did he see? Did he think of the Quad? Of Bowdoin? Of The Orient?

I LEARNED that Harold Wilder was born in Rochester, New York, in November 1850. His family was well-connected; his sister, Maud Wilder Goodwin, would go on to carve a prolific career as a writer of novels and histories. Trying to decipher who Harold was at Bowdoin feels like trying to follow a soggy map. The road that emerges suggests the path of someone giddy to be there. Harold was in the Psi Upsilon fraternity, and later the Bowdoin Alumni Association. During his junior year, he received a $50 gold medal—“The St. Croix Medal”—as the best debater of the Athenaean and Peucinian Societies. It’s unclear if this was the prize that got him a sentence of note in that July 1871 New York Times, but there he is, right beneath a notice about three Iowa men going “insane by the excessive use of tobacco”: Harold Wilder won a prize at Bowdoin’s “Junior Exhibition.”

The Orient was founded by a committee of members from Harold’s Class of 1872. It came as “the result of a deep-seated conviction… that Bowdoin should have a representation among college journals,” wrote Harold, the chairperson, submitting a correction to the editor of an 1872 book about Maine media. He was upset that not every Orient editor had been acknowledged by name. Each deserved credit, he wrote, for “conducting the Orient during the difficulties and uncertainties of its first year.” A letter to the editor like this is inked in love and loyalty, but also, it seems, the protective spirit of a natural leader. A person who wants to make sure nobody gets left behind.

The first issue appeared during the spring of Harold’s junior year, when, as the paper reported, unseasonably pleasant weather had “lessened the demand for rubber boots” on campus. It was sugar season, and milk pails

hung on the chestnut trees. “It’s no time to be writing essays when billiards are only ten cents a game,” said a sophomore anonymously quoted in its pages. The parties were lively—one masquerade had costumes ranging from the “dark robed monk to ‘Ye horrid Sophomore’”—and graduation was near. As the Orient quipped: “It is said that all the seniors intend…to go into either law or matrimony.”

Harold did neither, at least not yet. After graduation, he moved to Leipzig, Germany, to study as a teacher of Latin and Greek. In its alumni news section, the Orient wrote that Harold had shared that he’d “never appreciated how slow he was in moving until lately, when he came near being run over by a hearse.” At that time, Leipzig was a hub of Central European railway traffic. Harold had arrived during a period of rapid expansion, with new museums opening, an Opera House just built, shiny trams creaking down the streets.

Can’t you see him—a body frozen amidst the carriages and people? Lit with excitement, maybe, but also the dawning sense that he ticked at a different pace. A churn of longing to be somewhere quieter, somewhere he could see the stars. I see this in Harold, of course, because I know it in myself.

THE SPRING BEFORE I went to northeastern Oregon, I studied abroad at the University of Edinburgh. By the time I got to my dorm that first day in early January, it was 9:30 a.m., and the sky was still dark. It began to sink in that I knew nobody, and nobody knew me. Because I had opted out of an official study abroad program, enrolling directly at the University instead, there was nobody waiting to show me around, no built-in student cohort. I had no obligations outside of class. Compared to the rhythm of Bowdoin life—a Tetris of meal dates, Orient meetings, Outing Club trips, and parties—the number of unfilled hours felt astounding. I loved wandering alleyways and reading in the windows of ancient pubs, but even later when I had made friends, the thrum of relative isolation lingered.

I was a face in a city of so many faces. From the front door of my dorm, sliding into the current of people on the sidewalk, I would take

DECADES LATER, WHEN HE STOOD ON THE COLD FLOOR OF THAT OREGON CANYON AND TILTED HIS GAZE TOWARD ORION, WHAT DID HE SEE?

DID HE THINK OF THE QUAD, OF BOWDOIN? OF THE ORIENT ?

stock of my loneliness. There were euphoric days when I didn’t feel it at all, and other times when it prickled, like a mosquito bite I couldn’t ignore. On the hard days, when I felt near waterlogged with homesickness, my best antidote was to escape entirely. I’d bundle up and put on my running shoes, then jog until the streets turned to trails that snaked their way up Arthur’s Seat. Bent against the wind on the grassy bluffs, my breath the only human sound around, I’d feel a boost of sustenance, a calming glow.

With nobody in sight, there was nobody to remind me I was alone. As the chatter of self-consciousness evaporated, I tuned to another voice in my interior: the part of me that dreamed, observed, and wanted to write.

AFTER GERMANY, Harold’s life settled into the rhythms of house and work. He got married, lived and taught for over a decade in Barre, Massachusetts, and at some point had two daughters, Delia and Ruth. What were those years like? When did things change?

Years after Harold died, Clarence B. Boote, the principal emeritus of Northampton High School, would send a telegram to Oregon, fleshing out the details of his old acquaintance’s life. Boote wrote that Harold had fallen sick in Massachusetts, in a “serious and prolonged” way, and doctors prescribed him fresh air. Was the illness there all along, a shadow beneath his Bowdoin days, or did it only crystallize in his forties, the tunnel of his future narrowing to a point he could not bear? There were rumors— that another man had entered his family, or that he wanted to escape from alcohol—but here is the only truth I am confident in: something in Harold broke. “He disliked formal society, and preferred to be much to himself, or with one or two intimate friends, and the habit

of seclusion was growing upon him before he left New England,” wrote Boote.

What made Harold go west, and what, in that mountainous, northeastern corner of Oregon, made him eventually stop and stay? He landed in Joseph Canyon, ten miles south of Washington and twenty miles west of Idaho. The canyon was formed fifteen million years ago, after a wall of basaltic magma poured out from fissures in the earth, boiling groundwater and volatizing everything in its path—the largest eruptions in North American history.

A decade before Harold arrived, the US Army had forced the Nez Perce to abandon the homeland they had shared since time immemorial. What did Harold know of them, when, in late 1888, he settled in the very canyon their tribes had wintered so many seasons? He would have found a creek full of native steelhead, shade from old-growth Ponderosa Pines, bighorn sheep and cougars toeing the canyon walls, peregrine falcons and bats roosting in their rocks, wolf howls echoing through their walls. A cantilevered cliff, and beneath it, a small cave, Harold’s home during his first few years in Oregon.

THEY SAY that cows outnumber people ten to one in Wallowa County. I went to that rural corner of Oregon because wolves had recently reestablished packs there, and their return was raising controversy, which drew me in. I did not want to write a thesis about a subject I understood, or a subject where the answer was easy. It seemed that researching how humans lived beside wolves would give me a chance to think about how we lived beside one another. I was interested in the stories we told about habitat, about family, about belonging.

While in Edinburgh, I applied for a summer research fellowship. When the funds arrived

in my account, I booked a plane ticket back to Oregon and then talked my parents into letting me swap the back seats of their old minivan with camping supplies and drive five hours east. I’d return to Bowdoin in July, hunker down at the library and be with friends, but first, I’d get more practice being alone. Not in a city, this time, but among the trees.

After being driven to extinction in the mid-twentieth century, wolves had regained a foothold in the American west. The ones that wandered into Oregon were descendants of a mid-1990s governmental campaign that airlifted wolves from Canada to Yellowstone National Park and Idaho. In part because Wallowa County was on the state border, it was one of the first places where wandering wolves established packs. I went because it seemed like a hotbed of both lupine activity and political controversy. I wanted to talk to people on all sides of the issue. The livestock producers, the environmental conservationists, the government biologists, the shop owners who made a living off tourists who came from cities like mine.

Much of the coverage I read about wolves seemed to center on an invisible, mythical divide— “urban” versus “rural,” “environmentalism” versus “agriculture,” “us” versus “them”—and I didn’t trust it. My own life had shown me that people, our identities, were muddier. Though I grew up in the city, my family was often in the country, either on the Oregon sheep farm where my paternal grandfather lived, or in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, where my maternal grandparents lived at the end of a long dirt road, with a horse and a mule. Family called my sister and me “city girls,” but back in Portland, friends joked about our “farm roots.” I was used to feeling slightly out of place in each landscape, which is another way of saying each world offered me a sense of home.

ONE AFTERNOON, I was basking in the airconditioning of the Wallowa County Historical Museum, when, hunting for stories about wolves, I flipped open a Spring 1999 copy of Signal Mountain, “Northeast Oregon’s own historical magazine.” When I opened an article headlined “The Recluse of Joseph Canyon,” my eye snagged on familiar words: Bowdoin College. My eyes popped. I hadn’t yet connected Harold with The Orient, but running into any Bowdoin person on the West Coast was a thrill—one I now learned applied even for those who’d been dead almost a century. The museum I now sat in was located in the old 1888 bank building, a place Harold would almost certainly have passed through in Wallowa County. From here, Massachusetts Hall was 3,024 miles away. What were the odds that both of our bodies would have moved between these two brick buildings, more than a century apart? It seemed impossible.

In the article, which didn’t list an author, I read that Harold eventually left his cave and built a small homestead in the canyon, where he cultivated grain and hay and kept a band of sheep with dwindling success. As another local history book put it: “The gentle scholar was not born for the rugged tasks of western ranching.”

He was described as “quite likable,” a regular correspondent with family and friends in the East, the sort of man who never missed going into town to vote in an election. He wrote often and accumulated a pile of compositions. The walls of his cabin were lined with books, mostly his favorite: English literature.

When flames one day devoured his house, what did Harold try to save? “There’s no telling what was lost,” reads the Signal Mountain article. “Perhaps the world was deprived of another Henry David Thoreau.” I later found a photo from after the fire—the only one I’ve seen of

Harold—where he leans against the entrance of the chicken shed where he lived after losing the cabin to flames. The building is gap-toothed, as weathered as white-haired Harold. Frowning beneath a thick mustache, he squints at something in the distance.

BEFORE I WENT to Wallowa County to write about wolves, I went there to climb. It was my junior year of high school, and we spent a long May weekend mountaineering. As usual, I was one of only two girls. On trips like these, we’d swap dog-eared copies of books—Thoreau, Dharma Bums, Into the Wild—and I’d read myself into their pages.

When did I realize that the stories about how to find myself creatively, how to find myself in nature, were stories about men curling away from other people? I wanted to be a writer, but what did I know about reconciling my twin impulses toward solitude and community, toward

wandering into the woods and hunkering with loved ones by the fire? When did my focus shift away from the rugged outline of those who broke the trail and toward the people who stood behind them, who got left behind?

I last visited Wallowa County in summer 2021, spending a night camping en route to a month-long writing residency in the Midwest. Grateful for the gift of time and space to focus, I spent my first day there trying to reconcile my feelings about departure. Back in Portland, the man I was dating at the time sent me a photo from a long bike ride he had taken from our apartment. In choosing to write, was I turning my back to a life off the page?

At some point after midnight, a rustle woke me. Annoyed at my fear, I unzipped my tent to look around. I didn’t see anything really, not until I looked up. How quickly it happened, then: my body stayed in Oregon, but my head zoomed toward the Atlantic, where, on a patch of chilly Quad, Orion was looking particularly bright.

DESPITE LIVING in “a section of the frontier which the United States mail often does not reach for weeks at a time,” as Harold wrote in an update to The Orient, he kept in touch with his wife and daughters. He sent money home and received socks, handkerchiefs, and, once, a box of homemade chocolates in return.

One day, his daughters came to see him. I don’t know what year it was, so I don’t know how old they were when they finally stood at the edge of Joseph Canyon, staring down at the rudimentary house their father built after leaving theirs. “They sent word that they were there,” read the Signal Mountain article. Did they call down or get a messenger, someone skilled at scrambling up and down the rocky terrain? Harold’s response was resolute: he wouldn’t come up, but they were welcome to descend if they wished. The sisters had already crossed the plains and the Rockies for their father. They would not scramble any farther if he would not come up. They left without seeing him.

Because I don’t know if Harold’s cabin had already burned, I’m not sure where to imagine him going when his daughters fade from the horizon. Did he recede into his cabin, open a favorite book, and fall into its pages? Or did he

sit outside, waiting for the lid of the canyon to pinken into dark, for that hunter Orion to step into the sky?

Harold had never been squeamish about his end. “It is my will and last request, that my body be burned on a log,” he wrote before signing his will. He stacked a pyre of fifteen-inch wood near the homestead for this purpose, requesting his ashes be scattered by a nearby rock spire. His wishes never came to bear. In late 1927, a friend of Harold’s found his body by the trail. He was unconscious; the doctor later suspected he had been bitten by a rattlesnake. After receiving medical help, Harold asked to be left alone. When a friend with nearby property later checked on him, though, he found Harold unwell. They carried him out of the canyon on a stretcher; a few days later, he died at the house of another friend.

That month, in November 1927, the Bowdoin Alumnus wrote that Harold had moved west after twelve years of teaching in Massachusetts, and now lived on “a large ranch…which he still maintains, although assisted by a partner, as his health has failed somewhat.” It seems likely that, by the time the piece was printed, Harold Wilder was dead.

In those early decades of the 1900s, hunters killed almost 400 wolves for bounty payments in Oregon. Had Harold ever turned a wolf pelt in, traded it for $25? A howl is a form of communication, the sonic constellation of a pack. What did he feel, lying alone in that cold canyon, if he heard the wolves talking across the land to one another? By the mid-1940s, Oregon’s nights would be quieter. All the wolves would be gone. Even Orion has two companions by his side: Canis major and Canis minor

I BECAME INTERESTED in wolves in part because I was interested in the stories we told about them—in how we projected our fears and desires onto them. I wanted to understand real wolves, but also the ones I so often heard conjured in idioms, metaphors, fairy tales.

The first time I heard about Harold, at the beginning of my research, he struck me as a lone wolf. Someone who preferred to wander alone. Only later, learning more about lupine biology, did I learn that popular conceptions of

“lone wolf” are factually awry. Sure, a lone wolf has left its natal pack, but in the wilderness, this tends to mean that a young wolf has gone to look for a mate or new territory. A lone wolf does not set out alone because he wants to escape other wolves—he goes because he wants to find them. When I heard this, I thought of the cabin Harold had built with walls lined in novels. I liked to imagine him as someone who was searching for, rather than running from. Had he found what he was searching for?

I now know that summer of 2013 as the time I began orbiting wolves and the stories we tell about them. “Storytelling takes time. Years,” said Professor Anthony Walton on the first day of Telling Environmental Stories, the Bowdoin class I took that opened my eyes to the type of nonfiction I wanted to write. Ten years later, that orbit has found its end as a book. But when I look back on that first research trip, it’s not just the Canis lupus I think of. It’s Harold. If the wolves gave me something to write about, Harold made me think about the shape of a creative life.

The year after graduate school, I was offered a fellowship to teach as a writer-in-residence in northern Michigan. This is my chance, I thought. The first time I’d ever live entirely alone. With my life boiled down to the bone, I’d have little to distract me from writing. But there, adrift from anyone I knew, I struggled to express myself. It wasn’t until the pandemic sent me home to Oregon—back to the entanglements of family and friends, the familiar shade of old firs—that I felt myself nested. I sold the book; I turned it in.

Every writer charts a different path through their work. So much of creativity is a mystery— opaque not only to the viewer but to the creator—and sometimes the best we can do is learn to find the footprints of those who have come before. We can never know what it felt like to make those tracks, only how it feels to trace their trail. To trust ourselves to know, under the same stars, when it is time to step away.

Writer Erica Berry ’14 lives and works in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Her nonfiction debut, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, has just been published by Flatiron/Macmillan (US) and Canongate (UK).

As the assistant dean for inclusion and diversity at Bowdoin, Eduardo Pazos Palma oversees everything from religious, spiritual, and cultural experiences on campus to evaluating and adjusting Bowdoin’s social pendulum with the cadence of tradition.

Keeping the Tempo

It seems there’s been a shift in the way people approach faith on campus. What changes have you seen?

In the last fifteen years or so, we have seen a huge shift away from Christianity and a big increase to agnostic or “not affiliated”—not in the atheism category. It’s evolving the way students understand religion and spirituality for themselves, but it is also evolving the place and function of religious and spiritual groups on campus. To a certain extent, it has helped the religious and spiritual groups on campus see the great cultural value that religions bring to the conversation around diversity and identity. For instance, this year we celebrated the biggest-ever Diwali event on campus, had a huge audience at lessons and carols for Advent, and our Hillel group keeps being one of the most active groups, and the Muslim Student Association has grown every year.

There is a sense in which religious traditions—I would argue traditions in general— often feel like home. They’re not perfect. There’s certainly a lot to tease out. But there is something about ritual. I think especially in times of crisis all of us crave tradition and ritual. That was one of the hardest things about the pandemic, that it took away. It wiped out all of our traditions, our weekly, our yearly, our semesterly gatherings. It wiped out the ability to do those things, and it left a lot of us feeling

unmoored. Because these traditions and these celebrations and rituals, which often coincide with the sun or the moon or the time of the year, we lost those. Tradition is a cadence—it is constantly telling you the tempo—and we lost it. That was devastating for a lot of people.

On the other hand, we started to realize the role spirituality plays in holistic health. Spirituality can be an important source of wellness, and we’re starting to see that with the huge increase in the practice of yoga and mindfulness, meditation—loving kindness and compassion meditation. Those are all spiritual practices. You don’t have to practice them spiritually; there is a secular version of it. But they are grounded in spiritual practices. I think we have seen an increase in people going on retreats—a silent retreat, a meditation retreat, a walking retreat. Those are also spiritual practices. In general I think it is helping us understand that we can tell stories that are bigger than us, stories that give us meaning, and stories that help us frame this interconnectedness that we all have.

For some of us, I would argue that the interconnectedness extends beyond the human realm into the realm of this Earth and the planet. I think it frames this idea of eco-climate anxiety—on the one hand, we’re feeling it because we continue to harm our ecosystem and our habitat, and on the other hand I

think it gives us a lot of source of healing and rest to be able to find ways to be connected to nature, to the ecosystems around us. I think we’re learning more and more that we are barely separated from the microbes on the Earth—in the water and in the soil. We are made of viruses and bacteria and microbes, and I don’t know how separated we are. We might be a lot more connected to even the tiniest, minuscule pieces of the Earth than we think. Whatever is happening to the Earth will affect who we are and how we see the world. I think of it like a fabric. A thread in one corner is not far removed from the other corner. They’re not next to each other, but if you tug at this side you’ll be tugging at the other thread. I find that deeply beautiful and inspiring. And a huge responsibility as well—to take care of each other and take care of the Earth.

You see often in the media the idea that to be a globalist or to seek a global future is somehow anti-nationalist or just bad. But students seem more interested in each other’s cultures than in previous decades. What do you think is causing that shift, if that’s what you see?

Across the country we are graduating from high school the most diverse class of students ever. And I think students have a very different understanding and appreciation for diversity than a lot of us had growing up. And I think

that has changed in really positive ways and will continue to change probably for the next fifty or one hundred years.

An understanding of difference has helped us see that diversity is resilience. Diversity is an added benefit—it makes us better, it makes us kinder, and it makes us understand each other better. When you live in a diverse community, there are so many boxes there’s almost no boxes. Which I find so beautiful because it really allows for the authentic self to come through in ways that maybe other generations before didn’t fully get.

There is a divide in how people view the world, especially when it comes to diversity and globalism. Are we at Bowdoin looking through rose-colored glasses? Are we preparing students for others’ perceptions of reality? That’s a question we often talk about in my world. Here’s what I know. We have incredibly intelligent, capable, and just amazing students who join this community every single year. And we have equally talented staff and faculty who educate them every single year.

This generation of students that is here at Bowdoin right now, every single one of them came of age during the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of George Floyd. For them, they grew up understanding that, when the system is not working for us, we get together and we go out in the street and we protest, and we change things. And we change the way we talk about each other, the way that we legislate each other, and the way that we make things happen in our society.

Students are really aware of the social changes that they are seeing around them. When we create environments like we have at

Bowdoin, where there is conversation and education and a plurality of ideas—that prepares you better than anything else to be able to go out into the world and to be able to experience this difference of ideas and to have the stamina and the resilience to encounter whatever it is that you’re going to encounter. I think having a strong base and foundation is one of the best things we can do for our young adults as we’re helping them to graduate into “the real world.”

When it comes to students, do you see empathy being extended to everyone?

I think social movements are reactionary, and they go on a pendulum. I don’t think it’s a perfect balance right now. Because the conversation in the last two or three years has been so centered around systemic inequalities, we could, I think, do a better job to have a bigger understanding of the way that all of us need to be kind, compassionate, and empathetic toward each other. I think that’s the goal of a lot of the work that we do in inclusion and diversity. It really is to center the dignity of every single person in our community. Every single person. It doesn’t matter if you and I deeply disagree on something. You as a human being are worth every single ounce of respect and dignity because that’s really what creates community in ways that create transformation and the common good for all of us.

Are there any cultural groups or segments that are kind of beyond the pale in that regard? Two things: On the one hand, in order to be part of the Bowdoin community, all of us— students and employees—agree to abide by our nondiscrimination clause, which means that I cannot refuse to meet with you because of

your identity. That would be in violation of our nondiscrimination clause. However, that doesn’t mean that you cannot have your own thoughts about ideas, policies, identities, or whatever it is that you want to have. It just means that, in order for us to act and to be in community, we are saying that we will not discriminate against each other based on identity. So, I think for the College, our desire to be an inclusive community is essential, and the fact that we all choose to be here when this is one of the conditions to do so, that means it’s a pretty good place to be.

But, to your question whether any one of us is beyond the pale, I think every single generation across time has experienced extremism in one level or another. Can we eradicate it altogether? I don’t know. Optimistically, I would want to say yes. But I don’t know. I’m not a social scientist with that expertise. I don’t know what the data show about whether extremism is eradicable. I don’t know. But I do know that extremist groups represent a tiny minority of the people around. If we let them, they can take up a huge amount of the space that we have to think about each other, to think about our community, to enact policy and systematic changes for our community, and I don’t think we can or should spend as much time on that.

There are going to be folks who live in very extreme ways. I’m going to respect them. I want to treat them with dignity. But the majority of us see each other and see a sense of common ground. We may not agree on everything—and, by the way, I don’t want us to all agree on everything. I think this would be a really sad community if all of us agreed on everything, and I would be very concerned for us. We can have deep disagreements and deep respect and love for each other.

An understanding of difference has helped us see that diversity is resilience. Diversity is an added benefit—it makes us better, it makes us kinder, and it makes us understand each other better.

It’s hard. I’m not saying that this is easy work. It’s hard work. But I think it’s worth it. And I think what it’s showing us is that there is a lot of benefit that comes from pluralistic societies that make space for difference and for each other. We don’t have to understand absolutely every element of every identity out there. I think it’s impossible to do that. But we can certainly make space for people to live their full authentic selves and to live to their best capacity. When we do that, especially for those in our community who are the most marginalized, we elevate the whole community. The better job we do, I believe, of taking care of those who have been on the outskirts, the better job we do for everyone. And we need to focus on that more than focusing on the tiny minority of folks or groups who live in the extremist outskirts of different ideologies.

Some talk about colleges as places people aren’t allowed to express points of view that may have been standard twenty, thirty, or fifty years ago. What do you say to that?

It can be easy to rest in echo chambers of people who believe like you, speak like you, think like you. It’s harder to be a community when there are deeply held distinct beliefs and still deeply held respect and dignity for each other. I want Bowdoin to be—and I think we are—the latter. We want to be brave. We want to be critical. That is foundational to the scientific process, to the democratic process, and to the diversity process.

Our students, years from now, will be leading the most diverse workforce ever. It only helps to know about religious and cultural holidays, to know how to attract and retain a global workforce and a global clientele. I think we’re

doing really good work preparing students to excel in today’s world and to lead in tomorrow’s world too.

What does a good day look like for you?

I love that question. A good day often has tons of meetings where I’m talking to colleagues about how we are supporting students. A good day also looks like getting ready for a program where students are going to get together and center a part of their identity with others who are part of their community and celebrate. Normally, there’s food. Normally, there’s really good music, a lot of laugher, and a lot of community-making.

I also think a good day involves us continuing to think about what are we missing? Who are we missing? What do we need to do to make this better? Because a good day also includes a lot of learning for each other and for ourselves.

What do you say to an older white man who says, “Between toxic masculinity and white privilege I feel like I’m supposed to apologize for my existence”?

I am a man, and I think a lot about this. If you look at the data, in terms of performance and overall wellness, men are struggling. We’re dying earlier. We’re more addicted to substances. We die by suicide more often, we access mental health resources at very low rates. Nationally, men take longer to graduate college and do so with lower GPAs, and fewer men than women are entering college. Men are struggling. Call it whatever you want to call it, but there is no doubt that the system of “traditional masculinity” men built for themselves over the last century is not working, and we’re seeing the effects on men in our country. This does not mean that we no longer have entire societal systems

that advantage men and disadvantage women. Those are very much still there—the pay gap, the glass ceiling—but both things can be true at the same time. That is part of what we mean when we talk about “toxic masculinity” and why it is so important that we talk about healthier ways to embrace masculinities and work together for the health and wellness of all people. At the end of the day, I want to see us in a place where all people—regardless of gender—are thriving.

When we look back at who we were even ten years ago, hopefully we have changed. I have changed a lot. My language has changed. The things I appreciate have changed. The things I laugh about and the things I don’t have changed. The things I cry about, and the things I don’t have changed. Change is the only constant. So what do I say to someone who feels like they’ve been alienated and left behind? I say we need you. We need everyone. But more than anything, we need older white men right now to say, “I want to live in a place where people can truly bring their full authentic selves, where people are healthier and have more access and there is less poverty and oppression.” There is plenty of work to be done for my dear friends, those men. We cannot do this without them.

Eduardo Pazos Palma is assistant dean of student affairs for inclusion and diversity and director of multicultural student life. Born and raised in Mexico, he graduated from Boston Baptist College and earned a master’s degree at Yale Divinity School. Prior to joining Bowdoin, he worked in higher education, in business and finance, and as pastor and chaplain for immigrant families in Texas.

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

Whispering Pines

Inspiring Generations

The hard work and dedication of two women who immigrated to the United States in the 1900s have echoed through the lives of three generations of Bowdoin alumni.

THE SECOND SUNDAY IN MAY is Mother’s Day, established by presidential proclamation in 1914. Eleanor Roosevelt organized the American Mothers Committee in the 1930s, with support from J.C. Penney’s Golden Rule Foundation. Each state committee selected a Mother of the Year, who could become National Mother of the Year.

Mary Daly was born in 1890 in St. Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica, one of eight children. Her father died when she was ten, and Mary was sent to live with distant relatives; her formal education ended in middle school. At church in nearby Mandeville, she met David Dickson, who had been working as a clerk. David had been offered a job in Maine, and in 1911 he sailed for America, working as a janitor at a Portland music store after the original job fell through. He sent for Mary in 1912, and she made her way, unaccompanied, to Portland. They were married on Christmas Day 1912. Mary worked as a seamstress and laundress, while David was a shipping clerk, piano refinisher, a janitor at the store, a porter, and a bartender/steward for events at Bowdoin.

The Dicksons raised four sons and a daughter. The sons went to Bowdoin, where they distinguished themselves academically and in their subsequent careers: Leon ’35, a physician; Audley ’38, an optometrist; David ’41 a college professor, college president, and a Bowdoin trustee; and Fred ’45, a physician. Lois, the youngest, was president

of her class at Radcliffe. As vice president of the College Board, she was the architect of Pell Grants, which enabled generations of students to attend college. Bowdoin awarded her an honorary degree in 1984.

In her letter supporting Mary’s nomination as 1950 Maine Mother of the Year, seventeen-year-old Lois wrote, “Her children not only were fed and clothed well, but had to perform and appreciate music, read good books and cultivate learning in every form. … [S]he and her husband literally moved financial obstacles of mountainous proportions to educate them … in the best colleges and universities.” Those values were passed on to a second and third Bowdoin generation: Leon Dickson Jr. ’67; David Dickson II ’76; Lois’s daughter, Ambassador Susan Rice H’18; and Jacob Dickson ’13.

Two years later, Maine’s Mother of the Year was named National Mother of the Year. Toy Len Goon had come from China as the bride of Dogan Goon, who ran a Portland hand laundry. Research by anthropologist (and granddaughter) Andrea Louie ’89 revealed that Dogan had entered the US from Canada in 1912 without documentation. In 1917 he was interrogated about his status. His willingness to serve in the Army during World War I gained him US citizenship. In 1921 he traveled to Taishan, China, to marry twenty-nine-year-old widow Toy Len Chin and bring her to Portland. When Dogan died in 1941 from Army training shrapnel wounds, the couple’s five boys and three girls ranged in age from four to nineteen. Toy Len put in sixteen-hour days at the laundry, assisted by the children, who performed age-appropriate tasks. Teachers brought books to the laundry so that the children could continue their education. They all went on to professional careers and lives of service, including Ed Guen ’49, a research chemist and Bowdoin Common Good Award recipient, and Albert Len ’51, an estate tax lawyer. As with Mary Dickson’s family, Toy Len Goon’s legacy at Bowdoin College extends for three generations: Leo Guen ’76, Tim Guen ’79, Terry Guen-Murray ’81, Andrea Louie ’89, Nik Mitsopoulos ’08, Tim Mitsopoulos ’12, and Tori Guen ’13.

Toy Len Goon’s selection as National Mother of the Year in 1952 included a trip to Washington, DC, and photo opportunities with Bess Truman and with the Maine congressional delegation. The Maine Historical Society website includes a collection of photographs and items donated by members of the Goon clan.

Mary Dickson’s and Toy Len Goon’s stories are a Mother’s Day gift to us all—and a reminder that each first-generation college experience begins with someone whose hard work, sacrifice, and faith in the transformative power of education may last for generations.

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

THE RESPONSIBLE TRAVELER

I am fortunate to have traveled my whole life. I first traveled internationally when I was seven, during a trip to Japan to visit my uncle. I have since visited seventeen countries, including nine in my role with Kaya Responsible Travel, which provides volunteer and internship opportunities for college students in the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

My focus is on creating group programs that support the UN Sustainable Development Goals and partnering with local communities on sustainable community development and environmental initiatives. I absolutely love working with our ground teams in-country and being a liaison between universities and local organizations. People often think of my job as just getting a free vacation, but that’s not the case. While every trip is fascinating, it is also extremely hard work.

I have my parents and Bowdoin to thank for inspiring my love of the road less traveled. My parents made sure that traveling wasn’t just about seeing the tourist destinations. We often stayed with family or friends who were able to give us better insight into local life. And when I was thirteen, I borrowed my mom’s camera for the first time while traveling in Vancouver. I’ve had some kind of camera in my hand ever since.

Bowdoin deepened my appreciation for both travel and photography. I majored in environmental studies and visual arts, became an avid whitewater canoeist, was a leader in the Outing Club, taught photography for a summer in Varanasi, India, and studied abroad for six months in Tasmania, Australia.

Today, when I’m not traveling to new destinations or finding new ways to share the world with others in a sustainable and responsible way, I love to be outside, hiking, taking pictures with my birder husband, and paddling with my pup—a part lab, part Basenji named Teddy.

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

ALUMNI

PHOTO: JESSICA SCRANTON

EMILY TONG ’11

Emily Tong ’11 sees being an introvert as a strength. It allows her to tune into cultural differences and adapt to a wide range of communication and work styles across borders.

A Great Time to Jump In

Charitable gift annuities provide annual payments for up to two people—that could be you and someone you care about. For more than three decades, Bowdoin has offered donors a reassuring stream of income for life with payments backed by the resources of the College. With the increase in payout rates that went into effect on January 1, 2023, now is a very good time for donors to establish gift annuities—making meaningful gifts to Bowdoin and becoming valued members of the Bowdoin Pines Society.

Are you curious? Talk with Nancy Milam or Liz Armstrong in the Office of Gift Planning at 207-725-3172 or giftplanning@bowdoin.edu to learn more about how charitable gift annuities can be a part of your plans.

1956

From Henry Swan: “Judy Swan died November 5, 2022. She was married to Henry Swan for sixty-eight years. Judy enjoyed a twenty-year career as librarian and counselor at Lincoln School in Providence, Rhode Island, after completing her education at URI with a master’s degree in library science. She and Henry had a wonderful life with their three children, four grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren, enjoying summers cruising the New England coast with occasional trips to the Bahamas, as well as trips to the Greek Isles, Italy, and England.”

1963

Reunion

Excerpted from the publisher. George Smith’s Burden of Command, a work of historical fiction, was published in October 2022. “The book takes place in 1968 when the war in Vietnam is getting hotter, as are the anti-war protests back home, and tells the compelling story of how the conscience of an officer evolves and leads to personal action.”

1966 From Richard Howe: “After graduating from Bowdoin College, Mr. Howe enjoyed a successful thirty-year career in real estate development in the US. In 1997, he traveled to China and was captivated by its ancient culture. He moved there the following year and, over the next twenty-five years, he traveled throughout China and read hundreds of books on the history, culture, and philosophies of ancient China. In 2010 he cofounded a wine importing company, EU Wines, which imports European wines into Xiamen, China. He and his wife, Luo Lan, travel often to European winemakers, tasting wines, enjoying

the sights and foods of Europe and hosting friends and guests at their wine club in Xiamen. Mr. Howe has had a lifelong passion to understand the mysteries of the universe. In 2020, during the pandemic, he was invited to translate several Chinese cultural-historical books for Fujian Peoples Publishing House. He enjoyed the assignment so much that he embarked on writing a three-book adventure series about unlocking the hidden meanings behind many of the ancient wisdoms. The first book, Dougong— The Journey to ChangAn Book I, was released this month [November 2022] on Amazon.com. The second and third books will be released in 2023. As the hero in his novels once explained, pointing to the nighttime sky, ‘The ancient teachings are like those blurry distant stars … most people just see stars … but when you are open to life’s experiences, the experiences can connect to our inner spirits and reveal the hidden meanings of the ancient teachings … and then … only then can we realize the timeless wisdoms … the Tao is not a concept, it is an experience!’ Mr. Howe has always had a passion for life, and these books are the culmination of a life well lived. For more about him, visit his author’s website www.rhowe-haozi.com … or stop by the wine club for a winelover’s, book-lover’s free glass of wine. Cheers! Richard (Haozi).”

1974

From the publisher.

“Alvin Hall has released his new book, Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through Living History of Black Resistance (Harper One 2023). The book chronicles how, between 1936 and 1967, The Negro Motorist Green Book guided Black travelers to businesses where they could safely

Remember

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

Thomas C. Weatherill ’48

July 5, 2022

Sherman E. Fein ’49

October 29, 2022

Norman L. Rapkin ’50

December 30, 2022

Peter D. Blakely ’51

December 6, 2022

Richard E. Swann ’52

October 10, 2022

James P. Gaston ’54

November 13, 2022

Willis H. Goodman ’54

May 24, 2022

Akira Nakane ’54

July 18, 2022

Xenophon L. Papaioanou ’54

November 25, 2022

Harry S. Keller III ’56

October 2, 2022

George A. Vannah ’58

June 6, 2022

Martin Gray ’59

October 31, 2022

T. James Hallee ’59

October 5, 2022

Philip R. Kimball ’59

December 23, 2022

Porter W. Dawley Jr. ’60

November 23, 2022

George P. Flint ’60

November 28, 2021

Dixon D. Griffin ’60

October 15, 2022

Tyler I. Bean ’61

December 25, 2022

Robert E. Corvi ’61

October 19, 2022

Thomas Eccleston III ’62

October 3, 2022

Paul R. Riseman ’62

December 8, 2022

John A. Graustein ’63

October 23, 2022

Robert L. Simon ’63

December 15, 2022

Erick Leadbeater ’64

December 15, 2022

Stephen D. London ’64

December 19, 2022

John D. Hallisey ’65

November 27, 2022

Charles R. Vaughan ’65

September 24, 2022

John D. Williams ’68

December 16, 2022

Richard L. Paulding ’69

October 14, 2022

Robert B. Carpenter ’71

December 21, 2022

Richard S. Parasiliti ’72

November 14, 2022

Mark D. Lechner ’74

December 16, 2022

Craig H. Kronman ’75

October 20, 2022

Robert G. Rowe III ’76

October 10, 2022

Thomas E. George ’80

November 30, 2022

Craig T. Gardner ’82

December 23, 2022

Caroline Kennedy ’82

October 1, 2022

Stephanie Cadigan ’83

October 22, 2022

Philip C. Wick ’93

October 4, 2022

Kristin A. Todd ’99

November 30, 2022

Elizabeth M. Yanez ’11

January 2, 2023

Charlotte Billingsley ’24

December 26, 2022

Omar Osman ’26

December 3, 2022

HONORARY

C. Lee Herter H’13

September 20, 2022

FACULTY/STAFF

Sally Butcher

October 15, 2022

Charles Morneau

November 28, 2022

Mike Linkovich

December 4, 2022

Howard S. Vandersea

December 29, 2022

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.

PHOTO: ARTIST_CREDIT BOWDOIN MAGAZINE WINTER 2023 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 51

rest, eat, or sleep. Hall travels from New York to Detroit and then to New Orleans, finding the advertised stops still in business or now transformed for other uses. More important, he collects the memories of the last living witnesses for whom The Green Book meant survival, introducing us to remarkable people who not only endured but rose above the hate and learned to forgive while making sure their oral histories will never be lost or forgotten. It’s written as a stand-alone book, not as a companion book to Hall’s award-winning podcast series. The book contains more contextual information, as well as truly moving stories and personal recollection to expand the understanding and connections to incidents, proposed legislations, and policy issues very much in the news today.”

From Deborah Swiss: “After thirty years of writing nonfiction as my adjunct career, I’m delighted to say that the Australian film company Midnight Madhouse Productions will be turning my book The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia’s Convict Women into a television series. The Tin Ticket relays the largely unknown history of three of the 25,000 girls and women who were trafficked from Great Britain to Australia as ‘tamers and breeders’ and who ultimately became founding mothers of modern Australia—a story of hope, sisterhood, and survival.”

Excerpted from an East Boston Times news article, January 4, 2023. “Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has named Robert Terrell as executive director of the city’s Office of Fair Housing and Equity. The existing office, which is within the Equity and Inclusion Cabinet, prevents discrimination and ensures equitable access to housing in Boston. As executive

director, Terrell will work to enforce local, state, and federal fair housing law in Boston to protect renters and buyers from discriminatory practices. Terrell will also work to expand the investigatory capacity of the office to better receive formal complaints when laws are violated, increase access to trainings about housing rights for residents, and ensure fair housing is embedded into city policies. Recently, Terrell served as the Fair Housing, Equity, and Inclusion Officer for the Boston Housing Authority’s Office of Civil Rights.”

1981

From a University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health news release, October 4, 2022.

“Terri Young has devoted her career to advancing the voices of women and underserved minorities in the field of ophthalmology

She was honored for this work by the Women in Ophthalmology (WIO) at a special award ceremony during the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) annual meeting in Chicago on October 1, 2022. Young, chair of the University of Wisconsin Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, received the Suzanne VéronneauTroutman Award, which recognizes a female ophthalmologist who has been a champion for women in the ophthalmology field within the previous year. Young recently completed an appointment as the chair of a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) task force of the 32,000-member AAO, which assessed and changed membership demographics in all aspects of the organization—staff hiring and retention, contract relationships, committee membership, committee leadership composition, and methodology for how these positions are attained.”

Don Bloch, John Luke, Paul Johnson, Bob Smith, Tony Belmont, Don Cousins, Dale Matheson, Peter Brown, Bob Baldwin, Bob Hertzig, Ward O’Neil, Steve Loebs, Bob LeMieux, and Mike Frieze—all proud members of the Class of 1960—gathered together for an alumni luncheon in the greater Boston area on October 6, 2022. (Mike had to leave before the photo op.)

Montclair, New Jersey, residents Lisa Rosen ’81 and Nick Lewis ’74 posed with celebrated photographer Abelardo Morell ’71 at the Montclair Art Museum’s recent opening of his exhibit of camera obscura images: Projecting Italy.

Dan Spears ’81, John Hickling ’81, Dave Barnes ’81, and Pete Larcom ’81 pause to pose and take in the view during their visit to Ecuador—this year’s choice for their annual adventure trip together.

1985 From Andy Meyer: “Scott Smith celebrated his retirement from Kaiser Permanente as chief of infectious disease and geographic medicine after a twenty-five-year career by unicycling around the country of Taiwan with son Justin Tien-Smith and friend Jim Wiltins. Andy Meyer joined the adventurous crew via bicycle for the first week.”

and serve as the Arizona delegate to the American Veterinary Medical Association. I am also an advisory board member for the National Association for Black Veterinarians.”

1993

Reunion

1986

From Robert Bernheim: “My wife, Patricia, and I are members of the Class of 1986 and parents of a 2009 graduate (Sarah Bernheim Smith ’09). I recently had an op-ed piece published in The Portland Press Herald and had a peer-reviewed article published in Oxford University Press’s Holocaust and Genocide Studies journal. Dr. Steve Cerf and his colleagues were instrumental in my study of German at Bowdoin, without which I would never have been able to conduct the research I did, nor hold the position I do.” [Bernheim is assistant professor of history at the University of Maine at Augusta].

1987 From Cynthia Latham: “I won USTA Nationals in the 55+ Ladies 4.0 division. It was all very exciting! Too bad Coach Reed was not alive to see it!”

From Mike Lent: “I received my black belt in Krav Maga on November 13, 2022, at Aziz MMA in Los Angeles, during a Street Smart Survival seminar hosted by Grandmaster Shihan Jacov Bresler. Earlier this year, I also received my instructor certificate from the Federation of Israeli Martial Arts and became certified as a catch wrestler through Scientific Wrestling. I continue to practice full-time as a small animal veterinarian in Tucson

Excerpted from a Q106.5 online article, October 21, 2022. “Meet Christopher Leighton. Or, as you might know him on TikTok, The Leighton Show. He lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, is a husband and dad, and is usually apologizing for something ridiculous. He has two teenage kids and has been happily married for twenty-three years after he and his wife both attended Bowdoin College. The TikTok bit is done in his spare time, he does have a day job . . . he comes home from a hard day at work, talks with his family, apologizes, and then documents things. His show focuses on silly relationship and parenting moments—everyday relatable stuff. And his comedic take on things has gotten him about 2 million total views on TikTok.”

1996

From a Purdue University online news release, January 3, 2023.

“Rachel Clapp-Smith has been named the Teddy Jacobi Dean of the College of Business at Purdue University Northwest (PNW) effective January 3, 2023. Clapp-Smith was selected through a national search process. She has served as interim dean of the PNW College of Business since February 2022. She oversees academic programs, faculty and operations in managerial studies, quantitative business studies, the White Lodging School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, the White Lodging Professional Selling Center, the Center for Business and

Andy Meyer ’85 joined Scott Smith ’85, his son Justin Tien-Smith, and friend Jim Wiltons for the first week of Scott and Justin’s unicycling adventure around Taiwan. Smith was celebrating his retirement after a twenty-five-year career at Kaiser Permanente.

Cynthia Latham ’87 jumps for joy after winning the USTA Nationals in the 55+ Ladies 4.0 division.

Bob Dunn ’95, David Payne ’96, Emily LeVan ’95, Brad Johnson ’96, Sarah Folkemer ’98, Garrett Broadrup ’96, Hiram Hamilton ’97, Rob Najarian ’99, Jeremy Lake ’96, Adam Stevens ’99, Jon Ross-Wiley ’95, Kirsten Chapman ’96, Jon Chapman ’96, Michael Kaufman ’96, Nina Tallering ’96, Pat Kent ’95, Lukas Filler ’97, Scott Dyer ’95, Jason Klaitman ’97, and Jason Moyer ’97 in front of the Cribstone Bridge on Bailey Island, where they gathered at Cook’s Lobster House over the summer to catch up and reconnect.

Economic Development, and hosts the Northwest Indiana Small Business Development Center. Clapp-Smith is a professor of leadership and academic director of the Leadership Institute at Purdue Northwest. She previously served as associate vice chancellor of academic affairs for PNW, focusing on student success and retention as well as faculty development. She was one of the most recent winners of PNW’s Outstanding Administrative Leader Award in March 2022.”

1997

From Jason Klaitman: “On a spectacular Maine summer evening, alumni of Kappa Delta Theta gathered at Cook’s Lobster House for what we hope will be a recurring event. The reunion was a testament to the special bonds friends form at Bowdoin; despite not seeing each other in many years, it was as if no time had passed at all.”

1999

From Susan Olcott: “I’m now the director of operations at Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, a local nonprofit dedicated to fostering sustainable fisheries in the Gulf of Maine. We have produced Maine Coast Monkfish Stew with a soup company in Greene, Maine, to benefit our Fishermen Feeding Mainers fish donation program. I recently met with Ryan Smith, the new head of Bowdoin Dining Services, and he initiated getting the stew into the convenience store, which is terrific. It should be there January 20.”

2000

From Ariane Bailey: “During the summer of 2021, I worked as a dog trainer/handler with Tony Award-winner Bill Berloni on the

Netflix film The Noel Diary, directed by Charles Shyer. One of my Australian Shepherds, Skye, appears with Justin Hartley and Barrett Doss in the sweet holiday romance. It was our first time working on a film; it was an amazing, exhilarating, anxiety-ridden, exhausting, fun experience. It premiered on Thanksgiving, November 24. All three of my Aussies work professionally as animal actors/models; it’s been an incredible journey as an animal trainer. I started out over a decade ago teaching pet manners classes. Now, I also offer competition sport classes and compete in a variety of canine sports myself. We’ve qualified for Nationals and World Finals in multiple events. Several years ago, we started performing live at fairs and festivals and have done still photo shoots as well. My oldest Aussie, Jacob, has appeared in two calendars, including the upcoming 2023 ‘Just Australian Shepherds’ calendar by Willow Creek Press. My youngest, Finn, has appeared in an iRobot Roomba commercial and a UPS Healthcare commercial. And Skye recently worked on an episode of a new Amazon Prime series. We still perform live as well, having recently appeared at the Wolcott Country Fair showing off our agility and disc dog skills. In addition, I was recently promoted to program manager for case management and quality control for the Connecticut Judicial Branch. I’ve now been an attorney with the branch for seventeen years. While my two careers may seem miles apart, they both require exceptional people skills! I return home to Maine several times a year and find it difficult to leave every single time.”

From Meaghan Curran Guiney:

“It’s been a big year for us: After seventeen years of practicing law in New York, Brian accepted an

Ariane Bailey ’00 snapped a photo of her superstar Australian Shepherd, Skye, who worked professionally as an animal actor/model on the Netflix film The Noel Diary. Bailey has been working as a dog trainer/handler for over a decade, and Skye is one of her three Aussies—all of whom compete and perform with her.

Jon Rechner ’00, Ted Snyder ’00, Jeremy Moberg-Sarver ’00, Meaghan Curran Guiney ’00, Brian Guiney ’00, Jessica Clark Bryan ’00, Sarah Buckley Rodenhi ’00, and John Walker ’00 gathered at Meaghan and Brian’s new home in Medfield, Massachusetts, to celebrate Oktoberfest 2022. Meaghan says she is “looking forward to many more mini-reunions in the future.”

Kathryn Jordan ’10 and her father, Bruce Jordan ’69, celebrate Kathryn’s October marriage— and being third- and fourth-generation Polar Bears!

in-house position at Bracebridge Capital in Boston, and we relocated to Massachusetts at the end of the summer of 2022. As tough as it was to make such a change, an upside has been the chance to reconnect with Bowdoin friends in the greater Boston area! In October we were thrilled to host some of our ’00 classmates at our new home. We are looking forward to many more mini reunions in the future, so if you live in or are passing through Boston, get in touch!”

Ryan, and Taylor Walls, among others. He joined the Rays in 2008 as an intern in baseball operations without a traditional scouting background, rising from the administrative and front office side of the game. He is known for managing processes and incorporating an analytical approach.”

2007

From Otis Eliot Pope: “Dr. Pope’s book titled Forgotten Struggles: African-Americans Confront Racism

2001

During the Korean War Era is now available for purchase online. The book can be purchased on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online bookstores. Thank you for the support!”

From Sara Willot: “Sara Willot completed a PhD in East-West psychology from California Institute of Integral Studies. Her doctoral research was on the practice of microdosing psilocybin.”

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, November 28, 2022 “Financial consultant Jac Arbour has leveraged his finance skills and his passion for personal development to create a book that introduces children to the concepts of personal finance. Arbour discussed the book, This Little Piggy: The Tale of an Extraordinary Piggy Bank, his second book about personal finance and his first written for children, on the WCSH newsmagazine 207. He talks about learning about the importance of hard work and saving from his grandfather, how wealth isn’t measured only in dollars, and the value of a mindset rooted in gratitude. Arbour is the founder of J.M. Arbour Wealth Management in Hallowell, Maine.”

TRUSTED EXPERT

A Bowdoin basketball player turned lawyer, elected official, and NBA agent, Antwan Phillips ’06 is committed to expanding opportunities and changing narratives in his home state of Arkansas.

2002

From a Detroit Free Press article, October 25, 2022. “The Detroit Tigers have hired Tampa Bay Rays senior director of amateur scouting, Rob Metzler, as the organization’s new vice president and assistant general manager. Metzler will lead the Tigers’ amateur and international scouting efforts. Metzler worked fifteen seasons for the Rays and the past seven leading the amateur scouting department. He was responsible for day-to-day scouting activities within the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico in preparation for the draft. He was responsible for drafting Shane McClanahan, Nathaniel Lowe, Joe

From Matt Herzfeld: “I recently became a published writer. My short story ‘Do You Remember, Sarah?’ was selected as a merit winner for the Stories That Need to Be Told 2022 anthology.”

2008 Reunion

From a Mainebiz online news article, January 21, 2023. Sean Sullivan will leave his post as executive director of the Maine Brewers’ Guild after nearly a decade to pursue a master’s degree in computer science at the Roux Institute in Portland Sullivan said that while he’s made a professional move he will be staying in Maine and will remain working for the guild through

AS AN ATTORNEY, my aspiration is to continue to build a reputation of trust and expertise that is valued by my clients. As an NBA agent, my aspiration is to advise and “do life” with athletes who are truly living their dream. And as an elected representative of Little Rock, my aspiration is to change the narrative and perception of what Little Rock is and what Little Rock can be.

I GREW UP IN A LOW-INCOME NEIGHBORHOOD. I have multiple family members who have been imprisoned. Despite having twelve aunts and uncles and more than fifty first cousins, I was the second in my extended family to graduate from college and the first to earn a graduate degree. Unfortunately, there are so many people who grew up and are still growing up like me who did not have the opportunities that I was afforded— like attending the best liberal arts college in America. As I often say, I’m not different, but my opportunities were. That’s why I spend a lot of time volunteering.

MY FIRST TIME GETTING ON AN AIRPLANE WAS TO VISIT BOWDOIN. I’ve since visited thirty states—layovers do not count. I plan to experience all fifty, but I have a little work to do.

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

PHOTO: COURTESY WRIGHT, LINDSEY & JENNINGS

Antwan Phillips ’06

Catching Up

A LOT ON HIS PLATE

Caleb Pershan ’12 took a love of writing and an interest in food and mixed up a career.

I WAS A PICKY EATER AS A KID, but I’ve always liked restaurants and food—Bowdoin’s food, as we all know, is great, maybe dangerously so.

I GOT INTO JOURNALISM BECAUSE I WANTED TO WRITE, and I was partly inspired to do so at Bowdoin as an intern for this magazine. I wrote at least one terrible restaurant review for the Orient that was inspired by my uncle, a part-time food critic in San Francisco. He told me to read Kitchen Confidential, which led me to more great food writing, and I moved to San Francisco after graduating and worked as a fact-checker at San Francisco magazine. But I really got caught up in a food media boom while working as a reporter at Eater; I loved interviewing chefs, brewers, and winemakers.

AT THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, I focus on the craft of writing and deciding what’s worth covering. Our food and wine section produces great criticism, recommendations, and lists, but we also do great accountability reporting on the food and restaurant industry, which is so necessary. But I also like that we support the paper’s larger mission and investigative work by bringing in subscriptions and helping to keep the lights on.

WHILE I STILL LIKE RESTAURANTS, these days you’re more likely to find me eating with—or cooking for—my wife at home.

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

the end of March to oversee the New England Craft Brew Summit and hopefully onboard the new leader.”

2010

From Kathryn Jordan: “My husband (non-Bowdoin grad) and I got married on October 8, 2022. It was an honor to hold the [Bowdoin] flag at my wedding, as I am a fourthgeneration Polar Bear!”

From Alexandra Locke: “In December, I was named executive producer of Al Jazeera English’s award-winning news podcast, The Take. It’s been a ride: over the last few years, I’ve interviewed people across all borders and walks of life in more than forty countries, including former detainees and their lawyers from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, two of the last abortion providers in the South, Palestinians resisting displacement in Sheikh Jarrah, Amazon Labor Union cofounder Jay Flowers, the late David Graeber, credited for the slogan ‘we are the 99 percent’—and even got to reconnect with Bowdoin’s own former professor Shelley Deane. I also recently won a Signal Award, the Webby spinoff podcast award, for my episode ‘The War That Opened Europe’s Borders.’”

2011 From Rachel Gang: “This past summer, Rachel Gang married Tomer Stokelman in Baltimore, Maryland, among family stateside. They currently live in Beersheva, Israel, and have made the Negev Desert their home!”

2012 From Allen Garner: “So happy to announce that I married my love, Sarah Howard, this past August in the presence of many Polar Bears (even the photographer)!”

From Ian Vieira: “Ian and Alessia [Mondlane] were married in Tuscany, Italy, surrounded by friends and family from all over the globe. They currently reside in Boston, Massachusetts, with their pup, Teddy.”

2013 Reunion

Excerpted from a Portland Press Herald news article, October 11, 2022. Matthew Bernstein, a humanities and social studies teacher at Casco Bay High School in Portland, has been named Maine Teacher of the Year. He was selected from a pool of hundreds of teachers nominated this year and will represent the state in the National Teacher of the Year program. He is a member of the Portland Public Schools Social Studies Vertical Content Team, which is working to develop a Wabanaki studies curriculum, and was recently named a 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar, taking part in a seminar called “Teaching the Holocaust through Visual Culture.” Outside the classroom, he plays and coaches soccer and basketball. The candidates for teacher of the year were nominated by a member of their community, and the winners are selected by a panel of teachers, principals, and members of the business community.

From Louisa Cannell: “Louisa Cannell and Jeremy Ross ’09 married in Arlington, Virginia, at the home of the bride’s mother, Amanda Cannell-Boon ’77, with forty-five Bowdoin Polar Bears in attendance.”

2014

From the Children’s Museum and Theatre of Maine website Robbie Harrison played the starring role of Pigeon in the winter production of Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! The

Caleb Pershan ’12

Catching Up

PHOTO: KAREN OBRIST

Musical! (based on the book by Mo Willems) at the Children’s Museum and Theatre of Maine. “Pigeon wants to find what they are good at, but no one will let them do anything! When the bus breaks down and threatens to make the passengers late, Pigeon sees the opportunity to step up and save the day in this upbeat and engaging musical about finding where you belong.”

Harrison—an actor, educator, and director—was last seen in Maddy’s Theatre as Scott Gibson in Apollo to the Moon. He also directed the recent bilingual production of Snow in the Jungle/Nieve en la jungla Outside of Maddy’s Theatre, he has performed with Fenix Theatre Co., Theater Project, Dramatic Rep. Company, and Camden Shakespeare Festival.

2015

From Forbes.com.

Adrienne White has been named to the Forbes “30 Under 30” list for 2023 in the category of music. “White is the director of Dunvagen Music Publishers, Philip Glass’s management and publishing firm. Since White started in 2016, she’s grown Dunvagen into new territories, co-leading collaborations with Patti Smith and Phoebe Bridgers and bringing Glass’s first classic music NFT project to life. White was also behind the team who advanced the MET Opera recording of Glass’s opera Akhnaten, which won a Grammy for the Best Opera Recording in 2022.” The Forbes list includes “young innovators on the verge of making it big.” 2017

From a Maine Maritime Museum press release, October 26, 2022.

“Catherine Cyr joined Maine Maritime Museum in June 2022 as their exhibition coordinator.

She immediately began exhibition development surrounding her upcoming exhibition, Women Behind the Lens. This exhibition will highlight the work of three late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century female photographers from Maine. Catherine has also been working on the museum’s first-of-its-kind collaborative exhibition with Gulf of Maine EcoArts.”

From a Memphis Commercial Appeal news article, January 24, 2023. “In a special election that offered voters a choice between younger candidates that promised new approaches and seasoned political veterans that offered experiences and past accomplishments, the voters of Tennessee House District 86 opted for the former by choosing Justin J. Pearson by a significant margin. The seat stretches north and south along the Mississippi River, going from Southwest Memphis through Downtown to Millington. The commission plans to make the appointment on February 1, 2023. Pearson gained traction as a community leader when he cofounded the grassroots organization Memphis Community Against the Pipeline in response to a planned crude oil pipeline that would cut through backyards in South Memphis, particularly in the Boxtown neighborhood. The work of MCAP and Pearson was largely credited as the entity that stopped the intended pipeline plans from Plains All American.”

From Anne Gregory: “Riley [Harris ’20] and I got married this fall at my parents’ home in Austin, Texas! We were so lucky to have so many of our Bowdoin friends with us on the big day. And we’re so grateful to Bowdoin for bringing us together!”

You are From Here.

Once a Polar Bear, always a Polar Bear. Stay engaged with Bowdoin in whatever way works for you—volunteer, attend an event, make a gift, or tune into an online program. All of it matters for the campaign, and more importantly, keeps the bonds of the Bowdoin community strong.

Reunion 2022

Celebrate

1. Anne Gregory ’19 and Riley Harris ’20 were married on October 15, 2022, in Austin, Texas.

Pictured: Amber Rock ’19, Ivy Elgarten ’19, Sophie Lemkin ’19, Emma Beane ’20, Rhianna Patel ’20, Brendan Pulsifer ’20, Kate RuskKosa ’20, Julianna Burke ’18, Ariana Smith ’21, Isaac Greenawalt ’19, Lenoir Kelley ’19, Molly Prouty ’19, Hannah Jorgensen ’20, Chris Brown ’18, Nelson Andrade ’20, Mamadou Diaw ’20, Jon Luke Tittmann ’19, Caroline Carter ’19, Jesse Dunn ’20, Ben Painter ’19, Ely Spencer ’20, Diego Velasquez ’20, Dihu Wu ’20, Joshua Brooks ’20, Jiadi Chang ’20, Helen Wang ’20, Ben Hopkins ’20, Mohamed Oday ’20, Julius Long ’20, Tess Hall ’19, Charlotte Nash ’19, Nina Alvarado-Silverman ’19, Ripley Mayfield ’19, Lucia Ryan ’19, Anne and Riley, Matt Keller ’20, Caroline Carter ’19, Calvin Soule ’20, Elise Morano ’20, Paula Petit ’20, and Gabrielle Maffezzoli ’20.

2. Louisa Cannell ’13 and Jeremy Ross ’09 were married on May 28, 2022, in Arlington, Virginia, at the home of the bride’s mother, Amanda Cannell-Boon ’77. Pictured: Liza LePage ’13, Simon Bordwin ’13, Chris Omachi ’12, Anders Samuelson ’12, Lindsay Bruett ’09, Chris Burrage ’08, Hannah Hughes ’09, Eric Harrison ’09, Kelsey Borner ’09, Micah McKay ’09, Dominic Fitzpatrick ’09, David Leinen ’09, Josh Kimball ’09, Jeremy Bernfeld ’09, Julia Graham ’13, Helen Conaghan Renninger ’13, Derek Castro ’09, Sam Dinning ’09, Molly Clements Fisher ’13, Spencer Ho ’09, Matt Eshelman ’09, Lidey Heuck ’13, Rachel Donahue ’08, Sam Patterson ’14, Jan Pierson ’74, Liz Pierson, Chake Higgison ’78, Emma

Stanislawski ’13, Deanne Urmy ’78, Marcella Lovo ’13, Amanda CannellBoone ’77, Louisa and Jeremy, Christian Adams ’09, Kat Lannon ’09, Nick Simon ’09, Frances Milliken ’09, Aurora Kurland ’09, Lucy Green ’15, Julia Bensimon ’13, Gracie Bensimon ’15, Elizabeth Schetman ’13, Ali Fradin ’13, Bridget O’Carroll ’13, and Judy Yang ’13.

3. Kathryn Jordan ’10 and Ian Monk (Worcester Polytechnic Institute ’10) were married on October 8, 2022, in Whitefield, New Hampshire. Pictured: Mikyo Butler ’10, Alyssa Rose ’11, Sarah Clark ’11, Bruce Jordan ’69, Ian and Kathryn, Sarah Loeb ’11, Katie Cushing Butler ’10, and Clara Hill ’10.

4. Viviane Kostin ’19 and James Callahan ’19 were married on August 13, 2022, in Yarmouth, Maine. Pictured: Kevin Lane ’19, Nicole Tjin A Djie ’21, Caroline Kranefuss ’20, Samuel Lewis ’19, Fredericka Hibbs ’21, Lorenzo Meigs ’21, Amanda Ward ’18, Anastasia Arvin-DiBlasio ’19, Ryan Ward ’17, Sarah Walker ’20, Kathryn Ippolito ’19, Viviane and James, Isabel Thomas ’20, Benjamin Ratner ’19, Stephen Girard ’21, Sarena Sabine ’19, Matthew Swiatek ’20, Claudia Knox ’19, Mikayla Kifer ’19, Francisco Navarro ’19, Nicole Anthony ’19, and David Morrison ’19. In attendance but not pictured: Ezra Rice ‘19 and Zachary Coddington ’20.

5. Jessica Bowen ’17 and Cody Todesco ’19 were married on September 4, 2022, at the Warren Conference Center & Inn in Ashland, Massachusetts. Pictured: Jake Stenquist ’19, Christopher

Wallace ’19, Ian Squiers ’19, Reimi Pieters ’19, Marissa Fichter ’19, Maddie Baird ’15, Adriane Krul ’15, Nicholas Sadler ’18, David Peck ’18, Miranda Bell ’18, Caroline Godfrey ’19, Cullen Geary ’18, Jessica and Cody, Duke Albanese ’71, Ariana Bourque ’16, and Casey Nunnelly ’19.

6. Ian Vieira ’12 and Alessia Mondlane (Northeastern University ’13) were married on June 10, 2022, in Tuscany, Italy. Pictured: Pat Noone ’12, Samuel Martin ’12, Daniel Evans ’12, Alessia and Ian, Peter Troubh ’12, David Westhaver ’12, and Barry Clarke ’12.

7. Skye Aresty ’16 and Thomas Wiesner ’16 were married on June 19, 2022, in Tarrytown, New York.

Pictured: Stephen Meardon ’93, Tess Chakkalakal (Bowdoin faculty), Laura Friel ’22, Molly Kane ’16, Peter Aresty ’80, Andrew Haeger ’16, Charlotte Alimanestianu ’16, Noah Finberg ’16, Thomas and Skye, Nina Hadzibabic ’16, Lucy Skinner ’16, Joe Sherlock ’16, Hailey Wahl ’16, Maddy Fulton ’16, Shannon Brady ’16, Charles Friel ’86, and Phoebe Kranefuss ’16.

8. Asher Stamell ’13 and Claire Abrahmson (University of St. Andrews ’14) were married on September 10, 2022, in Coxsackie, New York. Pictured: Peter Yen ’13, Kenny McCroskery ’13, Peyton Kelley ’13, Tristan McCormick ’13, Michael Hannaman ’13, Justin Foster ’11, Peter Murphy ’12, Alex Jacobs ’12, Madison Whitley ’13, Tory Edelman ’13, Sara Driscoll ’13, Fhiwa Ndou ’13, Asher and Claire, Kevin Miao ’14, Michael Hendrickson Brightwell ’13, and Danaé Hirsch ’14.

9. Jordan Edgett ’12 and Emily Rose Bainwall (William and Mary ’14) were married on September 24, 2022, at the Omni Mount Washington Resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Pictured: Kevin McDonough ’14, Kyle LeBlanc ’14, Beau Breton ’13, Jon Fraser ’15, Danny Findley ’13, Trent Blossom ’12, Emily and Jordan, Amy LeBlanc ’12, Tim Welch ’12, Drew LoRusso ’13, Aaron O’Callahan ’12, Gabe Faithfull ’13, Duncan Taylor ’14, Matt Bezreh ’12, and Sam Canales ’15.

10. Tommy Cabrera ’12 and Nicole Erkis ’12 were married on October 8, 2022, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Pictured: Rachel Herter ’12, Claire Collery ’11, Robert Shaw ’12, Rachel McDonald ’12, Nicole and Tommy, Anitra Sprauten ’12, Aaron Wolf ’12, Beatrice Cabrera ’20, Ian Brandon ’12, Toph Tucker ’12, Woody Mawhinney ’12, Connor Gallagher ’12, Antonio Watson ’12, Taylor Vozniak ’12, and Liam Killion ’11.

11. Leah Kahn ’15 and Ben Plowman (University of NebraskaLincoln ’09) were married on October 23, 2022, in Chicago, Illinois. Pictured: Sabrina Worth ’15, Karl Reinhardt ’15, Elisabeth Strayer ’15, Ben and Leah, Jonathan Kahn ’83, Courtney Chuang ’15, Libby Szuflita ’15, and Charlotte Kleiman ’15.

12. Madison Whitley ’13 and Kyle Wons were married on September 10, 2022, in Harwich, Massachusetts.

Pictured: Asher Stamell ’13, Fhiwa Ndou ’13, Chelsea Gross ’13, Jasmine Bailey ’14, Allie Frosina ’14, Leah Greenberg ’13, Madison and Kyle, Michael Hendrickson Brightwell ’13,

Melody Hahm ’13, Tricia Thibodeau Beaudoin ’13, Kaity Sansone ’13, Andrew Millar ’16, Andy Gluesing, Jonathan Rosenthal ’06, and Julian Tamayo ’16.

13. Elizabeth Griffin ’09 and Dustin McLellan were married on July 17, 2022, at the Wilson Chapel in Ocean Point, Maine. Pictured: Ben Shulman ’09, Tori Shulman ’09, Caitlin Cooper ’09, Jess Sokolow ’09, Pierre Bourassa ’78, Tim Bourassa ’08, Betsy and Dustin, Denise Griffin ’77, Judith McMichael ’77, and Chip Griffin ’77.

14. Megan Maher ’16 and Ethan Welsh (University of Pittsburgh ’16) were married on July 16, 2022, in Mendocino County, California. Pictured: Natalie LaPlant ’16, Brianna Bishop ’16, Michael Colbert ’16, Charlotte Rutty ’16, Megan and Ethan, Colleen Maher ’12, Brittany Johnson Farrar ’12, Nicole Morin ’16, Daniel Zeller ’15, Laura Keller ’15, and Vy Nguyen Coykendall ’15.

15. Vy Nguyen ’15 and Christopher Coykendall (Old Dominion University ’13) were married on October 29, 2022, in San Jose, California. Pictured: Laura Keller ’15, Joshua Ly ’15, Ivy Xing ’15, Chris and Vy, Luis Rosias ’15, Mollie Friedlander ’14, and Megan Maher Welsh ’16.

16. Chelsea Bruno ’14 and Rory Baxter were married on July 9, 2022, at Grittleton House in the Cotswolds, United Kingdom. Pictured: Morgan Woodhouse ’14, Rebecca Krakora ’14, Louise Johnson ’14, Rory and Chelsea, Rebecca Stoneman ’14, Caroline Logan Handy ’14, Connor Handy ’13, and Kathrine Riley ’14.

Celebrate

17. Peter Troubh ’12 and Taylor Escajeda were married on October 1, 2022, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Pictured: Linzee Troubh ’09, Greg Pierce ’12, Christopher Omachi ’12, Sarah Vallimarescu ’12, Morgan Estey ’10, Boomer Repko ’10, Emily Smith ’12, Joseph Smith ’12, Caroline Tory ’12, McKenna Repko ’12, Sydney Miller ’12, Georgia McGinnis ’12, John McGinnis ’15, Ella Paskalides ’12, Daniel Evans ’12, Mark Flibotte ’12, Peter and Taylor, Chelsea Condon ’12, Celeste Swain ’12, Elisa Richardson ’12, Ian Vieira ’12, Rose Pino ’12, Nicholas Cataldo ’12, Patrick Noone ’12, Lindsay Noone ’09, Lonnie Nunley ’12, Sophie Feller ’12, Sara Dobkin, Nicole Coombes ’12, Jerrod Dobkin ’15, Barry Clarke ’12, David Westhaver ’12, Aaron O’Callahan ’12, Molly Popolizio ’14, Ben Tsujiura ’12, Samuel Martin ’12, and Paul Steinberg ’12.

18. Kristin Hanczor ’12 and Brian Golger ’15 were married on September 16, 2022, in Rye, New York. Pictured: Anthony Todesco ’15, Kevin Donohue ’15, David Prendergast ’15, Peter Yasi ’15, Jake Prince ’15, Tory Rusch ’15, John A. Woodcock Jr. ’72, Brian and Kristin, Thomas Wells ’15, Hannah Levy ’12, Matthew Perlow ’15, Anna Schember ’12, Kyle Nowak ’15, Tristan Van Kote ’15, Jack Donovan ’15, Fili Heider ’12, Sage Mikami ’15, and Gina Lonati ’12.

19. Allen Garner ’12 and Sarah Howard (Saint Mary’s College ’13) were married on August 13, 2022, in Monterey, California. Pictured: Allen, Brian Wedge ’97, Sarah, Maeve O’Leary Kelly ’14, Helen Newton ’14, Lela Garner ’16, Katherine Foley ’13,

Nicole Willey Warren ’08, Sam Packard ’12, Aileen Tschiderer ’12, Mai Kristofferson Inagaki ’13, Craig Hardt ’12, Emma Pyle Hardt ’12, Augie Kelly ’13, Tamara Perreault ’12, Kaley Kokomoor ’13, and Brad Burnham (Bowdoin coaching staff). Not pictured but in attendance: Malia Wedge ’98.

20. Rachel Gang ’11 and Tomer Stokelman were married on July 22, 2022, among family stateside in Baltimore, Maryland. Pictured: Rachel and Tomer.

21. Luisa LaSalle ’14 and Carlie Tarbell (University of New Hampshire ’15) were married on November 19, 2020, in Portland, Maine. Pictured: Marcus Schneider ’13, Katie Ross Schneider ’14, Dashelle Fabian ’11, Jay Greene ’13, Shelagh Van Note ’12, Natalia Richey ’11, Kenzie Richey ’13, Carlie and Luisa, Lucy Evans ’12, Matt Ramos ’12, Ellie Brennan ’14, Emily Carr ’14, Filipe Camarotti ’14, Sophia Cornew ’14, Matt Collins ’15, McKenzie Kessel ’16, Ali Mathias ’16, Matt Mathias ’14, Tory Edelman ’13, Viola Rothschild ’14, Emily Powers ’14, Danielle Willey ’12, Margot Roux ’14, and Emma Patterson ’16.

22. Stephen Pastoriza ’19 and Monica Xing ’19 were married in September 2021 in Falmouth, Maine. Pictured: Hannah Pucker ’19, Samantha Schaefer ’19, Cameron Chertavian ’20, Michael Given ’17, Tyler Chonoles ’19, Alex Reisley ’16, Isaiah West ’19, Matthew Peknay ’18, Anna Martens ’20, Myles Caldwell ’19, Michael Lee ’19, Adrian Van der Eb ’19, Simone Laverdiere ’19, Samantha Roy ’19, Samantha Valdivia ’19, Erik

Wurman ’19, Stephen and Monica, Mitchell Ryan ’19, Mary Laurita ’21, Karl Sarier ’19, Michael Netto ’18, John Lagasse ’16, Chris Li ’19, and Kacie Nelson ’19.

23. Claire Schollaert ’16 and Charlie Krause ’16 were married on October 1, 2022, on Westport Island, Maine. Pictured: Hy Khong ’16, Arianna Cameron ’16, Luke Von Maur ’16, Spencer Antunez ’18, Audrey Phillips ’16, Oliver Lawrence ’16, Matt Rubinoff ’16, Matthew Gutschenritter ’16, Emma Peters ’16, Connor Evans ’16, Margaret Webster ’16, Emily Nguyen ’16, Caroline Coles ’16, Charlotte Alimanestianu ’16, Christian Celeste Tate ’16, Jesse Weiss ’17, Andrew Fradin ’16, Claire and Charlie, Jared Feldman ’16, Olivia Diserio ’16, Emily Serwer ’16, and Phoebe Kranefuss ’16.

24. Leah Greenberg ’13 and Andy Gluesing ’13 were married on May 6, 2022, in Sonoma, California.

Pictured: Drew Zembruski ’13, Marcus Schneider ’13, Erica Swan ’13, Annie Leask ’13, Sam Chick ’13, Michael Ben-Zvi ’13, Tessa Kramer ’13, Charlie Cubeta ’13, Andrew Millar ’16, Melody Hahm ’13, Ryan Larochelle ’13, Sarah Fiske Larochelle ’13, David Bean ’13, Katie Ross Schneider ’14, Matt Gamache ’13, Hannah Young ’13, Holly Jacobson ’11, Fhiwa Ndou ’13, Andy and Leah, Madison Whitley ’13, Julian Tamayo ’16, Emily Clark Bean ’15.

WHERE IT BEGAN

Maine’s first ski mountain was Pleasant Mountain (elev. 2,006 ft.), which started with a single trail carved out of a farm in 1936 and officially opened January 23, 1938. The mountain also boasts the state’s first ski patrol (also in 1938) and the first chairlift, which began operation in 1954. A change in ownership in 1988 brought a name change—to Shawnee Peak—but a 2021 purchase returned the original name, and the resort is once again known as Pleasant Mountain.

CHRONICLER OF SKI HISTORY

The oldest brother of three Bowdoin Lund boys, acclaimed ski journalist and historian Mort Lund ’50 grew up in Augusta, Maine, spent a year in the Navy, graduated cum laude from Bowdoin, and went on to Harvard Law School before beginning a career that spanned six decades of writing for Sports Illustrated, Ski Magazine, and more. Author of The Skier’s Bible, The Skier’s World, and many other books, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism from the International Skiing History Association.

MEET AT THE MOUNTAINS

Two of the more challenging of Bowdoin’s annual Orientation trips are camping/backpacking trips that have participants trekking five to twelve miles a day through Maine’s western mountains. One trip starts at Saddleback Mountain (elev. 4,120 ft.) and heads past Sugarloaf (elev. 4,250 ft.), another starts at the opposite end and finishes at Saddleback Mountain—and the two groups pass on the trail somewhere in the middle!

WHERE IT REALLY BEGAN

Maine’s ski mountains have their roots in complex geologic history. Many began as sedimentary basins where silt, sand, mud, and fossils collected to form thick sequences. As a result of the forging of North America with Europe and Africa (as well as a few microcontinents that were caught up between these enormous land masses), these quiescent layers were folded and thrust together to form mountains that were then further sutured by granitic plutons. The cliffs of some ski areas preserve evidence of this multistage history. Others formed more recently and are part of the track left in the wake of the Great Meteor Hotspot that passed through New England after North America rifted away from Europe and Africa.

A MAINE SKI GIANT

John M. Christie ’59, both a Maine skiing legend and a quintessential Maine storyteller, wrote the book on Maine ski history as author of The Story of Sugarloaf, Skiing Maine, and other books. He was a ski racer at Bowdoin—winning the State Intercollegiate Downhill Championship in 1958—a former general manager of Sugarloaf, a leader in Maine and national ski circles, and an inductee to the Maine Ski Hall of Fame. He owned Saddleback Mountain in the 1970s and skied “hard and fast” down Maine ski slopes until his death in 2016.

GAME RECOGNIZES GAME

On a skiing trip one weekend, BOC director Mike Woodruff ’87 saw a telemark skier who impressed him, so he asked for some tips. A few weeks later, the two saw each other on the Quad, realized they both worked at Bowdoin, and Matt O’Donnell P’23—professional ski instructor, poet, and talented telemark skier, then working for Bowdoin Magazine—became deeply connected to the Outing Club’s long-running telemark program. Matt and Mike worked together for years, and Matt famously spent a day skiing on a BOC trip fully costumed (even the head!) as the polar bear mascot.

The white peaks in Maine run along the same spine as the Green Mountains in Vermont and the White Mountains in New Hampshire. They are home to some of the best ski resorts in New England—and provide a year-round destination for the Bowdoin Outing Club (BOC) and other adventurers.

BOC ON THE SLOPES

A Bowdoin Outing Club group skis at Mt. Abram (elev. 4,050 ft.) in Greenwood, Maine, in the shadow of Sunday River. The ski area was formally dedicated on Christmas Eve, 1960. The BOC runs ski programming for the six weeks between winter and spring breaks, teaching four kinds of skiing: skate skiing, classic crosscountry skiing, telemark skiing, and downhill skiing. In the 2022 season, ninety-five students registered to go on a learn-to-ski trip.

“It is the privilege of a lifetime to be president of Bowdoin College, to think about the future and what it will take to continue to be one of the great liberal arts institutions—and to help to move the institution forward.”

—PRESIDENT CLAYTON ROSE