FAMILY FOR Caitlin Sullivan Photography
By Rachel Stotts In 1989, Professor Duane Leatherman and his soon-to-bewife, Linnéa Anderson ’75, sat together in a dark room in Residential College (ResCo) trying to imagine what it would be like to live there with students. They couldn’t have known it would be the beginning of a 30-year adventure as Facultyin-Residence (FIR), living with and caring for their beloved “Butler kids.” In March 2020, Duane couldn’t have known how much life was about to change...again. In New York City, planning to attend the BIG EAST Tournament and enjoy a Broadway show, he and the rest of the Butler contingent learned that the Tournament was canceled and they were heading back to Indy, where a stay-at-home order was imminent and students would not return from Spring Break.
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BUTLER MAGAZINE
LIFE
For most faculty members, this meant teaching remotely from their homes. For the Leathermans, it meant their family had left the building. “I went up and down the hallways seeing all of the stuff that students had on their doors, but there were no students. It was eerie,” Duane recalls. While the students didn’t come back for the rest of the spring semester, the Leathermans did have some Zoom sessions with the students to talk through the shock of the situation and try to answer questions that the students had. “They all just wanted to know when it would be over,” says Duane. Before COVID-19, the Leathermans loved to have students come to their apartment, cramming as many as 40 students into the small space for pizza parties, Insomnia cookies,
