DePauw M A G A Z I N E
Summer 2020
IN THIS ISSUE: DePauw’s new president / The healers: medicine, research and hope / DePauw in the time of COVID-19 / and much more
Looking forward with President Lori White and the Class of 2024
DePauw M A G A Z I N E
Summer 2020
IN THIS ISSUE: DePauw’s new president / The healers: medicine, research and hope / DePauw in the time of COVID-19 / and much more
THE HEALERS
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1,000 WORDS’ WORTH
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Photo and cover photo: Brittney Way
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DePauw
M A G A Z I N E
Summer 2020 / Vol. 83 / Issue 1 depauw.edu/offices/communicationsmarketing/depauw-magazine/
STAFF Mary Dieter University editorial director marydieter@depauw.edu 765-658-4286 Kelly A. Graves Creative director kgraves@depauw.edu Joel Bottom Staff videographer/photographer joelbottom@depauw.edu Brittney Way Staff photographer brittneyway@depauw.edu Donna Grooms Gold Nuggets editor dgrooms@depauw.edu CONTRIBUTOR: Kate Robertson EDITORIAL BOARD: Deedie Dowdle, vice president for communications and marketing Sarah McAdams, internal communications manager Leslie Williams Smith ’03, executive director of alumni engagement Mariel Wilderson, executive director of communication Dawna Sinnett Wilson ’82, interim associate vice president for development and alumni engagement Chris Wolfe, social media manager
IN THIS ISSUE
1,000 Words’ Worth
2
DePauw Digest
4
The Book Nook
5
Letters to the Editor
6
DePauw’s new president
12
The healers
25
DePauw in the time of COVID-19
33
Leaders the World Needs
34
The Bo(u)lder Question
35
Welcome, Class of 2024
38
Gold Nuggets
46
Old Gold
48
First Person
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DEPAUW DIGEST Welcome to alumni status, Class of 2020 Four hundred seventy-two individuals joined the distinguished group known as DePauw alumni May 17, when the university conferred degrees on them in a virtual ceremony streamed live on YouTube. A video of the event can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIja7zuC6MU&t=2s. The virtual ceremony, necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, will be followed by an in-person ceremony planned for June 6, 2021, culminating the Class of 2020’s first Alumni Reunion Weekend. Brittany Davis received the Walker Cup Award, given to the member of the graduating class who has been determined to have contributed the most to the university while at DePauw. Luka Ignac was awarded the Murad Medal, which recognizes the senior who has had the most significant scholarly and/or artistic achievements while at DePauw.
Let the sunshine in The roof of DePauw’s Indoor Tennis and Track Center now displays 860 solar panels, the campus’s first renewable energy project and a step toward meeting the university’s goal of becoming a leader in sustainable practices. Spearheaded by Rick ’76 and Jan Neville, the solar initiative celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the Center for Sustainability at DePauw. More than 40 additional donors gave toward the installation of the panels, which cost $460,000.
Cats and dogs
Early in the coronavirus pandemic, DePauw’s Housing and Residence Life staff members wanted to provide small distractions to help student relax. Enter DePauw’s Communication and Marketing staff, which designed coloring pages and posted them on the university’s website for download by students and alumni -- as well as your children and grandchildren, who we like to think of as future DePauw alums. Find the pages at depauw.edu/files/ resources/depauw-coloring-pages.pdf.
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As football rivalries go, it’s nigh impossible to compete with DePauw’s legendary rivalry with Wabash College for the coveted Monon Bell. But that hasn’t stopped DePauw’s gridiron powers that be from consorting with a different rival – Butler University – to arrange another illustrious meet-up. Before former DePauw head football coach Bill Lynch, a Butler alumnus, retired after last season, he got to talking with Butler head football coach Jeff Voris, a 1989 DePauw grad, and they concocted a plan that would have the Tigers meet the Bulldogs on the gridiron this year and next. COVID-19 willing, game 1 is set for 1 p.m. Sept. 12 at Blackstock Stadium with new head coach Brett Dietz calling the plays. Game 2 will take place at Butler next year. DePauw’s first football game ever – in 1880 – was against Butler. Since then, said Bill Wagner, assistant athletics director for athletics communications, the schools have played each other 61 more times, most recently in 1979. Unfortunately, Butler, a Division I school, has dominated; from 1955 to 1975, the teams met 21 times and DePauw won just twice, in 1967 and 1968.
Residence hall on track for completion by fall The new first-year residence hall at the corner of Olive and Locust streets will be completed by the time students arrive on campus in the fall. The four-story, 60,400-square-foot hall features 152 student beds, most of them in double rooms in the top three floors, while the first floor will contain community-living space – the entry, a lounge, a kitchen and the like.
Alums to lecture on the liberal arts and leadership A lineup of alumni – as well as DePauw’s new president, Lori S. White, and her former colleague, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – will headline a new course offered to first-year students this fall. “Leadership and the Liberal Arts: In Crisis and Calm” will introduce new DePauw students to the liberal arts, with leadership as a theme explored in various disciplines. The course is not about leadership development, said its facilitator, Andrew Cullison, director of the Prindle Institute for Ethics, but rather one in which “students get introduced to a wide array of subjects and they see firsthand what that subject is all about by seeing how that subject might shed light on our thinking about leadership.” These alumni have committed to giving a lecture: Jim Alling ’83, former chief executive officer of TOMS®; Jon Fortt ’98, CNBC co-anchor of “Squawk Alley;” Jeff Harmening ’89, president and chief executive officer of General Mills; Erin O’Brien ’96, a Mayo Clinic rhinologist and surgeon; Brad Stevens ’99, head coach of the Boston Celtics basketball team; James Stewart ’73, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist and author of nine books; and Elisa Villanueva Beard ’98, chief executive officer of Teach For America. Each student who completes the course – which can be taken remotely or with some socially distanced, small-group meetings – will be eligible for a $1,000 Sanger Leadership Opportunity Grant from the Sanger Leadership Initiative, created in 2018 by 1968 graduates Steve and Karen Ogren Sanger. The grants may be applied toward an off-campus study, winter term, May term, research experience or internship during the student’s subsequent years at DePauw.
Record 351 student-athletes named to honor roll A record 351 DePauw student-athletes were named to the Tiger Pride Honor Roll for achieving at least a 3.4 grade point average in spring 2020. This tops the previous high of 243. The honor roll was started in 2012 by Stevie Baker-Watson, associate vice president for campus wellness and Theodore Katula director of athletics and recreational sports.
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BOOK NOOK Is a recent read occupying your thoughts? Has a book indelibly imprinted your life? We want to hear from you. Send your recommendation to marydieter@depauw.edu.
What We’re Reading by Felix Yau '01 I just read the inspirational book, “I’ll Push You,” by Patrick Gray and Justin Skeesuck. I was fortunate to hear Patrick and Justin speak at a national sales meeting last year about their journey traveling the famous Camino de Santiago, a network of pilgrams’ routes that lead to St. James’s shrine in Spain. They grew up as best friends and their brotherly bond grew even stronger as they got older. Justin was diagnosed with progressive neuromuscular disease and lost the use of his arms and legs. One of his dreams was to travel the Camino de Santiago and, when he shared this with Justin, Justin didn’t hesitate to push Patrick in his wheelchair throughout the journey. While their 500-mile journey through Spain was incredible, it was the deep friendship that will make you love this story. “I’ll Push You” will make you laugh and get emotional and remind you what true friendships are meant to be. Yau is a safety and cleanroom sales specialist for Thermo Fisher Scientific. He coaches soccer for Hoosier Futbol Club and Carmel (Indiana) High School and is a former member of the DePauw Alumni Board of Directors.
The Book Nook features notable, professionally published books written by DePauw alumni and faculty. Self-published books will be included in the Gold Nuggets section.
Valerie Wayne ’66 “Cymbeline” (editor) “Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England” (editor)
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J. Stuart Showalter ’68 “The Law of Healthcare Administration” (9th ed.)
The President’s Bookshelf by Lori S. White When she was in elementary school, President Lori White won the reading challenge so often that “after a while, everyone conceded first place to me because they knew I was always going to win.” Her love of reading continues to this day, and accordingly, she has agreed to write this feature for DePauw Magazine. Institutions of higher education hold two important values – freedom of speech and expression and diversity and inclusion. The value of freedom of speech and expression is our commitment to the world of ideas – that ideas should be freely shared, explored and challenged and, when necessary, refuted and replaced by better ones. The value of diversity and inclusion is our commitment to a community where all members, regardless of background, identity and viewpoint, are welcome and to our belief that diversity enriches the educational experiences for all of us. These values should not be antithetical. However, students and
LETTERS others tell us that protecting all speech and expression, including forms some find offensive and hurtful, though not illegal, creates a climate that challenges their sense of safety. “HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship” by Nadine Strossen, a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, argues that protecting all speech, even hate speech, upholds the right to free speech for everyone. Strossen argues that, if we limit some speech, no matter how abhorrent, we start down a slippery slope of limiting other speech because there will always be different viewpoints as to what is acceptable speech. I facilitated a discussion about this book with a small group of students. Some students wondered if, by choosing this book, I was advocating for hate speech; in fact, I chose it because, in the best liberal arts tradition, I wanted students to wrestle with its premise. I wanted them (and you, if you choose to read it) to contemplate the extent to which they agreed with the Strossen’s argument that hate speech should be protected. Did they believe First Amendment protections of hate speech should be revisited? What tradeoffs would be made if we changed the right to freedom of speech? And, most important on a college campus, how can we hold equally our commitment to freedom of speech and expression and to diversity and inclusion, toward creating a campus community where all members of our community can live, learn and thrive?
DePauw M A G A Z I N E
Spring 2020
IN THIS ISSUE: The nonconformists: Old Pogue distillers, the guardian angels of Casa Alitas and more / A chemistry prof reflects on Percy Julian / “Lo siento”
The noncon f ormists SPRING 2020 DEPAUW MAGAZINE I i
TO THE EDITOR: Subject: Great edition!! Wonderful!!!! – Chris Johnston ’83 Best issue ever! Keep it up! – Nancee Dickson ’60 I can tell a lot of effort has gone into the new look of the DePauw Magazine, and the content is actually worth reading. … How cool is it to read about a female motorcycle racer? Driving lawnmowers across the country to raise $$? The most American athlete ever? The story about Musgrave and Cheeseman… THAT is what I want more to read about … service to something greater than self! Well done changing it up! – Aaron Marx ’94 My grandfather was Dr. George Grose, DePauw’s president from 1912 to 1924. As such, he came to know one of DePauw’s most renowned students, Percy Julian, who graduated in 1920. Though Julian was underprepared for college when he arrived in Greencastle in 1916, recruiters and admissions staff saw his potential and believed in him. The university president, Dr. Grose, gave his
approval and recommendation. Most remarkably, Julian and the president appreciated each other as confidants. Near the time of his 1920 graduation, Julian wrote a letter to the president – which I still preserve – that said, “today with a heart overflowing in gratitude, I can say nothing but that I shall forever ‘Thank God for you!’” In response, President Grose wrote, “Dear Percy: Your letter of May 17 makes my heart beat faster. From the day to which you refer until now, I have not ceased to believe in you, and now even more than ever. May God bless and keep you! Faithfully, your friend, George Richmond Grose.” As a grandson of President Grose, I was invited by Julian’s wife and children to the postage stamp commemoration for Julian during Black History Month in 1993. President Grose’s compassionate relationship with a highly assertive Percy Julian offset his authoritative side experienced on campus and with family. – Chuck Grose, Ph.D. ’53 Thanks and congratulations for the prominent publication of professor (Rebecca) Bordt’s superb analysis of the economic interests that have led to the mass incarceration since the 1996 “get tough” legislation during the Clinton administration. In addition to Dr. Bordt’s neoliberal economic analysis of the roots of mass incarceration, I would also note that the racially disparate arrest, prosecution and incarceration rate for possession of illegal drugs suggests that the drug laws are in themselves a symptom of institutional racism. – Michael Rice ’50
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DePauw’s new president: A ‘visionary,’ empathetic and focused optimist … who sings By Mary Dieter
ori S. White underwent intensive vetting before she was
named DePauw University’s 21st president in March, but her former boss thinks “the DePauw community doesn’t
even know yet how lucky it is.
“Lori White is a compelling leader in every respect,” said
Holden Thorp, who was her boss when he was provost and
executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at Washington
University. She was WashU’s vice chancellor for student affairs for five years before assuming the DePauw presidency July 1.
“She is extremely knowledgeable about higher education; she
is a very experienced manager; and she can rally people around
her better than anyone I have ever worked with,” said Thorp, now editor in chief of the Science family of journals. “She is about to
set DePauw on fire. The students and alumni will be enthused like they never have been before. Get ready for record crowds at your events.” Photo: Joel Bottom
Two stories about White – one personal, one professional –
provide more insight into DePauw’s new president.
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Story #1
“I’m very focused. Focus is one of my strengths, so when I decide there’s a goal in mind, I’m going to put all of my attention on achieving that particular goal.” – Dr. Lori White
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It was 1995, and White had traveled for her doctoral work from Stanford University in California to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. She was having dinner with friends, when Tony Tillman, a colleague of one of them, spotted them through the restaurant window. Too shy to step inside, he later asked their mutual friend if White would share a phone number. She acceded, they had a pleasant phone chat and, when she was in New York City several months later, they “spent a nice day together and I thought he was quite a nice guy.” Here, White explained: “The other thing you should know about me is I’m very focused. Focus is one of my strengths, so when I decide there’s a goal in mind, I’m going to put all of my attention on achieving that particular goal, whatever that might be. The goal was to be complete with my dissertation, my graduate work, by 1995 because, in 1991, I had bought a license plate for my car that said ‘PHD 1995.’ So come 1995, I was determined to finish. … “I couldn’t imagine how I could date somebody who lived all the way across the country when I was trying to finish my dissertation. This was before email and FaceTime and all the ways with which now we keep in touch with people. So we lost touch.” White met her goal that year and secured her Ph.D. in education administration and policy analysis, with an emphasis in higher education. A decade later, she and Tillman reconnected, though he had by then moved to Washington D.C. and she to Los Angeles. They forged a two-year, long-distance relationship. Both eventually went to work for Southern Methodist University and, nine years ago, they were married.
Story #2
In April 2018 the student newspaper at WashU published the latest of several “gut-wrenching” op eds – White’s description – written by students who reported that they had been sexually assaulted and found little sympathy or justice in the reporting process required by Title IX, a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. A day later, the newspaper published an op ed by White in which she revealed that she too had been a victim of sexual misconduct.
Photo: Brittney Way
“I was inspired by our students and their bravery to tell their own stories, and this also was happening against the backdrop of the emerging ‘Me Too’ movement, where not only were our students coming forward to tell their stories, but other women were coming forward, much more openly, to tell their stories,” she said. “And I thought, I have a story to tell also. Why am I afraid to tell my own story?” She consulted with several colleagues who encouraged her to write the op ed. “Students often see the administration
as this kind of nameless, faceless blob of people who make decisions,” she said. “I wanted them to also understand that there were women on the campus who may have also experienced what the students were, sadly, experiencing and I wanted students to know that we stood in solidarity and empathy with them, and that we were human beings also.” Soon thereafter, students – led by Title Mine, the self-styled “trauma-informed, survivor-centered activist movement” – staged a protest and, several weeks later, issued several demands.
White went to the university’s chancellor – equivalent to DePauw’s president – and volunteered to lead the school’s response, starting with formation of a working group of people whose jobs touched on some aspect of Title IX. A week later, White and the director of the Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention Center met with the Title Mine leaders. “They could not have been more welcoming and understanding,” said Candace Hayes, now a rising senior at WashU and founder of Title Mine. “They, from the beginning and since, treated us as peers and colleagues who were working with them to make a safer and more inclusive campus learning environment, not as though we were existing in a clear hierarchical structure with an imbalance of power dynamics. They wanted to make us feel comfortable with voicing our concerns and voicing our opinions. … Fortunately, over the course of the past two years, we’ve been able to build deep interpersonal relationships with the administrators whom we’ve been working with and have been able also to build trust.” Over that summer, White’s team evaluated the students’ demands – which she prefers to call “requests” – and agreed to most of them. “’Demand’ implies an adversarial relationship between students and administrators,” she said. “I really believe that mostly, when students ask us for things, they’re asking us for things that are not unreasonable. And if there is a way for us to work with students to get to ‘yes,’ I think that’s where we should focus.” WashU ultimately added six full-time positions and committed to speedier investigations, longer counseling hours, timely accommodations, more staff training and other steps.
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Throughout her career, White has worked on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, beginning with her first professional job almost 40 years ago as the director of the Cross Cultural Center at the University of California, Irvine. “These are issues that all of us are struggling with in higher education across the country and, really, we’re struggling with as a nation and as a world,” she said. “So I don’t think one person can come in with her Super Woman cape and solve all of that. … I hope that I can be a role model for talking about how important this is at DePauw and that students will see me as somebody who feels personally and professionally really committed to these really important issues.” She may not wear a Super Woman cape, but a former colleague expects White will make a significant difference at DePauw. She is “one of the most visionary leaders I have ever worked alongside,” said Robert Wild, WashU’s associate vice chancellor for student transition and engagement and dean of students. “She nurtured and recruited a strong, diverse and studentcentered team of leaders. More than anyone I have ever worked for, Dr. White sees potential in people.” She also “cares deeply about students,” Wild said. “She gets to know students on an individual level and is always seeking out those who many not have a voice at the table to understand their experience.”
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A few facts about Lori White:
“I
’m the eternal optimist,” she said. “I’ve always believed tomorrow’s going to be better than today and that there’s no challenge that is insurmountable.”
S
he’s an extrovert. “Every now and then I want to curl up with a good book and turn off the phone, but mostly I’m an extrovert.”
S
he’s the oldest of three daughters born to Myrtle Escort White, a nurse, and the late Joseph L. White, who taught psychology at the University of California, Irvine. Her parents divorced when White was 8, so her mother raised the girls as a single, working mother, inspiring them to “believe that we can achieve whatever it is that we imagine.” Her father taught her that “part of our role as educators is to invest in the next generation and to use, hopefully, our gifts and our talents to really move that next generation forward.”
S
he’s a morning person. “I get up at 4 in the morning. The other thing about me is I’m a routine person. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I have the same thing for breakfast (avocado toast and a scrambled egg, plus a smoothie). Tuesday, Thursday, I have the same thing for breakfast (peanut butter and toast and oatmeal, plus a smoothie). I like the morning because it’s quiet; nobody else is up. It gives me time to peacefully ease into the morning.”
W
S
he’s diminutive. “In my mind, I’m six-foot-two. But yes, I am short. It’s funny. When people who have never met me before meet me for the first time, they do remark on my stature because they are, I think, surprised. But people who know me always tell me that I show up much bigger than my stature. … And you know, I’m bossy and assertive.” (Said Kathy Lewis, her executive assistant at WashU: “She is tiny, but very mighty. … She is not bossy. She is a great delegator, though.”)
hen White visited the DePauw campus, her tour guide took her to Meharry Hall. As she gazed at the portraits of past university presidents, “that’s when I tell people I got the call, right? Because I really felt like I heard this voice saying to me, ‘Lori, you have the opportunity to make history. You have the opportunity to be an inspiration for current students and for generations that follow you.’ How can you say ‘no’ to that?”
S
he sings at home, in the shower and in the car to relieve stress and “on campus, if I’m going to speak, it’s likely that in some way, shape or form, in the midst of my speech, I’m going to break into some kind of song.” She started a student affairs choir at WashU and said she’ll do the same at DePauw “if there are singers – which I know there are at DePauw, given our music school – who want to sing for fun.”
S
he is disciplined. “No coffee. No tea. No caffeine. I just drink water mostly.”
S
he loves college sports. “I love the pomp and circumstances. I love the fans. I love the cheerleaders. I love the competition – all of that,” she said. She was a high school cheerleader and she has coached college-level cheerleading. She also inadvertently memorized all the mascots of Division I teams, “probably from osmosis of watching so many college football and basketball games over the years.” She promises to commit Division III mascots to memory soon.
S
he recognizes the historical significance of her appointment. “Somebody told me there’s already a Wikipedia on me,” she said. “I went to it and that’s exactly what it starts with. And, you know, forevermore folks will describe me, whenever they talk about DePauw’s history, as the first female president and the first African-American president. It will be wonderful when we get to the point of time in the history of our country when we’re not still talking about the firsts. But we’re not there yet.”
H
er pet peeve is negativity. “We all have down days and bad days, and I get that. And that’s fine,” she said. “But then I want us to refocus and think about how do we move forward. So pet peeves are when somebody comes in and lays a problem at my feet and then walks out the door. I don’t mind you coming in and saying to me, ‘Lori, this is wrong; I’m frustrated about this.’ Not a problem. Then I want you to say, ‘and here’s my solution for what I think we ought to do to fix it.’” For just such encounters, she keeps on hand a “magic” wand – a bedraggled and bejeweled feathery thingamajig – that she uses to tap the complainant on the shoulder and say, “Guess what? You are now in charge of this. Go forth. Make the best decision that I know that you know how to do.”
S
he is an avid reader, especially historical fiction and biographies. “I’m really fascinated by leadership, by presidential leadership in particular,” she said, and thus is a fan of the four-volume (soon to be five) Robert Caro biography of Lyndon B. Johnson.
S
he loves her red BMW sports car (“Two-seater hard top. It’s snazzy. It’s cool.”) and her pink tennis shoes, which have made “a huge difference in my ability to connect to students, and then they recognize me.” She said she wonders if she should swap them out for gold. SUMMER 2020 DEPAUW MAGAZINE I 11
GOLD WITHIN
THE HEALERS
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Alum hopes to meet global needs by establishing med school By Mary Dieter
om Mote ’74 isn’t asking for much. Really. Just “somebody to prime the pump” with a couple million dollars, to give some street cred to his Tumaini Global Health Foundation and its grand plan to start a medical school in Greencastle. And then, down the line a bit, another $30 million that would make the Tumaini Medical School for Global Health a reality. Such largesse isn’t unprecedented, he pointed out, and the need is great. Tumaini would be only the third medical school in the world and the first in the United States dedicated to training physicians to care for underserved populations, whether in sub-Saharan Africa or downtown Indianapolis. When the Indianapolis anesthesiologist dreams really big, he envisions someone doing for future Tumaini students what billionaire Ken Langone, co-founder of The Home Depot Inc., did in 2018 for medical students at New York University: Donate $100 million and raise another $350 million so the school will be tuitionfree forevermore. For Mote and others on Tumaini’s
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“The current COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the need for a different/ renewed institutional focus on public health as well as individual health in medical education. … As we are now experiencing fully, public health issues have an almost infinite set of dimensions, which affect us all and to which we can all contribute.” – Jeffrey O. Lewis ’74, retired lawyer
“Why am I interested in a global health medical school? We need it! It would emphasize epidemiology and upstream medicine, serving underserved populations in the U.S. and abroad. … My commitment to this endeavor includes a major donation via my trust.” – Eleanor “Elee” Northrop Hall ’61, retired from a career in human resources and real estate
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board, the idea is that medical students without enormous debt might skip the more lucrative specialties and practice in underserved rural or blighted urban areas, domestic or abroad. “That’s farther down the road,” Mote allowed. Millionaires and billionaires “are hard to get a hold of.” But the medical school? “We think it’s doable,” he said. He has done a lot of homework; recruited the foundation’s board, which is replete with DePauw grads; attended conferences; visited med schools in California, Massachusetts and Texas; borrowed the financial studies done a decade ago during planning for the Marian University College of Osteopathic Medicine; and consulted with experienced fundraisers – including one on Tumaini’s board, retired attorney Jeffrey Lewis ’74, Mote’s roommate at DePauw, who raised money to establish 20-year-old University High School in Carmel, Indiana. Mote’s mission began out of his frustration with hospitals. “They seemed to be more about health care than health,” he said. “And not looking at the upstream social determinants of health, as they’re called – people’s behavior, living conditions.” That prompted him to spend 2003 away from his medical practice to study at Harvard University for a master’s degree in public health. Later, “I went with DePauw’s students on a winter term in service project to Ghana and I just saw how much of a difference you can make just doing simple things.” He also volunteered his anesthesiology services in a program in Kenya operated by Thomas Burke, director of the Global Health Innovations Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital and a Harvard Medical School associate professor.
“In medical school,” Mote said, “you learn how to take care of one person at a time, an individual, whereas public health is all about populations, groups of people.” He told Burke that he wanted to start a foundation to teach college students about global health and “he said, ‘why not a medical school?’ So I started the foundation then.” The foundation has a second purpose – to promote global health education for young people. “They are extremely helpful to us in terms of speakers, student encouragement and connections for us,” said Sharon Crary, professor of chemistry and biochemistry and co-director of DePauw’s Global Health Program. Speakers are brought in to lecture students but also to present annually to faculty members from DePauw and other members of a consortium Tumaini has formed – Wabash College, Butler University and Thomas More University, where Kathleen Snell Jagger ’75, a Tumaini board member who taught microbiology and public health at DePauw from 1983 to 2002, recently spent a year as acting president.
The foundation also has sponsored several DePauw students to attend global health conferences. Jeffrey G. Jones ’76, a physician and board member, said the foundation can teach young people that “we can use a tiny bit of our resources to help significantly in other parts of the world that don’t have so many resources. … We are rapidly getting to a place where you are a ‘have’ or a ‘have not.’ If you’re a ‘have,’ you’ve got no worries. If you’re a ‘have not,’ I’m not sure there’s that much difference between you and some other places we’re working in in the developing world. So these principles apply, regardless of where you are.” (See page 16.) Others on the Tumaini board are Eleanor “Elee” Northrup Hall ’61, Mote’s aunt; Kenrad Nelson ’54, a retired professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University; Michael Christie ’74, a Nashville orthopedic surgeon; and Sajel Tremblay Nuwamanya ’12, a resident physician in Alabama (see page 17). Burke is the only non-DePauw alum on the board. Mote studied zoology at DePauw, where
“something like 28 relatives,” including his late parents, attended, and thought about becoming a physician but doubted that he’d get into medical school. So he spent a year working as an orderly in a Massachusetts hospital, a year studying graduate-level biology at Case Western University and a year working as a research associate at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He returned to Case Western for medical school, after which he did a surgery residency but was persuaded by friends to switch to anesthesiology. He practices at hospitals across metropolitan Indianapolis. Mote said he’ll continue to strive to establish the medical school; he and his aunt have even included it in their wills. He is driven by hope and, when he was volunteering in Kenya, saw it all around him – in a book he read, on the posters then-Sen. Obama used to run for president, in the people he met. “I just think hope makes a big, big difference,” he said. “You can get through a lot if you have hope.” And that’s why his foundation is named “Tumaini.” That’s Swahili for “hope.”
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Personal experiences prepared ’76 alum for work, service By Mary Dieter
effrey Jones was operating a corn auger, one of the chores expected of an 11-year-old boy on a Madison County, Indiana, dairy farm, when the huge, diesel-powered grinder swallowed his arm. The auger broke his forearm, then his upper arm, before the pin sheered and he was stuck. When his mangled arm was freed and he was sent to the hospital, doctors considered amputation. “I was just a little kid; I had no business doing the work that I was doing, but that’s how it’s done on farms,” the 1976 DePauw graduate said. “Thinking back on it, I think that was really why I got very interested in prevention. There was no safety equipment. Should an 11-year-old be operating a huge diesel and all this stuff? No. But that made a big impression on me. It was my introduction to health care. It was powerful.” They saved the arm, and he has fairly good use of it – enough, anyway, that it did not get in the way of his career as a physician. The experience, coupled with the generosity of others, including the high school chemistry teacher who took him on a visit to DePauw, played a huge role in the way he practices. “I’d never even heard of DePauw so I went there and I thought, ‘this is glorious,’” Jones said. “And it’s so much easier than work on the farm. Then I got a scholarship
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to go, the Rector. What I’m getting at is, people really helped me along the way. So I feel a certain obligation to pay back.” He regrets now that he zipped through DePauw in three years. He is a travel medicine physician, caring for patients seeking preventive care before traveling and treating travelers who contract illnesses abroad. He did a family medicine residency after graduating from medical school “but I never really intended to have a traditional family medicine practice. What I really liked was prevention.” That caused him to earn master’s degrees in pharmacology in 1982 and infectious diseases in 2006 and a Master of Public Health degree in occupational medicine in 1989. He went to Peru to study for a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene in 1997. His interest in global health caused him to join the board of the Tumaini Global Health Foundation and support founder Tom Mote’s dual visions of teaching young
people about global health and opening a medical school dedicated to global health. Mote and Jones did not know each other at DePauw; they met when Mote visited Jones to prepare for a trip. Twice a year, for two weeks at a time – so he is not away from his practice for too long – Jones joins a nongovernmental organization on a mission trip. He has lost count of how many such trips he has made – 50 or 60, he guessed – but has traveled at least seven times with Timmy Global Health and a DePauw winter-term-in-service contingent, including one last January. Last fall, he traveled to Bangladesh to provide medical care to Rohingya Muslim refugees, who had escaped rapes, killings and the decimation of their homes by the military in their home country of Myanmar. “You don’t have to go too far in the world to see places with great needs and great suffering,” Jones said. “As a person, you’re limited at what you can do, but you can do something.”
Evolving interests drive ’12 grad to trade test tubes for a stethoscope By Mary Dieter
Sajel Tremblay Nuwamanaya ’12 taught hospital staff members and nursing students in Rukungiri, Uganda, about family planning during a mission month in January during her residency. She previously spent two years at the hospital after graduating from DePauw and before entering medical school.
ajel Tremblay Nuwamanya ’12 was a gung-ho laboratory scientist in the making when she came to DePauw University. And then her evolution began. She met Sharon Crary, a biochemistry professor who likewise relished her time at the lab bench but who also started Social Promise, a nonprofit health and education foundation that helps people in Uganda. “Seeing how she combined those two interests in her life – sciences and then actually meeting the needs of people overseas – showed me that there was a much bigger world to really apply this knowledge, all this science knowledge that I was gaining,” the Rector scholar said. Then, as a double major in biochemistry and French, she met Cheira Lewis, associate professor of global French studies, whose teaching “gave me the confidence” to study in Senegal, where she focused on public health and lived with a French-speaking family. (Lewis said this about Nuwamanya: “She is not only wise beyond her years, but also incredibly bright and generous-hearted.”) And then she met Thomas Burke, director of the Global Health Innovations Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, when he spoke to global health students at DePauw. “I asked Dr. Burke if he had opportunities to work overseas for a gap year, which I thought would end with me going to get a master’s in public health,” she said. “The program he had with an opening was a rural hospital in southwest Uganda, focusing on child malnutrition, both
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preventive measures – gardening projects and education – and also inpatient and outpatient clinical treatment of children with malnutrition. It was hand in hand, the prevention and the treatment, and it was during that year in Uganda that I decided that I really enjoyed the medical side, that personal interaction with patients.” And so, a person who had pointedly avoided medical school, figuring it was too difficult and too long a haul, reversed herself and, while extending her stay for a second year in Uganda, studied for the medical school admission test, applied and got accepted, having returned to the states long enough to take the test. She graduated from Wayne State University School of Medicine in 2018 and headed to Cahaba Medical Care, located in an underserved area of Alabama. There, she is beginning her third and final year of a family medicine residency. Nuwamanya sees hospitalized patients and “my own panel of patients” whom she sees routinely for adult medicine, pediatrics, prenatal care and deliveries. After her residency is completed, Nuwamanya plans to return to Detroit to work three years in an area with a physician shortage, then permanently move with her Ugandan husband to his home country. “Family medicine sets me up really well for global health in that it’s a broad spectrum of training,” she said. “You look at the whole person. You’re not focused on one organ system. You try to look at the whole patient and have a focus on prevention as well as treatment. … “I wasn’t made out for a lab job, a lab position at the desk doing basic sciences. I was much more interested in how that played out in communities and on a personal level.”
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Sharon Crary (middle)
Scientist and humanitarian: Prof embodies disparate interests, then acts on and teaches them By Mary Dieter haron Crary was on the frontlines battling the deadly Ebola hemorrhagic fever, working in a country terrorized by a resistance leader who maintained power by amputating enemies’ noses, lips, ears and arms. And yet the lasting impression that she took away from her first visit to Uganda was how much she loved the people and how much she wanted to do what she could to improve their lives. “Somehow,” she said, “I really fell in love with it there.” Crary, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and co-director of DePauw’s Global Health Program, is both a research scientist and a humanitarian. She loves working in a laboratory but found her humanitarianism reinvigorated when she went to Uganda in late 2000 on behalf of the Centers for Disease Control.
She had attended a Quaker high school that required its students to engage in service activities and write about them. But “that went away from me for a little while in college … (when) I got really focused on science,” she said. “Everything was just science and lab, and I think going to Uganda reopened that world for me, that there are people who are living in much more dire circumstances than me, through no fault of their own, and I can do something to change that.” As a CDC researcher, she never expected to go into the field. But then a boss asked her if she would be willing to spell a colleague who had been toiling in the Ugandan outbreak of Ebola so that person could spend Christmas with a young daughter. “I remember just being shocked,” she said. And scared – not of the deadly illness nor of traveling to a country unknown to her, but rather of the spiders and cockroaches she might encounter. “I had the silliest fears, you know? Then within a couple weeks of being there, I definitely put those fears to rest,” she said. “There are other things that matter in life, like the people who are living on mud floors.” For six weeks, she conducted testing that required her to wait several hours for the results. She would use those free hours to drive a borrowed car to St. Jude Children’s Home, an orphanage, “and hang out with kids there.” She felt safe on the journey along deserted roads, she said, because Ebola had scared people – including the resistance fighters – inside. All these years later, thanks to Social Promise, an organization Crary founded her first year back home and incorporated as a nonprofit in 2011, the hospital now has a primary school on site and a center that seeks to dispel folklore that children with disabilities are all-too-public proof that the parent has done something
wrong; it also teaches parents to cope with their children’s disabilities. St. Mary’s Lacor Hospital, where Crary worked during her CDC stint, also has benefited from her organization’s fundraising. Social Promise also offers programs focused on teaching young children about life in rural Uganda and urging them to use their creativity to problem-solve. The programs also teach about philanthropy; “there’s a lot of science,” Crary said, “that shows that giving and helping others makes you feel good. … Having empathy for people has that same effect, so we try to teach about empathy.” Meanwhile, Crary still gets into the lab, but it is with DePauw student researchers or, as she was doing before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, helping high school students
complete a science fair project. Doing so, she said, “reminds me how nice it is to be in lab and how peaceful and calm it is. It’s really rejuvenating to me.” She still works with one small – and nonthreatening – piece of the Ebola virus, but the goal isn’t to find a treatment; that’s not realistic in a lab where a rotating group of undergraduate students work just a few hours each week. “My goal is to train my students to do research,” she said. “I actually don’t even care anymore about that longterm goal. It’s just irrelevant to me, really. Oddly. What I care about is I’m training students to think really well about research and to learn techniques very well and to be able to analyze data and critique their own experiments so, whatever they do next, I know they’re going to do it very well.”
DePauw’s global health program As best as Sharon Crary can remember, she and Rebecca Upton were at a basketball game when they started talking about a global health major at DePauw. “For me, seeing the situation in Uganda when I was 30 years old made me realize I wish I had learned about it sooner,” Crary said. “... I went to a liberal arts college also, and I thought it’s really a liberal arts discipline because it requires math skills, logic skills, scientific skills, communication skills. Some empathy skills. Things we really stress, particularly here at DePauw.” Crary and Upton, a professor of sociology and anthropology and previously a medical anthropologist who worked in women’s health and HIV/AIDS, got serious about writing a proposal after Upton, who already had a Ph.D., earned a master’s in public health in 2014. “Global health has always been one of the clearest examples of the strengths of the liberal arts,” Upton said. “As Sharon and I have always said, it is inherently interdisciplinary – an applied discipline that requires students to be facile (and) fluent in both the sciences and social sciences.” The faculty accepted their proposal and the two were named co-directors of the global health program. The first cohort of five majors graduated in 2018, followed by 22 majors in 2019 and 20 this year. Though many students are inspired to study global health because of their studyabroad experiences, others want to delve into questions of access to health care locally, Crary said. “It’s the same question you have with access to a doctor in rural Uganda, but there might be different root problems and different solutions.”
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Researcher follows the science toward treatments By Mary Dieter
rom his fifth-grade class in Huntington, Indiana, through his zoology major at DePauw University to his lab at Indiana University School of Medicine, Mark Kelley ’79 has followed the science. “It’s always about following the protein, following what it does, and then following the science,” he said. And for almost 30 years, Kelley has followed a protein called APE1/Ref-1. “The story gets very complicated,” he said. “It’s really hard to do an elevator pitch.” But Kelley’s work comes down to this: Promising treatments for pediatric and adult brain tumors; pediatric leukemia and neuroblastoma; osteosarcoma; and pancreatic, ovarian, bladder, prostate and cervical cancers. For diabetic retinopathy and diabetic macular edema. For inflammatory bowel disease and other diseases of the digestive tract. Maybe more. “My lab and my partners’ labs are all about translation,” he said. “I know that’s a big buzzword, but we want to translate our findings from the bench to the public. That’s what our focus is. We like basic science but we always want to be thinking: Where is this going to go to help the patient? I love science for science, but I also love when I can see where this can have an impact.” His grade school teacher may have sparked his interest in science, but
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Photo: Tim Yates, IU School of Medicine
independent research with fruit flies at DePauw and a study-away program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory caused him to realize his calling was research. He worked with fruit flies throughout his master’s and Ph.D. programs and postdoctoral work at Rockefeller University, then went to work for Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University, where “we started morphing from fruit fly research into mammalian cells – cell culture in mice and humans. That’s when I started working on this protein.” In 1993, he joined IU, where his various titles and appointments rivals those of Elizabeth II. For this story, his most pertinent roles are associate director of basic science research at IU’s Simon Cancer Center and the Betty and Earl Herr chair in pediatric oncology research. Late last decade, Kelley, several other scientists and investors formed Apexian Pharmaceuticals Inc. to advance the clinical trials of his drugs. IU owns the intellectual property Kelley has developed, but licensed his patents to Apexian, which started
a phase one trial in February 2019 to determine the safety and dosing of his drug. The growth of tumors slowed in several participants, all of whom had end-stage cancer. “We figured they’d be on a few cycles, we’d get our safety data and stop,” Kelley said. “But if patients’ tumors aren’t progressing, it’s just immoral and unethical to stop.” The pharmaceutical world took notice of the drug’s safety profile and potential uses. In January, Apexian licensed potential drugs for the eye to Ocuphire Pharma Inc., which is expected to start a phase two clinical trial, when efficacy will be evaluated, yet this year. Meanwhile, Apexian is getting inquiries about licensing its other pipeline drugs. “You can’t imagine the feeling of taking something that you spend your life on in the lab, and you’re seeing a patient take this and you’re confident that it’s going to be safe,” Kelley said. “… It’s just fabulous, because that’s why we’re doing the science.”
Shannon Fayson (second from right) Photo: University of Michigan Department of Surgery
The ‘dura mater’ handles medical training and motherhood with aplomb By Mary Dieter hannon Fayson’s Instagram handle is “dura.mater.” For a while, the 2011 DePauw graduate described herself on Twitter as “ENT resident surgeon. Mother. … Nerd.” She recently swapped out a few descriptors for this: “Trailblazer. Health equity advocate.” Let’s parse. The handle: Fayson was attending a boot camp before starting medical school at Ohio State University, listening to a lecture about the coverings of the brain. “The thickest layer is called the ‘dura mater,’ and that means ‘tough mother,’” Fayson said. “My friend looked at me and said, ‘Shannon, you’re a dura mater.’ I’m like, I am a ‘dura mater.’ That name ever since then has stuck with me.” She’s a mother: Indeed, Fayson, an
ear, nose and throat surgeon starting her third year of a five-year residency at Michigan Medicine, is the mother of 9-year-old Aiden, born on the first day of her senior year finals week at DePauw. The biochemistry major and philosophy minor had made arrangements with her professors to take her exams late and, upon returning home after a cesarean section, “it was studying time. One arm I had studying; the other arm, I was trying to breastfeed my son. Twenty-one years old. It was so overwhelming.” Still, she did well on her finals, taken while friends watched the baby, and then, with her pastor caring for Aiden, “I walked on graduation day.” She’s tough: “I remember being nervous for Shannon as she was heading into that Chem 440 class, one of the
toughest in the major. But I needn’t have been,” said Dan Gurnon, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry. “She sat right up front, always positive, always engaged, working as hard as she could, never asking for special treatment. In fact, the only time she mentioned her pregnancy in the context of classwork was when she told me it was likely she would go into labor sometime during finals week, and that we might need to reschedule the exam. Never before had I seen such a strong work ethic and positive attitude. She’s amazing. At the end of that semester I knew that, if medical school was what she wanted, she would get there.” Two years later, Fayson was listening to a lecture about otolaryngogoly when “the little hairs on the back of my neck stood up.” She knew this was her specialty, but the speaker was a white man, and she wondered if a black woman could fit in. Immediately after the lecture, she googled “African-American otolaryngologists in Columbus, Ohio,” and learned that Minka Schofield was an associate professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at
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Ohio State. “I was blown away. … She’s actually at my medical school!” Fayson said. “So I emailed her and got a visit set up with her to shadow in her clinic and the rest is history.” Said Schofield: “Shannon is the epitome of resilience and persistence. … We worked together to devise the best pathway for her to be a competitive candidate to match in ENT (residency). This path was filled with blood, sweat and even tears.” She’s a nerd: “I am such a nerd,” Fayson said. “I love science. I love band, so people call me a band geek. (A trumpet player since sixth grade, she was in the marching and
symphonic bands in high school and the university band at DePauw and now plays in the life sciences orchestra at the University of Michigan.) I’m in love with learning. As a physician I’m a lifelong learner. But I get so excited about learning new things. I’m giddy when I’m learning something new.” She’s a trailblazer: Fayson was already well known in social media for being “a unicorn. People know who I am just because I’m a black female in ENT at Michigan.” She encourages young women who want to emulate her or ask how a single mother can handle medical training. Then the TODAY show noticed, featuring her and two
colleagues in a March story about women doctors “who are changing the field of surgery,” and “that really blew things up.” She’s a health-equity advocate: “I change daily, especially during this experience with the COVID-19,” she said. “… I’m really shifting into this role where I’m learning about health disparities” that put people of color at higher risk of contracting the coronavirus, and she dreams of becoming “a world-renowned advocate for people of color in the medical field. “That’s so exciting,” she said. “I’m actually going to add that to my Twitter handle.”
Liberal arts taught wildlife vet to consider different approaches to patients’ problems By Sarah McAdams
Photo: Dawn O’Neal-Shumate
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mber McNamara ’97 looked at the gopher tortoise lying on the treatment table and considered her options. The creature had been hit by a car, and was dragging her back legs. The veterinarian had treated wildlife with medications typically used for domestic animals, “but at some point, you run out of treatment options,” she said, “and this tortoise was very amenable to receiving acupuncture and physical therapy.”
Photo: Dawn O’Neal-Shumate
And thus McNamara, trained in traditional veterinary medicine at Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, tapped her less traditional training – she is certified in veterinary acupuncture – to treat her patient. “Eventually she was able to walk again,” McNamara said. “And eventually, released. So it is really amazing to see. And even though it’s a slow progression, it was progression and movement in the right direction.” McNamara is an associate professor of biology at Lees McRae College in North Carolina and a veterinarian at its May Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, where more than 1,500 injured and orphaned wildlife patients were treated last year. A biology major and math minor at DePauw, McNamara had always loved animals but credits a winter-term experience shadowing a vet for helping her envision how her love of science and her compassion for animals jibed. Her track took a turn toward the unusual when she was in veterinary school and worked a six-week externship at a
wildlife clinic in Florida. “I really loved the idea that every day was different,” she said, “and it really felt good at the end of the day to feel like you were doing something positive, not only for that individual animal but for the habitats in which they live and, to some extent, the environment and the ecology of the whole.” After graduating from Purdue, McNamara interned at the Clinic for the Rehabilitation of Wildlife in Sanibel, Florida, then worked there for eight years. “Wildlife medicine requires you to think quite a bit outside the box,” she said. “Since our patients are anywhere from two grams to 20 kilograms” – that’s seven-tenths of an ounce to 44 pounds – “solutions can be hard to come by.” McNamara has had her share of bites and scratches, though nothing serious. “I try to teach the students that, even though we are trying to help the animals, to them, we are predators. We teach the students to handle the patients in a way that is both safe for the handler and minimizes the stress of the patient.” Her liberal arts education taught to
consider more than one way to approach a problem, she said. Her wildlife patients, including that gopher tortoise, often benefit from a different approach to healing. She tries to impart the same sort of thinking to her students, and hopes they recognize that they can do good, “even if it’s just one small action,” she said. “It doesn’t always mean that we have a positive outcome. Sometimes the outcome is not what we hoped for, but if we can show compassion to an animal – even if that compassion means ending their suffering – they can do something good.”
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She has loved them since she was 6: Vet cares for, competes with and rescues horses By Sarah McAdams
Photo: Niamh O’Connell
ikki Dalesandro Scherrer ’07 loved horses since she was 6, so swapping out plans to be a physician to become a large animal veterinarian wasn’t too much a stretch. She had entered DePauw with a notion to following her mother, a nurse, into medicine. Human medicine. But something clicked when a classmate decided to go to vet school, and a winterterm class at an equine business cinched Scherrer’s decision. “I got to work with the local and horse show veterinarians and knew it was something I was really interested in,” she said. Her experience as a science research fellow at DePauw “gave me just a really nice base in research, combined with a biochemistry major,” Scherrer said. “And DePauw has a great reputation. The courses are just solid foundation classes. So
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I think it made an easy transition applying to the medical field.” Scherrer graduated from the Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine, interned at the Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, and completed an ophthalmology residency at the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center, where today she is an assistant professor of clinical large animal ophthalmology. She teaches veterinary students and oversees fourth-year students on clinical rotations. “Having them around with all the cases and asking great questions is awesome,” she said. “They keep me on my toes.” She also practices medicine at the center, which treats about 5,000 patients a year. “It’s a high case load,” she said. “It’s a lot of hours, but luckily I enjoy what I do.” Scherrer is one of the founders of Omega Horse Rescue, a nonprofit committed to providing humane treatment
for horses through education, research and high-quality care. “We end up adopting about 60 horses a year and help a total of around 150,” she said. “It’s fun to see horses that were slated to not have a future get to have a new career.” She adopted a rescue horse – Ears – and she owns two others, Tiger and Gnat. They’re all thoroughbreds. “I ride every day – early in the morning or late after work,” she said. “I ride a mix of my horses and rescues that I volunteer to ride so they can become more adoptable.” She and her horses also compete in dressage events and show jumping. “I love the feeling of going out with your horse and just having a great round and knowing that everything you worked on has paid off,” she said. “The stress from work can go away for a few minutes and all that matters is what you are doing.”
Magical thinking By Leila Hernandez ’05
DePauw in the time of COVID-19
COVID-19 closed our campus, shut us in, forced us to adapt. It sickened millions, killed thousands, rendered all of us powerless. We asked members of the DePauw community to reflect on the virus and its ramifications, which have monumentally changed our lives and indelibly marked our history.
The main lesson I remember from my anthropology classes with my brilliant professor, Lakshmi Fjord, is this: All human rites of passage have three phases: separation, liminality and incorporation. Liminality – where the magical transformation takes place – is the scariest yet most interesting phase. I can’t help but see this global pandemic as a rite of passage and our experience in quarantine as a perfect example of liminality, where we must perform certain actions to safely navigate to the other side. We left our offices and schools, and all-but-essential businesses were forced to close. We look forward to that glorious day when we can all go outside and hug our family, friends and neighbors again. We’re not there yet. We need to make peace with this magical and mysterious phase. We don’t know what’s ahead of us. We only know that we can never go back to how it used to be. So many things that gave us comfort and a sense of control are no longer there, and we don’t know if they are coming back. But liminality is where growth and change happen, where roles are reversed and the powerless become the powerful. Liminality is the great equalizer. By the time this global pandemic has run its course, and we are re-incorporated into a fully functioning society, I hope and pray that we are a better society, one that cares for our poorest and views health care as a human right. I hope we will continue to slow down. I hope that a new world will be born. I’m ready for the magic.
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A simple request
Resilience
By Meghann “Meggie” Dials ’03
By Gigi Jennewein, assistant professor of communication and theatre
My ask is simple: As we approach whatever phase we are about to enter, go in with an open mind and heart. We are six+ weeks into this and we have learned about the criticality of compassion and empathy. So don’t stifle your voices, your passions, nor your fears, but speak in ways that are not against your neighbor.
Artists are continuing to be resourceful, generous and community-driven people. While most individual artists (and arts institutions) are expressing obvious concern about their livelihoods, they are hanging in by staying actively connected and by opening up access. Theatres are sharing filmed versions of plays. Playwrights are unrestricting access to their work, and writing more and sharing it. I discovered a site featuring “Viral Monologues” written by successful playwrights and performed by famous actors from their kitchens and backyards and beds, among other locales. I was thrilled to discover this because I will use it for class, but also because it was artists doing what artists do best: responding to the times with insight, humor, pathos and inclusion. I think that when the gates reopen we’ll see an explosion of art as people will be so eager to be together. I think – hope – that theatres will flourish, music will explode and public art will reemerge. Because the arts have always been a celebration of our shared humanity and we all will certainly be wanting to share our humanity when we are released from this nightmare.
A different rite of passage By Byron Mason II ’20 This entire world is fighting the same enemy and it manifests differently for so many of us. We are fighting in solitude and in quarantine and yet, even despite differences, we could be a unified front if we seek to understand. And so above all else: Human. Kind. Be both.
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My last semester at DePauw felt like a movie that ended half an hour early. And you had to see the rest of it when it came out on DVD. You definitely feel disconnected. There’s no way that online classes, phone calls and text messages can replicate those connections you have with your peers and your professors. It’s tough, but very necessary. That feeling of being disconnected doesn’t make me feel any less accomplished as I finish out my finals, but being at home when I should be preparing for graduation takes away a bit of the gravity of the whole situation. I don’t feel that combination of relief and pressure as I move on to the next chapter. Some might say that’s a good thing, but that mix of pressure and relief you feel when graduating is like a rite of passage. That’s when you can really say you did it. A lot of seniors won’t be able to experience that until a later date. It still won’t be the same, but it’s something, and that’s what matters.
A changed life By Bo Shimmin ’19
Discovery By Gloria Townsend, professor of computer science In normal times, extroverts rule the world. Now, at long last, we introverts have some power. When I “talk” with my students during COVIDTime, I discover fascinating facets of their personalities. One of my advisees recently described the new way she experiences a blooming magnolia that she watched every other spring but had never really seen until spring 2020. As faculty members, we’ve talked so much about learning new ways to communicate with our students during spring 2020. I want to ensure that I don’t lose spring 2020 communication when I return to the so-called normal world.
On March 10, I received a devastating email from the Italian Fulbright Commission and Department of State stating that the Fulbright program for which I was teaching was being suspended and we must leave the country as soon as possible. I was in Rome with other Fulbright English teaching assistants and researchers and we all were enjoying the city and how quiet it had become without the usual tourists. My host city of Cagliari seemed one of the safer places to be, considering it was on the island of Sardinia, and I immediately packed up my suitcase to get back to my home. Schools had been shut down for a few weeks and I was eagerly waiting for Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, to bear some good news about returning. That news would never come and I arrived back to a city that resembled something from a horror movie. Public transit was empty. The streets were silent. Only pharmacies and groceries stores were open. I was scared. My beautiful and wonderful Sardinia wasn’t the same. I was greeted back to my flat with six feet of separation by my flatmates, who wanted to be sure I was healthy. They, too, were nervous of the virus. Sardinia is small and the life expectancy rate is very high, thanks to their high quality of life and great Mediterranean diets, so people were unwilling to take any chances when it came to the spread of COVID-19. I never got to say goodbye to anyone who had made my experience so special. I cried as I packed my bags, not knowing when I would be able to return or see them. On March 12, the night before my flight home, a student saw me from his balcony and shouted down to me, “Bo, we miss you! When is school starting again?” I had no answer. I could only wave back and tell him how much I missed being able to speak with them and watch them grow in the classroom. I never thought I would grow to love teaching high school this much, but this experience completely changed my life. The students, teachers and friends I had made will always be with me.
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Foundations By Jacob Hale, associate professor of physics I could reflect on students, family, teaching, science. I guess that my deepest reflection has been on a topic where all of those intersect: foundations. The pandemic has caused us to pause as a world, a nation, a community, a college, a classroom and a family. We all have been forced to pause and I hope we are inspecting our foundations. What truly is important for a happy life? What brings deep and reliable peace? I don’t think the answer comes from our surroundings and circumstances but much more in our character and how we respond. It is much more in our relationships with loved ones rather than our resources. For years I have enjoyed a Sunday walk with my sweetheart. We’ve continued that walk through the stay-at-home order (and made it more frequent) but have been thrilled to see so many families in our neighborhood playing in their yards, a sight we seldom saw before. I recognize that I am privileged with my current surroundings and resources: I have a safe place to go on a walk. Still, throughout my life with and without traditional resources, true peace and joy haven’t come from publications, payment or prominence. It is much closer to home.
Whimsy Jackie Roberts, the Howard C. and Mary Ellen Black professor of chemistry and biochemistry and department chair, made thrice-weekly wellness checks fun for her advanced biochemistry students. This was hat day, followed a week later by onesie day.
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A difficult decision Mahmoud Abouelkheir ’21 was in Belgium, participating in a study-abroad research internship, when COVID-19 began affecting communities globally. “I had to make the difficult decision to stay abroad instead of returning to my home in New York City,” he said by email in late April. “I hope that by June things will have returned to some level of normalcy as I have been accepted to a summer internship program at Massachusetts General Hospital.”
A month later, he wrote that the program “was not cancelled! Instead it has moved onto an online format so that I could participate remotely with a Harvard Medical School faculty member in computational biology. … “It’s interesting to see how much has changed since I first wrote about the pandemic and now. Grocery stores are fully stocked like normal, and many areas of the country have loosened quarantine restrictions. I have even returned to my lab to continue doing my research internship in person! I think we all are all cautious about restarting society, but so far things have been working out well with no significant second wave of infections.”
15 days By Abi Smith ’21 While other students were being sent home from DePauw, I was among 1,600 Americans stuck in Peru. The Peru president announced travel restrictions March 15; we had until 11:59 p.m. the next day to leave. Planes filled up; the government halted travel; and two other DePauw students, Catherine Fisher ’21 and Perla Bermudez ’21, and I were stuck indefinitely. I was working as a media intern for the nonprofit Globalteer, which let me stay in my housing during the lockdown. We ran out of hot water on the third day. On Day 10, I was turned away from a grocery store, although I had a face mask and gloves. I was allowed in the next day after my temperature was taken. At midnight on Day 15, I got a call informing me that I could fly out with Catherine and Perla’s study-abroad group, School for Field Studies. Seven hours later, I was out the door, hauling a 50-pound suitcase and trying to avoid police who might order me back to my housing. I got a ride with SFS to the airport, where we waited five hours to enter. We finally got a flight to Miami. I slept while waiting for a flight to Atlanta. When I got there, my flight home to Fort Wayne was canceled. I finally found another flight and made it home seven hours later.
10,000 miles It was 4 a.m. in Mauritius, so Khushboo “Ashna” Coondiah ’23 hesitated to call home with the news that DePauw, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, asked students to leave campus immediately. While Coondiah waited anxiously to call, “tons of questions were roaming in my head,” she said via email. When she finally reached her parents, they decided jointly that she should return home and figure out the rest later. After seven months and 10,000 miles away, she was excited to return to the tropical island nation 1,200 miles off the coast of Africa, but saddened to think that “after this, I will never return to campus with my senior friends there.” At home, Coondiah immediately isolated herself. “Even though I am living with my parents and sisters, I made sure we do not have any physical contact and we tried to disinfect surfaces as much as we can,” she said. “Three days after I landed, Mauritius reported its first case of COVID-19.”
1,000 masks By Mary Morris Hamilton ’81 When she was furloughed from her jobs as a swim teacher and coach, the former DePauw swimmer and lifelong seamstress started sewing masks. And sewing them. And sewing them.
I started with making the masks for my niece, who is a physician who lives in Milwaukee, because her dermatology clinic was totally out. I love updating my friends about my sewing projects on Facebook, so I posted a photo of the masks for my niece, and all of a sudden got dozens of orders! Many of the orders came from all over the country, and I ended up donating masks to physicians and other health care professionals in Florida, Wisconsin and Virginia. I supplied masks to multiple companies who support the health care industry too. I’ve used more than 150 yards of fabric for the 1,000 masks I’ve made. My current project is for my DePauw roommate who is deaf and pointed out the need for see-through masks, as those who are deaf need to see the lips of others to understand them or to converse. I love to sew; it’s something I learned from my mother, and it’s amazing to use this skill to help others! A fun fact about my mother is that she made the first-ever DePauw swimming banner.
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Déjà vu During World War II, a Maysville, Kentucky, distillery shut down its bourbon operation to produce fuel. The distillery – then owned by others – was previously and subsequently owned by the Pogue family, including Paul ’75, Peter ’83 and John ’07. (See the spring issue of DePauw Magazine.) The COVID-19 pandemic prompted the Pogues to undertake a new “wartime” effort – converting their Old Pogue Distillery to make hand sanitizer. “John, as usual, did the distilling part, and I did the logistics part,” Peter Pogue, a lawyer, said by email. “You essentially make high-proof alcohol, a bit higher than bourbon, and then put in
Ditto DePauw
some additives to comply with (federal) requirements. In speaking with the local Emergency Management folks, (we learned) the local hospitals, nursing homes, etc., were projected to be out of hand sanitizer in about two weeks. So we stopped making bourbon and switched to making hand sanitizer. We are donating our time, materials and labor. Other local companies are stepping up with donating grain – corn and barley – and plastic containers to get this accomplished. … “Ironic that our distillery stopped making bourbon during WWII and made fuel alcohol for tanks, etc. After all, didn’t DePauw teach us to be philanthropic? Hopefully, we’ll look back and can say we made a positive contribution to stemming this virus.”
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Some quick thinking also addressed the dwindling supply of hand sanitizer on the DePauw campus. Stevie BakerWatson, associate vice president for campus wellness and the Theodore Katula director of athletics and recreational sports, asked Dave Roberts if he could remedy the problem. Yes, said Roberts, whose multiple professional hats at DePauw include chemistry lab manager. He produced hand sanitizer for the campus, the Putnam County Jail and the Putnam County Hospital, which distributed it to local nursing homes and Emergency Management responders. “This is a humanitarian issue, and so we are just trying to do our part in this craziness,” he said. “Lots of places are learning how to adapt and do the right thing with the skills they have to help their communities. America is a great place.”
A different kind of care Though she is an ear, nose and throat surgeon, Shannon Fayson ’11 was less busy in the COVID-19 era than she previously was in her residency at Michigan Medicine. Any invasion into the nasal cavity was especially dangerous, so the hospital stopped elective surgeries, when she learns the most. She still performed some cancer surgeries, but spent most of her time consulting.
Fayson also spent time trying to assuage the anxiety of those around her – patients but especially her colleagues. “There’s a lot of fear and anxiety, uncertainty,” she said. “And our nurses are overloaded. They are worried about themselves and worried about taking this virus home to their parents, if they have older parents, or children or husbands. Providers, doctors, share that same worry too but the nurses spend the most time with these patients. I just talk to the nurses who take care of our patients and say, ‘you know I’m here for you; I support you.’ Because we’re all in this together. And it helps to know that someone else is worried too.”
Gratitude As president and chief executive officer of Michigan Sugar Co., Mark Flegenheimer ’83 wanted to recognize employees for working during the pandemic. The company bought 2,600 $50 gift cards from more than 50 restaurants in the communities where it operates and distributed them to its 1,300 employees. “Our motivation was twofold,” Flegenheimer said in an email. “First, as a food manufacturer we had a unique responsibility to keep the supply of a basic, but vital ingredient – sugar – flowing to grocery stores and food manufacturers as consumers were heavily stocking up on groceries. The gift cards were a small thank-you to our employees for their unwavering focus and determination to ensure an uninterrupted supply to customers during the pandemic. We could not have done it without their tremendous response. “Second, our factories are in very small, rural communities where many businesses, including restaurants, are suffering. We thought the gift cards from local restaurants might help these businesses during this difficult time.”
Brotherhood Phi Kappa Psi brothers gathered for a weekly happy hour via Zoom. Pictured here: Row 1: Andy LaDow ’01, John Rooks Jr. ’01, Dave Simon ’01, Xavier Pokorzynski ’00. Row 2: Josh Bolin ’01, James Monaghan ’01, Benjamin “B.J.” Griswold ’01, Felix Yau ’01. Row 3: Fred Crampton ’01, Jonathan Williams ’00, Andy Bagley ’04, Derron Harris ’01. Row 4: Nick Bowles ’01, Matt Pritchard ’01, Dan Klemencic ’01, Phil Smith ’01.
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Design for the end of the world By Ian S. Brundige ’22 Eyes adjusted to the dark. Shattered my screen on concrete. Breathing myself to sleep becomes my new beat – My body will ache, without constant clatter: Grindr taps. Viral videos. Digital deluge. I am overwhelmed by the pressure and heat. They told me to reduce, my use, to sustain this life cycle so I learned to start a compost: Egg shells. Coffee grounds. Orange peels. When I arrive at the end of the world. I will grow myself a better tomorrow. Food won’t waste, preserved to the point of future fuel. Fossils: Gatorade, Lipton, Mountain Dew. A new natural – landscapes of plastics planned to last longer than my impact or the home-cellar stocked with enough Kraft Macaroni and Frosted Mini-Wheats for our final supper. Take the stairs, turn off the lights, stop the tap. Global warming isn’t as obvious as local change, so ignore the warnings. But now, a revival of survival skills: folding t-shirts, frozen dinners, friendly Facetimes. I learned to fear the sky, the air, the gravity of humanity as we pulled the planet to pieces, pleasure usurping purpose. I think my world has ended before.
I tried to prepare for the end of the world, 2,569 pictures of clouds fill my cloud. The digital diary I’m compelled to complete, knowing that the sleek un-Apple apparatus I cling to will be obsolete. I want to remember the feel of my phone: Google Chrome, Chase Bank. Camera Connect. Its functions drive my life, while my details fill its drive. The cold burns, but I continue to hold in an ungloved hand my personal portal to the sun, and all the stars. I used to wait to watch daybreak, through endless isolated ignorance. Now, I worry I will combust: burning out in fires, my body blistered and withered without instinct of nature or education of nurture.
Like when, I cracked my sister’s window. A marble maybe, caused a hairline fracture. She, the always good one, candidly confessed my original sin. I, the always stubborn, lied through the night, refusing to admit my mistakes to my mother, until the fissure became a fault in the foundation of our family, a future of full-out fights with my father.
And then the world ended anyway.
These are days when I felt like it froze over, or just spiraled into entropy, Earth knocked out of our rightful place in space. So I hide under blankets of smoke, smoke out the sounds of waging wars knocking at my door. It only helps a little. Nature’s symphony, so loud, it bleeds into my being, molten moments erupt into my dreams and days.
My screen’s still cracked, the window’s fixed though. A pristine view of it snowing all Sunday. The clock I used to play around, frozen and faded. I had to stay, indoors, so I cried dusk away, went to bed in March’s winter and woke up in the spring of May.
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Endgame type shit. Grounded flights, isolated lights, this, our plight. Humans connected through iron unlike before. I am suffocating in the convenience of empty store bags reading: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Have a nice (sick) day.
The end of the world is today.
LEADERS THE WORLD NEEDS
Battling an epidemic, treating individuals: Physician alum has done it all
D
avid T. Allen ’61 was a newly minted physician, working as a pediatric intern at Palo AltoStanford Hospital in 1966, when he was sent to Guatemala to draw blood from indigenous people. Polio had ravaged the United States less than two decades earlier, then dramatically curbed in the mid-1950s when Jonas Salk developed a vaccine. The disease did not seem to affect people in the developing world, and Allen’s work was intended to decipher if Guatemala’s people had an antibody that made them immune. It was not easy. At the time, the indigenous people believed they were born with a finite volume of blood that was not replenished and thus “they were not willing donors,” Allen said. He regularly traded medical care for a test tube of blood. The experience demonstrated that “belief systems trump everything,” and Allen sees that happening again with COVID-19. “When you have a situation like this particular epidemic and you then are trying to explain to people how transmission works and they have a belief system that discounts it, it’s very difficult
to get people to change behavior,” he said. He knows what he is talking about. After that internship, he joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service, part of the Centers for Disease Control, where for three years he traveled to nine developing countries to combat malaria and promote maternal health. That led to health positions of escalating authority in Tennessee’s state government until July 1980, when he was named Kentucky’s health commissioner, a position he held more than three years. He next went into private practice until December 1987, when he was appointed health director of the Louisville and Jefferson County Health Department. He was on the new job less than two months when Louisville experienced an outbreak of hepatitis A; it eventually sickened 240 people and killed three. Allen led the investigation to find the cause, checking the public water supply, workplace drinking fountains and ice machines and restaurants. Meanwhile, his department undertook a massive public education campaign, plastering public washrooms across the county with half
a million “wash your hands” signs. It ultimately was determined the culprit to be a truckload of contaminated iceberg lettuce distributed to several Louisville restaurants. Allen later returned to the private sector, working on the corporate side and practicing medicine, so his 50-year career, he said, was split equally between public health and private practice. He volunteered his services in Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake and for 14 years did a monthly medical segment on a Louisville television station. Until he turned 79 in spring 2019, he worked several shifts a month at a Baptist Health Urgent Care clinic. And he has many thoughts about what should be done to slow the spread of COVID-19. (“We need to do the strictest social distancing and then we need to get into the field just literally millions of tests and identify who is in the infected but asymptomatic population, because that’s the real key to spread,” he said.) It all amounts to “an incredibly blessed career,” Allen said. “I’ve had a wonderful time. I have a wonderful family. What more can you ask?”
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THE BO(U)LDER QUESTION
by
Quinn Wright ’21
Brittany Davis ’20
Manpreet Kaur ’20
Layla Ahmadi ’21
Scientists around the globe are scrambling to develop a vaccine to prevent COVID-19. While the flu is considerably less virulent than COVID-19, it is fatal to many each year. Yet many Americans reject a readily available vaccine to prevent it. We asked these global health majors in professor Sharon Crary’s Global Health Practicum class:
Why is it important to get an annual flu shot?
I
t is more important to get a flu vaccine in 2020 than ever before. While the United States has enough hospital beds and medical professionals to respond to yearly influenza cases, COVID-19 has overwhelmed hospitals and health care budgets and increased the burden on health care workers. If we all receive our seasonal influenza vaccine, our health care system will more likely be able to cope with a second wave of COVID-19, which is anticipated in the fall. Additionally, seasonal influenza costs our nation more than $10 billion each year, including direct medical costs and costs from days of work lost to illness. Lowering this cost by increasing vaccination coverage will help our overall economy. Many people are reluctant to get vaccinated for the flu because of anxiety that the vaccine will make them sick. But
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the three vaccine types that exist and are effective against the flu cannot make you sick. They give your immune system a “taste” of a virus to help your body recognize and fight it in the future. In killed vaccines, the virus has been destroyed. Attenuated vaccines have a live virus modified to prevent it from infecting you. Subunit vaccines include pieces of a virus that cannot infect your cells. Two facts may be the basis for rumors about the flu vaccine and illness: One, every year the CDC chooses influenza virus strains to use in a vaccine, based on careful analysis of the virus that has been circulating in other parts of the world. Occasionally the choice is incorrect. In those years, the vaccine will not provide you with full immunity, but will still improve your symptoms and shorten the duration of your illness. Two, you might become sick after
getting the vaccine if you were exposed to a sick person within the seven-10 days it takes for the vaccine to become effective. In this case your sickness is not from the vaccine but because you got it too late. You may not suffer from the symptoms of influenza, but that does not mean you have never been infected with influenza. Those infected can transmit the virus to others, regardless of whether they experience symptoms. The safe thing to do is to get vaccinated to protect those around you. This idea of getting vaccinated to help others is referred to as “herd immunity,” which is important for protecting those who are immunodeficient and cannot be vaccinated. Vaccines not only prevent you personally from getting sick, but they decrease the likelihood that you would spread a disease to someone else, thus protecting your friends and family.
WELCOME, TIGERS! You’ve been preparing your whole life for this moment, when you will look in the mirror and see a college student staring back at you. Even better, as a member of DePauw University’s Class of 2024, you’ll see a DePauw Tiger. Just as thousands of DePauw matriculants have done over our 183-year history, you are about to traverse beneath our iconic Alumni Arch and step into a new world where you’ll explore the unknown, consider new ideas, learn from people from across the globe, face challenges and forge friendships that will last a lifetime. You’ll be exposed to new people and new ideas; learn tolerance, collaboration and compromise; and recognize the value of a diversity of ideas, cultures, viewpoints and perspectives. You’ll experiment, explore, test things. Test yourself.
Even now, during these tough and weird times of social distancing and hypervigilance about COVID-19, you’ll never go it alone. Your classmates, professors, staff members and alumni will support you, challenge you and cheer you on as you become the you you are meant to be. When you’re a DePauw Tiger, when you experience DePauw’s gold standard of academic excellence, when you make indelible connections with classmates, professors and alumni, when you graduate and go on to achieve the life goals important to you and when you know to your core that the DePauw community supported you every step of the way, you’re Gold Within. Welcome! Here’s a little something to help you find your way around during your first days on campus.
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Gather for student activities – or an impromptu game of Frisbee – at Bowman Park.
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Take a break between classes at Stewart Plaza.
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Start and end your years at DePauw by crossing under this arch, which was erected in 1910.
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Gather for convocations and other special events at East College, DePauw’s most iconic and oldest building, particularly in its Meharry Hall.
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Socialize, strategize or study at DePauw’s legendary boulder, placed here in 1892.
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Give a nod to one of our founders at the 1843 tombstone of Bishop Robert R. Roberts.
Get in some steps, pump some iron or play on an intramural team at Welch Fitness Center. Grab a smoothie at Blend. Find health and counseling services on the Lilly Center’s second floor.
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Find a respite from the demands of your studies at the 520-acre DePauw Nature Park, where you’ll see wildlife, plants and 350-millionyear-old fossils along 10 miles of trails.
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Show your Tiger pride – and have a lot of fun – by playing for or cheering on DePauw’s athletic teams.
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GOLD NUGGETS GOLD NUGGETS publishes submitted updates about DePauw alumni’s careers, milestones, activities and whereabouts. Send your news to DePauw Magazine, P.O. Box 37, Greencastle, IN 46135-0037 or dgrooms@depauw.edu. Faxes may be sent to 765-658-4625. Space considerations limit our ability to publish photos. Group photos will be considered if you include each person’s name (first, maiden and last), year of graduation and information about the gathering or wedding. Digital photos must be high-quality jpegs of at least 300 dpi. Submitted hard copies cannot be returned. Questions? Contact Mary Dieter at marydieter@depauw.edu or 765-658-4286.
1950
1961
E. Zillah Janes Novak is the author of “Shanghai Baby: The Adventures of an American Girl from the Far East to the Midwest,” a memoir of her childhood in China and other locations.
David L. Silver visited Tony Stavely and his wife Mary in northern Massachusetts. David is making plans to connect with other DePauw classmates; he says their friendships are the best part of his years at DePauw. (See photo.)
1955 Norman E. Strasma received a lifetime achievement award from the Daily Journal of Kankakee, Illinois.
1956 Alpha Tau Omega classmates Lindsay B. Smith, Jack R. Inyart and Thomas J. Grant recently met in Rio Verde, Arizona.
1957 Ann Luttrell Grant and her husband, Thomas J. Grant ’56, visited Meza, Arizona. They had planned to watch a Cubs baseball game but it was cancelled.
1960 Ralph A. Lawler spent 60 years as a broadcaster, retiring in 2019. For 40 years he was the radio and television voice of the Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA. He was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. He and his wife live in Bend, Oregon.
1963 Nancy Lewis Haswell married Billy Thomason, a retired Air Force colonel and chaplain Aug. 11 in Tulsa. Together they have five sons, including Stephen A. Haswell ’90. They enjoy traveling. Nancy is active as a Gilcrease Museum docent.
1964 Lee E. Tenzer was honored by the Daniel Murphy Scholarship Fund in February for his philanthropic and volunteer support. Tenzer was among the co-founders of the fund, which provides scholarships to promising eighth graders so that they may attend college preparatory high schools. Lee is a member of the organization’s Chairman’s Council and a past board member. He has served on the organization’s finance, education, development and gala committees and volunteers his time to interview prospective scholars. (See photo.)
1967 Jack Thomas, Tim Grodrian, William “Randy” Lazear ’69 and Delos Lutton
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John A. “Jack” Thomas ’67; Delos Lutton ’67; Anna Konkle, co-star of Hulu TV series “Pen15;” William “Randy” Lazear ’69; and Tim Grodrian ’67 (l to r). – all members of Men of Note, a men’s glee club – traveled to Los Angeles in late February to perform in a scene in Hulu’s television series “Pen15.” The invitation came via Anna Konkle, the show’s co-star and daughter of the late James “Peter” Konkle ’70 (see obituary, page 45), who was a member of Men of Note at DePauw. The group began at DePauw in the early 1960s and has continued as an alumni group. (See photo.)
David L. Silver ’61 and Tony Stavely ’61 at Salmon Falls.
1970 John Norberg’s most recent book “Ever True: 150 Years of Giant Leaps at Purdue University,” found itself in the hands of Pope Francis. The book, Norberg’s eighth, was presented as a gift from a Purdue professor who was among researchers discussing hydrogen energy with the pope. (See photo.)
Lee E. Tenzer ’64 with wife Marilyn Tenzer
1973 Phillip L. Stiver retired after 35 years of orthopedic practice in Evansville. He and his wife, Jan Heston Stiver ’75, have been married 44 years.
1974 Elisa A. Turner is one of nine visual art journalists to receive a Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation grant. (See photo.)
John Norberg ’70
Elisa A. Turner ’74
Deborah K. Burand ’80
1976
Nineteenth-Century Divorce: Was Elizabeth White of Tennessee and Kentucky Married to Mordecai Pillow?” It was published in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly in March. She used 19th-century court records to tell the story of White, a hard-working single mother. Elizabeth and her husband, Mark A. Ahlemann ’78, are retired and live at 209 E. Madison Ave., Wheaton, Illinois 60187. Mark is president of the DuPage Winter Tennis Club.
Mark Gadson, a drummer, percussionist and songwriter, has partnered with other musicians to produce his first album, “So What!,” a compilation of high-energy, distinctive fusion, funk and jazz tracks. Mark has recorded, performed and toured with some big-name musicians, including Benny Goodman, Bob Hope, Lynn Anderson and Sarah McLachlan. Sarah Reese Wallace received the John Alford Community Service Award. She is the chairwoman of the Evans Foundation and board chairwoman of First Federal Savings in Newark, Ohio.
1977 Margaret A. Roesch and her wife of 24 years, Patricia McAulay, are the founding members of Village Hearth Cohousing in Durham, North Carolina, a community of 28 individually owned homes that enable LGBT seniors to age in a vibrant, friendly atmosphere.
1978 Susan Weidenbaum Goldstein was inducted into the Council of National Trustees for National Jewish Health, a respiratory hospital, for her volunteer service and leadership.
1979 Elizabeth Bottorff Ahlemann wrote an article, “Pains and Penalties’ of
The DePauw Kappa Alpha Theta class of 1983 held a reunion in Los Angeles in October. Those attending included (first row) Leslie L. Martino, Gayle Soderstrom Gaeth, Susan Chiappe Lynch, Laura Belfiglio Gold, Debra Doyle Zablock, Lesley Nelson Reser, Mary Matson Latta’; (second row) Anne Spolyar Sellers, Michelle Fisher Michelman, Jeri Lyday Hise, Brynne Williams Shaner, Stephanie Rychlak Stilson, Leslie Dunn Nutt; (third row) Lynne Rolph Grantham, Elizabeth Sheaffer Romanovsky, Virginia McCracken Vogel, Megan Cassidy Walls, Margaret McCarty Shelly, Nancy Riker MacDonald and Julie Frier Palmore.
1980 Deborah K. Burand was granted tenure by the law school at New York University, where she directs the International Transactions Clinic and is a faculty co-director of the Grunin Center of Law and Social Entrepreneurship. (See photo.) Margaret Goettle Rush is president of the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt in Nashville.
1981 James M. Reynolds was named the 16th president of Millikin University.
1982 Kenneth W. Coquillette, a member of DePauw’s Board of Trustees, is vice chairman of the global financial institutions group in the investment banking division at Goldman Sachs in New York.
Members of the Class of 1985 held a mini reunion. Those attending included Jilaine Lehman Hynes, Nancy Rehm McCloskey, Sibley Smith Frye, Janet Tucker Woods and Michelle Mace Campbell.
1983
1986
The DePauw Kappa Alpha Theta Class of 1983 gathered for its 40th reunion in Los Angeles in October. (See photo.)
Ingrid M. Johnson is president and chief executive officer for the Colorado Center for Nursing Excellence. She was the 2019 recipient of the Colorado Nightingale Award for Excellence in Innovation for non-traditional nursing practice.
1985 Members of the Class of 1985 held a mini reunion in South Beach Miami. (See photo.)
1987 Jonathan C. Dill is the chief financial
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GOLD NUGGETS Thomas Foundation for Adoption. She is the president of Barney Enterprises Management Services. Karen Hughes Beacom is the artistic director of the Soo Theatre Project in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. She created the Soo Opera in 2006 and has produced an opera each summer. Many DePauw musicians have sung and played in the orchestras each year.
1996
Kappa Alpha Theta graduates from 1989 reunion weekend. Those attending included (first row) AnnClore Jones Duncan, Caryn Cockrill Anderson, Melinda Maine Garvey, Rebecca Yaeger Kimbell, Leslie Nasser Beaudette; (second row), Susan Geeslin Woodhouse, Stacia Stanford Lozer, Nancy Fox Ardell, Elizabeth Hentze Owens, Sally Ulmer Anglim, Mindy Laukitis Ellis and Debra Bangert Gerardi.
Timothy E. Keating has stepped foot on all seven continents. All of his travel has been for pleasure. He started with a trip to Paris, making Europe his first continent (except for North America) in 2014 and ended with Antarctica in Februrary. (See photo.)
1999
Timothy E. Keating ’96
Garrett P. Rice ’15
officer for the Midmark Corp., a provider of medical, dental and veterinary equipment.
1993
Stephanie Paine Crossin is a land protection specialist with Central Indiana Land Trust.
1988 Michael A. Sherman is a member of the board of directors of BioSpecifics Technologies Corp.
1989 Kappa Alpha Theta graduates from 1989 gathered for a reunion weekend Jan. 30Feb. 2 at the Galveston beach house of Melinda Maine Garvey. (See photo.)
James A. Rechtin is president and chief executive officer of Envision Healthcare in Nashville. Randall P. Stille is chief operating officer for Mayville Engineering Co.
1994 Marcus C. Robinson is the superintendent of the Normandy Schools Collaborative in St. Louis.
1995 Julie Barney Bieszczat is a member of the board of trustees of the Dave
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Edward M. Garnes Jr. won a grant to support the Rising Son Alliance, a program centered on increasing the rigor, achievement and academic expectations of high school-aged black males. He is consulting with the program’s founder on a series of dialogues, initiatives, workshops and field studies intended to reframe outdated visions of masculinity, expand career opportunity and promote postsecondary education awareness. Ed recently was featured as the spotlight on the University of Tennessee’s graduate school webpage.
2000
Tracy Booth Hinds is the deputy commissioner of the Missouri Division of Learning Services. Her son, Ahmad A. Hinds ’23, is a sophomore at DePauw. Alicia “Nikki” Davis was awarded an ATHENA award and named Entrepreneur of the Year by the Southwest Indiana Chamber. She is a real estate agent; a photographer; editor of ENGAGED! River Valley, a quarterly online magazine; an office manager; and executive director of S.M.I.L.E. on Down Syndrome, a nonprofit organization.
Whitney E. Tinley ’01 and Amy L. Androff ’01
2001 Whitney E. Tinley and Porter Deal were married March 14 in Atlanta. Their maid of honor was Amy L. Androff ’01. (See photo.)
2002 Michelle Morgan-Nelsen is the senior public relations manager and associate vice president for HGA, an architecture and engineering company in Minneapolis.
2007 Jeffrey P. Zanchelli is a partner at DLA Piper in Chicago, where he practices corporate, finance and partnership law.
2009 Andrew D. Kehr completed his postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health. He is the assistant professor of biochemistry at Loras College in Dubuque. He and his wife, Jacqueline Betsch Kehr ’08, have two daughters, Elna Mae, 3, and Ada Ruth, nine months. Carolyn Mueller Kelly is the author of “Forest Park: A Walk Through History.”
2011 Christine E. DiGangi is the editorial director of The Balance, where
DePauw alumni attending the wedding of Molly A. Wilder ’15 and Nicholas M. McCreary ’15 included Meredith M. Brown ’16, Ella G. Freihofer ’17, Andrew D. Miller ’13, Sarah W. Wilder ’19, Morgan A. Cohen ’17, Emeline Hansen Thompson ’13, Scott E. Thompson Jr. ’15, Christopher B. Hambrick ’14, Zachary A. Galyean ’13, Collin D. Henry ’15, Michael E. Maple ’16, Harry A. Donovan IV ’12, Taylor M. Williams ’15, Sean W. Kyle ’15, Nathanael D. Basham ’15, Jack D. Peck ’15, Enrico P. Lumanlan ’15, David A. Large ’14, Christopher C. Bertolini ’15, Eric A. Steele ’15, Peter G. Stuart IV ’14, Alexander M. Parker ’14, Miriam A. Panozzo ’15, Kelsey L. Stein ’15, Sarah K. Crandall ’15, Katherine C. Rourke ’15, Jamie M. Powell ’15, Tazree A. Kadam ’15, Kristen R. Huepenbecker ’19, Laura E. Guild ’15, Paige T. Henry ’15, Grace Fisher VanConia ’15, Hailey H. Ware ’15, Carey S. Kunz ’15, Meghan T. Burke ’17, Gretchen M. Wilder ’17, Margaret A. Anderson ’15, Margaret C. Campbell ’15, John C. Dillon ’19, James K. Brashaber ’17, Polly Mernitz Wilder ’85, Margaret Wilder Camuti ’83, Mark W. Wilder ’86, Rita Strange Wilder ’87, F. Daniel Wilder Jr. ’82, John W. Strange II ’97 and Meredith E. Rumble ’99.
she oversees content strategy and operations.
2012 Nicholas Flores is a visiting professor of Latina Studies at Kenyon College. He finished his doctorate in comparative studies at Ohio State University in August 2019. He has accepted a tenuretrack position in the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and will begin in August. Naiomy Guerrero was admitted to the doctoral art history program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She was awarded a fully funded graduate center fellowship for five years of study.
2015
DePauw alumni attending the wedding of Claire P. Meyer ’16 and Joseph A. Buckley ’16 included Timothy E. Meyer ’82, Melissa Phillips Meyer ’81, Lauren M. Meyer ’10, Matthew E. Meyer ’13, Patrick E. Meyer ’89, Julie McKeag Meyer ’90, Kim Klinger Butler ’81, William J. Butler ’82, Alexandra M. Butler ’14, Sarah W. Butler ’18, Pamela Miller Crain ’81, Carole Silvola Sotter ’81, John C. Mason ’80, Thomas J. Wrona ’11, Kristina Lubinski Wrona ’10, K. Amen Galley ’16, Michael D. Hornak ’16, Colleen M. Frost ’16, Anne C. Beath ’16, Helen R. Edwards ’16, Natalie G. Fryrear ’16, Dana M. Zerbini ’16, Alyson E. Marzonie ’16, Jenna M. Stoner ’16, Holly T. Lanham ’16, Thomas D. Semba ’15, M. Hamm Hooper ’16, Cole E. Thomas ’16, John J. Woods ’16, W. Gates Weaver ’16, Kody L. Bontreger ’16, Connor M. Jeffers ’16, Damon S. Hyatt ’16, Tyler B. Leising ’16, Jake A. Miller ’16, Uranmeian “Ray” Webb ’16, Cameron Etgen Webb ’18, Anastasia N. Tavkhelidze ’17, Rachel A. Amalfitano ’16 and Jared T. McKinney ’16.
Molly A. Wilder and Nicholas M. McCreary were married in November 2018 in Batesville, Indiana. (See photo.)
2016 Claire P. Meyer and Joseph A. Buckley were married last Aug. 10. (See photo.) Heather E. O’Brien and Matthew P. Hunt ’17 were married last Oct. 19 in Indianapolis. (See photo.)
2019 Jordan Horton was admitted to the Williams College of Art’s art history graduate program on a fully funded fellowship. She also was selected as the college’s Mellon Curatorial Fellow, the first post-baccalaureate student ever to hold this position.
DePauw alumni attending the wedding of Heather E. O’Brien ’16 and Matthew P. Hunt ’17 included Madeline A. Temple ’16, Taylor Brandstatter Campbell ’16, Madeline Morris McAdaragh ’16, Colleen S. Whiting ’16, Margaret E. MacPhail ’15, Megann M. Lear ’16, Amanda K. Repass ’16, Kara M. Caskey ’16, Jordan E. Roller ’16, Molly A. Cordes ’16, Paige J. Bixler ’16, Molly A. Henry ’16, Annaleise K. Dehnke ’15, Louisa E. Sheffield ’16, Rachel R. Green ’16, Meredith A. Schoenfeld ’16, Marek R. Burchett ’16, Kendall P. Weinert ’17, Emma C. MacAnally ’17, Siri Retrum Koors ’14, Hannah J. Gardner ’18, Caroline G. Zadina ’16, William E. Longthorne ’17, Peter E. Nelson ’17, Zachary J. Reichle ’17, Marko L. Adams ’17, Kevin M. Kiyosaki ’17, Thomas M. Gray ’17, Dakota R. Baker ’17, Christopher J. Dickow ’17, Eric P. Speer ’17, Samuel D. Alkema ’17, Joseph W. Fisher ’17, Grant J. Plumer ’17, Anthony J. Sciarrino ’17, Nathan L. Jahn ’17, John P. Cusumano ’17, John D. Vitale ’17, Michael C. Hineman ’16, Michael J. Lestina ’16, Nicholas A. Babinski ’17, Jacob D. Alleman ’16, Stephen D. Galanopoulos ’16, Philip M. Ganser ‘15, William T. McClamroch Jr. ’16, Charles D. Roberts ’16, Nicholas P. Makowiecki ’16, Mirza Somun ’17, Alexander F. Koors ’11, Mitchell A. Reavis ’16, Jennifer A. Norehad ’17, Addison L. Ball ’17, Sarah J. Simon ’19, Andrew C. Hunt ’19, Reza K. Slivka ’20, Benjamin W. Brandstatter ’12, Lauren Hannan Brandstatter ’12 and Michael D. Perry ’17.
Garrett P. Rice is an attorney with the law firm of Rice & Rice in San Antonio. (See photo.)
SUMMER 2020 DEPAUW MAGAZINE I 41
GOLD NUGGETS DePauw Magazine marks the death of alumni, faculty and staff members and friends. Obituaries do not include memorial gifts. When reporting a death, please send as much information as you have about the person and his/her affiliation with DePauw to Alumni Records, DePauw University, P.O. Box 37, Greencastle, Ind. 46135-0037 or to jamahostetler@depauw.edu.
IN MEMORIAM 1940 Park A. Wiseman, 101, Indianapolis, March 14. He was a member of the Men’s Hall Association and Phi Beta Kappa; a Rector scholar; and a professor emeritus of chemistry. Survivors include a grandson, Dean A. Wiseman ’92. He was preceded in death by his wife, Marjorie Nelson Wiseman ’41.
1942 M. Gertrude Slack, 99, Greencastle, Feb. 12. She was a teacher at Indiana State University and served in the U.S. Navy.
1944 Robert T. Hatch, 97, St. Joseph, Michigan, April 9. He was a member of Delta Tau Delta; a business executive; and an author. He had many interests and, after college, took a class a year for 50 years; received his private pilot and sail plane licenses; took up tap dancing at the age of 80; and taught himself the saxophone and trombone. He was preceded in death by his sister, Mary Hatch O’Reilly ’42; his brother, Edward N. Hatch ’42; and sisterin-law, Jean Turner Hatch ’41. Ned D. Johnson, 98, Bethlehem, New Hampshire, Jan. 17. He was a member of Phi Kappa Psi; an insurance agent; and an avid golfer. He was preceded in death by his wife, Kathleen Driscoll Johnson ’45.
1945 Marilynn Crask Hammond, 94, Greenfield, Indiana, May 1. She was a nurse; an avid reader; and a masterful cook. Survivors include her son, C. Craig Hammond ’70, and daughter-inlaw Candice Endicott Hammond ’70.
Ruth Dodge Larson, 95, Hamilton, Ohio, Jan. 26. She was a member of Alpha Omicron Pi; a special education teacher; and a church organist. John H. Huneke, 97, Louisville, Feb. 5. He was a member of Delta Upsilon; a Rector scholar; a World War II pilot; a business executive; and an accountant. Survivors include his son, John H. Huneke III ’67, and daughter-in-law, Ruth Russ Huneke ’68. Margaret Matthews Haried, 96, Naples, Florida, March 26. She was a member of Alpha Phi and a business woman. Survivors include a daughter, Kathryn L. Haried ’70. She was preceded in death by her husband, John C. Haried ’44. Margaret Roth Martin, 97, Chelsea, Michigan, April 18. She was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta who enjoyed Bible study, book clubs, sailing and tennis. Survivors include daughters Nancy Martin Podurgiel ’70 and Sallie Martin Foley ’72. She was preceded in death by her brother, Louis A. Roth ’50.
1946 Jean Laramore Schricker, 96, Plymouth, Indiana, April 22. She was an elementary physical education and science teacher who enjoyed traveling and made trips to Alaska, Hawaii, Europe and South America. She was preceded in death by a brother, William F. Laramore ’42. William A. Nicoll, 100, Frankfort, Indiana, Feb. 20. He was a member of the Men’s Hall Association and the Washington C. DePauw Society; a Rector scholar; and a United Methodist minister. He was preceded in death by his first wife, Mary Howard Nicoll ’41.
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1947 Thomas W. Hunter, 94, Fort Myers, Florida, Feb. 11. He was a member of Sigma Chi and had a private medical practice specializing in radiology. Survivors include daughters Judith A. Hunter ’72 and Elizabeth Hunter Schippers ’80. He was preceded in death by his wife, Barbara Day Hunter ’47. Nancy Wilder Tinkler, 95, Atlanta, April 29. She was a member of Alpha Phi; a personal banker; an avid bridge player; a member of the local hiking club; and a regular dancer at community gatherings. She was preceded in death by her husband, Delbert W. Tinker ’47.
1948 Elizabeth Gift Claycombe, 93, Indianapolis, March 24. She was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta; a lab technician; a traffic director of television stations; a mission outreach coordinator; and a Cubs fan. Survivors include her husband, John R. Claycombe ’48. She was preceded in death by her brothers, John W. Gift ’47 and Lyle H. Gift ’52. Dorcas Owens Kerr, 93, Canal Winchester, Ohio, March 8. She was a member of Pi Beta Phi who worked in public relations and enjoyed volunteering, traveling and antiquing. She was preceded in death by a sister, Jacqueline Owens Van Wagner ’52. Mynne K. Schmidt, 94, Joliet, Illinois, Dec. 14. She was co-owner of a gift shop. Richard “Dick” Wood, 93, Indianapolis, April 16. He started his college career at DePauw but transferred to Purdue University to join a Navy officers’ training program during the final years of World War II. He nevertheless considered himself a DePauw graduate and he served many years on the Board of Trustees, including a period as chair. He was named a life trustee in 2000; was given an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1972; and was awarded the Old Gold Goblet in 1990. Wood graduated from Purdue after the war and earned
an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, then began as a financial analyst for Eli Lilly and Co. He rose through the ranks over 43 years, working as president of Lilly International and ultimately becoming president of the company, chief executive officer and board chair for 20 years. During his tenure, Lilly grew into a global pharmaceutical company and developed two major products: Prozac antidepressant and biosynthetic insulin. He sat on the boards of several major companies and organizations and, because of his knowledge about international business, he served on the U.S.-USSR Trade and Economic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations and the President’s Export Council. He was a generous philanthropist, supporting a number of civic, art and educational institutions.
1949 Sara Lord Bodi, 92, Dix Hills, New York, April 5. She was a member of the Washington C. DePauw Society and a school psychologist. She was preceded in death by her husband, Lewis J. Bodi ’50. Marjory A. Monger, 93, Largo, Florida, Jan. 27. She was a former employee of the Salvador Dali Museum. Ann Warner Howard, 93, Mount Vernon, Illinois, March 18. She was a member of Pi Beta Phi who served many roles in the Girls Scouts and the American Red Cross and was a founding member of the Mount Vernon Little House Foundation. Survivors include her husband, John Howard II ’49. Ellen Weathers Stevens, 91, Westmont, Illinois, Aug. 12, 2019. She was a member of Alpha Phi and a retired teacher. She was preceded in death by her husband, John B. Stevens ’48; her father, Frank W. Weathers 1921; her mother, Marion Thrush Weathers 1920; a brother, Frank W. Weathers Jr. ’48; a sister, Suzanne Weathers Wood ’52; and an aunt, Marie Thrush 1912.
1950 Martha Ingram Keene, 91, Colorado Springs, Feb. 9. She was a member of Alpha Phi and an elementary school teacher. Survivors include her husband, James R. Keene ’50. Persis Orwig Rentner, 91, Sylvania, Ohio, Feb. 29. She was a member of Alpha Phi who loved family gatherings, her pets and gardening. She was preceded in death by her husband, Robert L. Rentner ’50. Mary Wilson Whalen, 92, Plainfield, Indiana, April 18. She was a member of Alpha Phi and the Washington C. DePauw Society. Kenneth L. Wray, 93, Arlington, Texas, Oct. 8. He was a member of Sigma Nu and the Washington C. DePauw Society; a Rector scholar; and a building contractor.
1951 Ninalouise Hart Isaacson, 90, Indianapolis, April 23. She was a bookkeeper and a manufacturer’s representative who enjoyed raising poodles, gardening, bird watching and walking. Marilyn Lawson Andrews, 90, Naples, Florida, Jan. 24. She was a registered nurse and a home care provider who loved flowers, animals and travel. Survivors include a sister-in-law, Carla Andrews Heskett ’53. Robert P. Smith, 91, Rockford, Illinois, March 26. He was a member of Sigma Chi and a businessman. Shirley Stephenson Strong, 91, Indianapolis, Feb. 15. She was a member of Delta Gamma and an artist who was active in the arts in her community. Charlotte Sutheimer Cochran, 91, Shelbyville, Indiana, April 15. She had a career in real estate and was an accomplished bridge player.
1952 Louis J. Fontaine, 89, Greencastle,
Feb. 12. He was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon; a college consultant; a businessman; and former director of DePauw admissions and financial aid and annual giving. Survivors include sons Jeffrey D. Fontaine ’78 and Gregory P. Fontaine ’83. He was preceded in death by his father, Arthur V. Fontaine 1922. Marilyn Luther Roesler, 89, Scranton, Pennsylvania, Feb. 19. She was a member of Alpha Omicron Pi; a junior high school music teacher; an accomplished pianist; an office manager; and an avid walker. Phyllis Nelson Danielson, 88, Sarasota, Sept. 2. She was a member of Alpha Chi Omega and an accomplished needlepointer, quilter and beader. Survivors include a daughter, Mary Danielson Foxwell ’78. She was preceded in death by her husband, G. Richard Danielson ’50. Peggy Ragan Hughes, 89, Oklahoma City, Jan. 15. She was a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma and a hospital volunteer who was quick to tell a joke. Mary Renkenberger Closz, 89, Muskegon, Michigan, Feb 24. She was a member of Alpha Gamma Delta; a Sunday School superintendent and teacher; a choir member; and a Girl Scout leader. She was preceded in death by her husband, William H. Closz ’52.
in finance. Survivors include his wife, Susan Willard Tuhey ’56, and a son, John M. Tuhey ’91. He was preceded in death by his father, Fred M. Tuhey 1922, and a brother, John E. Tuhey ’61.
1953 Caroljane Clift Lux, 88, Indianapolis, Feb. 22. She was a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma and an avid golfer who was and active in Creative Living Bible Study. Survivors include two nieces, Sharon Clift Drbul ’84 and Susan Clift Gislason ’82; a nephew, Douglas S. Clift ’80; and a nephew-in-law, Dave Gislason ‘82. She was preceded in death by a brother, Richard E. Clift ’51. Donna Cook Dreyer, 88, Burnsville, North Carolina, March 5. She worked in management roles at nonprofits and was a skilled writer. She was preceded in death by her husband, William H. Dryer ’52. Marcia Edwards Peterson, 88, Colorado Springs, Feb. 5. She was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta and a first-grade teacher for more than 30 years who also taught teacher education, served on several missions in Ethiopia and founded a theater troupe, Women of the Bible. Survivors include a daughter, Leslie Weck Gospill ’79.
1954
William H. Timm, 91, St. Louis, Feb. 21. He was a member of Delta Tau Delta; a business owner; and a real estate broker.
Edward W. Cassidy, 86, Albuquerque, Jan. 29. He was a member of the Men’s Hall Association; a Rector scholar; a business executive; and a compensation manager.
Douglas G. Trout, 88, Lewes, Delaware, Feb. 26. He was a member of Lambda Chi Alpha who was president of Tusculum College in Tennessee for three years and later developed a consulting practice to advise small colleges about fundraising. He was DePauw’s vice president for development and university relations 1974-76. He was preceded in death by his wife, Jean Foerster Trout ’51.
Pauline O’Rear Hicks, 87, Terre Haute, April 3. She was a member of Delta Delta Delta; a business manager; and a life master bridge player. She was preceded in death by her parents, Donald C. O’Rear ’30 and Mary Pentecost O’Rear ’30.
Jack M. Tuhey, 90, Mount Dora, Florida, Feb. 28. He was a member of Delta Tau Delta and had a career
William A. Pendl, 87, Terrace Park, Ohio, Jan. 22. He was a Rector scholar and a member of Phi Kappa Psi and the DePauw Athletic Hall of Fame, inducted in 2010. He was a four-year letterman in tennis who later volunteered as an assistant coach for the men’s and
women’s teams. He was instrumental in developing the DePauw Alumni Tennis Association. He played competitive tennis internationally and was a nationally ranked player on the Super Senior Tennis circuit. He worked as a business executive. Survivors include a son, William D. Pendl ’78. He was preceded in death by his first wife, Jane Dormer Pendl ’54. John T. Peters, 88, Wilmington, Delaware, Feb. 11. He was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon and an equine veterinarian of standardbred race horses who coached Little League basketball and baseball and farmed.
1955 Robert L. Muller, 86, Carmel, Indiana, March 17. He was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon and a businessman who played tennis and enjoyed traveling. Survivors include a son, Michael J. Muller ’88; a daughter-in-law, Heidi Weas Muller ’89; and a granddaughter, Olivia M. Muller ’16. He was preceded in death by his wife, Shirley Fouch Muller ’57.
1956 Glady Caley Faires, 85, Signal Mountain, Tennessee, May 15. She was a member of Delta Gamma and the Washington C. DePauw Society; a former member of the DePauw Board of Trustees; and a retired elementary school music teacher. She was a passionate advocate for the arts and education. She served on the Tennessee Arts Commission and chaired the Knoxville Museum of Art and the Governor’s Task Force on Education in Scott County. She was a gifted singer, frequent soloist and pianist and a dog lover. Survivors include a son, Kurt J. Faires ’81. Diane Foster Soder, 83, Hendersonville, North Carolina, Nov. 10, 2017. She was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta. Survivors include a sister, Jacquelyn Foster Wilson ’52. Nancy Mann Reese, 84, Fort Worth, July 31. She was a member of Delta Delta Delta and Phi Beta Kappa and was a business owner.
SUMMER 2020 DEPAUW MAGAZINE I 43
GOLD NUGGETS Jane Nehf Haslem, 85, Washington D.C., Jan. 13. She was a member of Alpha Phi sorority who majored in art, then went on to open art galleries in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Washington D.C. She held an exhibition of Garry Trudeau’s original drawings from “Doonesbury,” and several thousand people attended the opening. She later owned a gallery that specialized in American art of the second half of the 20th century and in 1995 she launched Artline.com, on which 675 top-tier galleries from around the world exhibited works. The Washington Post wrote about her when, in 2015, she stepped away from running a gallery after almost 55 years. She was active in numerous art organizations and contributed by reviewing art gifts made to the White House. In 2016, Washington’s Cosmos Club invited her to speak about her collection of artist self-portraits; the prints are now in Yale University Art Gallery collections. James C. Seyfarth, 86, Naperville, Illinois, May 1. He was a member of Sigma Alpha Upsilon who had a successful career in the financial industry and was an avid golfer and bicyclist. He was preceded in death by his wife, Nancy Sweeney Seyfarth ’56.
1957 Robert “Bob” Cummisford, 84, Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, Jan. 26. He was a Rector scholar and member of Lambda Chi Alpha who worked on research and development and taught at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Survivors include his wife Eleanor “Ellie” Lewis Cummisford ’57 and a sister-in-law, Kathleen “Kathy” Snyder ’61. He was preceded in death by his brother-in-law, Donald Snyder ’59. Janice Harrison Armuth, 84, Columbus, Indiana, Feb. 16. She was a member of Pi Beta Phi who volunteered for numerous church and community organizations. Bruce D. Rutherford, 84, Naperville, Illinois, April 5. He was a member of Alpha Tau Omega and an insurance agent. He was a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan; a
Kermit the Frog impressionist; a lover of classical music; and a voracious reader.
1958 Jacquelyn Snyder Estes, 83, The Villages, Florida, April 13. She was a member of Alpha Gamma Delta who worked as a secretary, director of Meals on Wheels and gate security at The Villages. She conducted Bible study groups and cared about faith, family and friends. She was preceded in death by her husband, Frank E. H. Estes ’58. Sue Sutter Killham, 84, Wichita, Jan. 18. She was a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma who worked in various jobs focused on serving others. Survivors include her daughter, Kimberley Killham Isherwood ’80, and son-in-law, Paul B. Isherwood Jr. ’78. She was preceded in death by her husband, Albert B. Killham ’58; a sister, Janet Sutter Dedaker ’48; a brother-in-law, Robert N. Dedaker Jr. ’50; and a nephew, Robert N. Dedaker III ’72.
Jane Roehr Hughes, 82, Appleton, Wisconsin, Jan.17. She was a business owner; an artist; a bread baker; a seamstress; and a quilter. Survivors include her daughter, Megan Hughes Stumpf ’90, and her brother, W. Glynn Roehr ’56. She was preceded in death by her parents, Walter W. Roehr ’29 and Esther Bash Roehr ’31.
1961 Edward H. Parsons, 81, Platteville, Wisconsin, Feb. 2. He was a member of Delta Upsilon; a banker; a businessman; a fisherman; a doughnut expert; and a family man. Survivors include a daughter, Anne Parsons Donovan ’87. He was preceded in death by his wife, Nancy Jones Parsons ’62. Joe F. Pearson, 80, Forres, Scotland, Jan. 30. He was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon and the Washington C. DePauw Society; a Rector scholar; and a research psychologist who worked in special education for the indigenous Navajo Nation.
1959
1962
Earl T. Herzog, 83, Cincinnati, Jan. 19. He was a member of Beta Theta Pi; a Rector scholar; a mechanical engineer; and a business executive.
Edmund A. Zapp Jr., 80, Wickenburg, Arizona, March 21. He was a member of Phi Delta Theta and the Washington C. DePauw Society and a high school teacher and school administrator who supported Habitat for Humanity and loved planes and trains.
Ronald J. Holthouse, 83, Richmond, Indiana, April 21. He was a member of Phi Kappa Psi and the Washington C. DePauw Society; a Rector scholar; a businessman; and a real estate salesperson. Survivors include a brother, Thomas L. Holthouse ’57, and a sisterin-law, Joy Uphaus Holthouse ’57. Jack A. Hughes, 82, St. Louis, March 14. He was a member of Phi Delta Theta; a Rector scholar; a business owner; and an artist who enjoyed golf, tennis and his barbershop quartet. Survivors include a son, William F. Hughes ’86. Matthew C. Lawlor, 84, Melbourne, Florida, Dec. 12. He was a member of Sigma Nu who had a career in sales management. Survivors include a brother, Joseph M. Lawlor ’58, and sister-in-law, Mary Dyson Lawlor ’58.
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1963 Eugene E. McDowell III, 81, Webster, North Carolina, April 24. He was a professor of psychology; a researcher; and a writer. He was a community volunteer and an avid runner who finished several marathons. Eleanor Putnam Mitchell, 78, Phoenix, Feb. 4. She was a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma and the Washington C. DePauw Society and a landscape architect who tutored students and delivered Meals on Wheels.
1964 Carl R. Doran, 76, Miami Beach, Feb.
1. He was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, a retired businessman and an avid golfer who practiced yoga and Tai Chi. Nancy Fribley Snider, 78, Warsaw, Indiana, May 11. She was a registered nurse. Survivors include a sister, Barbara Fribley Weidenbener ’65. She was preceded in death by her father, Robert W. Fribley ’35, and her grandparents, Fremont E. Fribley and Lucy Wile Fribley, both 1911.
1965 Daniel J. Grosse, 80, Racine, Wisconsin, Feb. 2. He was a research chemist; a world traveler; a fisherman; and a gardener. Judith Osterland Thornton, 77, Crystal Lake, Illinois, Feb. 29. She was a member of Delta Delta Delta and the Washington C. DePauw Society and a high school homebound tutor who enjoyed gardening, traveling and reading. Survivors include a brother, William B. Osterland ’70. Judith G. Wright, 77, Louisville, March 8. She was a member of Alpha Phi; a university professor; an animal advocate; and a world traveler.
1966 Margaret Kannenberg Dunnick, 75, North Olmsted, Ohio, Oct. 31. She was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta. Survivors include her husband, John R. Dunnick ’66. Glenn “Terry” White, 76, Granville, Ohio, Feb. 24. He was a member of Phi Kappa Psi and the Washington C. DePauw Society; a Rector scholar; and an attorney. Survivors include his wife, Frederica Sheridan White ’66.
1967 Dennis L. Barrett, 74, Indianapolis, March 20. He was a member of Beta Theta Pi and the Washington C. DePauw Society; a former member of the DePauw Alumni Board of Directors; and a businessman who enjoyed fishing and the
outdoors. Survivors include wife, Sally Crowden Barrett ’67; brothers, Dale A. Barrett ’70 and Rex M. Barrett ’74; sisterin-law, Vicki Crowden Schaffer ’69; and cousin-in-law, Elizabeth Crowden Vores ’76. He was preceded in death by his cousin-in-law, Susan Crowden ’78. Robert C. Marshall, 74, Schenectady, Feb. 15. He was a member of the Men’s Hall Association; a Rector scholar; a cardiologist; and an accomplished piano and trumpet player. Robert W. Urbain, 74, Miami, March 11. He was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon who had a career in international marketing and enjoyed playing tennis.
1968 David S. Utterberg, 73, Seattle, Nov. 17. He was a member of Phi Delta Theta; a business executive; an inventor; and a manufacturer.
1969 Ralph M. Drybrough II, 72, Tucson, Jan. 20. He was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon; a marketing manager; an avid golfer; a movie goer; and a sports fan.
1970 Nancy Graham Vera, 71, Pacific Grove, California, Dec. 24. She was a sales and account executive and a world traveler. James “Peter” Konkle, 71, Sun City Center, Florida, Nov. 15. He had a long career in human resources and previously spent time as an organizer for the Vermont Labor Union. While at DePauw, he was a member of the glee club Men of Note and, according to his published obituary, “discovered the liberal hippy inside, grew his own pot and became politically active. When Vietnam broke out, Peter lived in his VW van, touring the country, sewing patch after patch on his bell bottom jeans, singing to his guitar, attending the early concerts of some guy named Bob Dylan and waxing poetic, likely to no end.”
1972
1979
Kathy Daley Hunt, 70, Houston, April 15. She was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta; an investment banker; and a former school superintendent. She took a special interest in teaching children English as a second language. She was preceded in death by her husband, G. David Hunt ’50.
Charles J. Pritchett, 63, Reelsville, Indiana, Jan. 24. He was a retired air traffic controller and a medic and ambulance driver for Operation Life in Greencastle who enjoyed skiing in Colorado and scuba diving in Cozumel. He was preceded in death by his mother, Geraldine Aker Pritchett ’52, and uncles, Robert M. Aker ’52 and Charles L. Aker ’51.
1973 David T. Dillon, 69, Centerville, Iowa, April 17. He was a member of Phi Delta Theta who taught English at North Putnam High School for many years before continuing his education and practicing as a marital and family therapist and director of mental health clinics in Iowa and Tennessee.
1976 Dick Johnson, 66, northern Michigan, June 9. He was an award-winning television anchor at WMAQ-5, the NBC affiliate in Chicago, for 18 years and previously worked 20 years at WLS-7, the ABC affiliate. He was on board Air Force Two with then-Vice President George H.W. Bush during an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan and covered many other important stories, including the release of the American hostages in Iran. He frequently returned – including in March 2019 – to DePauw to speak to media fellows and other students. As a student, he was news director of WGRE and a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon. Survivors include his wife, Lauren Meurisse Johnson ’76.
1982 Mark G. Emerson, 59, Bloomington, Indiana, Feb. 24. He was a member of Alpha Tau Omega, Phi Beta Kappa and the Washington C. DePauw Society; a Rector scholar; and an attorney.
1983 Stephen P. Champion, 59, Columbus, Indiana, April 23. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa; a Rector scholar; and an emergency physician and medical director of information services at Emergency Physicians Inc. He was appointed to the Indiana Emergency Medical Services Commission. He enjoyed woodworking, astronomy and tennis; was a voracious reader; and shared his love of music, puzzles, hiking and the outdoors with his family. Survivors include his wife, Melanie Owen Champion ’83, and a son, Joshua D. Champion ’14.
1991
G. Michael Brubaker, 65, Mount Prospect, Illinois, March 26. He was a member of Sigma Nu and worked in management. Survivors include his wife, Susan Compher Brubaker ’77.
Christopher W. Gilbert, 50, Chelsea, Michigan, Feb. 2. He was a member of Phi Gamma Delta; a teacher; a stage actor; and a producer and development director for Palos Verdes Performing Arts in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. Survivors include his father, David W. Gilbert ’65. He was preceded in death by his grandparents, Ronald W. Gilbert ’34 and Ruth Cureton Gilbert ’35.
1978
1992
Donald E. Hunter, 63, Pittsboro, North Carolina, Jan. 1. He was a member of Lambda Chi Alpha and an electronic banking officer.
Brian K. Boykins, 52, Indianapolis, Dec. 14. He was a member of Phi Gamma Delta; a real estate agent; a teacher of
1977
English as a second language; and a restaurant owner. He lived the last 10 years of his life abroad. Survivors include a sister, Erika L. Boykins ’92.
Faculty Bernice Flanagan Grubb, 94, Greencastle, March 28. She taught 40 years at the DePauw School of Music alongside her husband, former director Cassel Grubb, who preceded her in death, and was known for her upbeat personality. The Grubbs joined the faculty in 1949 and retired in 1989; they also taught during summers at the Interlochen Center for the Arts. A graduate of Eastman School of Music with a performance certificate in harp, she appeared as a soloist with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and over the years was a harpist for several orchestras. She also volunteered for several local service and church organizations, including the Putnam County Hospital, where she was a cheer cart lady. Robert D. Newton, 92, Greencastle, Feb. 4. He joined the faculty of DePauw in 1956 and retired 52 years later as the Blair Anderson and Martha Caroline Rieth professor of applied ethics. He received a bachelor of arts degree from Yale in 1950; a bachelor of divinity degree in 1953 from Union Theological Seminary; and a doctorate from Columbia University in 1960. His class on biomedical ethics prepared two generations of students to become medical professionals. He was the co-coach of DePauw’s Ethics Bowl Team. His wife, Ann, was an adjunct faculty member at DePauw; his daughter, the Rev. Beth Newton Watson, is a university chaplain at DePauw; and his son, Christopher D. Newton ’85, is assistant director of the Pulliam Center for Contemporary Media and the operations coordinator for WGRE. Survivors include a grandson, Robert L. Watson ’13.
Friends Norma Jean Barger, 87, Greencastle, May 14. She has worked as a cook at DePauw. Carol Clark Blue, 90, Greencastle, Feb. 29. She retired from DePauw.
SUMMER 2020 DEPAUW MAGAZINE I 45
OLD GOLD
Retired archivist reflects on 36 years of memories as DePauw’s memory keeper By Wesley W. Wilson
I
t was not long before my retirement at the end of last academic year that the DePauw Archives and Special Collections were packed up and temporarily moved to permit renovation of Roy O. West Library. Clearly, things had come full circle. Early in my time at DePauw, which began in 1984, I was among the planners of the 1986-1987 library renovation. That work moved the archives from the basement to the second floor, our now vacated location, in an area favored by students for the well-lit and comfortable
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space for study (and sleep). For more than 30 years, that space has housed the memories of two institutions, DePauw University and the United Methodist Church in Indiana. In my 36 years at DePauw, service to our users has always been my first priority, and creating good finding aids is one of the most important things that an archives staff can do. Visitors are greeted and given information they will need to conduct their research and find what they’re looking for. Researchers used to have to visit to find out what was here. I long dreamed
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that we would “break out of the walls” of the archives and provide finding aids to researchers, wherever they were. That goal was not realized for years, but now the collections are available online. Every name and subject in every media type, from paper collections in boxes and folders to photographs, audio and video recordings on all formats, can be discovered through more than 18,000 finding aids. The digital library, planned in 2008-10, has grown to include photographs, local and DePauw newspapers and magazines, a large collection of audio and a fledgling
collection of video. A few of the more notable films in that collection are a 1940 Monon Bell game film; an episode of a 1950s TV game show, Twenty Questions, that featured DePauw President Russell Humbert; and a film of the May Day activities in 1950. We also preserve rare books: faculty, staff and alumni publications; United Methodist publications; and the library of James Whitcomb, Indiana governor from 1843-48 and a U.S. senator from 1848 until his death in 1852. Whitcomb gave the collection to Indiana Asbury University, which had few books at the time, so it was a major gift. Unfortunately, many of the books were lost in the 1879 fire that destroyed DePauw’s first building, the Edifice. Those we have were saved by students who threw them out of the windows. With millions of documents and recordings, it is nearly impossible to describe even a fraction of the historical treasures. Many more recent acquisitions will become more valuable with time.
For example, for the DePauw 175th anniversary in 2012, student groups gathered materials for a “time capsule” to be opened at the bicentennial. Students also sent collected digital files of the activities of the Justin and Darrianne Christian Center for Diversity and Inclusion, and some Greek houses have deposited their records at the archives, too. My favorites? My answer changes every time something new comes in or is discovered. One highlight is the 708page James Riley Weaver Civil War diary. Weaver, later a political science professor at DePauw, was a Union cavalry officer who was captured and spent 17 months in Confederate prisons and camps. Another are the love letters of Maude and William Wylie written in the 1890s while Will was a student at Garrett Biblical Institute and Maude was at home in Paoli, Indiana. One can see a relationship grow and develop with the inevitable ups and downs that result from a letters-only courtship. A third favorite are the scrapbooks and
letters that Rachel Lahti Donnelly ’59 wrote to her parents and their responses. Scrapbooks, nearly all made by women, are windows into students’ lives at DePauw. I will miss our archives on the second floor of Roy O. West Library overlooking the Holton academic quad. It makes a difference in having had a hand in designing it. But a new era is coming to the archives and a new archivist to go along with it. We have made a lot of progress over the years and there is much more to do. Art professor Robert Kingsley once asked me when I would retire. I answered that when I was done, and I was not done yet. Of course I would never be done, since history is made daily. There is much more to do to document the rich history of DePauw and the United Methodist Church and to get it to the people who need it. I look forward to seeing what lies ahead.
Items found in the Archives and Special Collections include: 1. A top hat of the Rev. Marmaduke H. Mendenhall, who endowed a lecture series at DePauw. 2. 1922 football letterman’s sweater. 3. James Riley Weaver’s Civil War diary. 4. A bowling pin from the Union Building bowling alley. 5. A hair that belonged to President George Washington. 6. The 1962 College Bowl trophy.
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FIRST PERSON
by Connie Campbell Berry ’67 Berry is the author of the Kate Hamilton Mystery series. Crooked Lane Books published “A Dream of Death” in April 2019 and “A Legacy of Murder” in October. Berry, who is married to Bob Berry ’68, has two other books in the works.
I
fell in love twice at DePauw. The second time – my senior year – love crept in gradually. I recently had returned from my junior semester abroad, and my plans included more travel, then graduate school. The last thing I expected to find that year was a husband and life partner. Life is like that. The events that shape us are recognized best in hindsight. But not always. The first time I fell in love, the sensation struck with the force of an epiphany. Autumn of my sophomore year. Fred Bergmann’s survey course in 18thcentury English literature. Second floor of Asbury Hall, the classroom at the end of the corridor. We’d been reading portions of Fanny Burney’s diary, a gossipy, often scandalous portrait of the literary and intellectual life of late 18th-century London. Bergmann was at his best, clearly relishing his lecture; as he spoke, I got the impression that time was folding back on itself. My fellow
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students – even Bergmann – seemed to dissolve, and I was there, listening with my own ears to Alexander Pope’s wicked commentary on London society; watching the near-sighted Dr. Johnson bend over a book, his eyelashes almost touching the page, leaning close as the elegant, vivacious Hester Thrale whispered her passion for her daughter’s Italian music teacher. On that day I began a lifelong love affair with the language, literature and history of the British Isles. Recently I read an article about researchers from Trinity College Dublin who demonstrated the existence of a new form of light. The initial paragraph, with its talk of angular momentum, quantum effects and Planck’s constant, lost me completely. But one paragraph caught my eye. It had to do with the bending of light as it passes from one material into another. My years at DePauw bent the trajectory of my life, both personally and professionally. The light within me was fanned and
focused by professors who challenged my thinking, encouraged my writing skills and nurtured my passion for all things British. I made it to graduate school after all, typing my thesis on Shakespeare’s comedies seated at a child-sized table while my toddlers entertained themselves in our basement playroom. And I’ve traveled, too – all over the globe. The British Isles will always be my favorite destination. The past lives there, visibly in the cultural landscape, but even more so in my imagination. Wherever I go, time folds back on itself, and I hear again those voices brought to life long ago by professor Bergmann. Today I write mysteries set in the British Isles. In each, the past plays a central role. I’m grateful for my years at DePauw, first for my husband, but also for Bergmann and the faculty of the English department who helped set the direction of my life.
FIRST PERSON
by Wayne Glausser Glausser taught English at DePauw from 1980 until he retired at the end of the 2017-18 academic year. He is receiving immunotherapy treatments for metastatic melanoma and, as a result, “I’ve lasted way beyond my expiration date.”
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n fall of 2016, I found out that an incurable cancer had taken lodging inside me. My diagnosis arrived as an uncanny coincidence. I was writing an essay called “Psychedelic Last Rites,” which compared the Catholic sacrament of extreme unction with modern experiments in which scientists give psychedelic drugs to terminal cancer patients. In both the traditional sacrament and the new experiments, the goal is to help dying people find peace as they manage their last days. Then suddenly, mid-draft, I joined the ranks of dying penitents and clinical subjects. The synchronicity of the moment struck with such force that it felt surreal; I had arrived at the cosmic threshold that just a few hours before had seemed a benign abstraction. In my own quest for equanimity and cosmic composure, I have been relying on other resources. Three of the last courses I taught at DePauw provided invaluable help. One was a longtime favorite on the British Romantics. John Keats’s “To Autumn” held particular significance now:
it was likely the last poem Keats finished, a quiet landscape charged with the emotions of a young man dying. He observes a field at sunset,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day And touch the stubble-plain with rosy hue.
I love how Keats marries life and death here. The day is simultaneously dying and blooming; sunlit clouds make roses out of stumps. Teaching that poem for the final time, I recognized more clearly than ever a deep truth that fortifies my spirits. Life and death are not really opposites, or even two separate things at all: “lifedeath” is what we have. The very last course I taught at DePauw was “The Seven Deadly Sins.” The topic may not sound so comforting, on the face of it: maybe not the best time to study medieval panic about eternal damnation! But I found another helpful perspective in our study of pride. Pride is a bit of an
oddball. Regarded by many theologians as the most dangerous of the deadly sins, it is also the only one routinely used in expressions of praise (“You must be so proud!”). Pride presents such a dire threat to souls, according to Thomas Aquinas, because it conceals itself so well: people do not recognize its presence. Might our fear of death be understood as a particularly well-camouflaged manifestation of pride? I have one more course-related encouragement to mention. The students from my 2015 first-year seminar found out about my diagnosis. They crafted a wooden box full of letters they had all written to me. To these I added other letters as they came in from former students after the news spread. I was taken aback by how elaborate my box was – decorations, fancy hinges, even an ornate carrying handle. I thought, it’s like something from an Egyptian tomb, packed with treasures to use in the journey through the underworld. And that’s exactly what it is. I carry these treasures with me every day as I manage my own version of the journey.
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