The Hendrix College Magazine Fall 2012 Volume 25, Number 1 Chief Communications Officer Frank Cox ’76 cox@hendrix.edu Editor Helen Plotkin plotkin@hendrix.edu Managing Editor Rob O’Connor ’95 Art Director Joshua Daugherty Designers Joshua Daugherty Ephraim McNair Staff Photographer Joshua Daugherty Hendrix Magazine is published by Hendrix College, 1600 Washington Avenue, Conway, Arkansas 720323080. This magazine is published for Hendrix College alumni, parents of students and friends. Permission is granted to reprint material from this magazine provided credit is given and a copy of the reprinted material is sent to the Editor. Postmaster, please send form 3579 to Office of Marketing Communications, Hendrix College, 1600 Washington Ave., Conway, AR 72032-3080 501-505-2932 Fax 501-450-4553 Alumnotes submission deadlines: Spring Issue: Feb. 1 Fall Issue: Sept. 1
34 Wood eye? Photo by Joshua Daugherty
on the cover
Printed on paper containing 10% post-consumer recycled content with inks containing agri-based oils. Please Recycle.
Inspired by the iconic campus mailboxes, children’s book illustrator Melanie Dorman Siegel ’85 created “Mailbox Dwellers” for the cover of Hendrix Magazine. The mailboxes were once students’ main connection to home. “Opening that little mailbox every day was a greatly anticipated event,” she said. “I also love the way they look and all their little details that don’t necessarily get noticed ... I thought they would make the perfect little ‘dorm’ in which our artists could live.”
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Art-O-Rama
Renee Williams ’87 and Greg Thompson ’90 share their love of art with collectors and connoisseurs in central Arkansas and around the world
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Yarn Spinner
Author Trent Stewart ’92 creates modern-day classics for readers young and old
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Bard Babe
Mary Ruth Marotte ’95 enjoys life in many acts, including leading Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre
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Electronica
Ryan Gaston ’12 uses the keyboard to create award-winning electronic music compositions
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Print-cess
Art professor Melissa Gill brings new medium to Hendrix art program
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Dynamic Duo
Alumni Ann Muse ’83 and Danny Grace ’77 set the stage for theatre students at Hendrix
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Illustrative
Melanie Dorman Siegel ’85 uses art to bring children’s books to life.
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Leading Lady
Ashlie Atkinson ’01 shares passion for performance on the screen and stage
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Alumni News Alumni Voices Alumnotes At Home at Hendrix Campus News Editor’s Message
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Faculty News Hendrix Through Time In Memoriam Marriages New Children President’s Message
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Hits of Lit
Students collaborate to create award-winning literary and art journal
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Thank You, Thank You
The Honor Roll of Donors thanks generous supporters for making a difference
a message from the president
Liberal arts education adds value to the world The cost of higher education is top-of-mind for many right now. Many see escalating cost as a barrier to access, another reason that climbing into the middle class is becoming an elusive dream for many families. State legislatures, the U.S. Congress, and presidential candidates express concern that escalating cost is eroding American leadership in higher education. We are concerned too. We’re concerned that students might write off higher education as inaccessible and not take advantage of the ways that Hendrix and other private liberal arts colleges can help make college affordable. Most of all, we’re concerned that the focus on cost might obscure the critical importance and value of higher education. Going “away” to college is a life-changing, opportunityexpanding experience. It is not — and should not become — simply a financial transaction. But, if you want to talk about numbers, consider these: • 66% is how much more college graduates earn than high school graduates over a 40-year career. • 19% of Hendrix students qualify for Pell Grants; 100% receive some form of financial aid. • 87% of students at national liberal arts colleges graduate in four years or less, compared to 57% at the top 50 public universities. • 60% of national liberal arts graduates believe they are better prepared for life after college than graduates of other colleges, rating their alma mater as “highly effective” at helping them attain their first job, gain admission to graduate school, and prepare for career changes and advancement. A college education is transformational. It is the first step in a life-long journey. Transformation happens when students are challenged to consider many perspectives, to develop a point of view, and to communicate their views. It happens when students
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work closely with faculty who are devoted to teaching and mentoring. It happens through hands-on learning experiences, such as internships, international study, service and research. It happens in a residential college setting where students encounter differences and learn to live together in a community. Students transformed by an engaged liberal arts and sciences education are ready for the world. They know how to think critically and creatively and how to communicate clearly. They celebrate diversity. They solve problems. They can learn and work collaboratively. And they can lead. They know the joy of discovering their passions and how fulfilling it is to follow their dreams. Actor. Artist. CEO. Doctor. Lawyer. Minister. Musician. Physician. Scientist. Teacher. Writer. Hendrix graduates lead successful careers in a variety of fields. They could have been trained anywhere. But they were transformed here. Yes, we’re concerned about the cost of college. But we’re even more concerned about a world without young people transformed by ideas and values like artistic expression, active citizenship, ethics, and scientific discovery. These classical ideals are the cornerstone for civilized society, and they are critical for a contemporary world. To ensure that Hendrix can continue providing life-changing liberal arts education to our students, we must be careful managers of our resources – and, we must depend on the generosity of alumni, parents, foundations, corporations and friends to help fund scholarships and other college priorities. I would like to personally thank each of you for financial support. And, I ask that you advocate lifechanging liberal arts experiences to others who think higher education is just a numbers game.
J. Timothy Cloyd, Ph.D. President
www.hendrix.edu
welcome aboard
Hendrix was selected for the latest edition of Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think about Colleges. Former New York Times education reporter Loren Pope first published Colleges That Change Lives in 1996. Hendrix has been among the schools selected for each edition of the book. This fall, Hendrix ranked 70th in the 2013 list of “Best National Liberal Arts Colleges,” published by U.S. News and World Report. Last year, Hendrix was ranked 86th. Among the areas of significant improvement this year are actual graduation rate and freshman in the top 10 percent of their graduating class. For the fifth consecutive year, Hendrix was listed as one of the country’s best “Up and Coming” national liberal arts colleges. Hendrix was also included in The Princeton Review’s “The Best 377 Colleges” 2013 edition, Forbes magazine’s annual list of America’s Top 650 Colleges, and the 2013 Fiske Guide to Colleges.
Hendrix welcomed 384 new students to campus this fall. The Class of 2016 represents 35 states, the District of Columbia, and nine countries. Top home states represented include: Arkansas (166), Texas (72), Missouri (20), Tennessee (15), California (10), Colorado (9), and Oklahoma (9). There are 19 international students from Barbados, China, Ghana, Guatemala, Myanmar, Rwanda, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. Gender representation of first-year students is 52.9 percent female and 47.1 percent male. Top academic interests include: biology, computer science, economics and business, English, environmental science, history, politics, pre-engineering, premedicine, and psychology. Hendrix students are a diverse group, and the Class of 2016 is no exception. One was “First Mate” and interned on a catamaran vessel in the Caribbean, while another spent a summer at an archeological site near Jerusalem. Three new students are private pilots, while another student is an iPhone app developer. Several students have conducted research, including a project on green sea turtle and marine mammal conservation. A handful of students have long ties to Hendrix, as third, fourth, or fifth generation legacies. One connection, Rebecca Nelsen ’12, includes a great-grandmother, Helen Nethery Stuck ’22, who attended Galloway Women’s College, among several family members who attended Hendrix.
Left: Hendrix was once again chosen for the latest edition of Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think about Colleges. Right: This fall, Hendrix welcomed 384 new students to campus, representing 35 states, the District of Columbia, and nine countries.
Photo by Joshua Daugherty
life changer
campus news
Campus News
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Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 3
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campus news Left to Right: Walter Owen Pryor ’87, Larry T. Wilson, Rev. Deidre Roberts, Bishop Gary Mueller
welcome a board
candlelight 2012
The Hendrix College Board of Trustees welcomed four new members: Walter Owen Pryor ’87 of Chicago, Ill., vice president for government affairs at Career Education Corporation; Larry T. Wilson of Jacksonville, Ark., chairman, president and chief executive officer of First Arkansas Bank & Trust; and Rev. Deidre Roberts of Conway, Ark., superintendent of the Central District of the Arkansas Conference of the United Methodist Church. The new members will serve six-year terms. The Rev. Gary Mueller, who became bishop of the Arkansas Area of the United Methodist Church on Sept. 1, joins the board as an ex-officio member. At its May meeting, the Hendrix College Board of Trustees said farewell to five members who have completed their terms of service: Dr. W. Kurt Boggan, Frank Cox ’76, Bishop Charles N. Crutchfield, Kent Ritchey ’65, and Dr. Mitzi A. Washington ’77.
Candlelight Carol Service will be performed in Greene Chapel at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 29 through Dec. 1 and at 4 p.m. on Dec. 2. For reservations call (501) 450-1495 beginning on Nov. 19. Reservations will be accepted from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. on Nov. 19-20 and from noon until 2 p.m. on Nov. 26. This year’s Candlelight Carol tour services will be Thursday, Dec. 13 at 7:30 p.m. at Belle Meade United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tenn., and Friday, Dec. 14 at 7:30 p.m. at Lakewood United Methodist Church in North Little Rock, Ark.. For more information, contact Danny Rhodes or Mark Acker (Nashville) at (615) 352-6210 and Kyle Blackburn (North Little Rock) at (501) 753-6186.
medal-urgy Five outstanding alumni will be awarded the Hendrix Odyssey Medal at Founders Day 2012 on Thursday, Oct. 25. The Odyssey Medal is awarded by the Hendrix College Board of Trustees to alumni whose personal and professional achievements exemplify the values of engaged liberal arts and sciences education. The 2012 Odyssey Medal winners and their categories are: Bret Jones ’81 (Artistic Creativity), John Birrer ’88 (Professional and Leadership Development), Lorna Collins Pierce ’59 (Research), Bill Fiser ’75 (Service to the World), and Dee Davis ’81 (Special Projects). Nominations for the 2013 Odyssey Medals are due Dec. 31, 2012 and may be emailed to president@hendrix.edu. For more information and a nomination form, visit www.hendrix.edu/odysseymedal.
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keepin’ the faith Michaelene Miller ’13 was awarded a Fund for Theological Education Undergraduate Fellowship. The Fellowship is awarded to students who have shown a commitment to the church, whatever denomination that might be, a capacity for leadership, a desire to connect faith with larger issues and an ability to engage with people from different backgrounds. A Little Rock native, Miller is a member of the Episcopal Church. Colin Bagby ’12 is one of two Arkansas students planning to go into the ministry to receive the 2012 Seminary Scholarship from the United Methodist Foundation of Arkansas. Bagby will attend the United Methodist seminary at Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Ga.
blast off! Hannah McWilliams ’13 was chosen as a Society of Physics Students 2012 Leadership Scholar for her academic performance, strong interest in continuing to pursue physics, and her involvement in the Society. After graduation, McWilliams plans to go to graduate school in aerospace engineering.
www.hendrix.edu
energy for aliens
Dan Gibbens-Rickman ’12 recently accepted a post-graduate award to teach in Austria for the upcoming year. The program is financed by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture.
Fourteen Hendrix students helped Hendrix professors Dr. Liz Gron, Dr. Robert Dunn, and visiting assistant professor Dr. Amrita Puri teach the chemistry and physics of electricity and energy storage to over 100 children between the ages of five and 13 this summer at the Conway Boys and Girls Club. The outreach program, titled “Energy for Aliens,” was sponsored by Hendrix College and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Student participants included: Michael Malick ’14, Anvesh Kompelli ’14, Charlie Petersion ’14, Brandi Gist ’13, Robert Nshimiyimana ’15, Stephanie Davenport ’13, Beth Childress ’13, McKenzie Keller ’13, Aline Umuhire-Juru ’15, Katie Coughran ’14, Britton Jones ’13, Jake Leffert ’14, Etienne Nzabarushimana ’13, and Saranya Prathibha ’14.
engaged investment This year, Hendrix students will serve others around the world, travel India by rail, research cancer treatments, create a smoothie recipe book, and explore printmaking – thanks to $54,803.76 in grants through Your Hendrix Odyssey: Engaging in Active Learning. The grants, approved this spring by the College’s Committee on Engaged Learning, will fund 22 projects proposed by faculty and students. Since the Odyssey Program’s inception in 2005, Hendrix has awarded $2,101,630.51 in competitive grants to faculty and students to support engaged learning experiences around the world.
e-bailey
in the pines Five Hendrix College students traveled 5,000 miles in two weeks as part of their summer undergraduate research. The students include: Adam Bigott ’14, Payton Lea ’12, Dakota Pouncey ’15, Brian Schumacher ’14, and Kevin Spatz ’14. They were accompanied by Hendrix biology professor Dr. Ann Willyard. The group collected samples from ponderosa pine in Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska. Sites ranged from cacti covered rocky desert canyons on Navajo Nation lands to 8,000-ft. mountainsides, where the pines were nestled among the quaking aspen. With the help of Kristen Finch ’13, the students applied molecular techniques to their samples. Evidence from differences in DNA markers was used to tease out patterns of how some unique pine populations have diverged over
Five Hendrix students traveled 5,000 miles in two weeks as part of their summer undergraduate research, collecting samples from ponderosa pine in Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska.
Courtesy Photo
Olin C. and Marjorie H. Bailey Library recently got its first e-book collection. With nearly 30,000 titles, the e-book collection expands Bailey’s overall book count by 10 percent. The collection will particularly enhance the library’s biomedical and computer science, engineering, mathematics, medicine, and physics offerings. Among the benefits of the eBook collection are: one-time purchase and ongoing access; unlimited concurrent usage and remote access; no digital rights management (e.g. Students can print as many pages as they need or want, save it to their desktop, and read it on any e-reader, while faculty members can put chapters in a course packet or put an e-book on a course website).
campus news
head of his own class
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Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 5
campus news
alongside sanctuary staff, as well as other volunteers from countries like England, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia.
Photo by Todd Tinsley ’98
on a mission
Katie Coughran ’14, Arthur Thomason ’97 and Britton Jones ‘13 on the floor of the Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center
evolutionary time. The students later presented their results at a national botany conference in Columbus, Ohio.
blast off Katherine Coughran ’14 and Britton Jones ’13 visited Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, this summer to see how scientific research has been used to further manned spaceflight. The students were accompanied by physics professor Dr. Todd Tinsley ’98, who met with scientists at Rice University and JSC to discuss potential collaborations in the area of particle astrophysics. The visit was coordinated with Charles Armstrong, a member of the Orion team who is currently serving on a rotation with JSC’s Office of External Relations, and Arthur Thomason ’97, an Extravehicular Activities (EVA) flight controller and instructor who designs spacewalks, trains the astronauts for the tasks, and troubleshoots any problems that occur while the EVA is under way.
Nine Hendrix College students spent the week after graduation with Island Journeys, a non-profit organization on Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas “dedicated to strengthening, rebuilding and transforming island communities.” The service experience was sponsored by the Hendrix Miller Center for Vocation, Ethics, and Calling. Student participants included Emily Cariker ’14, Jenna Gottschalk ’13, Karl Heinbockel ’12, Trey Kalbaugh ’13, Meredith McKinney ’14, Josi Robertson ’13, Trey Signorelli ’15, Sara Slimp ’12, and Maia Yang ’13. Much of the week was spent engaging with the community through service work and conversation with community members, according to Rev. J.J Whitney ’96, associate chaplain and associate director of the Miller Center, who accompanied the student group, along with Karl Lenser, director of the Wellness and Athletics Center. Service work included building the walls of a home for a family in Banneman Town; leading after-school recreation for children at the Banneman Town Library; painting the ceiling of the South Eleuthera Emergency Partners Center and sorting fire outfits for fire stations throughout the island. Ten students traveled to Philadelphia, Pa., for a summer mission trip sponsored by the Miller Center. The group spent the week at Broad Street Ministry in the heart of Philadelphia working at several of their programs and with other partner agencies. Student participants included: Colin Bagby ’12, Dillon Blankenship ’12, Johnny English ’13, Hanna French ’15, DeAngelo Gatlin ’12, Eva Harpst ’13, Abigail Nickle ’14, Laura Price ’15, Josephine Reece ’12, and Allison Sauls ’12. The students were accompanied by religion professor Dr. Robert Williamson, English professor Dr. Toni Jaudon, and Michaela Fraser ’11, Presidential Fellow for the Miller Center.
wild life
Right: Alysa Hansen ’14 spent three weeks this summer volunteering at African Dawn Bird and Wildlife Sanctuary in Thornhill, South Africa, getting handson experience with a variety of animals, most of them native to Africa.
Alysa Hansen ’14 spent three weeks this summer volunteering at African Dawn Bird and Wildlife Sanctuary in Thornhill, South Africa, as a summer Odyssey project. The sanctuary opened to the public in 1997 and has hosted volunteers from around the world, who work for days or months to help care for the birds and animals at the sanctuary. Volunteers are given room and board. Hansen, a biology major, chose to work at the sanctuary because it gave her hands-on experience with a variety of animals, most of them native to Africa, and offered her a chance to experience working in animal care and rehabilitation, which is a career field she is considering. Hansen worked
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where the buffalo flows This summer, three professors Dr. Jay Barth ’80 (politics), Dr. Jeff Kosiorek (history), and Hope Coulter (creative writing) led a group of 12 students on an interdisciplinary Odyssey trip down the Buffalo River. Student participants included: Monica Chatterton ’13, Nathan Crockett ’15, Alli Dillard ’14, Molly Elders ’13, Jonathan Howard ’13, Lindsay Lloyd ’14, Joe McCain ’13, Thomas Odom ’14, Cassidy Robinson ’13, Aaron Steinberg ’15, Allison Tschiemer ’13, and Kaleb Wolfe ’14. The professors chose the Buffalo because of its natural beauty and its historical significance as the first national river in the U.S. The 12-day project took students around northwest Arkansas, exposing them to the natural, political, historical, cultural and artistic aspects of the past and present of the Buffalo River and the surrounding region. Students heard a lecture on the natural history of the Buffalo River from Hendrix biology professor Dr. George Harper; attended a presentation on oral history methods at the David and Barbara Pryor Center at the University of Arkansas; learned about the history of the fight for the Buffalo River’s protection from members of the Ozark Society and professors at the University of Arkansas; spoke to a geologist and a musician; went on a bird walk; and were guided in their creative responses by a published poet; and much more.
Left: Meredith McKinney ’14 and Sara Slimp ’12 spent the week after graduation with Island Journeys, a non-profit organization on Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas dedicated to strengthening, rebuilding and transforming island communities.
Twelve students took an interdisciplinary Odyssey trip down the Buffalo River. The 12-day project exposed them to the natural, political, historical, cultural and artistic aspects of the Buffalo River region.
reaching out Hendrix was awarded a $1,118,063 grant from the National Science Foundation this fall to support a fiveyear education research project to recruit and prepare 19 outstanding STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) majors to teach in secondary high-need schools (grades 7-12) in the Arkansas Delta, in addition
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Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 7
campus news
to supporting them during their first two years of teaching in the Delta. Two major initiatives of the program are the N-STEAD Scholars program and the N-STEAD Internship. The scholars program will recruit STEM majors into teaching by significantly reducing the cost of teacher licensure through awarding scholars $15,000 a year (renewable for one additional year) if they commit to teaching in a high-need Delta school. The internship will allow freshman and sophomore STEM majors to teach within an informal STEM context. Students will be introduced to the academic field of science education through planning lessons, presenting science to children, and assessing the outcomes through participation in a lowrisk environment, the local science outreach program known as Ridin’ Dirty with Science. The project will be led by Hendrix education and science faculty members Dr. Dionne B. Jackson ’96 (education), Dr. Liz U. Gron (chemistry), Dr. Todd Tinsley ’98 (physics), and Dr. James Jennings (education).
Faculty News
In addition to their work in the classroom, Hendrix faculty members engage in research and professional activities that expand their expertise and enrich their teaching. Here is a small sample of the professional activities of Hendrix faculty.
Fred Ablondi, Morris and Ann Henry Odyssey Professor of Philosophy, presented “Hutcheson, Benevolence, and the Personal Virtue of Justice” at the Society for Christian Philosophers’ Midwest region meeting at Hendrix. David Bailin, adjunct art instructor, showed his work Cars, charcoal and coffee on paper, in the 54th Annual Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock. Jay Barth, M.E. and Ima Graves Peace Professor of Politics, presented five lessons on American democracy at Heilongjiang University in Harbin, China and Guangxi Normal University in Guilin, China. Keith Berry, professor of economics and business, provided technical advice to the District of Columbia Public Service Commission on cost of capital issues in Pepco Rate Case No. 1087, as well as affidavits to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Missouri Public Service Commission, and North Dakota Public Service Commission. Eric Binnie, emeritus professor of theatre arts, served as a member of the Ethics Committee of Alexander Technique International and the editor of “ExChange,” the Journal of Alexander Technique International. Hope Coulter, adjunct English and creative writing instructor, was a finalist for the North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize for her work titled “Moon Seen Through a Telescope.” Cheri Prough DeVol, assistant professor of theatre arts, designed the scenery for the world premiere of Ron Osborne’s Saving Old Smokey at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Va., and the Porthouse Theatre production of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys. Tom Goodwin, Elbert L. Fausett Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, with assistant chemistry professors Andres Caro and Christopher Marvin, received a $274,374 National Science
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Foundation (NSF) grant for a 400 MHz NMR spectrometer to enhance faculty and undergraduate research. Bill Gorvine, assistant professor of religious studies, presented “A Tibetan Travel Report: A Young Pilgrim’s Journey in the Religious Biography (rnam thar) of Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen,” at the ASIANetwork annual conference in Portland, Ore. Amanda Hagood, post-doctoral fellow of environmental studies in English, presented “Dead Meat: Margaret Atwood’s Ecological Collapse and the Rhetoric of Carnivory” at Centre College. Courtney Hatch, assistant professor of chemistry, presented “Atmospheric mineral dust aerosol: Laboratory and theoretical studies of indirect impacts on climate” at Texas A&M University’s Department of Chemistry Seminar. Dionne Jackson, assistant professor of education, and chemistry professor Liz Gron attend the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Noyce Proposal Writing Workshop in Washington, D.C. Lisa Leitz, assistant professor of sociology, received a $12,000 Associated Colleges of the South grant for “Systemic Approaches for Creating More Inclusive Campus Climates through Coursework and Cooperation: A Multi-Campus Collaboration.” Erik Maakestad, associate professor of art, is represented by Lovely Fine Arts in Naperville, Ill., and served on the selection panel for the May 2012 North Cascades National Park Artist in Residency. Chris Marvin, assistant professor of chemistry, received Research Corporation’s $35,000 Single Investigator Cottrell Science Award for “Visible Light Photocatalytic Oxidation of Amines to Iminium Ions: Amine Scope and Mannich Cyclization with Allyl and Vinyl Silanes.”
Jay McDaniel, Willis T. Holmes Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, presented “Life is More Important than Religion” at the International Conference on Conviviality in a Multireligious World and “The Concept of Harmony in Chinese Thought” at the International Conference on the Concept of Harmony and Ecological Civilization, both at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif. Sasha Pfau, assistant professor of history, presented “Ritual Violence against Sorcerers in Fifteenth-Century France” and participated in a roundtable discussion “The Future of Medieval Disability: Where Do We Go from Here?” at the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Mich. Mita Puri, visiting assistant professor of psychology, and Hendrix students presented a research poster titled “Gauging Average Fear in a Crowd: An Advantage for the Anxious” at the Association for Psychological Science annual meeting. Brigitte Rogers, assistant professor of dance, served as assistant choreographer for the Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre’s production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat. Dorian Stuber, assistant professor of English, published “Embossed Coins,” a review-essay of Steve Sem-Sandberg’s The Emperor of Lies in Open Letters Monthly, as well as four other literary reviews for Choice. Alex Vernon, James and Emily Bost Odyssey Associate Professor of English Studies and Humanities Area Chair, served as contributing editor for WLA: War, Literature, & the Arts and visiting writer at Troy University in Montgomery, Ala. Leslie Zorwick, assistant professor of psychology, was nominated for the BergerMarks Foundation’s Edna Award for Social Justice.
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Image courtesy of 1993 Troubadour
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at home at hendrix:
Bobby & Sarah Engeler‑Young By Rachel Thomas ’14 When Bobby Engeler-Young ’93 came to interview for his first position in the Hendrix Media Center, the subject of “dress code” inevitably came up. Anyone who knew Engeler-Young as a student will get the joke. It started when Bobby and Sarah Engeler-Young ’91 decided to go to a Sadie Hawkins dance with friends and, rather than walking back to their separate dorms, went to Sarah’s room and dressed up in what she had. After that, Bobby kept wearing the dress off and on. It was always that particular dress. “We tried to get other dresses, but ... ,” Sarah said. “None of them were like that one,” Bobby finishes. “That one was the right dress.” The couple married the summer before Bobby’s junior year. Sarah had graduated with a sociology degree, but she spent the two years until Bobby graduated getting a second degree in theatre. Although the Engeler-Youngs no longer don matching dresses, have duels with retractable swords and die dramatically in the center of campus, they keep their work and home lives creative and fun. And Hendrix is still the setting. Sarah is now the office and building manager for the Bertie Wilson Murphy House, the home of the HendrixMurphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language. Since she joined the staff eight years ago, one of her ongoing projects as “goodwill ambassador” has been helping students feel comfortable hanging out in the house. “I actually saw a girl show up for a luncheon with a speaker one day, she came in and she made it to the bottom of the stairs and she sort of looked, and then she started backing towards the door,” Sarah says. “She was like, ‘I
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Photo by Joshua Daugherty
Highlighting Alumni Faculty and Staff
don’t know ... it looks kind of formal and I’m just wearing jeans.’ And I’m like, ‘Everyone’s wearing jeans. You’re in college. Go upstairs.” Sarah says one of the things she’s appreciated about Murphy since she was a student is its commitment to giving visiting authors and students time to interact in classes and at Murphy-hosted luncheons. “Lots of colleges bring people in to speak,” Sarah says. “But the student interaction portion of it, that’s missing in a lot of places.” Bobby and Sarah always knew they were going to come back to Hendrix. “I can’t really imagine not being at Hendrix at this point,” Sarah says. “We’ve had sort of a variety of jobs ... I’ve had some where I had no idea what the department I was in did. That doesn’t happen here. This is a good goal, what Hendrix does.” Bobby is now the director of the Media Center and has overseen the rapid expansion of audio/visual and technological upgrades on campus. “We went from having an overhead projector in every classroom and a TV VCR cart in every building to the WAC, DW and MC Reynolds [referring to new facilities Wellness and Athletics Center, Donald W. Reynolds Center for Life Sciences, and the Charles D. Morgan Center for Physical Sciences], needing technology in every classroom every day,” he says. “So it’s been this boom, this proliferation of technology ... it’s kind of mind-boggling.” Even while he was working on the college’s technology boom, Bobby contributed to growth in the college’s art programs. He has enjoyed dancing since he was a student. When he realized that there were students on campus who were passionate about dance, he started working to get
Above: Bobby and Sarah Engeler-Young’s Hendrix experience from students to staff, including Sadie Hawkins Dance in 1990 with Jason Murphy ’93 (center)
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Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 9
1981
hendrix through time Photo courtesy of the Hendrix College Archives
From studying to social life, residence halls have long been the center for campus life at Hendrix and the cornerstone of many college traditions. Students learn how to live in a community, encounter new ideas and respect differences, balance between individual rights and responsibilities, develop lifelong friendships ... and have fun. Today, Hendrix has its six historic residence halls, including Couch, Galloway, Hardin, Martin, Raney, and Veasey, as well as five residence houses, three theme houses, and five college-owned apartment complexes. More than 90 percent of students live in college-owned housing.
Photo by Mike Malone
2012
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Photo by Peter Howard
A Message from the Editor There are so many inspirational Hendrix alumni whose lives and careers are closely connected to the arts. We found no shortage of subjects to feature in this issue of Hendrix Magazine, which celebrates the arts. We could just as easily have covered longtime Heights Gallery owner Mitch Jansonius ’71 or many other alumni art gallery owners and operators like John Bell ’79 (Sweet Home), Jon Mourot ’76 (Boswell Mourot Fine Art), Mac Murphy ’98 (M2 Gallery), or Cindy Scott-Huisman ’88 (Cantrell Gallery). But we ran out of space long before we ran out of talented Hendrix alumni worth writing — and reading — about. Artistic Creativity is one of the six project categories in Your Hendrix Odyssey: Engaging in Active Learning. Through Odyssey, students and faculty have undertaken amazing hands-on learning experiences in the arts. Hendrix has also strengthened its resources in the arts with new faculty members in creative writing, theatre arts and dance, and studio art, including art professor Melissa Gill, who is featured in this issue. Hendrix celebrates alumni achievements in the arts by awarding an Odyssey Medal for Artistic Creativity. Among the past recipients of this honor are Mary Steenburgen ’75, Susan Dunn ’76, James R. Hayes ’88, Natalie Canerday ’85, Sheri Bylander ’85, Randy Goodrum ’69, Bill Ragsdale ’83, and Robyn Horn ’73, who is featured in this issue. We look forward to awarding the 2012 Odyssey Medals at Founders Day 2012 on Oct. 25. We invite you to join us for this special convocation and to consider nominating other outstanding alumni for next year’s Odyssey Medals. The nomination deadline is Dec. 31, and you can find the nomination form easily at www.hendrix.edu/odysseymedal.
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Last spring, we received more than 650 magazine survey responses. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and story ideas with us. Your feedback helped us plan this issue and will help us identify subjects for future issues. We are so pleased to see that many of you liked the changes we have made after our 2009 survey. In particular, we noticed that the percentage of you who rated the magazine’s quality as “excellent” increased from 18% in 2009 to 33% in 2012. We are happy with that increase, but we will continue working to make Hendrix Magazine even better. And, we hope that you will continue responding to our surveys, submitting your news for Alumnotes and sending us suggestions for great Hendrix stories. You are welcome to send your suggestions and comments to me at plotkin@hendrix.edu or to Managing Editor Rob O’Connor ’95 at oconnor@hendrix.edu. One last thing, for those of you who have iPads: expect the iBooks version of the fall edition to be available for download by the middle of October. We are excited to be presenting Hendrix Magazine in this new format and would appreciate hearing your thoughts about it.
Helen S. Plotkin Editor
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Galleria alumni gallery owners make space for art lovers
By Rob O’Connor ’95 Managing Editor
Photo by Joshua Daugherty
Local Gal Local food fans find value in knowing the farmer who grows the food they eat. The same applies to art. For 17 years, Renee Williams ’87 has catered to people who want to know the artist whose work they buy. Williams, who owns Gallery 26 on Kavanaugh in Little Rock’s Hillcrest neighborhood, has built a business featuring original artwork, jewelry, and pottery by Arkansas artists – as well as offering custom framing. “There are so many really good artists in the state, which is great,” she said. Gallery 26 represents 70 local artists and has a two- to three-year waiting list for its series of exhibitions held every other month. Locally, Williams has seen a big increase in art sales. “Strangely, during a recession, there’s been a big resurgence in handmade and meaningful purchases,” she said. “People want something with love, soul and spirit in it.” Williams grew up in St. Louis, Mo., until her family moved to Dover, Ark., where she finished high school. She knew of Hendrix through her grandmother, who lived across the street from campus, and grandfather Dennis Williams ’30, who attended Hendrix. When her sister Dee Williams ’83 was a student, she attended plays and lectures by guest speakers on campus. “I had a great experience,” said Williams. “You’re not just a number, and you end up with mentors and incredible friends.” Williams was inspired by Hendrix faculty members, including art professor Bill Hawes, the late philosophy professor Dr. Francis Christie, and religion professor Dr. Jay McDaniel. “They were a big influence on me ... You could go and talk to them, not just about class but life,” she said. “That was really important to me.” As a student, Williams worked with Potpourri, the student literary magazine, and hosted a radio show on KHDX. She was also part of the second group of students to study for a term
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at the University of London’s Birkbeck College. “That kind of experience just opens up your whole world and makes travel seem so possible,” said Williams, who has returned to Europe several times since her first study abroad experience. “After Birkbeck, it just seemed so doable.” After college, she worked framing fine art at a frame shop in Little Rock for six years. When the owner closed the shop, Williams saw an opportunity. With a U.S. Small Business Administration loan, she opened her own frame shop and added a gallery. As a business owner, she made friends with local artists and mailed invitations to art shows held in artists’ homes, a precursor to the events she now hosts. “I got a good start with that and it all kind of started to gel,” she said. In 2005, she moved the shop and gallery to its current location, two doors down from where she was for 10 years. Gallery 26 offers Arkansas artwork in a variety of styles and prices from $35 to $3,500 and hosts about 18 art events a year. Though Williams is wired on Facebook and sends email notices about events, customers still enjoy receiving invitations to exhibits by mail, she said. With her skills in framing, she can build installations for “bizarre things,” such as an all plastics show, including plastic clothing, hosted by Gallery 26. “It’s great because we can be adventurous and not worry as much,” she said. Williams “knew from the beginning” she would be an art major at Hendrix, and she continues to be active as an artist. “Most gallery owners are artists,” she said. “And we have a natural inclination to want to bring people together.” She recently exhibited her work in acrylic, which she describes as “magical realism with a lot of symbolism,” at the Butler Center Galleries of the Arkansas Studies Institute. Williams is one of several Hendrix alumni active in the art world, including many in the Little Rock area. “There are quite a few of us, which is great,” she said, naming several Hendrix graduates who own other galleries or work in art in another capacity. “We all had really good art professors who were very encouraging that we could actually make a living doing something we love,” she said. “My whole life has changed because of those four years.”
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o brother, fine art thou
Thompson was always interested in art. “My mom was a museum director,” he said. “And I took classes at the Arkansas Arts Center from a very young age. It was like my home church.” His mother was familiar with Hendrix and former Hendrix education and history professor Bob Meriwether was a second cousin. “Growing up, I knew Hendrix had a reputation as a fine liberal arts school where the student-to-faculty ratio was low,” Thompson said. “I learned a ton of things at Hendrix, one of which was a taste and then a hunger for education, self-improvement and travel,” he said. “My art history professor Don Marr used
Photo by Joshua Daugherty
Arriving at Hendrix as a sophomore, Greg Thompson ’90 took a psychology class and an art class. “I had a ‘come to Jesus’ moment and asked myself, ‘What do you want to do with the rest of your life?’” he said. “What really made me happy was art.” Switching his major from psychology to art, Thompson had the following exchange with his father. “My dad said, ‘Do you think you can make any money at that?’ And I said, ‘I think I can’,” he recalled. “And that’s where it started.” His father needn’t have worried.
Thompson now owns Greg Thompson Fine Art in the historic Argenta business district in North Little Rock. The gallery features the best Southern artists from below the Mason-Dixon Line and sells original artwork – including works by contemporary and modern American and European masters like Botero, Cassatt, Picasso, and Wyeth – to clients all over country. Exhibitions, including the early Best of the South exhibition Thompson began in partnership with The Oxford American magazine, are regularly featured in Garden and Gun and Art in America magazines and the New York Times, and draw clients from across the country.
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to say in art history class, ‘Here is an image of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo De Vinci, and when you go to the Louvre in Paris you will be amazed at how small it is and may be more amazed by the 200 tourists crowded around the painting than the actual piece. And when you go to Turkey and see the Hagia Sophia, make sure you see the mosaics on the second floor’,” Thompson said. “Marr kept inserting that word ‘when’ into all of his lectures on fine art history,” he said. “So when I graduated from Hendrix, there was only one thing in the world I wanted to do – go to Europe and the Middle East (e.g. Turkey) and experience firsthand all of the things I had been studying in art history!
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My Hendrix experience led to an insatiable appetite for understanding and exploring the world around me.” Thompson stayed, lived, traveled and worked in Europe for a year during 1990 – 1991, an enriching and life-changing experience he owes to his days at Hendrix, he said. “At orientation, Dean Churchill said to the incoming class, ‘The reason you were selected is because we see the spark of leadership in you’,” Thompson recalled. “That really struck me.” After graduation, Thompson waited tables and worked as a graphic designer, painting on the side. He entered the Arkansas Arts Center’s Delta artists’ show and built a base as an artist. Though he sold some of his work, Thompson was completely puzzled by the process of pricing his art. He decided that, as a dealer, he would have a more stable income and would learn firsthand how to price art. Initially he worked from his apartment as an art consultant. His first big break came when he sold six or seven paintings to Charles Morgan, former Acxiom Corp. company leader and Hendrix College Board of Trustees member. It was his first big corporate sale and led to more sales to Acxiom, as well as new clients, including Alltel, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and Stephens Inc. “It just started to domino,” he said. Sales to the Arkansas Arts Center led to business with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which has led to relationships and deals with other important fine art museums and collectors across the country. “I realized really quickly that Arkansas companies like to buy Arkansas artists, and I wanted to represent the very best Arkansas has to offer as a way to set myself apart,” Thompson said. With no storefront, Thompson hosted art parties in an apartment. In one night, he earned more money than he did in one month as a graphic artist. “It mushroomed really quickly,” he said, reaching $1 million in yearly sales by his fifth year. “It just serendipitously happened.” It also happened with a lot of hard work, focus, and determination. Over 12 years, Thompson developed a reputation with artists and clients. The next logical step was to open a bricks and mortar gallery. Four years ago, he did just that. His gallery is part of the Argenta area’s renaissance. “When we opened, there was a firm footprint and clear vision for the Argenta community,” he said. “We dovetailed nicely as the type of business they wanted down here.” Thompson likewise had a clear vision for his gallery. He had been to professional
galleries in Chicago, New York, and Paris and wanted his gallery to be on par with anything in the world. “I knew what a real gallery looked and felt like,” he said. Touches like a private viewing room, receptionist desk, and an office are just as important as what is on the walls, he said. In 2009, The Oxford American magazine asked Thompson to develop an exhibition to coincide with its Best of the South Gala honoring actor and Mississippi native Morgan Freeman and Little Rock author Charles Portis. “I started looking more broadly at the South,” he said. “I wanted to represent the best of the best in Southern Regionalism.” His gallery now includes work by Mississippi artist William Dunlap, which Thompson describes as “a real coup,” as well as Delta artist Carroll Cloar and many others who not only show at Thompson’s gallery but have work in major museum collections across the country, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Smithsonian, The Whitney and the Metropolitan, to name just a few. “We want to give our collector client base the very best they can have in the art buying/ art collecting experience, whether they are focusing on important emerging talent or household names,” he said. “At our gallery, the well-seasoned collector, as well as the beginning one, has a wide spectrum of quality art in which to view and purchase. We are the only gallery in the state which offers such an experience.” The Best of the South show has become the biggest show of the year. “It broadened our client base by broadening the type of artwork we made available to the public,” said Thompson, who now has clients from Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Jackson, Memphis, New Orleans, New York and St. Louis. In addition to working with artists and clients from across the country, Thompson is proudly part of a cadre of Hendrix alumni in the art world, including Jennifer Carman ’00, an art appraiser who recently curated a show at Thompson’s gallery by the late Heber Springs photographer Mike Disfarmer. He’s not surprised though. “Hendrix students and alumni are bright, talented, driven, and entrepreneurial, and they strive for success,” he said. “My passion that got ignited at Hendrix was art. I knew with every fiber in my body that’s what I was going to do and approach it with the very professional attitude.” Now celebrating his 17th year as one of the leading art dealers, gallerist and consultants in Arkansas, Thompson is looking forward to the next 17 years and beyond. “I love what I do and I do what I love.”
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easy writer
author trent stewart builds best-selling book series
By Mary Ruth Marotte ’95 When you hang out with someone who has published New York Times best-selling books, there is a little pressure to step up your game. Trent [Trent Stewart ’92] is that friend of mine. You know he is smarter and more clever than you are, and you are good with that because he inspires you to kick it into a higher gear. Trent is one bright guy. He resembles pretty closely in curiosity and intellect Reynie Muldoon, the young protagonist of his The Mysterious Benedict Society series. Some tribal custom in the remotest region of Africa? Trent can tell you. And he is a natural storyteller. In fact, in a recent glowing review in The Horn Book (prominent reviewer of children’s literature), Trent was referred to as a “Master Storyteller,” which is the way that I’ll refer to him
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from now on because he really loves to be put on a pedestal. There is nothing Master Storyteller likes more than to be the center of attention. I’m only kidding. In fact, Trent has the great talent of turning the conversation back to you, to your life, to your interests, making you feel like you are more interesting than he is (You probably aren’t). Recently Trent realized I didn’t know the difference between a rifle and a shotgun, so instead of offering me a tedious description of each (knowing he would lose me), he told me a story that delineated the difference in a way that kept my attention. Given my interest in guns, that was quite a feat. When not educating those of us ignorant to gun construction, he is busy writing stories of his own, something he does very, very well. Trent has published five novels, his first
the beautifully evocative Flood Summer, set in Arkansas in and around Hot Springs where Trent grew up, and four books in The Mysterious Benedict Society series. Flood Summer is regional literature at its best and even includes Hendrix in its narrative as a place where his protagonist, Abe, spends a bit of time before life intervenes and sends him on a journey that includes some joy and some reckoning. The ending of Flood Summer is as subtle and perfect as any ending that I know in American literature. Of course, Trent has garnered national and international acclaim for his award-winning The Mysterious Benedict Society, a series for young readers that is classic story-telling in the manner of C.S. Lewis. These books feature the adventures of four children – Reynie Muldoon, Sticky Washington, Kate Wetherall, and Constance Contraire, a parent-less team
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Photo by Courtney Spradlin
of geniuses charged with saving the world time and again by using their considerable individual strengths, but also by working as a team to thwart nefarious villainy. My older kids have been fans for years, and just recently I finished reading the first book of the series aloud to my youngest son. It was quite a treat, and the experience reminded me why this book was awarded the prestigious E.B. White Read Aloud Award – it is as patiently descriptive and touching as it is suspenseful and clever. And I’m quite sure that after defining for my son all of the unfamiliar words that Trent includes in the narrative, my almost-8-year-old is prepared for the verbal portion of the SAT exam. Trent also collaborated on a puzzle book associated with the series and just returned from a national tour promoting his latest in the series, a “prequel,” if you will, called The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict, a novel that gives us the history of the beloved Mr. Benedict, leader of the Mysterious
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Benedict Society and friend to all orphans and vulnerable children. I was wholly absorbed in this one, making my own children orphan-like and vulnerable as I batted them away, telling them to leave me alone for the duration of my reading. Often I think about how lucky we are to have Trent in Arkansas to inspire our young readers and writers. He is a fixture at the Arkansas Literary Festival, each year packing the house with kids who are charmed within minutes of hearing him talk about their favorite characters and scenes from the MBS series, and he has visited too many schools to name here. Last year I took advantage of my knowledge of Trent’s fondness for Shakespeare by asking him to join the Board of Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre, an invitation he willingly and graciously accepted. For years now he has helped this fledgling organization, writing original pieces for our annual fundraisers and donating innumerable signed copies of his books for auction. I half-joked with him before our last fundraiser that we should auction him off as our live auction item. Most recently, for the “Shakespeare in the South” episode of the NPR show “Tales from the South,” Trent managed to weave together a story about basketball, high school romance, and Shakespeare. And he did it brilliantly. No surprise. Trent says that stories were always a part of his life, that his mother cultivated his interest in telling stories by telling her own and also by playing elaborate games that involved imagination and fancy. He wrote his own stories from an early age and entered Hendrix as an English major intent on becoming a writer. At Hendrix he forged a close relationship with Jack Butler, the then-writer-in-residence and author of award-winning books himself. Trent says of Butler: “He encouraged me to think of myself as a writer and not a studentwriter,” advice Trent took seriously, for shortly after leaving Hendrix, he was admitted into the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop. From there Trent moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, when his wife, Sarah Beth Estes ’92, a sociology professor, was offered a tenuretrack appointment at the University of Cincinnati. After several years in Ohio working at the library, raising kids, and reading and writing as much as possible, Trent sold both Flood Summer and the first The Mysterious Benedict Society book in the same six-week period. Trent and Sarah Beth decided to move back to Little Rock in 2006 with their boys, Elliot and Fletcher, to be closer to family, and Sarah Beth took a job as a professor in the sociology department at UALR. While Trent could ride the success of his books into the sunset, he is not one to rest
Trent Stewart’s Mysterious Benedict Society (2007) is the first in a fivebook series. A complete collection of Mysterious Benedict Society books will be released this fall.
on his laurels. He is currently working on two separate ideas for children’s novels and has recently completed a new short story intended for an adult audience. Trent has won numerous awards as a children’s author, and his adult fiction has been likewise lauded, landing in some of the most prestigious literary journals in the country, including The New England Review, Shenandoah, The Georgia Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Chattahoochee Review. To read Trent’s short fiction is to realize profoundly the versatility of his writing. These stories demonstrate Trent’s acute observational capabilities, so in tune is he with how people interact with their natural habitats, how our surroundings, in fact, often inspire our actions, thoughts, and beliefs. Trent has already won the Porter Prize and the Booker Worthen Prize, the two most prominent awards given to Arkansas writers. I have no doubt that more awards are in his future for the words that are dancing around in his head right now. He will string them together in a way that will capture the world’s attention again. That is what Master Storytellers do, after all. Dr. Mary Ruth Wilson Marotte ’95 is a member of the English faculty at the University of Central Arkansas and Executive Director of the Arkansas Shakespeare Festival.
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a Marvel in
Motion By Trent Stewart ’92
Photo by Joshua Daugherty
The other morning I was privy to a conversation between two professors I know, both of them accomplished in their fields, both mothers of young children. They were discussing the parentteacher organization at their children’s school, weighing the merits of deeper involvement against the many demands of work. I didn’t catch the name when one mentioned a friend of theirs who had recently served as a PTO president, but then the other said, “Of course you can’t use her as an example – you’ll kill yourself trying!” They took a moment to shake their heads wonderingly, and that’s when I knew which friend they meant. Because no matter how industrious and productive you are, you probably don’t want to compare yourself to Mary Ruth Marotte ’95 – not if you don’t want to feel like a slouch. Still, it can be fun, in a shivery, scary-movie sort of way, to contemplate Mary Ruth’s résumé and regimens from the comfort of your sofa. Let’s start with the résumé: After earning her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Hendrix (she did it in three years), a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Central Arkansas, and a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee (she finished her dissertation while raising twin toddlers), Mary Ruth returned to UCA in 2005, this time as a member of the English department faculty. Now an associate professor, Mary Ruth not only teaches and sits upon the usual slew of committees, but she also serves as her department’s director of graduate studies. What’s more, having seen a need for graduate students to gain a better sense of the profession, in 2007 she cofounded (and she continues to direct) an annual graduate student conference, which gives students the opportunity to present and discuss work with their peers. And still more: in addition to regularly moderating panels and facilitating discussions at conferences, colloquia, and public events such as the Arkansas Literary Festival, Mary Ruth has been a co-organizer of the Arkansas Philological Association’s annual conference twice in the last three years. All of which, for those of us who aren’t Mary Ruth Marotte, might seem enough to keep a person busy. Especially since she and her husband Dr. Jeff Marotte ’94, a Conway urologist, have three active children (Simon, the third, followed Olivia and Ethan, the twins), all of whom have swim practices, music lessons, chess club – the usual bevy of familiar activities, as well as less common ones such as triathlons and rehearsals for parts in theatrical productions. (And yes, Mary Ruth is a member of their school’s PTO; and yes, she’s recently served as its co-president.) But if you are Mary Ruth, then while doing all these other things you have also published a well-written, strikingly cogent book (Captive Bodies: American Women Writers Redefine Pregnancy and Childbirth, Demeter Press, 2007); co-edited another (Papa, PhD: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy, Rutgers University Press, 2010); published numerous academic articles, book chapters, and reviews; and presented so many papers at conferences that a bulleted list of them takes up an entire page. Does thinking about all of this work make you feel grateful for your comfortable sofa? Does it maybe, just a little, make you want to hide under a blanket? Not Mary Ruth. She’s just getting started. Though she loves teaching, cares about her students and finds satisfaction in her writing projects, Mary Ruth’s great passion (and all she really wants me to be talking about here) is Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre, of which she is the executive director. What this means is that, together with artistic director Rebekah Scallet, Mary Ruth oversees the operation of one of the most ambitious and impressive enterprises in the entire state: Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre’s summer festival.
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It really is something to behold, too. Every summer since 2007, dozens of talented, hard-working theater people from all across the country arrive to participate in the festival, where they work alongside other talented, hard-working theater people from Conway and Little Rock (including interns from both UCA and Hendrix) to stage several performances of four different productions – three of them Shakespeare plays, the fourth a beloved non-Bard classic. And they do so in the most hustling, bustling manner imaginable: There are performances in Reynolds Performance Hall on the UCA campus (AST operates under the aegis of the UCA Foundation); outdoor “Shakespeare on the Green” performances at The Village at Hendrix; special performances at Wildwood Park for the Arts in Little Rock; a host of programs and performances tailored especially for children – and all of this occurs in a matter of weeks. Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre is the state’s only professional Shakespeare company. It also happens to be a fantastic one. For testament to its excellence, you need only look to the positive media attention AST has garnered, not just from local and regional outlets but in national publications such as the New York Times. Or you might consider the following: In AST’s inaugural summer season, over two thousand people attended its productions. Pretty impressive for a new artistic venture in a small state. Even more impressive? Attendance this year was almost five thousand. Clearly, the word is spreading. Not without a lot of work, though, which brings us back to Mary Ruth. Yes, the summer festival is stunning with its weeks of ceaseless frenetic activity, of late nights and early mornings and every person involved with the plays – actors, stage crew, directors, volunteers, everyone – always needing to be two places at once. But this exciting summer work is just the tip of the colossal, year-round iceberg. To sustain such an ambitious enterprise calls for endless grant writing, phone calls to potential donors, hosting fundraising dinners, organizing huge fundraising events, recruiting board members (I’ve recently become a board member myself, and guess who got me to do it?) – the list goes on and on, and Mary Ruth has done it all. Why? The answer lies in part with an experience she had almost 20 years ago, when she attended her first-ever professional Shakespeare productions at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. It was, Mary Ruth says, “a defining experience,” one that helped inspire her to pursue studies in literature. It’s also the reason that when she heard, years later, of a similar festival being launched in Conway, she knew right away that she wanted to be on board. And soon she was – quite literally so. She’s one of AST’s original board members. That’s right, she volunteered. From the portrait I’ve been painting here, you might imagine Mary Ruth as an agitated bundle of nerves, someone who talks too fast and Continued on Page 37
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Composer’s Quest By Rachel Thomas ’14 Ryan Gaston ’12 started playing piano (he thinks) when he was five years old. His parents didn’t make him do it. “I think it was probably quite a long time before my parents realized that I was playing,” Gaston says. “I never had lessons or anything else for it.” One day, when he was at home sick, there happened to be a keyboard in the house. He decided to try it out. “That’s how I got started with music,” says Gaston, a Booneville, Ark., native. “And I just kept doing it, and I started composing.” He felt he was better at doing that than he was at speaking. “To this day, the thoughts I have that I feel aren’t best suited to words I try to express through music,” he says. By age 15, he was “pretty tired” of the piano and the trumpet, which he picked up at age 10. “I’d reached all the limits there, so I thought, ‘What’s going to be a new instrument that I can use that I’m not going to find limitations with so quickly?’” says Gaston. “So I thought, ‘Well, I can use an electronic instrument because, really, they can do most anything.” He bought a relatively inexpensive synthesizer. He soon realized that it was going to be able to do much more than a piano, which can only play certain notes and has a static timbre, meaning that a piano always sounds
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like a piano. “Whereas, with an electronic instrument, I can do all those little notes between the keys, and it can produce any timbre that you could think of, theoretically,” he says. Since then, Gaston has experimented with other ways to make electronic music, including circuit bending — redesigning audio circuits — and software design. “You know, people have been doing instrumental composition since before we’re really aware of,” he says. “Everyone talks about the ancient Greeks beginning it, but who knows if that’s actually the case?” Electronic composition really formally started around the 1940s, so it’s an art form that’s only about 70 years old now, Gaston says. “So I think it’s interesting because there’s really no known codification to it yet, no one’s decided what it’s for, or what it’s not for, so it feels less limiting than writing for a traditional ensemble,” he says. When Gaston arrived at Hendrix, he was unsure of his major. He considered physics, but he soon discovered he liked being taught music as much as he liked teaching himself. “I came here and just hit it off really well with the professors, I was really pleased with the way they taught ... so it just wound up working really well,” Gaston says. “I thought I’d try it out, see if a music degree would work for me, and it turned out that I really was genuinely interested in academic composition, more than just doing things as a hobby. So I
continued with it.” Last year, Gaston won top honors at the University of Louisville Young Composer Competition for New Electro-Acoustic Music with his original piece “Nocturne: Crickets (Inside & Out).” He also earned Odyssey funding for an electronic music research project. With the help of Hendrix music professors Dr. Karen Griebling and Dr. John Krebs, he convinced the Odyssey Office to use the money to purchase equipment for a modest electronic music studio. The music department had recently received a donation of Pro Tools, Finale, and Sibelius software, along with a MIDI controller/USB sound card. Gaston created a small body of audio analysis and processing software and donated an amplifier to the department. Odyssey funding was used to purchase a modular synthesizer custom-made by Michael Lamay, along with several utility modules. “It was great for me that they were so flexible in helping me figure out what I wanted to do, and helping me to provide some more opportunities for people who will be coming through in the future,” he says. Now that he’s graduated, Gaston is looking at several graduate programs in music, including one in electronic composition and another one in instrument design. Rachel Thomas ’14 is an English Studies major from Fayetteville, Ark.
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Photo by Bruce Layman ’12
odyssey experience helps students plug in to electronic instruments
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Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 21
art professor brings printmaking into focus for hendrix students By Rob O’Connor ’95 Managing Editor As an eighth-grade student, Hendrix art professor Melissa Gill was asked to describe what kind of career she wanted to have. “I knew it better be something I enjoy and that makes me happy,” said Gill, who was already showing an inclination toward art. “Nothing changed my mind after that.” Her parents encouraged her and her twin sister to make art, often giving art supplies as gifts. Her aunt was a college art major and artist, and her great-grandmother was “a pretty great artist.” In high school, a family friend gave Gill a stack of old Interview magazines with black and white portrait photographs. She trained herself to draw by using oil pastels to reproduce those photos. A Tucson, Ariz., native, Gill declared studio art as her major during her freshman year at the University of Arizona. She took figure drawing from a printmaking professor, who became a mentor and recommended she try printmaking. “I really loved painting, so I had to think hard about which one I wanted to focus on,” said Gill, who ultimately chose to concentrate on printmaking. As she was perusing the photo library at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, Gill discovered the work of Harry Callahan, whose series of photos of his wife Eleanor inspired Gill to use photography to make prints. “That’s what made me choose printmaking over painting,” said Gill, who uses photos as sources for her images. A year later, she left the desert for the Midwest and enrolled in a two-year M.A. program at Purdue University. As a teaching assistant at Purdue, she taught beginning drawing. After earning her master’s, she enrolled in a three-year MFA program at Indiana University, where she taught beginning printmaking. “That’s when I started to really love it,” said Gill, who had become comfortable in the classroom by then. “I also started to understand how my interaction with students fed my studio practice.” “When you’re teaching, you go over fundamentals. As artists, we’ve moved beyond the fundamentals in our own practice,” she said. “But it’s very helpful to bring them up in our own consciousness because we can look at them in a different way.”
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She received her MFA from Indiana in 2000 and moved to Seattle, Wash., for three years, teaching at art centers and working part-time jobs, “some art-related, some not.” In 2003, she returned to Purdue as a one-year sabbatical replacement and did the same the following year at Rockford College in Rockford, Ill., where she taught beginning photography, printmaking, drawing and two-dimensional design. She taught conversational English in South Korea for a year before focusing her job search on college teaching. When she interviewed at Hendrix, she was accustomed to getting to know new places. But she wasn’t prepared for how well she’d like Hendrix. “I was very impressed at my interview,” said Gill, who attended the senior art major’s exhibition and thought the work was “spectacular.” The college’s new three-building art center, which opened in 2001, had been built with a printmaking studio. But until Gill came in fall 2008, Matthew Lopas balanced printmaking with the department’s drawing and painting course sequence and other responsibilities. “The department wanted it to be a full-time offering,” she said. “It rounds out the art program because it appeals to all students. Students interested in photography, drawing, painting, they all enjoy it.” The department is beginning to see specialty printmaking students too, which is very exciting, she added. Gill teaches wood cut in the fall and etching in the spring, all of which are available at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced level. She also offers a new class in mixed media printmaking. In the summers, she has pursued professional development opportunities, from working in a print shop in Austin, Texas, to explore photo lithography, and a summer art residency in India to learn about Indian culture and Hindu religion. She has also accompanied Hendrix students to a printmaking conference in Minneapolis, Minn., and led the senior art major practicum trip to New York City. “Hendrix students are the best I’ve ever worked with,” she said. “They are hardworking and incredibly smart.” She enjoys the opportunity to interact with student artists who are not art majors. “Even if they are leaning toward other majors, they’re still interested and curious about art. It’s a different kind of energy compared to an art school or art center,” she said. “At Hendrix, it’s more dynamic. Students bring things from other classes and enrich it.” As an artist, Gill continues to look for ways to use prints and printmaking to bring awareness to environmental and global issues. To that end, she was instrumental in the founding of the Arkansas Society of Printmakers, which sponsors printmaking workshops and shows. “Just representing and selling in a gallery is not going to do it for me,” she said. “I want to focus my attention on the larger picture.”
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Photo by Mike Malone
The A-print-ess
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Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 23
24 Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012
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Making things that Matter
alumna carves out a career as an artist
By Rob O’Connor ’95 Managing Editor
learn then. I envy the students working in the art department now,” she said, praising the College’s current art facilities and faculty. After graduating from Hendrix, Horn worked at Prestige Composition, a Little Rock, Ark., typesetting house, setting type for advertising agencies and making deliveries in an old Volkswagen. She later worked as chief photographer for the State Parks and Tourism Department.
When she was in high school, Robyn Hutcheson Horn ’73 played guitar and sang in The Opposite Sex, an all-girl rock band. But when she came to Hendrix, she didn’t make the cut for the school choir. The rock world’s loss was the art world’s gain when Horn set aside her axe for a chainsaw and chose to hone her chops as an artist. [Note: Horn did become a member of the Hendrix Choir, under the direction of Robert McGill, during her junior and senior years.] Her work can now be found in fine art galleries and at museums, including the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. Crystal Bridges’ collection features Already Set in Motion, a 10-foot tall sculpture carved from redwood and dyed black. “It’s quite a thrill to be part of the collection,” says Horn, who was present when the work was installed, by industrial crane, on the grounds outside of the museum. The installation included a few nervewracking moments, as the sculpture hung suspended in the air high above the sloped grounds of the museum. For the sculpture, Horn used a forklift, an anniversary present from her husband John, as a scaffold and fired up her 47-inch bar Stihl chain saw. “It’s hard to be spontaneous with a chain saw ... It’s direct and aggressive,” Horn says, adding that the tool lends itself to a certain “destructive choreography.” The log she used was found lying in a valley in northern California after it had been blown over in a storm 40 years earlier. From a single log, she made two sculptures. One was shown at the Arkansas Arts Center’s Delta Exhibition. The second piece became Already Set in Motion. Both works are part of her recent Slipping Stone series. They resemble stacked stones on the verge of collapse. But looks are deceiving. Each sculpture is actually a solid piece carved to look like several pieces put together.
Early Material Since 1984, Horn has focused primarily on wood sculpture. She had tried metal but found it too heavy and dirty to work with. Rather than swinging a hammer and hitting an anvil, Horn decided she’d rather exert her energies swinging a tennis racquet and hitting a tennis ball. Her interest in wood began when she shared a shop space with her husband John, a retired printer and avid collector of vintage printing presses, and his brother Sam, a woodworker. “Sam handed me the tool and said, ‘You want to try it?’ and that’s how it started,” she remembers. Horn learned to turn wood at the Arrowmont School in Gatlinburg, Tenn. She started on a lathe but now uses mostly band saws and hand tools to carve. “It’s a subtractive process,” she says to differentiate it from an “additive” process like pottery. “Removing material seems to appeal to me.” Most of Horn’s artistic influences are sculptural, including the Japanese aesthetic of Isamu Noguchi and the shapes of English sculptor Barbara Hepworth, a contemporary of Henry Moore. Continued on Page 37
A Fort Smith native, Horn was first exposed to art through her mother, Dede Hutcheson, a painter. “Mom was always doing art,” says Horn, whose sister Karen Hutcheson ’78 is also a painter. The trio recently had a show together at the Center for Art and Education in Van Buren. Becoming an art major at Hendrix was “the easiest way to graduate,” Horn reasoned at the time. In her undergraduate days, the art program was a far cry from today. “It was fairly minimal at the time. There were so many things I didn’t
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Photo courtesy of Robyn Horn
Photo courtesy of Robyn Horn
DRAWN TO HENDRIX
Landslide
Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 25
A. Muse & Grace
passion for theatre draws alumni back to hendrix stage
By Rachel Thomas ’14
26 Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012
want to lose her because she was an excellent student ... When we met, he made me see that it was really the atmosphere of the university that I was unhappy with. It seemed that everyone was trying to get away with making grades instead of really learning something. ... So he said, ‘Why don’t you come here?’” “I have to say that it is one of the top 10 best decisions I have ever made,” Muse says. “Hendrix quickly became my home — the keeper of my heart and mind.” After graduating, Muse joined a local theatre company and worked full-time in various retail jobs. “Each time I speak to a student about theatre as a career, in fact, each time I can remember having conversations with folks about theatre when I was a student, one
Courtesy photo
Ann Muse ’83 and Danny Grace ’77 took different paths to and from Hendrix, but both of them found that their passion for theatre eventually led them back to the Theatre Arts and Dance Department. For Grace, Hendrix was his only choice. He can’t remember ever planning to go anywhere else. The campus was smaller when he arrived in 1973, both in size and student body, but Grace says it wasn’t so different from Hendrix today. “Many of the things that go on at Hendrix now have always gone on at Hendrix,” Grace says. “I think all my friends who read this will smile at that.” Grace says one of the most valuable parts of his Hendrix experience were the friends he made. They quickly got him involved in campus life. His roommate Mark “Max” McCalman ’75 got him on the air at the new KHDX radio station and his friend Tommy Sanders ’76 introduced him to the theatre. At that time, Grace wanted to be an actor, inspired partly by Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver. His first role was as “the rain” in Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. After weeks of rehearsals, Grace crouched in the rigging spinning a cylinder full of peas to make the sound of rain, his part was cut. “Dr. Henenberg knew exactly what to do, and why she had to do it, and she did it,” says Grace. “It was one of those real teaching moments she did so well.” When Frank Roland ’68 joined the faculty in 1975 as a designer, Grace felt increasingly drawn toward design work. Grace applied for graduate programs in the field. He chose Case Western Reserve and worked with Henry J. Kurth, an historic figure in design. After that he worked at other schools, but he was always ready to come back to Arkansas. One day he opened the New York Times and read an ad under jobs in education: “Hendrix
College seeks designer, technician, humanist, theatre arts department.” “I almost fell out of my chair,” Grace says. To him, this was “the job.” In 1985, Grace joined the Hendrix faculty. Ann Muse graduated a couple of years before Grace joined the faculty. Hendrix had not been her first and only choice. She started at a state university, but found it dissatisfying. Her friend Ramona Pipkin Crippen ’82 was attending Hendrix, and was also interested in transferring at the time. They settled on the University of Texas in Austin. Then Ramona told Muse that her Hendrix advisor, Dr. Jon Arms, wanted to meet her. “She had told him that we wanted to move to Austin,” Muse says. “Clearly he did not
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Courtesy photo
Theatre professors Ann Muse and Danny Grace accompanied Hendrix students to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, where students performed Burn Out Macbeth: A Southern Gothic Tale. Pictured, left to right, are Ann Muse ’73, Sarah Johnson ’09, Junia Massey ’09, Derek Easttom ’10, Lizzie Dunnet ’09, Justin Warren ’09, Brett Carr ’10, Constance Campbell, Michael Goodbar ’09 and Danny Grace ’77 statement is made, ‘If you can do anything else and be happy, do it,’” Muse says. “As a young person, I thought it meant that you could not make enough money doing theatre and, of course, I didn’t care. Now, I realize it is intended to warn you because, unless theatre is your passion, you cannot survive.” Eventually Muse realized that she couldn’t be happy doing anything else, so she went back to graduate school and studied acting and directing. When Dr. Rosemary Henenberg retired, Muse applied for her position. She joined the faculty in 2001. Muse says working with Grace is “a trip,” and that they complement each other well. “It is important to both of us that the department and the program maintain certain elements that are traditional,” Muse says. “For example, we have potluck dinners before the cue tech rehearsal. Well, that is just not how most folks do things, but for me, and I think for Danny too, it is important. ... We have a rigorous program, but we like to leave room for students who just want to come play in Cabe with us.”
Left: The Hendrix Players presented L’Etranger Mysterieux (The Mysterious Stranger), written and directed by Ann Muse ’83, this fall in Cabe Theatre. Pictured, left to right, are Katie Shultz ’15, Cameron Mosely ’15, Vvdaul Holloway ’15, Cathryn McClellan ’15, Michelle Stockwell ’16 and Blake Cooper ’16.
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Grace agrees that theatre at Hendrix takes a special approach. “We have a real manner of doing our work here, of doing shows and working with students,” he says. “And I really appreciate how all of the faculty that have come through, when I was a student and since I became faculty, just have this incredible respect for how they approach working with students, with young people and young minds.” “Until you’ve worked somewhere else, under different circumstances, you can’t imagine the difference of what you can do, not only with your classroom but also the work you get to do with students on the stage,” he adds. Muse and Grace also feel similarly about returning to their alma mater as professors. “To think that you might be good enough to come back from whence you came is kind of gratifying,” Grace says. Muse says, “Teaching at Hendrix, I think, is a secret desire of most students. I know it was one of mine.” “Last fall, we invited some children from Ida Burns Elementary to a production. When a group of the children walked in the door to Cabe Theatre one little girl said, ‘It’s a palace!’ Well that is how I felt when I walked in Cabe as a student,” Muse adds. “I feel that at least once a week now. I love Cabe and what it means to me as an artist.” “It is inspiring for me,” she says. “If I can be a part of a person’s life by opening Cabe to her or to him in a classroom or a play then I am happy.” Rachel Thomas ’14 is an English Studies major from Fayetteville, Ark.
Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 27
Picture Perfect
artist enjoys village living and bringing children’s books to life
The Big Picture
By Rob O’Connor ’95 Managing Editor
28 Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012
Despite her innate artistic ability, the picture of her future vocation wasn’t always so clear for Siegel. A Magnolia native, she followed her sister Debbie Dorman Bernard ’70 to Hendrix, where she majored in psychology. “I took a lot of art, but I was really terrible,” she said. “I’m not a fine artist.” “I didn’t have any particular direction ... I loved psychology and I was good at it, but I think I chose it more out of a sense of duty,” said Siegel, whose siblings were going into careers in medicine. Among her memorable professors are the late Frank Roland ’68, from whom she took photography, art professor Don Marr, history professor Dr. Garrett McAinsh, and Dr. Albert Raymond, whose human physiology course
Photo by Mike Kemp
When Melanie Dorman Siegel ’85 showed an interior designer for her previous home sketches from an art class she was taking, the designer told her the drawings looked like they belonged in a children’s book. It was fortuitous feedback for Siegel. “I was always drawing something, and it had to tell a story and had to be funny,” she said. “It was something I’ve always done. I just didn’t realize it.” “I think that would be a great thing for me to be,” she thought when the designer made that comment. Following her husband’s suggestion, she joined the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators to learn the idiosyncrasies of the publishing industry. She put together a portfolio of her work and showed it to Marla Frazee, a professional illustrator, at a conference in Los Angeles, Calif. Frazee looked at her work and said, “You’re ready to do this!” “I was fortunate that I can draw almost anything,” she said. “It was just a matter of gaining confidence.” Fortified by Frazee’s encouragement, Siegel was soon mailing postcards of her work to art directors and, in 2001, landed her first illustration job — a 48-page early reading book featuring funny little poems by Joan Horton. The project was due in six weeks. “I was too naïve to know you can’t do that. It’s too little time,” she said. “But it turned out OK.” Since her first illustration experience, Siegel’s work has appeared in publications in South America, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, as well as Highlights magazine. “I just couldn’t stop,” she said. “I’ve tried several times to quit but I just can’t. It’s what I do.”
remains Siegel’s favorite class at Hendrix. Uncertain about her future, she left Hendrix for a year and enrolled at the University of Central Arkansas, where she tried courses in accounting, business, computer science, and thought about nursing. Meanwhile, she worked as a graphic designer for Frank Robins ’49 at the Log Cabin Democrat newspaper. “Frank was tough, but I learned a lot,” said Siegel. “But I decided I can’t do this forever.” So she came back to Hendrix and met with Dean Raymond, who told her that all she needed to finish was one psychology class and three electives. She opted for physiological psychology with Dr. Chris Spatz ’62 and, among her electives, three independent studies with Don Marr. One of Marr’s assignments to her had been to find an artist and copy his or her style. “It didn’t occur to me until years later that I picked Mercer Mayer, an illustrator,” she said. Marr intended for her to choose a fine artist, not an illustrator, she said. “It was very sweet of him to just let me be who I was,” she said. After graduation, she married and started a family with Dr. Bill Siegel, an administrator
From her home office in The Village at Hendrix, Melanie Siegel uses an electronic drawing pad, monitor, and Corel Painter for her children’s book illustrations.
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at Fort Roots, the veteran’s hospital in North Little Rock and former professor at Hendrix. As a mother, Siegel was subconsciously studying children’s literature as she read to her children and future Hendrix students Rachel Siegel ’10 and Sam Siegel ’14. Rachel, a sociology and anthropology major, currently serves as a Presidential Fellow for the Crain Maling Center of Jewish Culture. Sam is now a psychology major at Hendrix. “I’ve had a long and strong interest in children’s illustration,” said Siegel, who enjoyed sharing the work of the late Maurice Sendak and the Poppleton series, written by Cynthia Rylant and illustrated by Mark Teague, with her children.
After 20 years of living in west Conway, the Siegels became empty nesters and decided it was time for a change of scenery. In January 2011, after eating dinner at ZAZA Fine Pizza and Salad in The Village at Hendrix, they walked through the residential area under construction and stood on the porch steps of the sales office. “We said, ‘Wow! It’s so quiet’ and we just looked at each other and knew,” she said. “I work at home by myself, which is very isolating,” she said. “The thought of living closer to people began to be really appealing.” The Siegels moved into their home in The Village in November 2011. “Now we have a nice social circle of neighbors, and I see people every day,” she said. “It’s just the right medicine ... a perfect marriage.” From her home office, Siegel uses an electronic drawing pad or monitor (Wacom Cintiq and Wacom Intuos 5) and Corel Painter for her illustrations. Though she did advertising layouts manually when she worked as a graphic designer, she has always used digital technology for her illustrations. She is currently working on a children’s book project for Red Robin Books in the U.K. called The Best Present Ever and English-asa-second-language books for elementary students at Compass Publishing in South Korea. She hopes to write and illustrate a book on her own in the future. She’s also exploring the possibility of using new publishing technology to release e-books of her work. “During my career, at first, the illustrators and writers were out in the field, and the publishers had the key to the gate,” she said. New companies like Book Tango will now take your book and format it for every kind of media, she said. “It’s changed radically, in a good way. Now everybody has a key.”
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Photo by Mike Kemp
An Artist in the Village
Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 29
By Rachel Thomas ’14 Ashlie Atkinson ’01 still remembers the day she changed her major from English to theater. “I remember I had gotten an A, my first A on a paper in Alice Hines’ class ... and I remember she walked past me and dropped the paper on my desk and said ‘we’ll make an English major out of you yet, Miss Atkinson,’ and I thought, I just changed my major,” Atkinson said. “I had done it right before I went to her class. And then I thought, ‘Oh, I will miss you Dr. Hines, but I’ve got somewhere to be’.” Now a stage and screen actor who played major roles in two films that premiered this year at the Sundance Film Festival, when Atkinson started at Hendrix she was an English major with serious doubts about a career in acting. A Little Rock native, Atkinson knew from a young age that she wanted to act. After graduating high school, she briefly went away to
playwriting partner. She and Dancer have won and placed in the alumni category of the Hendrix Playwright Theatre playwriting competition several times. Atkinson was struck by the difference between her coursework and that of her friends. She remembered watching her friend practice lines and build sets and thinking “This doesn’t even look like work to me, this looks like fun.” However, Atkinson couldn’t reconcile changing her major until working with Dr. Rosemary Henenberg and Professor Danny Grace ’77 convinced her. “I really have to give credit to Dr. Henenberg and to Danny Grace because they instilled in me, in that little chunk of time that they had me in those classes or doing a play, they instilled in me that it wasn’t about the ego,” Atkinson said. “That a life in the pursuit of art is a life well spent, and that there’s something about art and the performing arts that
Compliance, in contrast, felt like being in a gang of thieves. The film was shot in a real Kentucky Fried Chicken. For two weeks, filming began after the restaurant closed, and ended when the employees came in the following morning. Compliance, which is based on true events, contains scenes of sexual assault. Atkinson described the first screening at Sundance as “intense,” with people walking out or shouting at the screen. During the postscreening Q&A, a man shouted at Dreama Walker, the actor playing the lead character, “your body’s pretty appealing.” That was the last straw for Atkinson. “I’m mad. And one of the things that I think Hendrix and my mother taught me is to be very articulate when angry. Instead of retreating, I tend to want to make my point very clearly,” Atkinson said. “So I get mad and I take the microphone and I say something along the lines of ‘are you saying that because Dreama’s
On Stage in New York, At Home in Arkansas college in New York but decided to come home and enroll at Hendrix, where she had attended Arkansas Governor’s School for drama. “I’m so glad I didn’t go anywhere else. The friends I made at Hendrix are my friends still, to this day. And I don’t mean like three or four of them. I have probably still 40 friends from Hendrix that I talk to ... Isn’t that crazy? The school was only like 1,200 people, how do I still have 40 friends that I talk to? We graduated 11 years ago. That’s insane. It’s wonderful.” Atkinson said. However, in New York, Atkinson had gotten a “reductive view” of acting, that it “fed the ego.” “I felt like it wasn’t the right thing to do, and somehow I lost the thread of what I wanted to do as an actor,” Atkinson said. So she majored in English, but she quickly found herself drawn back to theater. She made many of her closest friends in the theater department, including Lesley Dancer ’01, who is now Atkinson’s
30 Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012
can nurture and that can soothe and can heal and can teach. And that there is nothing to be ashamed of to be enthralled by the creation of art. And that was huge. That changed everything.” Now an established actor, Atkinson recently attended the premieres of Compliance and My Best Day at Sundance. Atkinson said she had fallen in love with a phrase she learned at Sundance, “the heart project,” and that both her films were real heart projects. “I feel like both film makers, Erin Greenwell and Craig Zobel, who directed My Best Day and Compliance respectively, came to the project with so much passion and there was a distinct feeling that everybody on both of those sets was playing at the top of their game,” Atkinson said. She said filming My Best Day felt like “adult summer camp,” since they filmed in rural Pennsylvania, and all the actors stayed together for the 18 days of filming.
pretty she can’t portray the victim of sexual abuse?’ ... that cleared the air a little bit, in a weird way.” After that, people stopped Atkinson in the street to say they had agreed with her or that they weren’t sure and wanted to discuss the film further. Atkinson, who had seen the culture of Park City as unsettlingly focused on prettiness when she first arrived at Sundance, found that this experience helped her realize what her role was. It was the role she wanted. “I realized that what I was there to do was talk about my film, to have opinions about it, to try to express them the best way that I could and create a conversation, and to engage with people, not to get my picture taken,” she said. “And it sort of solidified for me why I wanted and needed to be there, and made me feel far more confident in my role in this particular little corner of the industry.”
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Photo by Mike Kemp
hendrix alumna knows who she is and what she wants
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Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 31
32 Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012
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Success Story students collaborate to create award-winning literary and arts journal
Photo by Joshua Daugherty
By Lauren Daly ’11 The Aonian literary and visual arts magazine is one of many creative outlets for Hendrix students. Student editors and staff have created an award-winning publication, including a first-place finish in the 2012 Southern Literary Festival Student Writing Contest. The magazine won second place in 2011, and students are hopeful for a first-place prize again this year. Growing interest in the magazine has increased staff applications and submissions, more recently in the areas of photography and visual arts after the addition of woodcutting and printing courses taught by art professor Melissa Gill in 2009. The audience for the magazine’s annual release and reading has also increased to a point where staff members are looking to move the reception to a larger space. The magazine’s biggest success has been the campus’s increased attention for the arts on campus, according to Hanna Al-Jibouri ’12, last year’s editor-in-chief. The Aonian’s success is due, in part, to the support from the English and art faculty and the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation “whose support of the creative writing program has allowed so many of our students to meet with writers, attend workshops, and create a lively and engaged community of writers,” said creative writing professor Dr. Tyrone Jaeger, the magazine’s faculty advisor. “Programs such as Word Garden, the student reading series, and the on-campus support work in tandem to enhance and improve the creation of our literary magazine,” he added.
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The student-run organization assembles each year to create their original publication, which is funded by the Student Senate. The staff mulls over the submissions in the categories of prose, literary hybrids, photography, visual arts, and poetry to choose their semifinalists. Once they have been chosen, the submissions are sent to professional judges who choose first-, second-, and third-place winners. The staff compiles the magazine, designing a bound book. On Honors Day, they award prizes, funded by Hendrix-Murphy, to the winners, reveal their creation, and distribute the magazine to the Hendrix community at a reading reception. The first reading reception occurred in 1996 when editor-in-chief Kristen Hopkins Albertson ’96 decided to have a party to reveal the publication. Since then, the reception has been funded by the HendrixMurphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language. Also that year, the staff voted to change the magazine’s name from the Potpourri, its title since the 1960s, to the Aonian. Being a peer-run publication, the magazine is successful because the editor-in-chief and faculty sponsor help to guide and support the staff. In 2009, when Joseph Hayden ’10 was editor, the college’s creative writing program was growing rapidly, and student submissions were changing. Because of this, Haydn and faculty sponsor Tyrone Jaeger, amended the submission categories. They combined the former categories of fiction and non-fiction into the current prose category and added the literary hybrids category. In 2010, editor-in-chief Colleen Mayo ’11 began offering literary and art workshops to
prepare the Aonian staff for viewing, reading, and critiquing student submissions. The workshops help the staff grow more cohesive and enable them to work more as a team. This year’s workshops will be led by professors Dr. Tyrone Jaeger (fiction), Hope Coulter (poetry), Dr. Marianne Tettlebaum (aesthetics), Melissa Gill (visual arts), and Maxine Payne (photography). To increase the magazine’s credibility and strength, the editors have sought more seasoned and experienced staff members as well as a balance between visual arts and creative writing members. These changes have not only allowed for submissions to receive more helpful and educated critiques but also changed the publication’s feel from strictly narrative to a balance between the different artistic domains. While experienced writers and artists are critical to the creation of a successful magazine, the more practiced students submit a vast majority of the publication’s pieces. Because of this monopoly, Haydn and his staff limited the number of pieces a person may submit to five per category. This year’s editor-in-chief Julia Lee McGill ’14 and associate editor Alli Dillard ’14 are busy working to create this year’s Aonian, which will be released on Honors Day, April 25, 2013, at the Aonian/ Murphy Programs Literary Contest Winners’ Reception and Reading in the Murphy Seminar Room. Lauren Daly ’11 is a Presidential Fellow for the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language.
Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 33
Peri Steere will lead the new women’s lacrosse team at Hendrix College. The non-scholarship NCAA Division III team will officially begin intercollegiate competition in spring 2014. Steere served as first assistant women’s lacrosse coach at her alma mater, Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., where she received academic and intercollegiate athletic honors as a Division III student-athlete. She was head women’s lacrosse coach at Mount Ida College in Newton, Mass., leading the program from its inception as a club sport to three consecutive berths in the NCAA Division III Great Northeast Athletic Conference post-season
tournament. She also served as senior woman administrator, weight room supervisor, contest management supervisor and assistant to the athletic director at Mount Ida. “Coach Steere brings successful coaching experience and a thorough knowledge of Division III culture and values,” said Amy Weaver, director of athletics at Hendrix. “When you add a new sport, it is critical that the head coach be someone who not only wants to win but to build a successful program over time. Coach Steere is the best possible professional to successfully launch a new program at Hendrix.”
Photo by Joshua Daugherty
New coach puts wisdom to work for new Hendrix sport
Flying Coach
Neil Groat ’05 was named head baseball coach this semester. A former Hendrix infielder and longtime assistant coach, Groat spent the past seven years on the Hendrix staff working with the infielders and has been the recruiting coordinator since 2008. In his first year in charge of recruiting, Groat orchestrated the addition of a 14-member class from six states that was a major contributing factor in the Warriors’ 2009 Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference Championship. Under Groat’s direction, all four of Hendrix’s starting infielders were named All-SCAC in both 2009 and 2010 and the Warriors’ team defense improved from a .927 fielding percentage to a program-best .965 in 2012.
In addition to his baseball responsibilities, Groat served as an assistant director of admission at Hendrix. A four-year starter for the Warriors, Groat was a three-time member of the SCAC Academic Honor Roll. A history major and Spanish minor at Hendrix, he is working toward a master of liberal studies degree with an emphasis in health and human performance at Fort Hays State University in Kansas. The Warriors will return 19 players from last year’s team that tied the school record with 22 wins. Groat will make his debut as head coach on Feb. 8, 2013 against Willamette University in McKinney, Texas.
Photo by Cody Usher
Alumnus named head coach for Warrior baseball
All-American
Junior sees national championships a second time Elizabeth Krug ’14 earned All-American honors for the second consecutive year in the heptathlon at the NCAA Division III Outdoor Track & Field Championships this summer in Claremont, Calif. The Heber Springs, Ark., native finished in sixth place overall with a school record 4,726 points. She took seventh place as a freshman in 2011. On the first day of competition, Krug broke her own school record in the 100-meter hurdles and the 200-meter dash. She had the
34 Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012
fourth-best long jump of the competition, leaping 5.36 meters (17 ft.-7 in.) and closed out nationals with the third-best 800-meter time of 2 minutes 24.98 seconds. Krug’s success came even as she battled a hip injury before the competition, said head coach Patrick MacDonald. “We are pleased with the effort ... I’m really looking forward to next year for her,” McDonald said. “I know she has all the pieces to win the whole thing. It’s just a matter of time in my eyes.”
Photo by Patrick MacDonald
athletics
Power Steere-ing
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athletics Photo courtesy of Fennell Purifoy Architects
Breaking Ground
College to construct new digs for football and more A new stadium and a press box will be built at the existing field hockey and lacrosse field behind the Wellness and Athletics Center. The stadium will seat approximately 1,500 and host men’s football, lacrosse, men’s and women’s track and field, intramurals and ultimate Frisbee. The project will be complete by September 2013. A new field house, built at the north end of the football field, will be ready shortly thereafter. The field house will serve more than 300 student athletes. All of the outdoor sports will use the facility’s weight
room and several sports will use the locker rooms. A new synthetic turf field will be built for women’s field hockey and women’s lacrosse. The field, adjacent to the baseball and softball fields, will also be utilized by the baseball and softball teams when they are unable to practice on their fields due to inclement weather. This field will also provide another option for intramural sports and ultimate Frisbee.
High Scorers
Travel Team
Still Kickin’
136 student-athletes were named to the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC) Commissioner’s Honor Roll during 2011-12.
Women’s basketball players Katie Coughran ’14, a forward from Allen, Texas, and Anna Roane ’12, a guard from Albuquerque, N.M., represented the United States this summer on the American International Sports Teams in Prague, Czech Republic. They played against local teams from Prague and had the opportunity to travel to Munich, Rothenburg, Freiburg and Heidelberg in Germany and Saulzburg in Austria. “It was an interesting and fun experience to play with girls from a completely different culture,” said Coughran. “Even though there were a few differences in the (international) rules, it was nice to be doing something so familiar while we were overseas. The teams were tall and physical. It was a great practice for this coming season.”
Men’s soccer head coach Doug Mello picked up his 700th career victory as the Warriors (3-0-1) topped LeTourneau University (0-4) 4-0 at home this fall. Mello, in his fifth season at Hendrix and 36th as a head collegiate soccer coach, has won 418 games while coaching men’s teams (32 at Hendrix) and another 282 while coaching women in his storied career. He has also coached 1,126 collegiate contests, more than anyone else in history.
Summer Leagues Jennifer Koller ’14, a defender from Woodbury, Conn., and Betsy Kelly ’15, a goalkeeper from Houston, Texas, represented the United States this summer on the USA Athletes International field hockey team in Barbados. They spent eight days with 15 other student-athletes from NCAA Division II and III programs and played four games against Barbados’ U21 National Team, going 1-2-1 against the home squad at the Barbados Olympic Center on a turf field. Besides competing, Koller and Kelly experienced West Indian culture first hand. They toured the island and spent time snorkeling, scuba diving and learning about Bajan customs.
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Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 35
alumni voices: dr. rock jones ’80
The selection of a college in the mid 1970s was rather simple compared to the process followed by high school students today. I recall setting my sights on United Methodistrelated liberal arts colleges within a day’s drive of my parents’ home. I had vague ideas about academic interests, but those initial ideas all washed out in the first year of college. I was not particularly interested in Greek life. I wanted to continue my choral experience, though I had neither the interest nor the aptitude for pursuing a major in music. The most natural choice was Hendrix, which I resisted because it was the alma mater of my parents. Then I visited the campus, and the rest is history. Among the things that attracted me to Hendrix was knowledge of the Hendrix College Choir, its reputation for quality music, its openness to music majors and non-majors, the tradition of the Candlelight Carol Service, and the prospect of traveling to Europe. My introduction to the choir came through Roger Beal ’77, a family friend who hosted me on my overnight visit as a high school senior. I recall arriving for freshman Orientation and scheduling an audition. It was my first introduction to Bob McGill. Like everyone else who auditioned, I sang a verse of a wellknown patriotic hymn and then was presented a piece for sight reading. Mr. McGill was kind. I was terrified. I was ecstatic when my name was posted for membership in the Hendrix College Choir. Over the next four years the Choir became one of the defining features of my Hendrix experience. Fellow members of the choir became some of my closest friends. All of us from those days have our favorite McGill stories, ranging from the first time we were asked to join a quartet to sing a verse of Once in Royal David’s City early in the semester, to his passion for the music and the choir, to the
36 Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012
Image courtesy of 1979 Troubadour
Choir provides soundtrack for the Hendrix experience
Members of the 1979 choir tantrums that occasionally accompanied his drive to bring out the best in the choir, to the demand for absolute precision in rehearsals of processions. Memories of T-3, Greene Chapel, and Reves Recital Hall remain crystal clear in my mind. From time to time I reflect on the impact of participation in the choir. Here we were challenged to be better than we thought we could be. We were expected to maintain discipline and to execute with the highest technical skill while still allowing the music to be fresh and new each time. We worked hard. Through the experience of disciplined effort and creative
expression, we produced beautiful music, and we learned to care deeply for one another. I like to think of music as the language of the soul. As with the other arts, music invites us to embrace the full range of the human intellect, human emotion and human experience. And in the process, we discover much about ourselves and about one another, and we move a step closer to fulfillment of the Hendrix motto, “unto the whole person.” Can we ask for anything more? Dr. Rock Jones ’80 is president of Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio.
www.hendrix.edu
At Home at Hendrix Continued from page 9 a dance ensemble together, with instructors and, eventually, dance classes on the books. With the growing demands of technology he has since “passed the baton” of the program to others. “Now I’m just a fan,” he says. The theatre program at Hendrix is now the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, with a full-time dance professor, dance ensemble, scholarships for dance students, and a minor in dance. Both the Engeler-Youngs have stayed involved with theatre, the subject they both have degrees in. They’ve taught classes when theatre professors went on sabbatical, and Bobby has taught theatre through Arkansas Governor’s School, which is held on the Hendrix campus in the summer. Aside from being involved with artistic creativity on campus, Sarah says they try to make their family life creative too. “We spend lots of time just making weird things in the kitchen and collage kinds of things,” Sarah says. “We watch TV really creatively ... it can take us like an hour to watch a thirty-minute long thing because everyone’s like, pause! pause! And then you have to stop and talk about something, or rewind and laugh at it five times, or have what [our 13-year-old daughter] Zelda calls an ‘interesting conversation’.” Although they no longer wear matching fashion, the Engeler-Youngs are still the Engeler-Youngs. “The Engeler-Youngs are still here,” says Sarah. “And we’re still strange.”
A Marvel in Motion Continued from page 19 never sits down. The truth, though, is that she comes across as completely laid-back, softspoken – even, if you can believe it, relaxed. She regularly hosts dinners for friends, likes to read in the early morning hours, enjoys making breakfast for her kids and walking to school with them. So how can someone so busy stay so, well, sane? It’s anyone’s guess, but I have a suspicion it’s the several miles she runs most mornings before dawn. Oh, did I not mention that Mary Ruth likes to run marathons? Sorry, it’s difficult to write a proper profile of a person you can’t keep up with. And at any rate I’m out of space and need
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to lie down. But if you ever bump into Mary Ruth hurrying from one project to another, consider calling out this line from the King in Hamlet – “We thank you for your well took labor”! – and then ask her about next year’s season. That’ll stop her in her tracks and get you a smile to boot. She’s always got time for Shakespeare. Trent Stewart ’92 is the author of five books, including The Mysterious Benedict Society series, which is popular with children of all ages.
Making Things that Matter Continued from page 25
More Monumental For several years, Horn’s wood sculptures were smaller in scale. After working with David Nash, an English sculptor who lives in Wales, she was inspired to make something “more monumental.” “Scale changes how sculpture is perceived,” she says. Horn discovered wood at the right time in the art world, as gallery exhibitions and private collectors were eager for original work using wood. “It was a perfect storm for me and my career,” says Horn. “It was totally unexpected ... I was just making things.” Not only is Horn an artist, she is a passionate advocate for the arts. Among her many activities, she serves on the collection committee for the Arkansas Arts Center. “The Arkansas Arts Center does a really good job of bringing good art to the state,” says Horn. “Their collection is impressive and educational, and the museum school does a very good job of developing artists and skills.” She is also active on the board of the Thea Foundation, supporting founder Paul Leopoulos’s mission to get arts back in schools and improve school performance by engaging young students in art. “People think that art is just something fun, a hobby,” she says. “I think it’s much more.” The Horns are also active supporters of the Penland School of Crafts, a craft school in western North Carolina that teaches traditional art forms, including blacksmithing, bookbinding, and pottery. They teach
workshops in wood sculpture and letterpress printing, among other things.
A New Medium More recently, Horn’s artistic attention has turned toward painting. “It’s nice to push yourself with something that you didn’t want to do,” she says. Among the painters Horn admires are Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Marcel DuChamp, whose painting “Nude Descending a Staircase” was a major influence for the Slipping Stone series. In her most recent series of multidimensional paintings on paper and wood panels, Horn incorporates wire and rust to develop lines and create shadows. While her work with wood was a slow progression through several series, Horn feels she progressed much faster with painting because she had already “developed an aesthetic.” “When I looked back, I was surprised at how much my painting relates to my sculpture,” she says. “That made me feel like I was on the right track.” As her interests evolve and are more painting related, she looks forward to new series and new challenges. “When you have an artist’s mentality, making things is what you do,” she says. “It’s the way you think ... I would be absolutely lost if I couldn’t make things.” For more information on Robyn Horn, visit www.robynhorn.com.
Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 37
Who Attends Hendrix Events?
You Do!
We appreciate all of your attendance at Hendrix Alumni and Parent events from June 2011 to the end of May 2012. We ran a few numbers to see who joined us and we were pleasantly surprised with the numbers. 2,276 alumni, parents, and friends attended at least one Hendrix event this year. Of the alumni who attended, here are a few statistics:
A1
26.53% of the alumni attending
Hendrix events this year are members of the Class of 2000 or more recent class years.
48.03% of the alumni attending
Hendrix events are members of the Classes of 1970 through 1999.
A2
A3
25.44% of the alumni attending
Hendrix events are members of the Class of 1969 or earlier.
17.88% of all participants attended
more than one event last year. 82.12% only attended one Hendrix event last year. We would love for this number to shift with more people attending more than one event. A4
Hendrix Alumni and Parent events occurred on campus, in Little Rock, North Little Rock, and Springdale, Ark.; San Francisco; Oxford, Miss.; Atlanta, Ga.; and Washington, D.C. Events are planned through May 2013 on campus and in Nashville, Tenn., Los Angeles, Little Rock, and more. We’ll keep you posted! Make sure we have your current address by becoming a member of the Hendrix Web Community. If you are a member, please check in to make sure all of your information is up-to-date.
A5
A6
B2
38 Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012
B3
B1
B4
B5
www.hendrix.edu
C1
C2
C3
Alumni Weekend 2012 April 2012, Hendrix College
A1 2012 Half-Century Club inductees A2 East Hall Reunion Barbeque A3 Margaret Brown Aktas ’87, Walter Pryor ’87, Monica Palko ’87, Marylou Martin, Rich Swafford ’92, Kimberly Miller ’92 A4 Billie Oholendt Dreher ’81, Bo Frazier ’81, Cindi Jernigan Maddox ’81, Richard Phelps ’82
C4
A5 Lori Peterson Garner ’92, Shelley White Russell ’92, Hallie Jarvis Leicht ’93 A6 Chassie Sasser Jones ’02, Holly Best Parker ’02, Corey Bacon ’02, Emily English ’02, Tanya Cobin Holmes ’02
Odyssey College Reception
May 19, 2012, Michelangelo’s, Conway, Ark. B1 Frances Hendricks, LeRoy Hendricks, Katherine Coulter Stanick ’37, David Hinson B2 Eric Binnie, W. Ellis Arnold ’79 B3 Jay Kell ’99, Emily Collins ’00, Kim Cook ’80
C5
D1
B4 Sloan Deer Powell, Jim Deer ’55, Ramona Pipkin Crippen ’82 B5 Marianne Smith Welch ’80, Ward Davis
Hendrix at Crystal Bridges June 3, 2012, Bentonville, Ark.
C1 Carole Herrick, Joey Williams ’08 C2 Robert L. Entzminger, Taylor Kidd ’11, Steve Barger ’87 C3 Flo Keplinger, Ken Keplinger C4 2012 Crystal Bridges Attendees C5 Al Gordon ’80, Debborah Eubanks Furry ’79
D2
D3
Alaskan Discovery Cruise June 13-20, 2012
D1 Blake McKinney, Joyce Dilbeck Wuetig ’59, Melissa Ripley, Katie McKinney, Marit Ripley D2 Maida McCormack, Pam Binning Pearce ’70 D3 Paula Crabtree Bookout ’62, Simon Bookout ’64, Hilda Hancock Malpica ’64, Larry Malpica ’64
D4
www.hendrix.edu
D5
The photos and names continue on page 42
Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 39
Photo by Michael Tarne ’14
Shirttails Competition
student perspective
Raney Hall residents perform at the 2012 Shirttails Competition. This year, Hardin guys and Couch girls took first place. Shirttails started in 1913 as a spontaneous celebration after a football victory. The tradition evolved but the attire remains: tennis shoes, shorts, and a white, long-sleeve shirt.
E1
F1
E2
E3
F2
F3
F4
F5
G1
H1
H2
I1
D4 Robert Dawson, Courtney Dawson Beland D5 2012 Hendrix College Alaskan Cruise Attendees
Hendrix at the Museum of Fine Arts July 26 2012, Houston, Texas
E1 Kela Kalmbach McDonald ’06, Heather Bailey, Daniel Levy ’08, Jackie Perryman Hart ’71 E2 Barbara Meagher, Morgan Shelburne ’12 E3 Rich McAvey, Val McAvey, Sarah McAvey, John McAvey ’16
Hendrix Night at the Travs
Aug. 2, 2012, Dickey-Stephens Park, Little Rock F1 Pittman Ware, Brooke Augusta Owen Ware ’01 F2 Drew Linder ’83, Patrick Linder ’12, Nancy Kenner Gann ’83, Paula Linder, Robert Burnett ’83 F3 Charles Tadlock ’61, Kathy Snell Tadlock ’62 F4 Ken Hunter ’62, Kendra Hunter Massa, Scott Massa, Renee Hunter, Sara Massa F5 Joe Howe ’70, Richard McKelvey ’64, Patrick Osam ’70
Hendrix Night on Capitol Hill Nov. 2, 2011, Washingon, D.C.
G1 2011 Night on Capitol Hill Attendees
Hendrix Night at the High Museum Nov. 9, 2011, Atlanta, Ga.
H1 Adam Ford ’02, Elizabeth Fite ’02 and Taylor Hafner Martin ’02 H2 2011 Hendrix Night at the High Museum Attendees
Hendrix Night at San Francisco MOMA June 30, 2011, San Francisco, Calif.
I1 2011 Hendrix Night at San Francisco MOMA Attendees
42 Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012
www.hendrix.edu
connecting with classmates 1947
34 years of teaching elementary music.
Bill Edler of Toyonaka Shi, Japan, continues to provide counselor training and supervision for the Japanese Lifeline telephone counseling program. This spring, he completed a four-day peer counseling program for Osaka Jogakuin Junior College, where he is an emeritus professor.
1955
Dr. William “Bill” Scurlock was admitted to the Arkansas Medical Society’s 50 Year Club. He has practiced medicine for more than 50 years as a surgeon in El Dorado, Ark.
1961
Dr. Noel W. Lawson of Little Rock was inducted into the College of Medicine Hall of Fame during the Dean’s Honor Day ceremony at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences campus in April.
1963
Larry D. Powell of Conway retired from the ministry in 2005. In recent years he has published three books (in addition to five previously published works). Retrospect and Stones are collections of essays.
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Devreaux’s Appointment is a full-length novel.
1966
Robert Scarlett has moved from Ann Arbor, Mich., to Chicago, Ill.
1968
Rick Foti received the 2012 Community Leadership Award from the Leadership Fort Smith Alumni Association at their annual banquet in May. Foti is the executive director of the Community Services Clearinghouse and was a teacher and administrator in the Fort Smith schools for 33 years. Jim Gray of Washington, D.C., recently moved to a management position in housing policy at the Federal Housing Finance Agency. He recently completed the NeighborWorks® Achieving Excellence in Community Development program in collaboration with Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government as a Ford Foundation Fellow.
1970
John Wesley Hall of Little Rock, a criminal defense attorney, has been elected to serve a
two-year term as treasurer for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). He has previously served NACDL in several capacities, including as president. Dr. Larry Pearce received the 2012 Community Leadership Award from the Leadership Fort Smith Alumni Association at their annual banquet in May. Pearce, a member of the Hendrix College Board of Trustees, is a physician advisor for meaningful use for the Mercy Health System.
1972
Robert Armstrong retired from the United Methodist ministry on July 1, 2012. He and his wife Mary are living in Dubuque, Iowa, where he plans to participate in local theater and music groups and serve as a layperson in St. Luke’s UMC. A space in the basement is being carved out for his train layout, and he hopes to find time to write the great American novel.
1976
Katherine “Kathy” Goodwin of Little Rock retired in June 2012 from the Little Rock School District after
1977
Nancy B. Childress has transitioned from active ministry to hospitality. She has purchased and now runs Rabun Manor, a bed and breakfast and event center built in 1846 in the Blue Ridge Mountains in northern Georgia.
1978
Terry Diggs is in his 30th year of law practice in Hot Springs, Ark. He and his wife Tammie are enjoying their 11-yearold daughter, Hannah, and their five-year-old granddaughter Gracie.
1980
Katherine Milligan of Cabot was selected as Family Advocacy Officer for 19AW, 314 AW, Tenant Units and Department of Defense regional active duty and beneficiaries at the Little Rock Air Force Base.
1982 Army Reserve Col. Leanne P. Burch of Monticello was nominated by President Barack Obama for appointment to the rank of brigadier general and a
new assignment as chief judge of the U.S. Army Legal Services Agency in Arlington. Her appointment was confirmed by the Senate in June. In 2009, she completed a yearlong tour of duty in Kabul, Afghanistan. Jennifer Horne of Cottondale, Ala., released a new book, Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality, co-edited by Wendy Reed and published by the University of Alabama Press.
1988 Paul Carr’s blog Forbidden Hillcrest: Little Rock Crime, History and Weirdness was selected as first runner-up in the Best of Arkansas 2012 blog category by the Arkansas Times’ readers’ poll. The site was also a runner-up for best website.
1989
Paul Smith of Mason, Ohio, recently completed Lead with a Story: A Guide to Crafting Business Narratives the Captivate, Convince, and Inspire. Smith is the director of consumer & communications research at The Procter & Gamble Company and a highly rated leadership and
Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 43
alumnotes
Alumnotes
Share your news with other alumni by visiting www.hendrix.edu/alumni and using the online form. Information received after September 1 will appear in the spring edition.
alumnotes
1999
Delving into the psyche of a dark knight Dr. Travis Langley ’86 of Arkadelphia, a psychology professor at Henderson State University, recently published Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight. Langley is a self-described “superherologist,” a “psychologist using superheroes to teach psychology and the psychology to analyze superheroes.” Batman and Psychology is the culmination of years of work and study on Batman, comic books in general and the fans who love them. Langley chose Batman because he’s a superhero without superpowers.
communications trainer for P&G’s management training colleges.
1990
Jamie Griffith of Little Rock is the office manager/volunteer coordinator at the Methodist Family Health Foundation. Christy Creger Jackson of Little Rock was awarded the 2011-2012 Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award for the College of Science and Mathematics at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and received the 2010 Student Choice Award for Teaching. Meredith Ehrmann Taylor was recently promoted to vice president for corporate and U.S. ethics of Walmart Stores, Inc. In addition to her current responsibilities supporting Walmart U.S., Sam’s Club, and the home office, Taylor will also be responsible for leading the Global Ethics Office corporate function.
“The Batman character, more so than any other superhero, is defined by his psychology,” he explains. Langley is involved in Comic-Con and often takes students to the comics conferences as part of the Empirical Research on the Interpretation and Influence of the Comic Arts (ERIICA) project. He says it’s OK to combine serious study with fun. “The sooner you find a way to combine the things that you have passion for, the more years you will get to spend enjoying them,” he says.
State Rep. Darrin Williams was named one of AY Magazine’s Powerful Men of 2012. He is an attorney, an Arkansas State Representative and the elected SpeakerDesignate of the state legislature. He was also recently named one of the 12 State Legislators to Watch for 2012 by Governing Magazine.
1993
Marcia Beauchamp of Tulsa, Okla., received a Ph.D. in philosophy of religion from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Beauchamp is now the U.S. coordinator for the Tony Blair Faith Foundation’s Face to Faith Program. Dr. Dan W. Clanton Jr., assistant professor of religious studies at Doane College in Crete, Neb., has edited or coedited two books. He co-edited a classroom text titled Understanding Religion and Popular Culture and authored a chapter on the television
44 Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012
Dr. Russell S. Roberson finished his residency in anesthesiology at Duke University and started a critical care fellowship at the same institution, which he completed in June. In July, he started at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as an assistant professor in the department of anesthesiology where he will practice as an anesthesiologist and critical care physician.
2000 show NYPD Blue for the book. He also edited The End Will Be Graphic: Apocalyptic in Comic Books and Graphic Novels.
sciences and the center for vital longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas. She began her position with the start of the fall semester.
1994
1997
Laura Annulis Wallen was promoted to district supervisor for the Sedalia, Mo., office of the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Adult Learning and Rehabilitation.
1996
Russell DePriest of Fayetteville is the awards chair for the 2012 Hardened Electronics and Radiation Technology Conference. Daniel Ellis of Burnsville, Minn., is the assistant director of the Minnesota Opera. Dr. Kristen Kennedy of Dallas, Texas, has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position in the department of behavioral and brain
Dr. Craig McLain is the assistant director for science at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center at Duke University.
1998
Dr. Lindsey Claire Smith has been awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor in the English department at Oklahoma State University. Mark Wilson of Jacksonville is the 2011-2012 president of the Arkansas Bankers Association’s Emerging Leaders Council, which promotes the education and development of young bankers in the state.
Chris Olson of North Little Rock completed the Little Rock Marathon in March of 2012. Fred Baker of Conway has been promoted to director of admission at Hendrix College.
2001
Bryan Borland of Alexander, Ark., founded and edits Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, through his Sibling Rivalry Press, which was named one of the Ten Best New Magazines by Library Journal in its May issue. Two collections of poetry published by Borland’s Sibling Rivalry Press were named by the American Library Association as recommended LGBT reading on its annual Over the Rainbow list. Dr. W. Richard Counts of Conway, associate professor of chemistry at Arkansas State University, Beebe, has been named the division chair for math and science and granted tenure. He also oversaw
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Candice Osborne of Galveston, Texas, completed military service as a captain in the U.S. Army in December 2009 and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in rehabilitation science at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Brooke A. Owen Ware of Little Rock is director of facilities and rentals at Wildwood Park for the Arts in Little Rock.
2002
Nidia Logan of Marion, Ark., graduated from Leadership Memphis, a nine-month, cohort-style program that has formed community leaders in the Memphis area since 1979. Dr. Daniel Liu of Deerfield, Ill., has joined University Plastic Surgery, serving the greater metropolitan Chicago area. His specialties include microsurgical breast reconstruction, craniofacial trauma, super microsurgery, and cosmetic surgery.
2003
Jennifer Burkett of Arkadelphia has accepted a faculty position in Ouachita Baptist University’s English department, beginning fall 2012. She will be the director of the Writing Center and will teach composition and literature, while finishing her dissertation
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for the University of Southern Mississippi on masculinity in Southern literature. K. Chad Clay of Athens, Ga., received his doctorate in political science from Binghamton University, State University of New York, in August and accepted a position as an assistant professor in the international affairs department at the University of Georgia. Don Porter of Setauket, N.Y., received his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. Porter is now an assistant professor of computer science at Stony Brook University.
2005
Laura Conley of Little Rock started a two-year child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship in July at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. Lindsay Baldwin Porter of Stony Brook, N.Y., received her master’s degree in education from Endicott College
in Beverly, Mass. Porter is now an elementary school teacher at the Love of Learning Montessori School in Centerport, N.Y. Kathy Woerner is the director of community affairs for the city of Cedar Park, Texas.
2006
Eric Bell earned his master’s degree in business administration from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business with distinction as a community scholar for his commitment to volunteerism and community service. Brad Howard of Washington, D.C., is the communications director for the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of fiscally conservative Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Rev. Molly Housh Gordon is serving as the third settled minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbia, Mo.
Alisha Burrow of Austin, Texas, completed a three-year intensive tourism marketing and management program with the Texas Travel Industry Association. She will receive the Certified Tourism Executive (CTE) designation upon completion of her final project. Richard “Rip” Weaver of Boston, Mass., started a master’s degree program in public health at Northeastern University in Boston in fall 2012.
2007
Rosemary Hallmark of Little Rock is associate editor/online editor for At Home in Arkansas magazine.
2008
Tara Allison of Lubbock, Texas, was promoted to unit assistant director of serials and cataloging at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Preston Smith Library in June. She has been the catalog librarian for the library since May 2010.
Jessica L. Crenshaw of Cordova, Tenn., has selfpublished four books of poetry, LOVE, Oasis, On the Way and You Wish You Could Say. She is currently working on her fifth book. Franklin “Frank” Davis of Columbus, Ohio, graduated with a juris doctorate from the University of North Carolina in May and took the Ohio bar exam in July. Laura Hutchison of Baltimore, Md., has been accepted into the Ph.D. program for classical art and archaeology at John Hopkins University where she will study with classics and archaeology professors Alan Shapiro and Pier Luigi Tucci. Laura began her studies in August. Samuel Kauffman was selected by his peers to serve as class speaker for those receiving juris doctorates during the 2012 graduation ceremony at the University Of Illinois College Of Law.
Eric Francis’ writing career is flying high Eric Francis ’90 has been involved in journalism in Arkansas for 17 years, but this year marked the first time his byline was read at 35,000 feet. Francis has been an editor and writer at various newspapers in Arkansas and Kentucky and he spent 11 years at The North Little Rock Times. He recently wrote a bundle of articles on Arkansas for Sky Magazine, Delta Airline’s inflight publication. The bundle of articles featured stories about Arkansas business, education, attractions and life.
Even though Hendrix doesn’t offer a journalism major, Francis credits his Hendrix English degree with helping him succeed in his field. “[It] actually worked to my advantage because I learned creative and expressive writing at a time when many newspapers were transitioning from old-school ‘just the facts’ stories to what’s known as narrative journalism. In addition, we were taught to be open minded and to think critically,” Francis says.
Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 45
alumnotes
the university’s successful North Central Accreditation by the Higher Learning Commission.
alumnotes
2009
Christine Faubel has completed her master’s degree in teaching at the University of Arkansas and has accepted a full-time teaching position at Rogers High School and Rogers Heritage High School. Her sections will include Spanish I, Spanish II, and ESOL-Algebra.
2010
Janson Hightower of Georgetown, Texas, has earned his master’s degree in business administration from the University of
Central Arkansas and recently accepted a position as assistant men’s basketball coach at Southwestern University. Catherine Piazza McMains is studying community health at the School of Public Health at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth, Texas. Sheila Rupert of Conway graduated in December 2011 from California University of Pennsylvania with a master’s degree in exercise science and health promotion.
New Children Charlotte Josephine, first daughter, to Alan Newman ’89 and his wife Jessica, Jan. 9, 2012. James Alexander Barnett, first son, second child, to Rebecca Lemley McGraw ’91 and John McGraw ’92, March 7, 2012. Mirande Dawn, first daughter, second child, to Ruth Eyres ’92. Born June 12, 2006, adopted March 12, 2012. Toby, first son, to Amy Peterson ’94 and her husband Takashi Yoneta ’93, Jan. 24, 2012.
Marriages
Laura Conley ’05 to Mark Olsen, Oct. 15, 2011, Greene Chapel.
Dr. Jay Barth ’87 to Charles Buren Cliett Jr., March 18, 2012.
Stacy Montague ’05 to Jeramie Henderson, June 30, 2012.
Dr. Lindsey Claire Smith ’98 to Chris Newsome, Oct. 14, 2011.
Kela Kalmbach ’06 to Russell James McDonald, March 31, 2012.
Brooke Augusta Owen ’01 to Pittman Ware ’03, April 21, 2012.
Barrett Moore ’06 to Sara Forgy ’06, April 28, 2012.
Angela Potochnik ’02 to Andrew Garth, Aug. 20, 2011.
Amanda Mooneyham ’08 to Brett Ussery, Feb. 10, 2012.
Ryan Mason ’02 to Jennifer Kribs ’05, Aug. 6. 2011.
Matt Casey ’09 to Amanda Lloyd ’09, June, 2012.
Darcy Baskin ’05 to Clint Pumphrey, April 28, 2012.
Catherine Piazza ’10 to Conner Patrick McMains ’12, June 23, 2012.
Dempsey Mitchell, first son, to Brett Worlow ’97 and his wife Julie, March 23, 2012. Beatrice Chloe Rose, first daughter, to Angel Johnson Belsey ’98 and her husband Giles, January 2012. Leah Kemei, first daughter, second child, age 2, was welcomed into the family of David Warren ’98 and his wife Lola, December 2011. Adeline May, second daughter, to Chris Canavan ’99 and his wife Lisa, April 21, 2012. Grant Owen, third son, to Russell Roberson ’99 and wife Emily, March 2011. Lucy Anne-Claire, first daughter, to Adam Smith ’99 and Cassidy Patterson Smith ’00, Feb. 10, 2012. Ian Michael, first son, to Jessica Bartnik Saunders ’99 and her husband Charles, Feb. 21, 2012. Wesley Silas, first son, second child, to Julie Wood Hughes ’00 and her husband Randy Hughes ’01, July 2, 2012. Jameson Finn, first son, second child, to Dr. W. Richard Counts ’01 and Leigh LassiterCounts ’01, March 16, 2012. Zephaniah Wesley, second son, fourth child, to Nathaniel Langford ’01 and his wife Liz, Sept. 29, 2011. Alston Lloyd, first son, to Laura Jennings Earley ’02 and her husband Jason, Jan. 19, 2011.
Jones Fletcher Wedding: Nicholas Jones ’11 to Lauren Fletcher ’11. Pictured with Dominique Kelleybrew ’11 (center).
46 Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012
Justin Medrick Warren ’09 and Heather Hawkins Warren enjoy visiting Ghirardelli’s during their honeymoon in San Francisco.
www.hendrix.edu
Grace Elizabeth, second daughter, third child, to Daniel Foster ’03 and Eva Bell Foster ’03, Aug. 28, 2011. Penelope Suzanne, second daughter, third child, to Lindsey Prince Berardi ’04 and her husband Dan, May 22, 2012. Reed David, first son, to Julie Alford Routon ’04 and her husband Stephan Routon ’04, June 21, 2012. Ezer Caleb Gregory, first son, second child, to Paul Gregory ’06 and Lori Ann Gregory ’07, Sept. 5, 2012.
James Alexander Barnett, first son, second child, to Rebecca Lemley McGraw ’91 and John McGraw ’92, March 7, 2012.
Terin Calliope Smith, first daughter, first child to Michael Smith ’03 and Alice Holifield Smith ’04, June 18, 2012.
Clara Alexandra, first daughter, to Alyson Lieban Hatten ’02 and her husband Benjamin Hatten ’02, June 14, 2012.
Nicole Tyler, second daughter, to Chassie Sasser Jones ’02 and her husband Theodore, Nov. 5, 2010.
Melody Kate, first daughter, to Ashley Harden Hill ’02 and her husband Brian, Nov. 22, 2011.
Isaac Eugene, second son, to Mollie Scarbrough Teas ’02 and her husband Damon, Aug. 22, 2011.
Harvey Park, first son, to Sarah Kopp Kopper ’07 and her husband Neil Kopper ’08, June 24, 2012. Caroline Michelle, first daughter, to Amy Elder Laney ’08 and her husband Phillip, August 22, 2012.
Dr. Albert M. Raymond Sept. 27, 1921 – May 19, 2012 Beloved biology professor and administrator Dr. Albert M. Raymond passed away on May 19, 2012. A Hendrix professor for 36 years, Raymond was the Virginia A. Pittman Professor of Biology and Associate Academic Dean of the College. Raymond attended the University of Arkansas, Vanderbilt University and the University of Michigan. His specialization was neuroanatomy. He served three years in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War II and was a member of the Western Star Lodge No. 2 of the Free and Accepted Masons, the Scottish Rite of Freemasons, and the Conway Kiwanis Club. “He was The (with a capital T) initial premedical advisor, and he was the one most responsible for starting the development of Hendrix’s reputation as a premier college preparation site for entering the University of Arkansas Medical School,” said retired
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Hendrix biologist Dr. Bruce Haggard, a 40-year colleague of Raymond’s. Haggard spoke at the memorial service for Raymond at First United Methodist Church in Conway, where the Raymonds were members. “When I arrived in 1972, there were a group of academic giants, leaders of all things Hendrix,” said Haggard, recalling a group that included Albert, Bob Shideler, John Stuckey, Richard Yates, Joe Robins, George Thompson, Bob Meriwether ’49, Art Johnson, and Francis Christie, among others. “That group of giants led Hendrix through several significant transformations as an institution. But they certainly had differences of opinion. It was Albert that held all of them together, building a spirit of community that allowed progress to be made.” Haggard remembers Raymond’s “infectious” enthusiasm teaching comparative anatomy.
“He would stand next to an authentic human skeleton, beam, switch to his special lecture voice that was never used outside of the classroom, and explain in detail how to tell the age, disease status and the gender of the individual, all from the shape of the skull,” Haggard said. “His enthusiasm enticed many students into studies that they never dreamed they would enjoy. His patience in explaining complex anatomy, and his encouragement through rigorous exams, helped them gain confidence in their ability to establish successful careers as physicians ... There is no question that Albert’s enthusiasm and reputation as a teacher was on a par with that of the very best that there has ever been at Hendrix.” He is survived by his wife of 66 years, retired Hendrix professor Eloise Weir Raymond, and their two daughters and two grandchildren.
Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012 47
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Weston Richard Scotten, second son, to Shelly Peterson Scotten ’02 and her husband Doug, Aug. 13, 2012.
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Former Hendrix College President Dr. Joe B. Hatcher July 28, 1936 – June 1, 2012
Former Hendrix College President Dr. Joe B. Hatcher passed away on June 1, 2012. Hatcher served as President of Hendrix from 1981 to 1991. “Joe’s focus was indeed on the student experience,” said W. Ellis Arnold III ’79, executive vice president, dean of advancement, and general counsel, who worked with President Hatcher. Arnold was invited by the Hatcher family to speak at the memorial service in Greene Chapel. Hendrix made many great strides during Hatcher’s tenure, including the renovation of Greene Chapel, Martin, Galloway, Couch and Raney Halls, and Staples Auditorium, Arnold said. Following the 1982 fire that destroyed the College’s administration building, Hatcher
led the effort to build Fausett Hall. He led Hendrix through a successful campaign of nearly $17 million, which concluded in 1989, and helped launch the campaign to build and endow the college’s current library. During Hatcher’s tenure, Hendrix transitioned from the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics to the non-scholarship NCAA Division III. In 1987, the Carnegie Foundation reclassified Hendrix as a Liberal Arts 1 institution, one of the most important events during Hatcher’s presidency, Arnold said. “This recognition was crucial to the college being known as a national leader in liberal arts and sciences education and opened the eyes of editors of Money magazine, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Peterson’s Guide and others
to provide national acclaim to Hendrix,” he said. After leaving Hendrix in 1991, Hatcher was vice chairman of First Commercial Bank and a consultant for colleges and for placement companies finding college executives. He served as interim headmaster on two different occasions at Pulaski Academy. Hatcher was very involved in the community serving on numerous boards and charities, including CARTI, The Arthritis Foundation the Conway Chamber of Commerce, the First Commercial Bank Board, the UCA Foundation Board, and the Conway Hospice Committee. He is survived by his wife of 55 years, Irma Gail Hatcher, four children, and six grandchildren.
William Lamar Bennett ’47 Lloyd Reid George ’47 Elaine Wilkins Maynard ’47 Henry Lewie Fason ’48 Dr. Robert Bowen Moore Jr. ’48 Elizabeth “Libby” Breitenbur Dale ’49 Harry Newton Quinn ’49 Walter Rossington ’49 Nedra Brown Spiers ’49 James Murray Tennyson ’50 Margaret Jean Ellis Edwards ’51 Hallie Jo Hart ’51 Rev. David Hartman Dickens ’52 Daniel Webster Hickman ’52 Kathryn Louise Lambert Angelo ’53 Marion Sorrells Robertson ’53 Shirley Simpson Burleson ’54 Dr. Bob Shields Edwards Sr. ’54 Bettye Sue Taylor Dexter ’55 William Kernan Pryor ’56 Marcus Wright Harton Jr. ’57 Nancy Elizabeth Westbrook Miller ’58 Ann Patton Dawson ’59, former trustee (1990‑2002) Michael “Mike” Hartje ’59 Robert G. Peterson ’59, Col. USAFR, Ret. Ronald Daniel Bagley ’60 Mary Mathis El-Beheri ’60 Dale Allen Myers ’62 Dr. Harold Truman Baber Jr. ’64 Rev. Chester Howard Henry ’65 Floyd R. Clark ’66
B. Frank Jewell ’67 Jack Raymond Rhodes Jr. ’67 William Kraig Kendall ’69 Patricia Barry Powell ’69 Rhonda Kay Tallant ’70 Denzil “Denny” Gainer ’72 Joseph B. Pierce ’72 Margaret Ann “Peggy” Stover ’74 Dr. Milton Ralph Barrett II ’74 Fr. Daniel Bruce Eakin ’75 Stephen M. Tate ’75 James “Jim” W. Moore ’77 Louis Morgan Cox Sr. ’78 Karl Fohn ’81 Ronald Wilson ’81 Lisa Ann Winter ’81 Patricia Keith Hedges ’82 Sandy Carl Huckabee ’83 Christiana Denise West ’85 Tory Stallcup ’94 Barrett Vogelgesang ’07
In Memoriam Mirian Mitchell Hulen Scott ’35 Odelle Yingling Thomas Morris ’36 James “Jimmie” B. Welch ’37 Louise Martin Williams Hays ’37 Ella Ruth Roberts Davis ’39 Mary Minta Thompson ’40 Olva Doyle Leach ’40 Katy Donham Rice ’41 Jean Kamp Marks ’41 Sarah Cox Beeson ’42 Mary Elizabeth Folbre Davis ’42 James W. Garison ’42 Billie Peel Gray ’42 Charles E. Jackson Sr. ’42 Virginia Louise Dunnam Massey ’42 Annalynn Mitchell Mordic ’42 Robert Hilary Adcock Sr. ’43 Hilburn O. Borland ’43 Dorothy Kuhn Brick ’43 Jane Hubbell Brogdon ’43 Catherine Cahill Ponder ’43 Joy McMurray Burris ’44 Veda Lee Donham Cross ’44 Mary Hoggard Hendrickson ’44 Martha Alice Holcombe Stockton ’44 Ruth Evelyn Murphy Wilson ’44 Dr. J.P. Chancey ’45 John E. Lyon Jr. ’45 Thomas W. Puddephatt ’45 Ethel Rogers “Sally” Laidlaw ’46 Lillian Barbara Huxtable Hathcock ’46 Elizabeth “Betty” Lamberson Ross ’46 Charles McDonald Jr. ’46
48 Hendrix Magazine | Fall 2012
Faculty & Staff Joe B. Hatcher, Hendrix College President (1981‑1991) Dr. Albert Raymond, Virginia A. McCormick Pittman Distinguished Professor Emeritus of biology (1952‑1996) Ida Carolyn Raney, associate librarian (1961‑1998)
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Dr. Richard Yates, Professor of History (1938-1974) For a Hendrix history student in 1974, no memory is clearer than that of Dr. Yates delivering his last Civil War lecture. Including his gift for teaching by telling tales — just as his hero Abraham Lincoln did. If you cherish your memories of Hendrix, you can provide the same kind of memories for generations to come. A designated or planned gift provides life-changing experiences for students and it creates a legacy that will endure. Although the names and faces change over time, the memories remain. Share the gift of Hendrix memories. Support the Altus Bell Society.
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For more information, contact Lori F. Jones ’81, CFP® Director of Planned Giving (501) 450-1476 or email JonesL@hendrix.edu www.hendrixaltusbell.org
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Over the past few years, Hendrix students have built a successful Model UN team. For example, the group received four awards at the 2012 National Model UN Conference this spring in New York City.