The Miami Student Magazine | Fall 2017

From the Editor

Happy holiday season, and welcome to the newest addition to the Miami student media landscape.

Luckily for me, there are lots of story-makers and storytellers on this campus, students who are dedicated to putting our little corner of the universe on paper, and faculty and staff who are dedicated to helping us do that.

As a sister publication to our weekly campus newspaper, The Miami Student Magazine is here to showcase the best creative nonfiction and features journalism that the Miami community has to offer.

I’d say it takes a village, but that’d be committing the journalistic cardinal sin of cliché. So suffice it to say that this magazine wouldn’t have landed in your hands without the support of many people. I’d like to extend a sincere thanks to the Department of Media, Journalism and Film, my predecessors and founders of The Miami Student Magazine, the editorial staff, our designers and photographers, and the writers who shared their work with us. Thanks to design editor extraordinaire A.J. Newberry for his vision and dedication, and to Student editor-in-chief Emily Williams and faculty advisor James Tobin for their belief in the worth of this project and in me as its leader.

In a word, we’re here to tell you stories: Offbeat, personal and unconventional ones that you might not expect to find in a newspaper. In this issue, you’ll hear from a student who opens up about her experience with sexual assault and from another who traces the history of radioactive uranium being secretly machined in Oxford during the 1950s. One of our writers will take you along for a night at the Oxford Hookah Lounge, and another will introduce you to a Miami employee who’s helping keep Armstrong Student Center running — four years after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

Whether you’re finding us in a dorm lobby, in a coffee shop, or somewhere in the underbelly of Upham Hall, and whether you’re a student, faculty member, alumnus or member of the Oxford community, we’re glad you’re here. And we hope you’ll stick with us.

We’re telling you these types of stories because we believe in them, and in the power they can hold when told well. As a writer, I’ve always felt it my duty to seek out and share stories, and to align myself with others who do the same.

See, I believe that just like every other place on earth, this campus and community is full of stories — important ones, ones that deserve to be told.

Megan Zahneis Editor-in-Chief

Fall 2017 Ceili Doyle

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Alba Craft Inc.

Jack Evans

7

Slow Down

Riley Steiner

11

Decision

Emma Kinghorn 14 A Hitch in Jim’s Step Kylie Gambill 18 Clean Megan Zahneis 23 Doing the Most Jennifer Wenger 28 Finding Grace 37 For Your Amusement POETRY Emily Dattilo 27 “Simplicities Don’t Tend to Stay” Talia Mesnick 33 “I Remember” COVER PHOTO

Heather McCowan

TMS Magazine Staff Megan Zahneis Emily Williams

Editor-in-Chief Head of Student Media

A.J. Newberry

Art Director

Sabrina Tinoco

Design Staff

Maggie Walkoff Heather McCowan Riley Steiner

Photo Editor Editorial Staff

Maya Fenter Hannah Meibers Cassidy Sattler Natalie Utt

Business Manager

Ali Hackman

Asst. Business Manager

James Tobin

Faculty Advisor

Fred Reeder WDJ Inc. - Bill Dedden

Business Advisor Distributor

ALBA CRAFT INC. by: Ceili Doyle

The Robinson sisters played in the water that shimmered and shined as it moved through the gravel and grass on its path down west Rose Avenue and onto south Main Street. Carol Robinson, the self-proclaimed mud pie queen, splashed in the rivulets that trickled off the roof and around the massive industrial facility next door to the Robinson’s home. She paid little attention to the bustling sounds of workers coming in and out of the concrete complex.

The girls, all six of them, made an innocent hideout among the raspberry bushes that grew in their neighbor’s yard and on the building outside the perimeter of their own yard, often plucking and eating the wild fruit right off the vine.

That was seven decades ago. The Robinson sisters — Terry, Gail, Carol, Kelley, Peggy and Amy — didn’t know it then, but the center for processing radioactive uranium in Oxford, Ohio was directly behind their backyard.

The Alba Craft Laboratory, Inc. From 1952 to 1959, former Miami professor and Oxford resident Eugene Albaugh owned and operated Alba Craft Laboratory, Inc. Albaugh was subcontracted to manage Alba Craft by National Lead of Ohio, a company that controlled Fernald, which was a uranium processing facility for the Atomic Energy Commission until it closed in 1989.

But it wasn’t until March of 1993 that Daryl Kimball, who worked for the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), a Washington D.C. group that informs the public on health risks of nuclear weapons-related activities, discovered by chance that his hometown, Oxford, had been added

to the Department of Energy (DOE)’s Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP).

“It was a long time ago, but I remember it quite well,” Kimball said. “I was working for PSR, leading a research project about the nuclear complex industry. I was speaking with a DOE official at Oak Ridge who was ticking off the locations of FUSRAP sites throughout the nation and when I heard Oxford, I went, ‘Wait, back up, please.’”

That same Friday afternoon, Kimball told his mother, Linda MusmeciKimball, then-president of Oxford Citizens for Peace and Justice (OCPJ), about what the DOE had been hiding from the public.

Musmeci-Kimball was shocked to learn that Alba Craft, which in 1993 had been an embroidery shop, used to process uranium for the government during the nuclear arms race.

When her son called, MusmeciKimball was in the Peace Center (OCPJ office) with her two interns, Jason Gambatese and Michon Woods. And, as soon as she got off the phone she immediately lept into action, taking Gambatese with her and telling Woods to stay behind.

“I wasn’t sure what we were going to find,” Musmeci-Kimball said. “[Woods] was in her prime childbearing years.”

Musmeci-Kimball and fellow OCPJ member Yereau Peterson (who at the time lived next door to Alba Craft) immediately began contacting the DOE and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

They wanted the department and laboratory to release the results of the DOE’s report: “Results of the Radiological Survey at the former Alba Craft Laboratory Site Properties, Oxford, Ohio.”

“I was concerned because it was in the middle of town, two blocks away from

the apartment [Village Green] where my younger sister was living while she was at Miami,” Kimball said.

In early 1992, nearly a year before Kimball’s discovery, the DOE had informed several officials on Oxford City Council, as well as the owners of Village Green and the Alba Craft building, that the building was being considered as a potential site requiring radiological cleanup within the next 15 years.

Musmeci-Kimball couldn’t believe that the DOE was willing to put Oxford on the back burner, conceivably until 2008.

“Were it not for [Daryl’s] persistent requests to the DOE for a pre-publication copy of the unclassified report on the September 1992 radiological survey, I am not sure how many more months it would have taken for the data to reach anyone in Oxford,” Musmeci-Kimball wrote in a 1994 column of The Oxford Press.

The “Significance of Findings” section of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s September 1992 report concluded that “the former Alba Craft Laboratory contains quantities of uranium that pose little health hazard if leftyes undisturbed.”

In reality, months later the DOE manager of the clean-up, Dave Adler, admitted that the amount of contamination ranged from 10 to 100 times the radiation levels considered normal under DOE regulations, MusmeciKimball said.

Unfortunately, Oxford was just one small cog in the uranium machine that operated throughout Ohio and the United States during the Cold War. The center of the ‘atomic mindset’ The Fernald Feeds Material Production Center, or simply Fernald, was the third largest nuclear waste dump

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in the country. Facilities around the nation would send waste to Fernald with the belief that the center would process the radioactive materials, but there was no place to put any of the waste after it was processed. Thus, it was buried in pits beneath the ground.

From 1951 to 1989, the plant produced 170,000 tons of metric uranium, most of which was conducted under secret government contracts. Many employees who worked for Fernald and its subsidiaries had no idea what their work exactly entailed.

Alba Craft was one of 83 companies that were subcontracted by National Lead of Ohio during the nearly four decades when the Fernald plant remained in operation for the Atomic Energy Commission.

Specifically, Alba Craft was one of 17 Ohio sites that worked with radioactive material and uranium metal in conjunction with Fernald from the 1950s through the 1970s. Outside of Ohio, there were 65 other sites that worked underneath the Superfund (locations categorized by the EPA as candidates for hazardous waste cleanup) site, Fernald.

While the DOE began its own record search for the cleanup that began in 1987, it was difficult to compile a list of commercial facilities that Fernald subcontracted.

“I had to base our search on old contracts and rumors from former workers and residents of these sites,” Adler said in a Hamilton Journal-News article from 1994.

In a special edition of the Oxford Daily Bugle (a newspaper produced by an English 212 public affairs reporting class in Miami’s English department on Dec. 23, 1994) a student interviewed David B. Fankhauser, a genetics expert, biology and chemistry professor from the

Image from collected findings of radiological survey published by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

University of Cincinnati.

Fankhauser independently surveyed the Alba Craft property and reviewed the DOE’s original report from 1993.

He was disturbed to see how his own conclusions about the level of contamination around the Alba Craft site differed from department’s initial assessment. “[The survey] appears disingenuous and self-serving to the DOE who would be responsible for the clean up,” he said in an article from The Bugle. “At a time when our government was [supposed to be] protecting us from a threat...we were exposing ourselves to a greater real threat than the Soviet threat.”

Six years after Daryl Kimball found out that Oxford was home to a FUSRAP site, USA Today came out with a comprehensive list of private sites where

companies contracted work for the government’s nuclear weapons program.

The report from Sept. 6, 2000 compiled a list of 150 sites where USA Today was able to verify the “specific nature of the contracting operations,” by analyzing data from over 300 private companies and over 100,000 pages of declassified federal records.

Twenty-four states were included in the special report. There were companies engaged in nuclear weapons work everywhere from Cranston, RI, to Granite City, IL, to La Jolla, CA. And 26 sites were identified in Ohio.

Oxford was listed underneath Ohio’s subsection, with Alba Craft Shop as the contractor.

“Machining of large quantities of uranium metal, 1952-57. Operations raised substantial amount of radioactive dust,” the report read. “Federal cleanup, removal of 2,800 cubic yards of contaminated soil and building completed in 1995…”

Contamination cleanup Starting in late March 1993, MusmeciKimball spearheaded the charge to inform Oxford’s city council about what her son had uncovered.

She has spent much of her adult life publicizing and condemning the U.S. government’s nuclear arms race.

As the president of OCPJ, she worked relentlessly to promote peace during the Cold War era.

“To realize that this entire time I was working for OCPJ protesting against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, there was a uranium machine shop hidden within the Mile Square of Oxford was shocking,” Musmeci-Kimball said.

Musmeci-Kimball and her OCPJ colleague Peterson issued a public notice for “major concern about Alba Craft”, which was read aloud at a city council meeting on March, 23 1993.

“Oxford residents are [to be] kept informed of any action that takes place at the site,” the notice read.

The notice also called on the Ohio EPA to conduct an independent assessment and asked that the city push for the DOE to execute a full and quick cleanup of the site.

While members of city council had been informed a year before that the DOE had conducted a radiological survey and ran tests, they were unaware of the scope of contamination at Alba Craft.

“In 1992, the EPA told us the site was clean,” former councilwoman and current OCPJ president Janis Dutton said. “We accepted their word at face value. Unfortunately, you can’t just make up scientific decisions.”

Following the city council meeting in late March 1993, Dutton and various members of the council and city staff teamed with OCPJ to lobby late Ohio senator John Glenn’s and then congressman John Boehner’s offices.

“We took two lobbying trips to D.C. to try and get the state to fund an independent surveyor,” Dutton said.

“We wanted the DOE to give Oxford a higher priority because Alba Craft was in the middle of a residential neighborhood.”

Promises were made by Glenn,

Boehner and the assistant to the secretary of the DOE, Dan Reicher, to expedite the cleanup process.

One of the promises involved decontaminating the home of Marilyn and Wayne Elzey, who had unknowingly bought Eugene Albaugh (Alba Craft’s owner)’s former home.

Albaugh, who lived on South Main Street, had often traipsed through what was eventually the Elzeys’ home in work boots covered in radioactive material.

Little did Albaugh know that, over three decades later, Marilyn and Wayne would be directing DOE crews on where

to remove flooring coated with uranium dust in their living room.

“We were upset that we never knew what had happened when we bought the house,” Marilyn said. “The DOE gave us the option of moving out, but we chose to stay.”

The decontamination crews came to the Elzeys’ home in October of 1993 every day for a week. They cleaned up the garage, the master bedroom, family room and pathway from the backyard through the garage.

“We ended up moving in 2000,” Marilyn said. “My husband was very

NBC Nightly Newscast from August 28, 1994 featured the Fulton Family, affected by the contamination in Oxford.

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FUSRAP Sites,” the effects of Alba Craft’s uranium machine shop years still linger.

Aftermath of Alba Craft

angry. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease in 1997 and was diagnosed in 2010 with pancreatic cancer and passed away. We never pursued it because you have to get on with your life. If you become obsessed with something like that, you can’t live.”

Less than a month after the DOE’s hazmat crews cleaned up the Elzeys’ former home, the DOE said it might have Alba Craft cleaned up by 1994.

It took another full year for the president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), Arjun Makhijani, to speak in front of Oxford City Council on Nov. 29, 1994, and deliver his recommendations on the DOE’s cleanup progress as an independent surveyor.

“Radiation levels in the area posed some health risks,” Makhijani said at the council meeting. “DOE officials could not truthfully tell residents there is no large risk.”

Makhijani submitted his “Recommendations to the City of Oxford, Ohio regarding Alba Craft” on Jan. 10, 1995 to city manager James Collard.

He outlined various steps he believed the city should take, including following through with commitments made through Adler and the DOE and putting pressure on the DOE to “fund a dose reconstruction effort” to understand how exposure to uranium affected the former Alba Craft workers and surrounding residents.

The DOE contracted Bechtel, a construction and civil engineering company, to help clean, decontaminate and disassemble the Alba Craft Shop throughout 1995.

While notice of cleanup certification for the site was published in the Federal Register on Nov. 26, 1996, according to the DOE’s “Long-Term Surveillance and Maintenance Plan for Completed

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Of the six Robinson sisters who played in the water contaminated at the Alba Craft shop, five have had thyroid cancer.

In 2004, Terry Robinson Fulton “had two partial thyroid removals and underwent radiation treatment for the thyroid cancer that spread to her liver,” according to an article in The Oxford Press from July 16 of that year.

For years, Terry had been incredibly worried about the effects the Alba Craft building and its contributions to the nuclear arms race had on her sisters, her children, and on herself.

One of her vocal cords was removed in 2004 and she was constantly waiting to see “whether cancer cells [were] forming again in her throat or liver,” according to a Hamilton News-Journal clipping.

Two years later, Terry died by suicide at the age of 54.

Kelley Robinson Hickey, who had surgery to remove one of the lobes on her thyroid gland after a tumor developed, died on March 12, 2014 at age 51.

The other four sisters, Amy Robinson Ferris, Gail Robinson Marbut, Carol Robinson McLaughlin and Peggy Robinson Feller, are alive today.

Gail moved to Garden City, KS as an adult. Her daughter, who never lived in Oxford, was also diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2004. Amy owns property

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in Oxford, but rents it out for student housing, and Peggy lives in Mt. Vernon, WA. Carol, the mud pie queen, lives in Liberty, IN. Carol suffered two bouts of initial thyroid cancer as a young child. In the 2004 article in The Oxford Press, Carol discussed how she “ha[d] three growths on a thyroid goiter and the removal entails risks of losing her ability to swallow.”

The Robinson sisters were just one tragic casualty of the four decades of inaction that passed following Alba Craft’s closure as a machine shop in 1957.

“There’s the old adage, ‘If you don’t learn and understand history, you’re bound to repeat the same mistakes,’” Daryl Kimball said.

“Our neighbors and residents have been affected by the Cold War in a profound way,” Kimball said. “They paid a price in the name of national security, and we need to honor them to make sure we don’t allow that to happen again in our lifetime.”

Kimball, along with his mother, Linda, and Janis Dutton, Marilyn Elzey and Arjun Makhijani, is adamant that remembering these events is important.

“The reason I had to discover its existence in the first place is because it was forgotten,” Kimball said. “If this generation doesn’t understand nuclear history, especially between the Fernald site and Alba Craft, we could repeat the same mistakes.” t

Slow Down

By Jack Evans

Through the front door is the head shop— polished and gleaming pipes and hookah parts are displayed for sale in glass counters. You enter the main lounge through a doorway opposite the register in the head shop. The cinderblock walls are painted red and black, and the two-story ceiling gives space for the ‘They leave clubby light fixtures you after a find in every college bar. They while. Their draw red and blue and green beams through the haze that eyes are has accumulated from the evening’s exhalation of glazed.’ flavored tobacco smoke.

2:45 a.m. on May 4 “Slow down, man,” says the kid waiting in front of me at the register.

The air is fruity and the lights are soft in the Oxford Hookah Lounge.

He blinks slowly, giving his eyelids a few moments to travel back up to an inebriated resting position. He’s wearing a short-sleeve, red and black button-up shirt with a dragon on the back. His hair is styled into a little tuft at the front.

“Just slow down,” he slurs, like I might not have heard him the first time.

3:00 a.m. on May 4 The lounge’s address is 15 North Beech Street, but really the building sits on an alley behind Left Field Tavern, off the corner of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Park Uptown.

Thirteen people are crowded around the largest table in the room. They pack a couch and a handful of padded stools and chairs, all drawn close to the four hookahs set up on the table. One of the guys, with blond hair, leans back and spreads his arms wide over the top of the sofa.

A case of Natty rests on the floor, alongside a lone empty beer can and an open bag of Doritos. A dozen more cans occupy the tabletop territory left unclaimed by the smoking rigs. The brunette sitting next to the blond guy takes her mouth off the hose, locks her lips around what looks like a bubble wand for 20-somethings, and blows a wobbling smoke bubble.

The squirrely orb rises up to join one or two others of its ilk floating in the air. Each is the subject of a communal hot potato game, as people sitting around the table wave their hands and blow at the bubbles, propelling them from one laughing friend to the next.

The brunette flaps her hand wildly beneath her tentative creation. It lingers, corporeal, for a few seconds before it bursts, releasing a cloud of smoke above her head.

The blond guy cocks an eyebrow and wrinkles his nose. Clearly, he’s seen better bubbles.

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1:10 a.m. on May 13 Amid the din of laughs, smoke curls and top-40 playlists that fill the air, a couple sit on a couch by themselves. They are older than the students in the room, but not yet middle-aged. Between hits from a hookah, they sip Turkish coffee, tipping back demitasses of the unfiltered brew toward weathered cheeks. He wears a faded Ed Hardy-esque sweatshirt.

They were smiling earlier. Now, they look straight ahead at nothing as they puff.

He talks for a little while without changing his gaze and then pauses before talking again. She rests her head in her hand and her elbow on the couch. He puts two fingers to his head and runs them over his eyebrows, smoothing them out. She fixes her hair. He talks again and receives no response.

They leave after a while. Their eyes are glazed.

About 3:10 a.m. on May 4

crooked smile.

One of the girls from the big group stands up from her stool, getting ready to leave.

A few minutes later, he pops his hood up and pulls his hookah hose tight against his chest. He’ll nurse it until he leaves.

“Sam!” calls a slim guy in a grey sweatshirt at a neighboring table. He was curled up comfortably in the corner of a couch, but he leans forward a little bit and his eyes open wider at the sight of her.

“You heading out?”

Her jeans have wide, intentional holes down their length and run tight from the top of her thighs down to her ankles. From the front, they barely qualify as pants.

She cocks her hip, accentuating her curves, and, with a smile, yells back something mostly indistinct but for, “Of course I am.” She then spins around to leave.

The slim kid leans back into the cushions. His eyes follow her out. He puts his hand up to his forehead and pushes his hair up and back, holding it tight for a beat. He lets go and exhales. His eyes drift to the ceiling.

One of his buddies says something that pulls him back, and his gaze shifts to the floor as he cracks a

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THE MIAMI STUDENT MAGAZINE, FALL 2017

1:45 a.m. on May 13 A trio walks in and settles around the table in the front of the lounge. A tall guy in a bright red polo takes a stool and his friend, wearing a sweater that falls somewhere between beige and heather grey, plops into the couch opposite him. They’re both smi ing.

The lone girl in the group climbs onto the couch and sits cross-legged, scooching into the corner. Her hair is bedhead-frizzy and she’s swimming in a Mami crewneck and thick cotton sweatpants. Her face is blank; she’s absorbed in the phone cradled in her lap.

A hookah arrives at the table. The guys smoke and laugh. The one in the vaguely-taupe sweater spreads out his legs a little wider on the couch. They smoke and laugh some more.

The sweater guy lays his right arm in the empty space in the middle of the couch between himself

and the girl. The girl keeps playing with her phone.

The guy in the polo leaves to go to the bathroom and the sweater guy starts talking to the girl. She responds with a word or two, keeping her eyes down but for a brief glance at the ceiling.

He moves his arm an inch closer to her, in the deliberately casual way boys try to slip an arm around a date at the movies. He keeps trying to talk to her. She tucks her legs underneath herself and points her knees away from him.

The guy in the polo comes back and the guy in the sweater smiles, immediately turning his attention back to the one person at the table interested in talking to him.

The girl brings her head up to steal a glance at the sweater guy when he isn’t looking.

3:35 a.m. on May 4

4:00 a.m. on May 4

A pair of jingle bells tied to the shop door clink as new patrons walk in at 3:30 in the morning on a school night.

The music drops a few notches.

Usually, the lounge closes at 2 a.m. on Thursdays, but Moe, the middle Megatheh brother, says if people are coming in, they’ll keep the lights on. But, by now, the post-bar crowd of 50 has shrunk to less than a dozen.

Amad Megatheh, the youngest of the three brothers who own and operate the Oxford Hookah Lounge, walks over to check on the slim guy’s group in the corner.

He’s wearing dark jeans, with a clean beard and styled hair.

He puts his hand on the shoulder of one the guys in the group and makes a remark that elicits laughs all around. He swaps out the sooted coals in their hookah for glowing ones, pivots easily to grab their trash off the floor, then glides to the back room to drop it off.

Amad comes back and settles into a vacated stool at the large table.

He says something to the dragon shirt guy, then turns and talks to the girl on his left. She brushes back her hair, smiles and laughs.

The group dwindles to a few stragglers after a couple stumbles out, almost colliding with the wall as they do. Another exodus is led by a guy in a black ballcap who promises to a hockey teammate at another table, “I’ll be bringing my A-game tomorrow.”

Amad stands up from his stool and begins straightening up chairs and wiping down surfaces.

With yawns cascading around the room, the blond guy — the one from the group blowing bubbles — stands up, tilts back his head, and polishes off a can of beer. He walks, a bit dazed, out the jingling door and into the drizzling night.

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By: Riley Steiner

E

mily’s phone began to buzz.

She was in her friend Sarah’s room in McKee Hall. It was a Friday — one weekend before Halloween — and they, along with another friend, Jackie, were getting ready to go out for the night.

Emily looked down at her lit-up phone screen, and her stomach fluttered. She knew that number.

She held her phone in her hand and looked back up at Sarah and Jackie.

Guys, she said, I’ll be right back. I’m about to get an offer.

Emily left Sarah’s room and went into the hallway. She tapped the green circle on her iPhone screen.

Hello? she said.

Hi, Emily, said a woman’s voice on the other end. It was Lindsay Jackson, the head coach for the College of the Holy Cross’ field hockey team.

She and Emily made small talk for a minute. Coach Jackson asked Emily how school was going.

Then she said, So, the team all really enjoyed getting to know you, and we’d all really love it if you’d come play for us.

Emily walked into McKee’s lobby and over to the window opposite the front door.

Her reflection stared back at her from the glass.

I’m really honored, she said. She paced in circles in front of the window. But I have to talk to my parents, since it’s a big financial commitment.

Coach Jackson’s disembodied voice sounded a little surprised. Emily knew what she was thinking: Haven’t we already had this conversation?

They had. It was not hard to see that Coach Jackson and the rest of the Holy Cross field hockey staff were interested in adding Emily to their roster, especially after everything that Emily had done the summer before. Emily knew they wanted her, and she knew her parents expected her to go.

I know it’s a big decision, Coach Jackson said. She asked Emily to call her once she’d made her choice.

Emily hung up. She had worked for five years to get here — to get an offer to

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play Division I field hockey. This was why she had spent so many hours at all of the practices and tournaments and overnight camps. She had had her hopes raised and dashed and then raised again. She’d finally gotten what she’d told herself, for so many years, that she wanted.

So why did she feel so unsure? * * * The recruiting frenzy began when Emily was in eighth grade. That spring, on a recommendation from her club coach, she tried out to be a goalie for her regional Futures team, and made the cut. Being part of the development program for the U.S. women’s national and Olympic teams meant that for seven Saturdays that spring, Emily trained for eight hours each day with girls from Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, and the surrounding areas. That summer, her team played in the National Futures Championship against teams from other regions around the country, each girl hoping to attract the attention of Futures scouts and win a spot at the Junior Olympics.

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Emily didn’t move on to the Junior Olympics, but the wheels had been set in motion. She wanted to play college field hockey, to become one of the best players at one of the best schools. Her parents told her that field hockey could help her get into a better school than she would otherwise have been able to attend or afford.

So that summer, Emily began going to college recruiting camps. She played in tournaments with her club team on the weekends. Her summer break was filled with sweaty practices and road trips and strange hotels. When she wasn’t away with the club, she had her upcoming season on Coffman High School’s team to prepare for.

During Emily’s freshman year, she made friends with Sarah Noreen, a fellow goalie on Coffman’s field hockey team. Sarah would vent to Emily about how she was burnt out and disillusioned with recruiting, with all the hours and heart poured into a system that gave no guarantees it would pay off. Emily listened to her and couldn’t help but feel the same way. She decided she wanted to stop all of it.

But something happened Emily’s sophomore year. She was sitting on the bus

after a game, her gear piled around her on the sticky leather seat. It was early in the season, and the trees’ still-green leaves blurred past the open window.

Emily was sitting near Katie, Carly and Kate, juniors who who were considered three of the best players on the team. They always stuck together, and at every endof-season banquet they won all-league accolades.

As the bus bumped along the road back to Coffman, Emily overheard the three of them talking about emails they had gotten from college coaches, who expressed their interest in recruiting the girls and invited them to visit campus.

Of course. It was September 1.

According to NCAA regulations, Division I coaches could initiate communication with players only after the first day of September. Before that, the players were the ones who had to be the first to make the phone calls and send the emails.

As Emily listened to Katie, Carly, and Kate on the bus that day, she thought, I want that. She wanted to be considered one of the players on the team that was being recruited, that a big-time school was coming after. She no longer wanted to be just a player. She wanted to be a recruit.

So Emily started it all over again.

She joined a new club team, coached by Keli Puzo, a former Olympian. From sophomore year until senior year, she dove back into the recruiting clamor, once again doing the tryouts and practices and tournaments with her club team. She went to colleges’ recruiting camps — OU and Indiana and Northwestern and Louisville. Some, she attended multiple summers in a row. In the spring of her junior year, she went to the a recruitment-focused junior day at Dartmouth.

That year, Emily was eating lunch in the school cafeteria with her friends when she looked up to see Katie’s face on the two small lunchroom TVs. The broadcast team was interviewing Katie about her recent commitment to play field hockey for Ohio State.

The majority of Coffman’s student body wasn’t very familiar with field hockey, but everyone knew about college athletic recruits. Coffman athletes signed letters of intent every year at signing days hosted by

the school in November and April. Every athlete who was considered to be good at their sport heard the question, “Are you going to play in college?”

As junior year merged into senior year, more and more of Emily’s friends from her club team committed to play in college.

Maddie, Avery, and Kendall committed to Miami. Rachel committed to Ohio State.

Meanwhile, Emily’s parents continued to stress that field hockey could be her path to a prestigious school. Suddenly, it seemed like she was seeing new posts pop up in her Instagram feed all the time showing people she knew, smiling and wearing in college gear, above captions that proclaimed they had accepted an offer to play at the next level.

The summer before Emily’s senior year, both Northwestern and Dartmouth were pursuing her as a possible goalie for their roster. But she was second on both of their depth charts; if the schools’ top recruits accepted the offers, it was all over for Emily.

Emily would have gone to either school if they had made her an offer.

But that fall, her

decision was made for her: both schools called to tell her they were signing their top recruits. The Dartmouth coach, promised to pass Emily’s name on to other programs that she knew were still looking for goalies.

Both programs called Emily before

college applications were due, so she spent the rest of her year the same way every other senior did — applying to schools and waiting to hear back. In April, she decided to attend Miami University, and looked forward to a relaxing summer of hanging out with her friends before they all went their separate ways in the fall.

In June, Emily was sitting in the backseat of her car, with her parents sitting in the front. She unlocked her phone and checked her email.

She had all but given up on playing varsity field hockey in college, yet beaming up at her in bold face from her inbox was an email from the head coach at the College of the Holy Cross. * * * In early July, Emily and her parents flew to Boston. From there, they drove 45 minutes to Worcester, Massachusetts, home of the College of the Holy Cross, where Emily would attend the last two days of the Holy Cross field hockey camp.

Holy Cross’ campus is small and sloped, with one side higher than the other. The 3,000 students who live there during the school year can walk from one end of campus to the other, heading uphill, in 15 minutes. Perched on the hills are tall buildings with pointed roofs and many, many sets of stairs.

The field hockey fields — where the Crusaders, clad in purple and white, play their home games — are at the top of the hill.

In her email, Coach Jackson had told Emily that she was interested in recruiting her and invited her to their annual summer camp. Since the invitation had come so last-minute, Emily only went to two days of the camp, instead of the full four. The first person she met when she and her parents got there was Rachel Lapar, a current sophomore Holy Cross player who was running the camp store.

After getting settled in at Mulledy Hall, one of two freshman-and-sophomore dorms, Emily hiked up to the field hockey fields. For the next two days, she did drills and played in scrimmages with the rest of the players in two-hour sessions under the hot sun.

The Holy Cross team had already committed one goalie, so Emily was

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competing for the second spot with another player, a high school senior from New York named Danielle. Even though they were both vying for the same position, things were friendly between them. Emily called her Danni for short.

Her parents stayed, and they all met Coach Jackson in person. She had curly brown hair and a friendly smile, and this season would be her first at Holy Cross. She didn’t even have an assistant yet.

At the end of the two days, after Coach Jackson had gotten to see Emily play, she talked to Emily and her parents about what would come next.

You’re obviously a little rusty, but we saw some good things, she told Emily. She said she wanted Emily to come to Holy Cross for an official visit in the fall. * * * A few weeks after the Holy Cross camp, Emily was sitting on the couch in her living room. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass doors that led into her wide backyard, she watched her Italian Spinone, Zio, run around in the early August air.

At the same time, Emily scrolled through her Twitter newsfeed, pausing for barely a second to read each 140-character blurb before swiping upwards with her thumb.

The tweets were about food and sports and friends and the weather. Then something different caught her eye.

It was from Danni.

“Verbally committed to play Division 1 Field Hockey at The College of The Holy Cross!! Go Crusaders!”

The words were followed by two purple hearts.

After that, Emily lost hope in playing for Holy Cross. She was disappointed, but not surprised. Playing field hockey in college hadn’t worked out before, so why should it now? A good showing at the Holy Cross camp was no guarantee of a varsity spot.

She figured it would end in the same way as Dartmouth and Northwestern ended. She didn’t expect Holy Cross to still be interested. After all, they had two new goalies on their roster already.

But when Coach Jackson called Emily, she didn’t say, I’m sorry, but we’ve decided to make the offer to someone else. In fact, the words that came through the phone were the exact opposite of what Emily was expecting to hear.

Coach Jackson told her that the staff still wanted her to come on her official visit in the fall. She didn’t mention Danni.

Emily had known Holy Cross was going to call her at some point, but she was surprised to hear they were still looking.

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She’d fully anticipated to hear that Holy Cross was done recruiting, that they had enough goalies on their roster. But they were still interested. She was happy to know she still had a chance.

Emily’s parents were happy, too.

Coach Jackson told Emily before the official visit that she didn’t have any scholarship money to offer her, so Emily would have to pay the full price of attendance — almost $60,000.

But Emily’s parents were fine with that.

For them, it was worth it for the caliber of the education they thought Emily would be getting.

Emily went on her official visit in September of her freshman year at Miami. She flew into Boston, where Holy Cross had sent a car to drive her to the school. The assistant coach met her when she arrived in Worcester and introduced her to the player she would be staying with that night: Rachel, the girl who ran the camp store in the summer.

Rachel gave Emily a campus tour, and they got food at the student union. In the middle of their meal, Rachel had to leave to get changed for her game later that day, so Emily finished eating by herself and braved a chilly hike up the hill to the field hockey fields.

She watched from the stands as Holy Cross beat Colgate. After the game, Rachel took Emily back to her room in Mulledy Hall. They got dinner at the campus’s only dining hall, then went to one of the junior dorms to hang out with the rest of the team.

The next morning, Emily met with the coaches. She brought up Danni’s tweet.

We did commit another goalie, said Coach Jackson. But we would really like to have another goalie on the roster. Not all three of you would be able to travel, but in case someone gets injured, I would like to have you.

She explained that having Emily on the team would create more competition for Holy Cross’ goalies; the players would get better by working harder every week to try

THE MIAMI STUDENT MAGAZINE, FALL 2017

and secure their position.

Emily acted like she agreed with where Coach Jackson was coming from. Yeah, she said, there was a goalie on my high school team that I had to fight for the spot.

But this wasn’t really true; there had never been much of a question about Emily’s status on the Coffman team.

She couldn’t help feeling a little slighted.

Emily thought she’d be receiving an offer that day, but the coaches ended her official visit by telling her, We’ll be in touch.

She returned to Miami. Weeks passed, but she heard nothing from the Holy Cross coaches.

Emily kept her skills fresh by playing on Miami’s club field hockey team. She made plans to spend the next semester studying in London — if Holy Cross offered her the position, she would transfer there the following fall, which meant spring semester of freshman year would be her only chance to go abroad.

She tried not to stress about the phone call — until that October evening in McKee Hall. * * * After Emily got the call from Coach Jackson, she went out and had a fun night with her friends. The next day, she put off thinking about the offer for as long as possible.

She was stalling. She knew she was. She was so unsure about what she should do and so terrified of making the wrong decision.

So finally, at 7:16 p.m., nearly 24 hours after taking Coach Jackson’s call, she texted her club coach, Keli Puzo: “Hey kel, I got word from holy cross that they want me to come if it’s what I want. I was hoping we could talk sometime soon to just talk it out.”

Emily always told Keli everything. Keli had been her coach for three years in high school, then moved to Oxford when her husband got a job as Miami’s head field hockey coach. Now that they were both in the same city again, Emily babysat Keli’s kids.

Keli couldn’t talk that night, so Emily had to wait until the next day. She was in bed, taking a nap, when Keli called. A little groggy, Emily answered and told Keli about the offer.

Is this what you really want? Keli asked her.

I’m not sure, Emily said. But I think I’m going to take it.

She thought that would be her final decision.

She felt like she should accept the offer, after everything that had led up to this point. She had had a hard time adjusting to freshman year at Miami, in a new place with new people, but she could get over it. She could be happy at Holy Cross. Probably.

Emily had always wanted to coach field hockey, too, and during the summer after senior year, she went to the high school practices to help the incoming freshmen. She was introduced as a “former player,” which embarrassed her. She felt like she had to validate her ability to coach them, to earn their respect. They hadn’t played on the field with her. They didn’t know how good she actually was.

Emily thought that if she played in college, she would command more respect. Her players would want to learn from her and would see her as someone who really knew what was going on.

Wow, she played Division I field hockey, Emily imagined her players would say. She was, like, really good.

Emily remembered how disappointed she had been when it didn’t pan out for Dartmouth or Northwestern. Here was a chance at redemption.

But at what cost? What was she giving up here at Miami? What would she be leaving behind if she packed her bags for Holy Cross?

I’m really happy and proud of you, said Keli, on the other end of the line in Emily’s bedroom. Emily thanked her and hung up.

But, still, she didn’t call Coach Jackson back. * * * Emily spent the next week thinking about the offer. One night, before club practice, she parked her gray Subaru Impreza in the lot

outside the field hockey fields to talk to her teammate, senior Cam Colby, who was sitting in Emily’s backseat.

Cam was a former Miami varsity field hockey player, but had quit after sophomore year. Now she played for the club team.

Emily told Cam about the offer and about how she wasn’t sure if she was making the right decision. She asked Cam why she had stopped playing varsity.

I’m a firm believer that everyone deserves to be happy, Cam said. There was no longer any joy for her in competing at a level with such high pressure and high stakes.

If this doesn’t make you happy, you shouldn’t do it, Cam said.

Emily didn’t exactly feel happy about the offer. In fact, she felt like she should have been more excited about it. It should have been news she was happy to share with everyone, but it wasn’t. She was dreading telling the friends she would have to leave at Miami. * * * Emily stood in line for the bathroom next to Maddie and Avery, who, along with the rest of the varsity field hockey team, were dressed as members of a motorcycle gang. It was Halloween, a crowded Saturday night at Brick Street, and the air was filled with the sound of thumping music and the smell of Red Bull.

Emily had started playing field hockey with Maddie and Avery in her sophomore year of high school. They had gone to endless practices and summer tournaments together.

Every February for three years, they had played together on the glittering green turf of the ESPN Wide World of Sports in Orlando, Florida.

Every November, they had played together at the National Hockey Festival in Palm Beach.

Maddie lived near Emily in Ohio, but went to a different high school. Avery lived four hundred miles away from them, in Virginia.

But despite the distance, Emily grew close to them. She blocked shot after shot under glaring stadium lights and knew that her teammates were there to help her protect the goal. Off the field, the trio became friends through countless hours of chatting in hotel lobbies and over pregame meals.

Emily was especially excited when she found out that she, Maddie and Avery were all going to be attending Miami together. But when she got to school in August, she realized that she wasn’t going to be able to spend as much time with them as she’d hoped. Varsit practices and games ate up almost all of her friends’ time, and this Halloween night at Brick Street was the first time she’d been able to see them all year.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 35

A field hockey goalie’s stick has more surface area while maintaining a thin profile, making it easier to save the ball from the goal.

THE MIAMI STUDENT MAGAZINE, FALL 2017

13

A Hitch in Jim’s Step BY: EMMA KINGHORN

Jim Rhodes was taking a shower.

It was a Saturday in June 2014. He was at home, unwinding from a long week at work maintaining the physical facilities of Miami University’s Bell Tower Place.

He was just washing up. It was just a normal shower.

Until he looked down.

His right calf was there, in all of its beefy glory. But his left was not.

His day usually began hours before he set foot on Miami’s campus. Every morning, Jim woke up early to exercise before work.

Besides maintaining his athletic physique, the 49-year-old wanted to pump his body with endorphins, preparing him to be positive-minded throughout his work day.

Jim’s calves were especially large, so large that his older sister, Sue, called them “steaks.”

It seemed like it happened almost overnight. His left calf muscle had visibly deteriorated. It was shrunken, to half its normal size. Jim rushed through his shower, climbed out and tried to flex his left calf. But it didn’t move.

“It was, like, halfway gone,” he remembers.

The doctor’s offices wouldn’t open until Monday. “I couldn’t wait to call my doctor,” he says now, “but I had to wait.”

After consulting the doctors, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) was ruled out. The doctors found that Jim’s spine was pinched and performed a posterior anterior spinal fusion. The surgery inserted cadaver bone, Jim’s own bone and surgical steel into his spine, freeing the pinched nerves.

The insert boosted Jim’s height from 6’1” to 6’1½”.

“If I knew they were going to put a lift kick in me, I would’ve asked for the fourincher,” he laughs.

But six months later, his height was the only thing that had improved.

So Jim’s doctors decided to run another test, this time to search his blood for a small enzyme, creatine kinase. Referred to as CK, this enzyme is produced by the liver to repair tissue damage in the heart, muscle or

brain. The normal CK count for the average person sits around 80-100 total units.

Jim’s was almost 10,000.

His liver was working overtime to repair something that was seriously wrong.

After meeting with several neurologists and finding no answers, Jim was told to seek a specialist at The Cleveland Clinic. He began doing his research, sizing up doctors and recommendations before making an appointment.

After extensive blood testing, brain imaging and full-body electromyographies to assess his muscles, Jim was diagnosed.

He wasn’t worried about being sick when he went in — he thought that had been ruled out in Cincinnati before his back surgery; all of those tests had been run. His biggest worry was seeing all of the esteemed, fancy credentials on his doctors’ name tags.

“I kept thinking they were going to speak to me in languages way, way over my head,” he said.

Jim’s doctor sat him down and diagnosed him with ALS. ALS is commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease, named for the Yankees player who delivered a famous farewell speech about his own struggle with the disease. The progressive neurodegenerative disease attacks motor neurons in the brain and spine that spread to every muscle in the body. When these motor neurons die, the body can no longer initiate or control its muscle movements.

There are generally two timelines given to people diagnosed with ALS: a three-tofive year progression or a five-to-eight year progression.

In the early stages, sometimes even before diagnosis, patients have stiffness in their muscles or spasms. They can also experience fatigue or lose muscle mass, as Jim did in his calf.

As more motor neurons are attacked, moving becomes difficult. Voluntary movements — such as holding things, walking and swallowing — are the first to become affected.

Paralysis is guaranteed with ALS. It

happens gradually, starting with the small muscles and eventually progressing to fullbody paralysis. In the final stages of the disease, patients require around-the-clock attention, and are often fed through a tube due to throat paralysis.

Towards the end, ALS victims can no longer communicate.

The prognosis is death, with 90 percent of victims dying within five years of being diagnosed. There is no cure to pause, end or reverse symptoms. There are only a few drugs and therapies that may slow the disease’s progression.

After breaking the news to Jim, the doctor launched into explaining all of these progressions, and explaining what Jim’s tests and images looked like. Jim was there, he was listening, but it was all a blur, really.

Now, he specifically remembers one piece of information the doctor told him that day: that his disease was not hereditary, meaning that it wouldn’t physically affect his family.

That was a relief to Jim, a single dad whose daughters Courtney, 21, and Taylor, 23, were his first thought.

How would he explain this to them? How do you tell your daughters you’re dying?

Until that appointment, all of Jim’s thoughts were about the possibility of being sick, the maybes and the maybe-nots. Now the conversation was concrete. Jim was really sick.

“There’s just no way to dodge a subject like that,” he says.

After the appointment, he had a fourhour ride home to think about it. Now, he recalls it as the fastest car ride of his life.

Jim just kept running through it all in his head, what would happen, what he could say. Soon enough, he was pulling into his driveway; his daughters were already home. They asked him how everything went, how his visit was.

And Jim broke down.

“I’m going to do everything within my power [to fight this],” he told Courtney and Taylor.

They cried. They hugged. They were

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clingy for a while.

That day in was the beginning of a string of emotional ones for the Rhodes family. After his daughters, Jim had to tell his parents. As one of four kids, he kept thinking about how heart-wrenching it would be to lose one of his own daughters during his lifetime.

While his family came to terms with what was about to happen, Jim did too.

“All the tears got cried out,” he explains.

“I couldn’t cry anymore.”

Jim was faced with a lot of questions that were hard to ask and harder to answer.

A football player at Hillsdale College, he had remained devoted to staying in shape and maintaining his ox-like strength. This made it hard for doctors to predict how long he had left, or how his disease would progress.

Immediately following his diagnosis, Jim started taking Rilutek, a drug that can help slow symptom progression of ALS by protecting nerves in the brain and spinal cord from glutamate, a substance that contributes to the nerve damage. He also began taking anti-depressants, but no narcotic pain medicine.

That was three years ago.

Today, Jim is the Armstrong Building Service Coordinator. He comes in every morning by 7:30 and checks all of Armstrong’s systems through his computer program. Then he looks for alarms to know what isn’t operating properly or what’s low. He keeps up to date on the freezer temperatures. He walks through all of the mechanical rooms to search for leaks and breaks.

He talks to all of the Building Service Associates, who maintain the dish machines and make sure each level of Armstrong is stocked full of everything it might need. He does almost everything he used to, except climbing up on the roof. It’s not really his job to do all of the little things, but he says the first shift is hard, so he makes sure he gets done with his checks with enough time to jump in and help out.

Jim used to log about 25,000 steps in a day’s work, but with the opening of the Armstrong East Wing, that number has increased to about 40,000.

He is in pain, every day, almost all of the time. In the morning, particularly, he has joint pain due to his abnormal gait. A “giddy-up in my hitch,” he calls it.

The telltale limp is improved by special shoes and a carbon fiber plate that runs under his foot and around his ankles.

“Without them, I’d walk like a duck,” he says.

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Jim was so determined to not allow his diagnosis to impact his life that he kept it a secret when he returned to work. But when his abnormal gait “reared its ugly head,” he was outed. People started asking about his knee or hip problems, and he decided it was time to fill everyone in.

At the start of the 2015-16 school year, a year and a half after his official diagnosis, Jim sat all of his coworkers down together and told them about the illness he had been hiding. He made a point of asking for no special treatment.

Sue posted her brother’s diagnosis on Facebook. It was the first time Jim had gone public with his diagnosis. His Facebook notifications multiplied; his extended family and friends were finding out for the first time.

Some of these people, and some strangers, took their response a step further, sending Jim letters, cards and notes.

“It’s uplifting; they always come with a positive message,” he says. “I still told people, ‘I don’t want sympathy. I just want to live as normal a life as possible, while I can.’”

Of the dozen or so ALS patients who were diagnosed at the Cleveland Clinic in 2014, Jim is the only one that still holds a day job.

In fact, he’s the only one that can walk into his appointments under his own power.

When Jim tells people this, he pauses, he takes a deep breath, and sighs, “Yeah.”

He sits back in his chair and exhales.

“Well, I’d be a liar if I said it wasn’t hard.”

In an effort to help find a cure, or at least to find treatments that slow or halt progression, Jim has opened himself up to help doctors with their research. By looking at his genes, researchers think they have found the biomarker for ALS, and hope to be able to reconfigure and re-insert the gene to help slow its growth.

Experimental treatments like that are too expensive for most people fighting the illness.

Jim signed up for a national ALS registry so that other researchers can contact him, because, he says, “There’s nothing left to lose.”

From the time of his diagnosis, Jim was never content to sit back and let death be the end of the conversation. That’s his explanation for his the almost unheard-of slow progression of his ALS, his refusal to give up and seclude himself.

“I chose my faith, my family and my work, over myself,” he says.

Today, Jim still has not filed for disability

THE MIAMI STUDENT MAGAZINE, FALL 2017

benefits. He thinks that if he keeps working, keeps improving other aspects of his health, then the ALS will stop.

Jim doesn’t look sick. His muscles bulge under his cardinal-red polo shirt. His nails always have a hard day of work’s worth of dirt under them. His hands have grown calloused and capable. His thick build and confident attitude do nothing to clue anyone in on his secret.

If you saw him at the gym, you wouldn’t know, either. Jim listens to music on his iPod during his morning workouts at the YMCA. He used to run, but as his legs stiffen, he has started working out on a stationary bike. Stretching his muscles and lifting weights with his arms, Jim makes sure that his body is healthy as possible.

Other than that hitch in his step and a breathing machine he’s recently started using at night to improve his pulmonary function, Jim hasn’t experienced any physical decline.

“Hopefully [I’ll] prove them wrong, hopefully show them that I don’t have [ALS],” he explains. “So I haven’t stopped since then.”

He also hasn’t stopped turning to his faith in light of his diagnosis. Before, Jim didn’t ever think he needed other people’s prayers; he had it handled all on his own.

But after being diagnosed, Jim found that people of his faith just had a better idea of what to say. And what to not say.

One of these people is Cindy Amerine, who was diagnosed with ALS in 2014. Jim met Cindy through his sister, Sue. Though Cindy lives in Naples, Florida, the two used to talk about their journeys, before Cindy’s disease prohibited her from speaking.

Cindy gave Jim a small silver coin — the kind that you see in baskets by the register in stores, with a raised angel on one side of it.

“Protect me” curls across the other side in cursive handwriting.

When Cindy could still talk, she wrote a song for ALS patients everywhere. It’s sung by her friends, Jo Ann and Moose. The “ALS Odyssey Anthem” sums everything up for Jim perfectly.

He opens his browser, quickly navigating to the song, and presses play.

The lyrics began to fall softly across the screen.

“I thank God she had the talent to write that,” he says, tears quietly gathering at the bottom of his eyes.

Jim’s blurry eyes follow the words as he threads the coin through his fingers, rubbing his thumb over its engraving, flipping it over and over. t

Jim with his granddaughter Lydia in Armstrong Student Center.

by Kylie Gambill

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I. My own dorm. The softness of my sheets hugging my body. My family and friends’ photos lining the cream-colored walls. The sweet scent of “Volcano” by Anthropologie permeating my room. My own home. My personal space.

Where my childhood stuffed animal, MiMi, sat watching with her beady eyes. God, I wish she would come to life and save me. My unfinished homework neatly organized on my desk. My Post-It pinned to my corkboard reminding me to take my heart medicine twice a day, every day: “Do not neglect your health! Take your medicine!” A thank-you note from a child I worked with at my camp job pinned on the same corkboard. My dear friend and roommate’s blankets hanging down from the bunk bed. Her note on the door to call her after class so we could get dinner. Some flowers I had brought from home, sitting on my windowsill, soaking up the sunlight. But all I saw was darkness. My emergency contact list hanging on that corkboard. I glanced at it as it hung there, mocking me.

My own dorm. Wasn’t this supposed to be a safe place?

The radiator rattling, warming up the room. But I was frozen.

This was not like the movies. This felt violent, a heinous act. I did not feel loved, excited, or special. I felt vulnerable. Frightened. I felt the scream in my throat, burning through my whole body, bleeding out of my eyes as one silent tear raced down my cheek. It stung my skin as if it were acid rain breaking my flesh. Even the scream couldn’t escape. No noise. Silence. Except for his heavy breathing, his grunts, his teeth grinding. His body rummaging through my own. A thief. The image of his disgusting smile, seared into my memory. I wanted to leave my body. Everything around me was empty.

Dark.

I was trapped in a glass cage, watching, completely helpless. Watching everything that was happening to me. His fingers running down my chest. Then up my legs.

“I love you,” he whispered. God, please help me.

I banged on the walls of the cage. I screamed and cried, but no one heard a thing. I couldn’t escape. My mind was doing all the right things. Calling for help. Running.

Fighting. Crying. The words clung in desperation at the back of my throat, scrambling to climb up and leap off my lips. Please stop. Someone help me! I’m not ready for this! Go away! Get off! STOP! But nothing. My body was frozen. A deer in the headlights.

I want to leave my body.

II. My body was frozen as terror burned through me like a wildfire. I felt like a sharp icicle had burst straight through me. Was this supposed to be romantic? Were his bony, frigid hands supposed to give me comfort? He acted as though this were romantic, as though he was warm and loving. Slowly, he undressed me. I was frozen. A deer in the headlights. My shirt on the floor, tossed aside in “the heat of passion.” My mind was racing, but my body was frozen. My body, exposed now. For him to ogle at.

For him to caress in reckless desire. For him to violate.

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THE MIAMI STUDENT MAGAZINE, FALL 2017

III. I remember the conversation that started it all: “Can I come over to your dorm, babe?” he asked.

“I mean, I’m studying for my test tomorrow and I’m trying to write my research paper.” I remember not really wanting him to come over that day. I just wanted some time to myself. He was always over. I never got any space.

He replied, “I promise I won’t bother you, I just want to see you.”

Giving in, I said, “Fine, but you’ll literally just have to be sitting there in silence because I don’t have time to watch T.V. or talk or anything.”

“Okay!” he said.

He came over and was quiet for about a solid twenty minutes. Then it all happened. So quickly, I didn’t even have time to think about how to stop it.

“Come here,” he said, ushering me towards him. “I want to cuddle for a little bit.”

“I told you, I’m studying. You promised you could chill here quietly and you promised you wouldn’t bother me.”

“I know, but I just want to hold you.” he whined.

I replied, “Maybe later. I really have to work now.”

He came over to where I was working at my desk. Hugged me. Kissed me. Pulled me away from my desk and over to my bed. The bed in which I would have to sleep every single night, knowing what had happened. Reliving it. The bed in which I would never be able to escape the nightmares.

Once he began his premeditated, heinous act, I couldn’t move. My body was frozen. A deer in the headlights.

IV.

After my assault, I felt flooded with violent thoughts.

Empty, alone in the dark depths of the night. My fault.

I failed. I should have ran. Screamed. Cried. Fought.

Anything. Why me? Why can’t I just die? I cried at night.

Cried myself to sleep. Cried so much I ended up heaving, unable to breathe. What little sleep I did get was always interrupted with the nightmares of reliving it.

I could still smell him. Suffocating me with his Axe cologne, the one he thought smelled manly. His sweat dripping onto me. The stench engulfing me, assaulting my nose. My eyes burning with tears.

I could still see him. Little images flashing across my mind. His moist lips, hungry for my body, curved in a sickly smirk of satisfaction at what he was about to do.

I could still hear him. The whisper of an “I love you.”

Love? This was not love. Not in the slightest sense. His heavy breathing was deafening me.

I could still feel him. The heat of his body; the friction of his body rubbing against mine. His cold hands parading through every inch of my body as if I was his to take. His to possess.

I smelled, heard, saw, and felt everything all at once, again and again. He thought he had pleased me. How could he think such a vile thing? How could he possibly think that I could be pleased by him? By his sinister smile. By his icy, sharp hands. By the weight of his body smothering mine. Unfathomable. Repulsive. Degrading.

V. I tried running from what happened. Running from myself. Block it all out. Pretend nothing happened. It was all just a bad dream. A terrible, terrible nightmare. I repeated this in my mind, trying to make myself believe it.

Normalize it. I tried to understand it all, an impossible feat. I tried to tell someone. I couldn’t. I was embarrassed. Ashamed. I remember waking in the middle of the night, desperate to tell someone.

3:27 A.M. I call my best friend. Three rings. Hang up.

3:35 A.M. I try again. One ring. Hang up. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. I didn’t know how.

I tried telling my parents. I couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly burden them with the image of their daughter – their youngest child, the girl who always smiled, the girl who always laughed – being violated in such a way. I couldn’t let them see my terror. My pain. I could not let them see that the light that once shone so brightly behind my eyes was no longer there. I could not let them see that there was no color or light in my life anymore. I could not let them see my emptiness. The knives stabbing me, scraping and scarring my mind with relentless glee. I couldn’t tarnish their picture of me, the happy girl, with such a disgusting assault.

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He thought he had pleased me. How could he think such a vile thing?

VI. So, for a long time, I didn’t tell anyone. I put on a mask of happiness every day. A smile. A laugh. Like the Phantom of the Opera, hiding my ugly scars. The scars inside me, in my heart, my soul, my mind. Inside, I felt like I was dying.

I certainly wanted to. I thought about death constantly, the sweet release it would give me. I dreamed about slipping away into a darkness different from the one I relived in my nightmares. A peaceful darkness. One of relief. I imagined escaping my body and standing in front of God. Waiting to hear the verdict: relief, heaven. Torment, hell.

I didn’t really care where I ended up anymore, as long as I did not exist in the physical world. I just wanted to disappear and leave this place. Leave my room? Leave my body? Leave the earth? I didn’t know. I just wanted to leave. I was no longer part of myself. I had no control of my own thoughts, of my own body. I saw him whenever I closed my eyes. Even for a split second. A simple blink.

Terror. I couldn’t feel pleasure anymore. I just felt him.

Violating me over and over and over again. A never-ending merry-go-round. Ha. “Merry.” A cruel joke.

VII. Months after my sexual assault, I still felt lost, confused. I still do sometimes, even two years later. I wanted to feel free. To fly away.

So I faced it. Faced what happened to me. Faced my body again. I was sexually assaulted. He violated my body and my mind. I was not ready for what he wanted to do. He did it anyway. I was sexually assaulted. My body and my mind were violated. I was sexually assaulted. He violated my body and my mind.

When I was in so much emotional and mental agony, that’s when I knew I had to fly away. To get out clean.

When I was drowning in the flood of pain, terror, and memory, when I let myself drown, that’s when I could finally breathe again. Blocking the assault out made everything worse. Facing it, even if I was drowning, even if it hurt to face it, made me clean. Clean from the sexual assault. Clean from all the negativity that crashed over me. Clean from him. t

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THE MIAMI STUDENT MAGAZINE, FALL 2017

DOING THE MOST By: Megan Zahneis

It wasn’t until Emma Shibley’s senior year of high school that her mother seriously questioned her extracurricular involvement.

One afternoon that fall, Emma arrived home from school with an announcement.

“Hey, Mom, guess what?”

Susan Shibley knew how that conversation would end.

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Mother and daughter had been there before, when Emma had joined the school band, the marching band, choir and ensemble, and again when she had gotten the leading role in the school musical.

Before that, there had been Girl Scouts, volleyball, cross-country and track, spelling bees, a competitive writing team and summer swimming and diving teams.

Emma didn’t even like swimming, but she knew she needed exercise and, equally as important, something to do in the summer.

There was always a reason, always a purpose for each of Emma’s many engagements. She was passionate about the music and the theatre and the writing, and she hoped to convert one or more of those pursuits into a meaningful career.

First, though, Emma had to graduate from high school. And now, as she told her mother that day, there was one more role she’d have to play along the way.

She was the newly-elected president of the Centerville High School National Honor Society. …

It was in the seventh grade when Emma’s classmates and teachers first began to notice that she wasn’t like most students.

Emma was everywhere, all the time.

It became her reputation – not just 24

the band geek or the choir girl or the volleyball player, but the kid who did everything.

She thrived on the rush of it all, on her good grades and creative talent and on her teachers’ praises.

“I was just talking about you with this other teacher that you have about how great you are,” they would tell her in the hallways.

They all know me. They all think well of me. Emma often thought.

She wouldn’t, couldn’t put that approval on the line by dropping a class or by skipping a club meeting. And besides, this was how her classmates knew her, how younger students looked up to her. But being busy was also how Emma withdrew from herself, from the thoughts that might otherwise paralyze her.

After all, aside from the usual horrors of adolescence, Emma had her grief to contend with. …

Emma were an escape hatch, granting her reprieve from her own mind.

“Not that it was a conscious thing, but I think that I was way more comfortable going to another practice or another rehearsal or another club or another something, something, something,” Emma says. “I just would rather do that than sit and feel these really bad feelings.”

Not only that, but success for Emma was an imperative. It was what she knew, what her school and social community expected of her. Success was an addiction, and it meant being as involved as possible, at all costs.

“Something I’m wrestling with is, ‘Am I striving for this stuff because I really will be happy [doing it], or do I think that these are my responsibilities or my duties?’” Emma said.

It all arose from what Emma calls “an externalized internal pressure to do as much as I can.” …

Lee Shibley Sr., Emma’s father, had died suddenly in 2006, leaving his wife and two children behind.

Emma was eight, not old enough to fully comprehend the notion of death but not young enough to be oblivious to its impact.

Middle school, then, became her proving ground, for grieving and for growing.

Indeed, extracurricular activities for

Denise Clark Pope has never met Emma Shibley, but understands her all too well.

Pope, a former high school English teacher and college composition instructor, is a senior lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.

She’s also the author of an awardwinning book on the subject – “Doing School”: How We Are Creating

THE MIAMI STUDENT MAGAZINE, FALL 2017

a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students – and a cofounder of Challenge Success, a nonprofit that helps schools calibrate an academic balance for their students.

Pope has met hundreds of Emma Shibleys – high-achieving and highly motivated students who, simply put, do it all. And like a growing wave of educators across the nation, she’s increasingly concerned about what it all means.

“Right now, it’s cool to be busy,” Pope said. “People say, ‘How are you?’

That’s a common phrase - ‘I’m good.

I’m just really busy.’ Is that a good thing? You don’t hear someone say, ‘I’m good, I have a lot of free time on my hands.’ That’s not an American value.”

For Pope, high school is ground zero for the achievement culture often perpetuated in college. As she writes in Doing School, the grades-first mentality employed by many high schoolers sets a dangerous precedent.

“The bottom line is you’ve got to get the A, you’ve got to get the scores, you’ve got to get the grades to get into college, which brings you the high-paying job and happiness,” Pope writes.

Hence the proliferation of jampacked after-school schedules, of AP classes and honor societies, and of staggering amounts of community service.

Pope likens the abundance of activities students now can choose to a smorgasbord.

“We’ve never had such a prolific, huge, wonderful, scrumptious buffet table in front of us, and you always overeat at buffets. The nutritionist will tell you, ‘Take one plate, go through the line once and walk away from the buffet table and don’t stay and graze.’ And everybody is staying and grazing these days,” Pope said.

Add on the pressures of social media, where one-upmanship reigns, and memes and media portrayals that draw straight lines between failing a calculus test and permanent unemployment and homelessness, and it’s easy to see why students feel overwhelmed.

At the root of it all, Pope says, is the question of what it means to be a successful student. “[This is] a very, very narrow notion of success…about performance and what you’ve done and how you do, as

opposed to who you are,” Pope said.

“When you measure success as grades and test scores and how many things are on your resume and how many clubs you’re in and what’s the best grad school you can get into and what’s the best job you can get and money, it’s this very narrow, extrinsic view of success as opposed to saying, ‘Success is about happiness and health and resilience, and giving back to society.’”

Pope’s rat race only compounds itself when students reach college. Faced with a preponderance of free time – college students may spend as little as 20 percent of their time each week in class – students look for ways to pass the time by getting involved.

“They are filling their schedules without realizing, ‘Wait a minute, it’s not like high school anymore. I have to build in time to read and time to study and also time to have a life and maybe hold down a job,’” Pope said.

Such involvement can easily lead to immense stress, as noted in the spring 2017 National College Health Assessment, conducted by the American College Health Association. Eighty-eight percent of undergraduate respondents had in the past year felt overwhelmed by all they had to do. Nearly 85 percent said they felt exhausted, 62 percent reported anxiety, and over half said they’d experienced more than average levels of stress. …

Emma Shibley was certainly among those ranks. During her freshman year at Miami, she lived Denise Pope’s cautionary tale. She registered for 20 credit hours and, at one point, found herself a member of 12 extracurricular organizations.

Many of those clubs met on the same day, so that Emma had meetings scheduled one day every week at 4 p.m., 5 p.m., 6 p.m., 7 p.m., 8 p.m. and 9 p.m.

Afterward, of course, there would be dinner to eat, readings to do and tests to study for – and, if Emma was lucky, a modicum of sleep to be gotten.

But for Emma,

a crowded calendar was a source of comfort. Every minute she was occupied, whether in class or a meeting or rehearsal or study session, was a minute spent being purposeful and productive.

“There’s a sense of control that I feel when my calendar is filled to the minute of a whole day, and I know exactly where I’m going and what I’m doing,”

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Emma explained. “When my calendar is full of stuff to do, I know I’m achieving something at the end of the day.”

That achievement wasn’t an insignificant one, in a lifestyle Emma compared to surfing.

“I feel like I’m constantly paddling really hard, like on a surfboard, and I sometimes ride the wave and it’s awesome. But that’s only because this huge wave came and the timing is right and I had the perfect surfing technique.”

Except when she didn’t have the perfect technique.

“I kind of delude myself, thinking that I have like a system that works, because of those moments where it all lines up,” Emma said. “I do get everything done, or I show up to everything I’m supposed to, or things just work out and I don’t drop any balls, I don’t let anybody down.

“But I feel like that is like the glorious exception and not the rule. That really makes me like dislike who I am, because I let people down a lot.”

Those people, too often, have wound up being Emma’s closest friends, whom she found herself too burnt out to support.

“I was really caught up in my own life, very self-absorbed,” Emma said.

“I was looking for support from [my] friends, as opposed to being aware that one of my best friends needs support.”

Was it all worth it?

Halfway through her collegiate career, Emma still wasn’t sure.

“You can’t really get the full 100% experience of anything, because you’re doing a solid 80% of everything. And that top 20%, I think, matters. I feel like that is the difference between being a part of something and belonging, you know?” …

In the summer before her sophomore year, Emma took six credit hours. That fall, she added 21 more, plus six more over J-term, 15 during her sophomore spring and another seven the following summer.

All the while, she served as assistant editor of Inklings literary magazine and was on the executive boards of two other student organizations, sang in two campus choirs, was part of the Sketched Out improv comedy troupe and the Scholar Leader Living-Learning

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THE MIAMI STUDENT MAGA-

Community, obtained a leadership certification through the Wilks Leadership Institute, wrote for The Miami Student and directed vocal music performance for a Stage Left musical.

She also studied abroad twice.

By the time Emma returned from six weeks in the Literary London program this past summer, she was exhausted.

She’d done it all, proving to herself that it was possible.

But she was waking up with nightmares about the fall schedule she’d planned for herself. When her mom pleaded with her to stop kidding herself about how busy she was, her usual denials began to sound less convincing.

Thus, Emma dropped a few classes before returning to campus for her junior year. She switched from a Bachelor of Music degree to a Bachelor of Arts in Music program, cutting the credit hours required for the curriculum in half. She took a semester’s leave from Sketched Out and resigned from another student organization’s executive board.

The constant motion that propelled Emma in semesters past, the extreme anxiety that forced her out of bed in the morning, was gone. In its place came complacency, a lack of motivation to go to class and what Emma described as a sense of being “emptied out.”

“You’ve been running on adrenaline for so long, years of your life, and all of a sudden you’re rewiring some of those things in your body and your brain, the physical and biological stuff,” Emma

said.

It was an addiction, and this was withdrawal.

“The crazy lifestyle of, ‘Emma’s always busy,’ that was how I felt defined by people who knew me,” Emma said.

“It was really hard to [say], ‘I don’t want to be that anymore.’” …

Emma says that now, she’s approaching an equilibrium.

“I’ve always been effusive and kind of a flitty person, but now I feel like I’m a more grounded presence. I have a different energy, I think, and a different internal metronome,” Emma says. “Anxiety was so much a part of my moment-to-moment life, literally all day, every day.

“Learning to exist without that is just … quieter.”

Emma’s schedule is still not a breezy one – she has double-majors in creative writing and music with a theatre minor.

She’s editor-in-chief of Inklings and vice president of Collegiate Chorale, and she picked up a part-time job at Kofenya Coffee House this fall. But her extracurricular obligations end there, and she finds herself with an open calendar most nights of the week.

And ultimately, that makes many things, including conversations with her mother, a whole lot easier.

“Hey, Mom, guess what?” Emma might say now.

“I’m figuring it out.”

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THE MIAMI STUDENT MAGAZINE, FALL 2017

High Street in 1953. Courtesy of Smith Library of Regional History. from the George R. Hoxie Photograph Collection

Finding Grace by: Jennifer Wenger

R

onald H. Tammen, Jr., was a ridiculously handsome guy from the Cleveland area who, in the spring of 1953, was majoring in business at Miami University. He seemed to have everything going for him: brains (he carried a respectable GPA); leadership potential (he was a sophomore counselor in a freshman men’s dorm); a certain degree of hipness (he played the string bass in a campus jazz band); and friends, both Greek (he was a Delt) and non-Greek. He was also one of the few students with a permit to have a car on campus, so he had that going for him too.

On an otherwise forgettable Sunday evening, April 19, 1953, the guy whom many would have considered to be a shoo-in as a bank president someday made a name for himself in another way — he vanished. It happened in the vicinity of Fisher Hall, a hulking old residence hall that has since been replaced by the Marcum Center. The story of Tammen’s disappearance has become legendary, mostly because of the remnants he’d left behind — an open textbook, a burning lamp, and most of the possessions he normally wouldn’t have been caught dead without, including his wallet, keys, 1939 Chevy, and string bass. Tammen’s disappearance was investigated by Miami officials, Oxford police, and even the FBI with no success. The author, who graduated from Miami in 1980, has been conducting her own search, talking to the people who’d known Tammen and uncovering as many new clues as she can in hopes of perhaps finally solving the case. This article describes a detour she took along the way.

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T

he instant I saw the photos, I knew that I was in for a long slog with a new addiction. I’d already been searching for the boy — Ronald Tammen — for several years by that time, but now I would need to find the girl, too. The two scenes, freeze-framed in black and white, had managed to survive one thrilling day that had come and gone ages ago — a day when stomachs fluttered and a pair of teens had adorned tux and gown with the weighty expectation of looking better than they’d ever looked in their young lives. A day when a mystery girl had accompanied Ronald Tammen to the 1951 Maple Heights High School prom.

Photo credit: Used with permission of Tammen family. Not for reproduction.

In the first shot, Ron and his date are faced forward, their eyes squinting into the sun. Her dress is white chiffon with a tiered bodice and simple jewel neckline. A similarly colored wrap hugs her neck and shoulders, bolero-style. Her corsage, an orchid, is enormous, bound to bother as the evening progresses. Her short hair is newly permed, the tight Lilt curls framing her face. (In cruel contrast, Ron’s hair glistens with product, an effort to tame his natural waves.) She is a dazzling girl next door, and anyone can see by her unprovoked smile that she’s been anticipating this moment for weeks.

That smile might have been what had led Ron to ask her to the prom in the first place. She seems to be genuinely nice.

Ron is standing to the right of his date. Their shoulders are touching, possibly for the first time. He’s wearing a white jacket and shirt with a perfectly knotted black bow tie. A carnation pinned to his left lapel is the same deep shade of gray as the handkerchief peering out of his pocket — probably crimson in real life. He’s dashing without really trying. A half smile on his lips and a slight tilt of his head give him swagger. If someone had told me I was looking at a youthful Paul Newman before he made it big, I would have believed it.

It’s the second photo, the one snapped when neither of the pair is quite ready, that draws me in most. Ron’s sister Marcia, who would have been eight, is standing in front of Ron and smiling at the camera, an ornery, lopsided grin. Ron’s date is turned toward Ron, while Ron faces forward and is looking downward. His date’s smile has dimmed a little and she appears to be looking past Ron, perhaps in response to his expression, which is…what? It could be simple shyness or modesty, self-conscious embarrassment at the prospect of exchanging a glance with someone he doesn’t know very well. But there’s something else. Sadness? A pang of worry? His head is bowed as if he’s done something wrong.

Photo credit: Used with permission of Tammen family. Not for reproduction.

“Do you happen to remember her name?” I’d asked Marcia when she’d raised the topic of Ron’s senior prom with me one spring day in 2011. We were sitting in a Denny’s in Cleveland, our inaugural meeting. It would be two more years until I had the actual photos in my hand, but the subject had always intrigued me.

“Grace,” said Marcia. “But I couldn’t tell you her last name. She was one of the girls who lived down the street.”

“Was she in Ron’s class?” I asked.

“I don’t know. She could have gone to a parochial school, for all I remember.”

It was a start. I’d already bought several Maple Heights High

School yearbooks on eBay, covering Ron’s sophomore, junior, and senior years. Ron had even signed a couple of them — a big, loopy signature in perfect cursive. It would be easy enough for me to leaf through the pages of the 1951 issue, Ron’s senior year, stopping only at the Graces, and then ask Marcia to help me narrow the field to the one and only Grace to grace Ron’s arm at the prom.

Grace was an uncommon name back then, unlike the Carols, Jeans, and Peggys that populated the pages. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a single Grace in Ron’s senior class. There was one Grace in the junior class, a Grace P., and there appeared to be no Graces in the sophomore class either, though I barely looked at that section. The students seemed so young. You’d think that I would have tried to track down the lone Grace immediately, but I didn’t. In my mind, if Ron could have taken anyone to the prom, as so many of his friends had claimed, there really wasn’t any reason for him to look beyond his own age group. Or possibly, I had already locked onto what Marcia had said: that Grace may have attended a parochial school. Her comment had reminded me of a similar remark made by a former classmate of Ron’s when I’d asked her if she’d remembered Ron ever dating anyone.

“Not anyone from our school,” she’d told me. If there was a dance, Ron was the type of guy who would bring a girl from another school, she’d said.

A nearby Catholic school would certainly qualify as another school.

But the possibilities were too wide open. I put Grace on the back burner and continued my main pursuit — trying to figure out what had happened to Ron. In the spring of 2013, Marcia and I were catching up over coffee at a Wendy’s near her new hometown, a farm community in northeast Ohio. It was one of our usual rendezvous spots whenever I came to visit. As my list of discussion topics was winding down, she said that she’d been doing some digging in preparation for our meeting. She turned to a carryall bag and began pulling out some of her most cherished possessions. There were 8” X 10”s of Marcia and her four brothers — stunning high school senior portraits that, for as long as Marcia could remember, had been lined up on a bookcase in her parents’ home, the same place where Mr. Tammen used to put his hat at the end of the day. There was a photo of her mother Marjorie when she was probably in her 20s, her eyes as big as a doe’s and her hair in a flapper-esque ‘do.

There was a yellow-bound report that Marcia had written when she was a junior in high school. Titled “The Tammen Ancestors,” it described the origins of the two sides of her family and included a chart filled with relatives’ names, many of which had already become familiar to me. Marcia’s narrative described how the Tammens (on her father’s side) and McCanns (on her mother’s) had conducted their lives — where they had lived, how they had been employed, and whom they had married and conceived. There was one exception: Ron Jr. His life had been summed up in one forlorn sentence: “Ronald Henry Tammen Jr. was born July 23, 1933.” could understand why Marcia had so little to say about Ron. What else could she have written about him? That he had disappeared from his second floor room in Miami’s Fisher Hall when he was a sophomore and no one had seen him since? That would have sounded too tragic. Besides, everyone in Maple Heights had already heard the story by then. There was no reason to bring it up here. Also, at that time, the family still believed that Ron was alive,

His life had been summed up in one forlorn sentence: “Ronald Henry Tammen Jr. was born July 23, 1933.”

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I

Grace and Ronald before Prom in 1951. Used with permission of Tammen family.

Grace with her Home Ec Class, center back. Used with permission of Maple Heights High School

and there was no telling what had happened to him. For all Marcia knew, he was a grown man with a new name and identity living in a sunny climate and raising a family of his own — one that would never make it onto her chart. By then, memories of her brother were receding so fast that one of the few things that Marcia could state unequivocally was that he had indeed been born.

The next item that Marcia pulled from her bag was a picture in a frame. I immediately recognized it as a painting of Jesus standing outside a cottage door, knocking. The artist was Warner Sallman, an American painter who had created many of the iconic religious images that I’d seen since I was a kid in Sunday school. He’d also painted the close-up, profile view of Jesus with shoulder-length hair and beard. I’d seen that image so often in hospitals and nursing homes that I figured it was Jesus. The brown and gold tones made it appear ancient, as if it had been pulled from 2000-year-old Jerusalem rubble. But no, it was painted in 1940 by a guy from Chicago. Marcia’s picture, the one titled “Christ at Heart’s Door,” was painted a couple years later.

It wasn’t until Marcia had turned the frame around that I understood its significance. Marcia had won the picture as a child in a competition at church after memorizing 18 verses of the Bible. At the top, Marcia’s instructors had inked in the date of the competition: April 19, 1953, the same day that Ron had disappeared. What they’d written beneath the date gave me a chill: “Only one life—‘Twill soon be past. Only what’s done for Christ will last.” Did the universe already know what was about to happen? Was Ron’s life about to come to an abrupt end that day?

That’s not why Marcia had held onto the print, however. The painting itself had spoken to her and, for that reason, accompanied her throughout her life, tacked to the assorted walls of the houses and apartments she’d resided in since she was ten. Only after a friend pointed out the date to her did she realize that she’d been living with that picture for as long as she’d been carrying the grief of losing her brother.

As we prepared to leave, Marcia mentioned that she also had a couple videotapes that I was welcome to borrow. She suggested I drop by her home the next day to pick them up, along with all of the other materials that she said I could take with me to duplicate. As I drove away the following day, my priceless cargo in a manila envelope on the passenger seat, it occurred to me that Marcia and I had turned a corner. I had finally earned her trust. Out of all the people who had written about Ronald Tammen’s disappearance — and after 60 years, there were quite a few — I had managed to convince

Marcia that I was in it for the long haul. We both wanted the same thing: to find out what happened to her brother, and we would be allies in that search.

The first video, titled “The Phantom of Oxford,” was a half-hour documentary produced in 1976 by a TV station in Dayton. I’d already seen that tape, a re-dredging of all of the details surrounding the mystery, and featuring interviews with some of the main players. The second video was shorter and more recent. It had been produced by a Cincinnati news team when investigators were trying to determine if a dead body found in Georgia in 1953 could have been Ron. (It wasn’t.)

Within the first few seconds of the news segment, there it was: a photo of Ron and his date to the high school prom. Moments later came the second photo, the one of Ron gazing downward. Grace was on the front burner once again.

I screen-grabbed stills of the prom photos, along with several other shots of the family, and had a few copies made of each. I then mailed a set to one of Ron’s classmates and former neighbors who agreed to let me know if she or anyone else she kept in touch with recognized Ron’s date. After several weeks of hearing nothing, I revisited the possibility that his date might have attended a parochial school. I recalled that one of Ron’s friends, whom I’d interviewed a couple years earlier, had attended a Catholic high school in the area.

“Do you happen to recognize this person?” I asked him in a Facebook message. “I think her first name is Grace.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t,” he replied.

Of course, in the back of my mind I’d always wondered if Grace might not have been her name after all. I knew how my memory worked when it came to the names of people I used to go to school with. Some names I could call up, but others stayed on the tip of my tongue, stuck at the first letter. Perhaps her name was actually Gladys or Gloria. I ran my theory past Marcia, who said no, she was quite sure it was Grace.

Her certainty increased my momentum. I found an online database of yearbooks, which made it possible to search electronically for all of the Graces who attended schools in the area, both public and private.

The first person to turn up was Grace P., the same girl I’d spotted in the 1951 Maple Heights yearbook as a junior. Her senior picture looked somewhat like the Grace in my photo, though not identical.

I found her married name from a brother’s obituary and gave her a call.

No one picked up, so I began to leave my message: “Hi, I’m lookTHE MIAMI STUDENT MAGAZINE, FALL 2017

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ing for a person named Grace, who graduated from Maple Heights High School in 1952. I’m writing a book about the disappearance of Ronald Tammen…”

“Hello?” Grace P. interrupted.

That was par for the course. Early in my project, I was pleased to discover that the people I was attempting to track down for interviews — people in their late 70s and early 80s — picked up their phones no matter what, and usually on the first or second ring. But within the last year or so, many were letting their calls roll over to voicemail. The robots and scam artists had finally jaded them too.

When I mentioned the name of Ronald Tammen, however, the screening ended, and we were talking one-to-one. Ron Tammen was my instant in.

“You’re writing a book about Ronald Tammen?” she asked.

“I am,” I said, and then explained a little about my project. “I don’t suppose you went to the prom with him, did you?”

“No,” she laughed. She said she hadn’t dated very much in high school. She had an Italian father who was pretty strict in that regard.

I’d already known her answer would be no. If she’d attended the prom with Ronald Tammen, she would have volunteered that information immediately, without my asking. I followed up with a question that I asked anyone who had known Ron in high school or college. Unfortunately, it was a question that usually yielded disappointing results.

“What kinds of memories do you have of Ron back then?”

“Not much, I’m afraid,” she said. “I was just a junior when he was a senior, so I didn’t know him very well.”

That was common. Ronald Tammen wasn’t exactly a well-known guy. Sure, everyone knew him — they’d seen him playing in the orchestra or singing in the choir. They admired him. But very few had stories to share.

I was back to square one. I returned to the database, and searched for more Graces in the Cleveland area during the 1950s. This time, another Grace from Maple Heights popped up, one I hadn’t noticed before. Her name was Grace H., and her last name, with its shortage of vowels, sounded Eastern European. She was standing in the back row of the home economics club in the 1951 yearbook. She’d managed to fly below the radar because, for whatever reason, she hadn’t appeared in any of the class photos that year — not with the seniors and not in the homeroom shots of juniors, sophomores, or freshmen. Her smile was unmistakable, though, as were her curls.

She was the one.

I checked an online phone directory on the off chance that she was still going by her maiden name, but came up empty. After conducting a few additional Google searches, I landed on a contact page for several alumni of Maple Heights High School. Miraculously, among the names included under the class of 1952, there was Grace’s. In addition to the discovery that her new last name is gentler to the ear and by far more common, there was an email address to a customer service account at a small business in Georgia. Even if she were no longer working there, I figured, someone might be able to point me to her home address and phone number, which they promptly did.

Roughly an hour after finding Grace’s name online, I was dialing her phone number. A couple seconds after that, I was talking to her machine.

“Hi, I’m writing a book about Ronald Tammen…,” I began.

There was a beep and some jostling and then a woman’s voice.

The voice was deep and full, nothing like what I’d imagined from the girl in the photos. It was the voice of a woman who’d been around the block several times over. It was a voice like those of some of my rowdier aunts on my father’s side — not fancy, not terribly feminine, but warm and jovial and strong.

“You’re writing a book about Ronnie Tammen?” she asked, the 32

THE MIAMI STUDENT MAGAZINE, FALL 2017

Grace in 2017 word Ronnie revealing the utmost in familiarity, the word Tammen accented with disbelief. “He took me to the prom!”

Deep down, I felt myself do a double cartwheel.

“I was just thinking about him yesterday!” she exclaimed. And as I filled her in on my book project and the hoops I’d jumped through to find her, Grace began to cry.

Grace and I continued our conversation the following Friday, once I’d had the chance to pull together the million or so questions I wanted to ask her, and once she had time to recover from being blindsided by a certain ghost in her past. Marcia was right — Grace had lived in the same neighborhood as the Tammens, though her time there wasn’t exactly carefree. Grace’s mother had been a single parent in an era when divorce was considered a suitable reason for shunning in the eyes of neighbors.

“My mom was the anomaly,” she told me. “My mom was the one they talked about. They didn’t have any reason to talk about her. All she did was work all the time. But that’s what single moms do — they work all the time.” I was beginning to see where Grace had gotten her moxie.

“So the year that Ron took you to the prom — he was a senior and you were a junior?” I asked. I was basing this on the date provided on the alumni page I’d found online.

“I was a sophomore,” she corrected me.

Impressive. A junior going to the prom with a senior is one thing, but a sophomore and a senior? That was a much bigger deal.

Grace described herself as an average student, adding that, other than her involvement in the home economics club, she wasn’t a joiner. (This is in contrast to Ron, who signed on to just about everything that was offered.) Still, she managed to break into a circle of popular girls whose ranks included several cheerleaders and one majorette.

So many years later, it was hard for her to explain her reason for being in that particular clique.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 35

Finding Grace FROM PAGE 32

“Maybe I was the nice one,” she offered. She admitted that she was pretty and well-liked. In 1952, the year after Ron graduated from high school, she attended the prom with the star of the football team, the highest rung there is on the high school social ladder.

Grace and her friends called themselves the “slick chicks,” a name she regretted many years later after she became a member of the National Organization for Women. When she spilled that detail, I thought about how surprised Ron would have been to see his friend — pretty, well-liked, average Grace — marching in front of the White House in support of a woman’s right to equal pay.

Another surprise for him would have been the news that she’d gotten married right before her senior year of high school.

“I was precocious,” she said. “The first one who got married, the first one who had babies, the first one who got a divorce.”

“Cool,” I said with a laugh.

No, I didn’t think it was cool that she’d gotten married and divorced at such a young age. I’m not a total jerk.

It was that my perception of Grace had been changing by the minute. Here was a woman who had made a few bad gambles in her life and still managed to come out for the better. A survivor.

But that was all post-Ron. When Ronald Tammen asked Grace to the prom, she was still young and naïve and, like him, didn’t have any dating chops to speak of. She doesn’t exactly remember when she first became aware of Ron, but if her Maple Heights yearbooks are any indication, it was in 1950 during her freshman — his junior — year. In 1948 (when she was in the seventh grade and he was in the ninth), he signed his name — that big, loopy signature — but nothing more. His signature doesn’t appear anywhere in her 1949 yearbook. But in 1950, he penned the following: “To the girl with the smile in her voice.”

Grace and Ron had dated a few times before and after the prom, sweet little meet-ups featuring movies and ice cream, but going to the prom, that was the high point of their relationship. She was over the moon with excitement.

“I thought I was a big deal because a senior took me to the prom,” she said.

“He looked really good, and he was smart, and he was musical. I really liked 35

that. It was a good package.”

“What do you remember most about that night?” I asked.

“It seems to me that it was in a big, very nice hotel, and the weather was very nice and there was a big patio, like an outdoor space,” she said. “I just remember walking outside and it was so…the weather was perfect and it was a beautiful night and, oh my gosh, you know?

It was just…”

At that critical point, our phone connection broke up, and I didn’t catch her last few words, which she followed up with a girlish giggle. I knew where she was headed, though. It was sublime. It was dreamlike. It was a moment so special that, above all of the other moments that had come and gone that evening, it seared itself into her consciousness, forever occupying brain space for as long as she’d live.

Several months after our conversation, while preparing her house to go on the market, Grace would discover the program from that evening. The dance had been held in the ballroom of the Park Lane Villa, an iconic building in Cleveland that had started out in the 1920s as a luxury hotel. The date was May 19, 1951, and they’d dined on fruit cup, garden salad, Swiss steak, mashed potatoes, and peas. There were dinner rolls and pie and ice cream, and, to drink, they had their choice of coffee or milk. Grace had saved the program from all those years ago. Grace had saved the program! So, yeah, it was a special evening.

“Did you ever neck with him in the back seat of a car?” I asked.

“Probably, but not so far that I even remember it because it was not…he was not…” She paused a beat. “In the next couple of years, I came to find out what aggressive was. He was not aggressive.

He was nice. He was comfortable. He was my friend. And you know, there’s not any adjective that I could find to describe him that wasn’t a good thing.”

Weeks later, Ron would sign Grace’s yearbook for the last time. In it, he wrote, “To Grace: The sweetest and prettiest sophomore girl. I guess you know how I feel about you and I can only hope that you can go through life having a good time as I had going with you. Best of luck always, Ron.” There was no formal break-up, although his yearbook sentiment almost conveys a tone of goodbye. “Best of luck.” She doesn’t recall ever seeing him during his visits home after he started at

THE MIAMI STUDENT MAGAZINE, FALL 2017

Miami.

Grace thought about the person she was during those years and what Ron might have seen in her — beyond her smile and her voice.

“He was good-looking and he was on the wrestling team. He was somebody around school,” she said. (And by somebody, she means someone of substance.) “He could have taken anybody to the prom. And the fact that he took a sophomore says that he was shy and he was reaching to somebody who was not threatening to him.”

She was devastated when she heard the news about Ron. By then, she was a newlywed with a new last name. In the weeks that followed, she would worry about what might have happened to him, until she eventually concluded that someone he trusted must have lured him to a terrible end. As her life continued moving forward — after she married for the second, and then the third time — she’d think of him every so often, particularly when she read in the news that someone had gone missing. Decade after decade, she continued to carry Ronnie Tammen inside her, protected from view.

Protected, that is, until 60-some years after the fact, when a late-morning phone caller seeking information about her friend caused the tears to flow as if it had happened that very week. As if she were the girl from the photo who had just been told that the handsome, perfect boy who had taken her to the prom was nowhere to be found. t

Decision FROM PAGE 13

In the line for the bathroom, they chatted as if no time had passed at all.

Then, during a lull in the conversation, Emily spoke up.

Oh, by the way, she said, I got the offer from Holy Cross and I’m going to take it.

She watched her friends’ faces fall as they stood in front of her. Then Maddie jumped into Emily’s arms.

I’m going to miss you so much! she cried. Avery agreed. The girls congratulated Emily, saying they were so happy for her but so sad that she was leaving.

Something tugged at Emily then.

Transferring to Holy Cross would

mean leaving Maddie and Avery, and all of her other friends at Miami, behind. She had had a hard enough time adjusting to her freshman year of college, even when she knew people who were on campus with her; would she be able to do that all over again, and this time at a place where she didn’t know anyone at all?

Avery and Maddie were trying to be supportive, but Emily could see in their faces that they were depressed by her news. At that moment, she realized that she would never be as happy at Holy Cross as she was at Miami.

As the girls washed their hands and headed out of the bathroom, Emily knew what her final decision was going to be.

She wasn’t telling anyone yet, but she felt sure that this decision would finally be the right one.

A week later, Emily texted Keli again.

Hey kel! Just wanted to let you know I changed my mind…I had definitely made up my mind to go but when I told people about it, I realized that i was unhappy and that I was almost forcing myself to want to go. I’m talking with the coach tomorrow to explain all of that. I’m excited about my future here though!!

A few minutes later, Keli replied: Im happy for you! Way to follow your heart. Happiness will always lead to success… In hockey, life, love and everything you do! Looking forward to having another babysitter in town. ;) The next evening, Emily found herself pacing outside Havighurst Hall, her phone in her hand. She was nervous

about calling Coach Jackson. Though she knew she was making the right decision by staying at Miami, some of her old doubt was creeping into her brain.

This was it. Once she said it, she could never take it back.

She finally screwed up her courage and called, telling Coach Jackson, I can’t ask my parents to spend that much money. But the real reason was so much more than that.

To Emily’s relief, Coach Jackson was understanding. You have to do what’s best for you, she said. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you. I’ll be rooting for you in the future.

The call lasted barely three minutes.

After it was over, Emily felt a little bittersweet. She had worked for this for so long, and now she had said no. Her on-again, off-again dream was done.

The prospect of being a Division I varsity athlete was gone, but so was all the stress of having something to prove — to coaches, to other players, and to herself.

Really, the biggest emotion she felt was relief.

A year later, after a full day of classes, Emily walks back to Wells Hall, where she lives. It is October once again, and Miami’s trees are resplendent in glorious golds, oranges, and reds. The evening sun is beginning to dip below the tree line.

Wow, Emily thinks. This school is so beautiful.

She is in her sophomore year at Miami, and completely confident that she made the right decision to stay. She loves it here. She is studying political science and interning with the Ohio

Democratic Party. She has a job at the package center. For the first time in her life, she is playing field hockey — for Miami’s club team — just to have fun.

Sometimes, still, for no apparent reason, there are moments when she simply thinks, Wow, I’m really happy that I decided to stay. Maybe it’s the opportunities she finds here, or the friends she’s made. Maybe it’s because the pressure is gone.

Maybe it’s a combination of all of these.

Maddie and Avery were thrilled when Emily told them about her decision to stay at Miami. Her parents, however, were a different story.

Her dad had been furious. Emily usually tunes him out when he yells, but she remembers him yelling on the phone.

Her mom was calmer, upset but wanting to understand what was going through Emily’s head, why she had turned the offer down. She and Emily’s dad weren’t happy for a while, but eventually, they came to terms with the decision.

You needed to talk to us about this, her parents said. But Emily had made this decision for herself — for her own reasons, not anyone else’s.

As Emily crosses Oak Street on her way home, she passes other students on their way to class or dinner or their own dorms. Cars rumble by on the street next to her, and, just beyond the next building, she can see Wells.

She lives here — in this place that is colorful and vibrant and full of life.

This is where she’s supposed to be, and now, finally, she’s sure of it. t

THE MIAMI STUDENT MAGAZINE, FALL 2017

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this semester’s news? We’ve crammed facts from 22 of the school year’s top stories into this crossword.

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3. Presidential pup 6. A student’s use of a racial slur in this app sparked campus-wide conversation about racism at Miami.

7. This Miami volleyball coach

Crossword by: Emily Williams Cartoon by: A.J. Newberry

earned her 700th career victory this October.

9. The _____ at College, an outpatient center for students struggling with addiction or alcohol abuse, opened this semester.

12. A star from this popular TV show visited campus this semester to share her struggle with addiction.

15. This fall, Miami faced this school in football for the first time since 1909.

16. Over the summer, Uptown restaurant 45 ____ closed for renovations.

18. Up until 2008, the ___ was operated by volunteers (abbrev.).

20. Retired Oxford businessman Jack _____ gave significant aid to four city council candidates, sparking rumors that they were running as a bloc.

22. Miami debuted the Heritage Logo to raise awareness about the university’s relationship with the _______________.

DOWN: 1. Students and city officials have been in talks this semester to bring a movie theater to Oxford. The city has been without one since the ________ Theatre permanently closed its doors.

2. Only 17.7 percent of Miami undergrads completed this university-wide survey.

4. Last month, ASG hosted a fo-

rum for international students to ____ their concerns about inclusion in student government.

5. This local restaurant closed suddenly after 20 years of business on High Street.

8. This year, ______ candidates ran for four open Oxford city council seats.

9. At the Black State of the Union forum on Nov. 7, students asked questions using the hashtag #WhatIsLoveAnd_______.

10. Miami and Oxford joined the “___ in Our Town” initiative.

11. They added three new officers and increased bike patrol this year.

13. Miami introduced a new networking and recruiting tool to students this semester, Hand_____.

14. This year, Dr. Vicka Bell-Robinson was named the new director of this office (abbrev.)

17. Nickname for tech guru who spoke at Millett Hall in October.

19. Pres. Greg Crawford published a statement urging Congress to protect college students in the U.S. who were covered by the now-dismantled ____ program.

21. This university institution is searching for a new dean (abbrev.).

Think you’ve solved it?

Go to miamistudent.net/ mag-crossword to check your answers.

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