SPRING 2007
From blueprints TO BRIO
SPRING 2007 volume 37, number 3
EDITOR
Susan Rosenberg srosenbe@skidmore.edu A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R
Maryann Teale Snell msnell@skidmore.edu CLASS NOTES EDITOR
Mary Monigan mmonigan@skidmore.edu DESIGNER
Michael Malone WRITERS
Paul Dwyer ’83 Kathryn Gallien William Jones Peter MacDonald Barbara A. Melville Andrea Wise EDITORIAL OFFICES
College Relations Skidmore College 815 North Broadway Saratoga Springs, NY 12866 phone: 518-580-5747 fax: 518-580-5748 online: www.skidmore.edu/scope SKIDMORE COLLEGE
Main number: 518-580-5000 Alumni Affairs and College Events: 518-580-5670 College Relations: 518-580-5733 Admissions: 518-580-5570 or 800-867-6007 Scope is published quarterly by Skidmore College for alumni, parents, and friends. Printed on recycled paper (10% postconsumer)
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C O N T E N TS
F E AT U R E S
10 ST I C K
WITH ME, KID What happens when Skidmore faculty and staff become Skidmore parents?
18 H A R M O N I C
PROGRESSION Cover story: New music building on the fast track
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21 A M E R I C A’ S
AGING CRISIS Faculty and alumni experts share insights on elder care
D E PA R T M E N T S OB S E RVAT I O N S 2 C A M P US S C E N E 3 C O N N EC T I O N S 26 W H O , W H AT, W H E N 3 0
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C L A S S N OT ES 3 1 S A R ATO G A S I D E B A R 5 6
21 56 ON THE COVER: Zankel Music Center plans move toward realization (Ewing Cole Architects and Michael Malone)
observations L E T T E R S
Segregation redux?
experience in American society is what has been felt and experienced by, literIn response to the winter Scope’s ally, millions before you. “Outreach or Sanctuary” feature, here I think this issue of “diversity” is an is my opinion about identity-based exploitation of a set group of people, clubs: I am opposed to them. (I’m and those people don’t even know it. aware that my reaction is evidence of What significance is it that Skidmore’s how this subject is defined by each student population includes 15 percent individual's experience and will not students of color? What percentage generate consensus. There is no right will be enough or ideal? And just what or wrong on this subject, and the conexactly is “diverse” anyway? Has anyversation regarding it has no beginning one asked of late if there are enough or end.) Italians, Scottish, Irish, Germans, Dutch, My childhood took place in the Swedes, or Russians in the student pop1960s and ’70s, when one of the priulation? And what exactly is “awaremary social issues that consumed our ness” of cultural diversity? Is there country was racial desegregation. And some exam that will require the entire so by the time I arrived at Skidmore in student population to recite the com1979, it did not seem logical to intenplete list of countries, religions, ethnic tionally segregate myself from the Skidgroups, and languages spoken on the more community by socializing with planet? Just how far will these identityonly my own kind and by joining the based clubs go? Is there yet a deaf stuAsian students’ club (which I think was dents’ society or a blind club? Aren’t a new club on campus then). On our blonds still the only true minority on first day on campus in our freshman the planet? Or is that redheads? year, everyone felt the same way that I I challenge the so-called “minority” did. We were all strangers having just students on campus to close down their arrived in a new place. We were all special-interest clubs for one semester. uncomfortable and nervous. Have no meetings, hold no events. Today’s people of color have been Conduct this experiment for one brainwashed in a negative way. It is semester, and use the time otherwise arrogant and selfspent with these absorbed of them to DO THE WRITE THING clubs for getting think that they to know your felhave the monopoly low students and Scope welcomes letters to the on feeling out of other members editor. Send your comments by place, uncomfortof the Skidmore e-mail to srosenbe@skidmore.edu, able, or different community better, fax to 518-580-5748, or mail to from the general and for participatScope, Skidmore College, society. Or that ing in the campus 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866. Letters may because their skin and wider combe edited for clarity and length. color is some spemunity just like cial shade it offers everyone else. them a special Stop splinterplacecard, a right to stand at the head ing and dividing, separating and segreof some mysterious line to receive spegating. Isn’t this what we want from cial treatment. Here is my recommenour politicians? Isn’t this what we want dation to today’s young people of for our country? Then why not start at color: Read and study the history of Skidmore? the United States of America. What Melanie J. Lee ’83 you feel about your place and your New York, N.Y
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AD LIB Thoughts on the “id”…
4One of the problems with working
too much is that we don’t get a chance to act on our id impulses. There is always something else to do rather than indulging in that forbidden pleasure. Most of the people I know who exercise their ids regularly are either unemployed or in jail. DONNA BRENT, visiting assistant professor of education
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4Although pondering the psyche is fun, I think it can also be dangerous. At some point we cannot blame our subconscience for our actions. After all, no matter how many divisions we make of human consciousness, we are each but one person, and therefore responsible. HEATHER MOORE ’08, history and government major
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4If you can call some people egotistical, can you call others idtistical? In any event, I always had to look “id” up! That’s a word that looks like it should never be spoken. DENNIS CONWAY, director of campus safety
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4My paintings are maps of a place
somewhere between the land of Nod and the land of Id. JOSH DORMAN ’88, artist
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4Why will someone always talk when
a certain issue arises and never contribute when anything else is on the table? Why will a student fixate on a seemingly random issue in class, when it seems out of place for her character? These habitual hot buttons are instances where I can see “the id” in play. My own impulsive nature makes it feel like the lines between my id, ego, and superego are pretty blurry. MOLLY APPEL ’07, anthropology major
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PICK YOUR OWN. What concept would you like to ad lib about? If there’s a topic you’d like to see addressed in this column, send an e-mail to srosenbe@skidmore.edu or call 518-580-5747.
campus scene
Pond scum. It’s not just trash talk. It’s a trash purifier, capable of glomming onto pollutants and even thriving on them. Pond slime is made of biofilms— colonies of microbes, often a mix of one-celled algae and bacteria, whose cells are glued together by their secretions. The glue is EPS, which stands for both extracellular polymeric substance and exopolysaccharide. Sewage-treatment engineers and pollution researchers already know that algae, like certain larger plants, can neutralize a variety of impurities in water. But the exact role of EPS in algal biofilms is less well studied—unless you’re biology major Katie Scheu ’07 and her algaphile professor, David Domozych. When Scheu wanted to learn how to use Skidmore’s scanning electron microscope, Domozych suggested a research project on EPS. Along with sticking the biofilm onto stones or
other solids, EPS may supply nutrients for the member microbes, and its expansion can even help them move by gliding along with it. Domozych is currently studying how cells produce EPS and how it forms and A STICKY BALL OF ONE - CELLED ALGAE , GREATLY ENLARGED BY A maintains SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPE biofilms in ed into four glass containers, which the acidic environment of bogs. receive a dose of nitrates, or phosOne of Scheu’s projects, using water phates, or both, or no added nutrients. and sediment collected from a beaver After a day or two Scheu checks for pond near Skidmore, entails “micropopulation changes in each microcosm. cosm experiments.” Samples are dividIn the Mahoney Electron Microscopy Lab, she can clearly see and count individual organisms; in fact, she can actually see strands of EPS material. (Once, she even saw a clump of diatoms that was rolled into an improbably perfect little ball by microcurrents in the pond.) Alternatively she uses the Lintilhac Microscopy Lab to gauge numbers of different algae by the way their pigment molecules glow under a confocal fluorescence laser scope. General results so far suggest that blue-green algae and diatoms multiply when nitrates alone are added, but desmids thrive better with both nutrients. Another experiment, Scheu explains, is to compare different species of desmids by adding tiny fluorescent beads to their environment and using a fluorescence microscope to see if any desmid biofilm gathers up the beads as it grows. “If so, that would suggest that When making your gift to Skidmore, remember that it’s the EPS can collect and hold particles that number of alumni who give that makes our college strong. We know it encounters.” you work hard to bring home the bacon; but even if you can’t give Working with pond slime also has its much, your participation is crucial to the whole. low-tech aspects, she admits. “When it’s You don’t need to break the bank. Call 800.584.0115 or time to clean out the containers, I have give online at www.skidmore.edu/makeagift. to use a razor blade to scrape these films off the inside surfaces.” —SR Skidmore College. Creative Thought Matters.
We’re all about reasonable.
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KATIE SCHEU ’07, SKIDMORE MICROSCOPY IMAGING CENTER
Microgreens
campus scene
Retirement plans: dig in
GARY GOLD
Isabel brown Associate professor of dance Isabel Brown came to Skidmore as an instructor in 1969. Besides choreographing annual productions that often featured classic dances of India, she gave numerous lectures (on topics ranging from “A Ballet Tour of the Great Cities of the World” to “Dancing and Metaphor” and “Swan Lake…Again”), offered master classes at regional schools, and regularly took her students on field trips to see the New York City Ballet. Among her courses—which included modern/contemporary dance technique, choreography, and dance history—her favorite, Brown says, was “Bharata Natyam, the dance of South India, where I saw students blossom into dedicated performers of an ancient and beautiful form.” Teaching in the Liberal Studies and Scribner Seminar programs (“Stravinsky and Balanchine”; also “War and Peace and Eugene Onegin”) gave her an opportunity to connect her background in dance performance and history with literature and the fine arts, she adds. Brown will miss her students and “the physical and mental excitement they contributed” to her classes. She and her husband are planning “a long vacation in Jasper, Canada, and an extended autumnal stay in New Hampshire (we love mountains!). Retirement will unfold,” she says. “In another year or so, I will know better what to make of it.”
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Paul Corr Paul Corr, associate professor of management and business, has been at Skidmore since 1981, teaching accounting, finance, theory, business organization and management—and, of course, MB107. The best, he says, was “Corporate Partnership Taxation”: “That topic may not excite most people, but the students loved it. “I never really looked at teaching as work, but mainly as something I enjoyed,” he adds. “It’s learning and teaching. Students learn, I learn. That’s the way the classroom should work. If you can excite students and get them involved, then it’s a lot of fun for everyone.” Corr has a fondness for the Skidmore community and atmosphere (especially the Spa snack shop) and plans to stay connected. His retirement agenda includes traveling to France (he lived there for a few years and has a PhD in French literature), and staying involved in business (he has a small investment company and is a longtime board member of Espey Manufacturing and Electronics Corp., a Saratoga Springs–based maker of specialty power systems for military and industrial equipment). “And I play basketball,” he says. “Not well; people laugh. But I enjoy getting a quick workout, and the camaraderie. I don’t like to work too hard. I love teaching, I love playing basketball.”
Joan Douglas Professor Joan Douglas started at Skidmore in 1969 and chaired the psychology department for several years. A clinical/developmental psychologist, her research interests include gender issues in children’s emotional development and the effects of parent death on adults. Her work has been published in research journals including Child Development, Developmental Psychology, and Omega. A 1978 National Science Foundation award inspired Douglas to help develop Skidmore’s women’s studies program and teach “Psychology of Women” (her favorite class). Her parttime clinical practice also enriched her classroom teaching and led to her volunteering with the Albany CASA (Court Appointed Special Assistant) program, advocating for children in family court proceedings. Her interactions with students—in the classroom and as an advisor—were “interesting and rewarding,” she says. A recent memorable moment came with a twist of humor. Douglas was saying good-bye to her last class, after thirty-eight years of teaching. “I made a mistake and said fifty-eight years. The students figured I must be about ninety and looked horrified.” In retirement Douglas plans to “travel, read all the books I’ve wanted to read, visit with my nine grandchildren, and sit by the ocean.”
gerry erChak Anthropology professor Gerry Erchak came to Skidmore in 1976. Over the years he received numerous grants for research in Brazil, South Africa, Micronesia, and elsewhere. Among his Skidmore classes were “Anthropological Perspectives,” “Psychological Anthropology,” “Sub-Saharan African Cultures,” and “Human Brain and Mind Evolution”; he also developed recent courses including “The Swahili Coast: Crossroads of Culture” and “HIV/AIDS: A Global Perspective.” He especially enjoyed two travel classes he taught with UWW colleague Chris Whann in Ghana and Tanzania. What strikes Erchak about Skidmore is that “each individual really matters, and you can get to know personally people at every level of the college.” The place has become “an extension of my house and my self,” he says, and he will miss all “the little quotidian pleasures.” Highlights of his teaching career have included “hanging out with Joe and Anne Palamountain at the Skidmore Christmas party, rocking to David Porter’s keyboards at his inaugural bash, senior anthropology parties, dissing postmodernist theory at a Senior Week Symposium… I could go on and on.” Retirement plans include traveling off-season for the first time. Also, he says, “I enjoy cooking, and may take up bread-baking and pasta-making.” And now he’ll have more time to spend with his four children and granddaughter.
ruth anDrea levInson Ruth Andrea Levinson, professor of education, came to Skidmore in 1989. She’s taught “Adolescent Development,” “Integrated Teaching,” and “Child Development and Learning”—the latter being her favorite, particularly after she added a service-learning component. Getting to know her students during their four years at Skidmore and “watching them grow in their knowledge, confidence, professionalism, and dedication” has been remarkable, she says. “I have been so gratified and proud of them after graduation because they fulfill their promise and make a significant impact on children, their schools, and the field of education.” Levinson also admires her colleagues, who share “a commitment to the mission of the college, the students, and scholarship.” The Skidmore environment “encourages leadership, change, growth, and excellence,” she says, and supported her in creating Expanding Horizons: The Skidmore/Schuylerville Connection and promoting servicelearning opportunities on campus. She’s excited about having more time for “family, reading, writing, cooking, dressage, gardening, learning new languages, hiking, and skiing.” While she intends to stay “active in some type of educational endeavor and community outreach,” for now she welcomes “the chance to explore” before deciding where and how to dig in. —MTS
BOOKS 4Wealth Accumulation & Communities of Color in the United States edited by Ngina Chiteji, associate professor of economics, and Jessica Gordon Nembhard University of Michigan Press, 2006 Examines the connection between wealth and well-being among different racial and ethnic communities
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4Demystifying the Euro-
pean Union: The Enduring Logic of Regional Integration by Roy Ginsberg, professor of government Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007 International scholars address the problems of diversity, difference, inclusion, and cultural pluralism in organizations.
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4Bee Thousand
by Marc Woodworth ’84, lecturer in English Continuum Books, 33 1/3 series; 2006 A personal take on the “Bee Thousand” album by Guided by Voices and its enduring qualities
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4Clinical Care Classification System Manual: A Guide to Nursing Documentation by Virginia K. Saba (Ginger Joseph) ’48 Spring Publishing, 2007 Details the patient medical record information-coding system that can be used regardless of health-care setting
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4Sal Maglie: Baseball’s
Demon Barber by Judith Testa ’65 Northern Illinois University Press, 2007 A biography of the son of poor Italian immigrants who became a star pitcher for the New York Giants
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4The Copacabana
by Kristin Baggelaar ’69 Arcadia Publishing, Images of America series; 2006 Chronicles, through vintage photos and stories, how this New York night club became a cultural icon
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campus scene
Table manners New d-hall sparks culinary, and social, interplay ethos. “You know that old saying Café, whether the Diner offered chickgive it an a, and that’s no grade about too many cooks in the kitchen? en à la king or eggplant parm with a inflation. The new Murray-Aikins DinIt’s true,” Neil grins. “But here each side of garlic-sautéed spinach. Semoing Hall has earned it—in décor and cook gets his or her own kitchen and lina’s (the homemade pasta station) cuisine, but also in the social science all the right tools” may feature blackof enjoyable dining. THE NEW HALL SEATS 675, —a tandoori oven, ened flank steak The $11 million renovation comON EVERYTHING FROM TALL a stand-up rotisover linguine one pleted last September thoroughly transday, shrimp stirformed the old hall. The original brick BARSTOOLS TO STANDARD-ISSUE serie, a pasta mafry over penne the building was refaced with a dramatic CHAIRS AT ROUND TABLES TO chine. “They learn their recipes and next. In the vegantwo-story atrium (named for trustee CUSHY SOFAS IN FRONT OF THE they learn their vegetarian Emily’s Polly Skogsberg Kisiel ’62 and her husTWO GAS FIREPLACES. clientele.” StuGarden, a salad du band), which offers casual seating overdents freely browse and peek in to see jour might be baby spinach leaves looking Case Green and also a convenwhat’s cooking. “You can ask the cook vinaigrette with apples, walnuts, cranience store and a smart little café for to hold the broccoli and give you just berries, pine nuts… Whoa, this stuff is light meals and upscale desserts. Bethe tofu and sauce,” says Fred Braundelicious! Scope found most everything hind that is the main dining space, a stein ’08, “and you can stop back on nicely spiced without excess salt and— bazaar of seven individual food stayour way out and tell the chef, Hey, a real marvel for any d-hall—nothing tions, each with its own splashy décor. that was really good!” overcooked. Fresh and expensive items Part futuristic fun house, part Disney New spaces do create new social patabound, like snowpeas, red bell pepWorld, the walls curve and zing in brilterns, says Joanna Zangrando, a Skidpers, real bacon bits, fresh parsley, goat liant shades of plum, teal, scarlet, and more professor of American studies who cheese, black sesame seeds. The tradipersimmon. The old hall’s original teaches a course in material culture. But tional standbys are here, too: the do-itcathedral ceiling has been visually lowin this case, the zippy new space also yourself waffle irons and big griddle ered with a playful array of standing reflects the popular-culture patterns of for eggs and grilled-cheese sandwiches, and hanging abstract shapes. The new students’ lives. “They’ve grown up with a carousel of cereals and granola, five hall seats 675, on everything from tall choice, variety, bright colors, a fast pace, kinds of brick-oven pizza so fresh you barstools to standard-issue chairs at a lot going on,” says Zangrando. Ancan watch the pizza cook flinging round tables to cushy sofas in front of thropology professor Michael Ennisdough in the air for the next pie. the two gas fireplaces. A vigorous social McMillan points out the visual cover Not only do students dig into plates flow percolates among the nooks and afforded by the different levels and gorgeous enough to rival food-magacrannies, solitary perches, and teamtypes of seating. “The old dining hall zine centerfolds, but they also waste sized tables. was a vast sea of tables, and everyone less food than before, says Ann Bull“It’s like an airport—big, with peolooked up when you walked through,” ington, a dining-services assistant superple walking around hectically and he says. By contrast, the lively, megavisor. “They’re taking big plates but finally arriving at a destination,” Alexclectic new d-hall “feels like a marketandra Golcher ’10 told the Skidmore eating it all.” Why? Simple: “The food place—nobody stares at you here,” News. To choose among the offerings tastes better,” Tyler Vukmer ’07 says. agrees Zangrando. “You can retain at various stations, “you have to do a “It’s fresh, fantastic. A big step up.” anonymity, but it’s friendlier, too.” couple of laps How did they do THEY’RE TAKING BIG PLATES BUT that? In an era of That ability to dip unnoticed into before you can EATING IT ALL. WHY? SIMPLE: the student culture delights Ennisdecide,” says increasingly McMillan. “I can come in for morning Alison Wiggins “THE FOOD TASTES BETTER,” TYLER sophisticated coffee, sit at a small table in the atri’09. (And you campus ameniVUKMER ’07 SAYS. “IT’S FRESH, um, and observe the flow of student do it without ties, the college’s FANTASTIC. A BIG STEP UP.” culture in ways I couldn’t before.” Nowtrays; the new Dining Services adays he tells his student advisees, “I Committee “decided to bounce it up d-hall has none.) Skidmore News colam available for lunch meetings, and from institutional to restaurant level,” umnist Emily Maskin ’07 wrote, “I I don’t mind eating in the dining hall.” explains Jon Neil, dining services’ inlove the color scheme. I love the new “There’s a real buzz here,” says Zanterim director, who coordinated the layout. I love the better food.” grando. “It makes you feel that eating renovation. The old hall’s cramped In the spirit of selfless research, is a ritual that should be enjoyed.” and antiquated kitchen was largely Scope grazed the menu and found it —BAM replaced by the small food stations, extraordinarily good, whether it was each with its own chef and its own quesadilla or curry day at the Global
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MICHELE HORWITZ ’08 JOSH GERRITSEN ’06
campus scene
String theory—and practice If it was plucked, strummed, or bowed, it made music at Skidmore’s third annual string festival in February. The opener was a Filene Concert Series performance by Wu Man on the pipa, an ancient Chinese instrument resembling a lute. An internationally renowned virtuoso, Wu played pipa works from the traditional and contemporary repertoire and also created cross-cultural sounds by performing with American banjo player Lee Knight. A principal of cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, Wu has collaborated and recorded with a wide range of top musicians from East and West. The following weekend featured
one of America’s bestknown chamber groups, the Manhattan String Quartet, as Skidmore’s Sterne Virtuoso Artists. Long based at Colgate University, the ensemble has a strong record of mentoring student musicians. For the string festival MSQ gave a public concert and offered coaching and master classes W U M AN ON THE PIPA for Skidmore students and the music prof who organized the local high-school ensembles, capped string festival… if space, I can add a by a group “play-through” of the quote from the music prof who organfinale to Mendelssohn’s Octet. ized the string festival… —SR …if space, I can add a quote from
Talking culture shock
JOSH GERRITSEN ’06
8 BIG HIT
shock jocks they’re not. Still, some of Skidmore’s guest lecturers this year did explore red-hot culture-clash issues, such as: • “Hamas and Hizbollah: Risk, Conflict, and Democracy” by Robert Malley, International Crisis Group (and formerly, National Security Council) • “Cyrus’s Twins: An Unconventional Guide to the History of Israeli-Iranian Relations” by Haggai Ram (Greenberg Middle East Scholar-in-Residence), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev • “Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-based Violence and the US War on Iraq” by Yifat Susskind (Coburn Lecturer), MADRE International Women’s Rights Organization • “Democracy, Terrorism, and Human Rights,” by Riza Türmen, European Court of Human Rights
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en-year-old Acadia LeBlanc learns volleyball skills from Thoroughbred Laura Olstad ’07 as part of National Girls and Women in Sports Day. Along with offering a variety of sports clinics for area girls, Skidmore hosted keynote speaker Carla Overbeck, the National Soccer Hall of Famer who captained the 1996 gold-medalist US Olympic team and the 1999 World Cup– winning team. Participants also joined Skidmore students in cheering on the home team at women’s basketball games, and shared lunch with Skidmore athletes. The sports day, now in its twenty-first year, commemorates Olympic volleyballer Flo Hyman, who died in 1986. —SR
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• “What Europeans Thought They Would Find: The Mental Landscape of Native Americans in the Era of Exploration” by Gary B. Nash (Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar), UCLA • “Beyond Me: Mindful Responses to Social Threat, by Kirk Warren Brown, Virginia Commonwealth University
8GOOD PLAY 4SPORTSWRAP
BOB EWELL PHOTOS
T’ BRED R OB M OORE ’09 VIES WITH DOUBLE -TEAMING H AMILTON OPPONENTS
Horse hockey? No laugh: the Thoroughbreds showed how it’s done. In their best season since joining the ECAC East (back in 1998), they had a 16-8-2 overall record and finished third in the conference. Among the wins was a 4-2 upset over last year’s national champ, Middlebury. That drew some press—and a national ranking (12th) for the first time in Skidmore hockey history. Skidmore also hosted its first-ever ECAC East playoff game; it lost a tough battle, 5-4 in overtime, to eventual champion Babson. Among several conference honors, Coach Neil Sinclair was named Coach of the Year and goalie D. J. Delbuono ’10 (above, working on his .922 save ratio) was Rookie of the Year; Matt Czerkowicz ’10 also made the All-Rookie team. Basketball. The women finished with a 12-13 record. Krystal Coke ’07 led the team in scoring and rebounding, with 10.0 points and 7.0 boards per game. The green men’s squad went 2-22, but had an exciting 88-84 overtime win against Liberty League leader Hamilton. Jonah Haviland-Markowitz ’08 led the team with 12.9 points per game. Swimming and diving. The women had their best NYSWCAA finish in several years, taking 10th in the championship event. Sonia Segal-Smith ’10 was twice named Liberty League Rookie of the Week. Along with her school record in the 100-yard breaststroke (1:11.7), two men’s-team records were also set, by the 200freestyle squad (1:33.01) and by 100-breaststroker John Tyler Norton ’10 (1:04.89). Riding. Having won seven of eight regular-season shows, the team looks for a return trip to the IHSA nationals in May. T’BRED HOTLINE. For all teams’ schedules and scores, call 518-580-5393 anytime or go to www.skidmore.edu and click “athletics.”
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Putting the kid in Skidmore Some Skidmore parents drop their college-bound children off at the airport, or deliver them to Skidmore and then drive back home, often hours away. But a few usher them to the residence hall and then walk back to work. From among the two dozen employees whose kids are current students, here’s a sampling—and a few words about each other and about their overlap at the college.
PHOTOS BY MARK MCCARTY
PHIL BOSHOFF English professor (26 years) Laurel is honest and independent; I’m very proud of how she is taking ownership of her education. I try to stay out of her way and let her have her own Skidmore experience. I know firsthand she’s getting a terrific education, with a terrific faculty.
LAUREL BOSHOFF ’09 planned English and government major When I was a little kid in the campus day-care center, I used to sneak away and play with the babies in the infant room. Sometimes students ask me questions about my dad as a teacher that I don’t know the answers to. But everyone tells me they like him a lot, as a professor and as a person. I hope his traits have rubbed off on me.
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MOLLY BRAY-HAYES ’10
UNA BRAY
possible studio art and/or biology major
mathematics professor (21 years)
One of my first memories is playing in the sandbox at the Skidmore child-care center. Whenever I’ve had a bad day or a really hard test, I can go to my mom’s office and it’s like being home for a little while. I admire her strong sense of self, and I am in awe of her ability to do a million things and still help others.
Molly is kind and gentle, knows a lot about ‘60s and ’70s music, is very good at fly-fishing, and is a crack shot with a gun. I’m trying to wear blinders, but I’m glad Molly drops by my office to check in. I know some of her friends, and they’re really great; I’m very impressed with them. SPRING 2007
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RYAN JESKA ’08
SANDI JESKA
religion major
administrative coordinator in special programs (10 years)
I remember visiting my mom’s office when I was younger, and I really liked the progressive atmosphere at Skidmore. It’s a little weird that my mom and my friends are friends; she’s kind of their surrogate mom on campus. She’s good at putting herself in another person’s shoes, even a teenager’s, so I’ve always felt very comfortable talking to her about anything.
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Ryan persevered through a remarkable recovery from a car crash last spring. His smile lights up a room. And, just like me, he loves to shop. I like meeting his friends— and getting to hug him at least once a week. But I am too easily accessed for cash. And sometimes I see a little more than I want to know about his life here.
PATTY BOSEN
ERIC BOSEN ’10
nurse practitioner at health services (8 years)
planned psychology major
Eric is a loyal friend, warmhearted and caring about others. Even though we share a campus, I don’t see him much now. But if we run into each other, he’s not embarrassed to be seen with me. Another plus: no need to drive crosscountry for parents’ weekend.
My mom honestly cares about each and every student she sees at health services. When I was about thirteen, I remember, she took me and the rest of the family to see West Side Story on campus. As a student here, it’s good not having to wait for a school break to see a family member. On the down side, I don’t have a clean slate with administrators, since a good portion of them knew my mother before they knew me.
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ANDREW BROWN ’09
JOEL BROWN
music major and business minor
senior artist-in-residence in music (21 years)
When I was a kid I used to come over and watch my dad teach. It’s great to see him a lot; the only bad thing is that my mom doesn't work here too. My father is known for playing jazz and classical guitar, but when he rocks out on his electric it sounds better than Eric Clapton. He’s very modest about it.
Andrew is one of the very best musicians I’ve ever known. He’s also funny, and just plain fun to be with. It’s a nice surprise to see him at my office door or walking across campus. (His two older siblings also attended Skidmore.)
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KAITLYN MAHONEY ’08 exercise-science major When I was little and came to campus for a volleyball camp, my mom and sister would pick me up at lunchtime and we’d sit by the pond and eat with my dad on his lunch break. My dad supports me no matter what; he’s always there for advice or conversation. And if I forget anything at home, it’s right on my doorstep the next morning. When I see my dad on campus and get a big hug, it’s an indescribable feeling.
RAY MAHONEY HVAC technician in mechanical trades (13 years) Kaity is smart, loving, down-to-earth, and hardworking. She’s happy and seems at peace with herself. The family attends all her volleyball games, home and away. When she sees me on campus she’ll call out my name, or my coworkers’, and come right over to us.
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MARTY CANAVAN
MATT CANAVAN ’10
management and business professor (28 years)
undecided major
I admire Matt’s modesty and quiet nature, his knack for getting along with many people, and his ability to drive a golfball 300 yards. I know he’ll be learning from many fine professors here. I endeavor to stay away from his space while on campus; I pretend he’s at college in California (although sometimes I receive his e-mails by mistake).
My first Skidmore memory was a basketball camp I went to when I was younger. The best thing about being at the same college with my dad is having someone who knows how to go about the registration process to choose courses. Great things about my dad: he’s an honest, hard-working guy, he played hoops at Siena College, and he loves golf.
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KATIE McEACHEN ’07 environmental-studies major
MOLLY McEACHEN ’09 sociology-anthropology major Our dad can relate to anyone, especially his students and players, because he is genuinely interested in others. In high school I (Katie) went to a Halloween party in Scribner Village, where one of my dad’s soccer players was dressed in a hamper to look like a dinosaur. I don’t have much separation between homehome and school-home. But I (Molly) like having a home-cooked meal and doing laundry for free.
RON McEACHEN men’s soccer coach (7 years) Molly has more friends than anyone I know, and a beautiful singing voice in the Sonneteers. Katie is also musical and has worked on behalf of children in Central America. When my wife and I go to a college event and see the girls, we feel like intruders and are often compelled to leave early. This is their time and space.
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Perfect pitch The new shape and trajectory of music at Skidmore
EWING COLE ARCHITECTS
BY SUSAN ROSENBERG
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Zankel Music Center planning— a long-developing Skidmore project of equal parts creativity and committee work—has traced an almost symphonic arc: determination of its need and priority (adagio), wish lists and architects’ proposals (moderato), pause to allow other urgent construction (largo), and resurgence of momentum with a dramatic donation (presto con brio!). Now the “Creative Thought Bold Promise” campaign aims to cue the finale, a grand crescendo of excavators, cranes, and cement mixers. The Arthur Zankel Music Center—named for the trustee (and parent of Kenneth ’82 and James ’92) whose $42 million bequest to Skidmore included $15 million toward its construction—will be twice as big as the Filene Music Building. When Filene was built in 1968, Skidmore had a music faculty of about five; today, it’s more like forty, and nearly sixty course offerings range from classical to nonWestern, jazz, and electronic. According to Tom Denny, music professor and department chair, the Zankel’s much-needed rehearsal and practice space will leave the concert space available for concerts, and larger classrooms will allow “active learning in music-theory courses, where you want students to come up and scribble on a big blackboard.” Size also matters in the media room that houses computers with musical-notation software and other resources. “It’s a very popular place for our students to gather, hang out, and study,” says Denny. But Filene’s is now too small; the Zankel’s will be much more commodious. g
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believed in the As for performtransformative ance space, Denny power of the arts,” says Filene Recital and son Jimmy ’92 Hall’s capacity of predicts the build235 means “we ing’s impact will be sometimes push the “beyond huge. Not limits of the fire only will the Skidmarshall’s regulamore community tions, and still we experience music may turn away collectively in a more people than first-class facility we can let in.” The that we can call our Zankel’s 700-seat own, but also peoconcert hall “will ple outside the colallow our big lege will flock to events to reach the campus to partake audience they’re in whatever magic intended for.” Prois occurring on any fessor Tony Holgiven day. Skidmore’s reputation will grow exponentially.” land, conductor of Skidmore’s orchestra, is eager for the The building will be a concrete tribute, but, as Jimmy day when “string players can move their bows back and notes, already his father’s legacy as a benefactor and forth without poking the musician next to them, and the trustee “is everywhere: in scholarships, professorships, conductor can stand in front rather than being enveloped curriculum development, unparalleled into the wind section.” And behind “THE ZANKEL WILL ALLOW endowment growth, and, most importhat large stage will be a huge threeOUR BIG EVENTS TO tantly, the success of my brother and story window looking onto South me.” At Skidmore, he recalls, “I finally Park. (Or it can be darkened and the REACH THE AUDIENCE fulfilled my academic potential. Along hall partitioned to create a more intiTHEY’RE INTENDED FOR.” the way, I met smart, fun, creative peomate venue.) ple who challenged me to broaden my mind and become Designed by the Ewing Cole architectural firm, the a better person.” He concludes, “It’s simple—Skidmore Zankel is “the most ambitious building project ever got my brother and me excited about applying ourselves, undertaken on campus,” according to President Philip so my dad got excited and applied himself to Skidmore.” Glotzbach. As Denny sees it, “It represents a tribute to Fundraising to the philanthropic complete the vision of Helen Zankel Center’s Filene Ladd. She needs—$30 million said she wanted to for construction ‘breathe life’ into her building—and and $12 million for she did! So much its operating life that we need endowment—is larger quarters.” now on the camGlotzbach says the paign’s front burnZankel will also be er. A challenge “a shining light for grant from the Fred L. Emerson FounSkidmore and the dation offers a entire region.” It $500,000 reward if will be sited to the college can serve as a gateway raise $2 million for at the campus the project by this entrance, welcomNovember. Skiding visitors to more campaign events that compleofficers hope to bring in enough donations for a Zankel ment the offerings of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center groundbreaking very soon. When that happens, a gloriand other cultural outlets in the area. ous fanfare will ring out far and wide. Zankel’s brother Martin says, “Arthur profoundly
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Age And Agency
As baby boom becomes senior surge, is our ethos of elder care meeting the crisis ?
ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRAD YEO
BY SUSAN ROSENBERG
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Feeling pretty spry? Old age not even on your radar screen? Look again. The “graying of America” is a demographic tsunami, whose societywide implications are enough to turn anybody’s hair white. In 2004 citizens over sixty-five years old cast 19% of the votes; in the 2040 election, they’ll cast 41% of all votes. In the 1960s only 1 million people were eighty-five and older; in 2030, there will be 9 million of them. In the past decade the number of people who will turn sixty-five in the next twenty years jumped by 39%, compared to a 13% rise in the overall under-sixty-five population. Today the sixty-five-andovers are more than 36 million strong, or about 13% of the population; by 2050 they’ll total 87 million, for a 21% share. If those census figures don’t give you palpitations, consider that 83% of Americans die while covered by taxpayerfunded Medicare. A PBS Frontline documentary reports that agencies charge for home health aides at about $19 per hour; aides earn wages of under $9 per hour. Aging even affects border policies: the Wall Street Journal reports that immigrants, legal and not, make up a disproportionate share of those who care for the elderly in the US. But a Johnson & Johnson survey estimates that 80% of long-term care in the US is still provided for free by family and friends; their time off for this purpose costs their employers as much as $29 billion annually. Of course, with such a fastgrowing Gray Power lobby, senior citizens might well win important reforms in elder-care policies and programs. But how should those reforms take shape? What has begun to change already, and which issues will become most pressing in the future? Some Skidmore experts are on the case. Crystal Moore, on Skidmore’s social-work faculty, was one of twelve scholars nationwide to earn a 2006 research grant from the Gerontological Society of America. She co-edited and contributed to Palliative Practices: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Mosby Inc., 2005). As one of GSA’s Hartford Faculty Scholars, Moore is using the $100,000 grant for a two-year study of caregivers’ support for elderly patients, especially in health-care communication and decision-making. While death often came swiftly a century ago, nowadays medical advances usually forestall it, so the majority of today’s old people live with a chronic illness—or several of them—for months or years. But the welter of new technologies and specialties turns the medical system into “another culture,
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where doctors speak a different language and operate by unfamiliar rules,” Moore says. Because “patients and families do bear some responsibility in collaborating with their physicians,” she wants to determine how they might best navigate the rocky communications road, so they can proffer clear information and questions, rather than being reactive or overly passive. Moore allows that older folks are more likely to see doctors as authorities who shouldn’t be questioned. Besides, being ill or infirm is often depressing, and “it’s hard to mobilize yourself to ask questions and make decisions when you’re depressed,” notes Karolynn Siegel ’71, a professor at Columbia University and director of its Center for the Psychosocial Study of Health and Illness. She says, “A division of labor between patient and family sometimes means that a family member becomes the communicator,” especially for an elderly patient with hearing or memory trouble. In some cases, too, “doctors are afraid to communicate bad news directly to the patient. They’re willing to be more straightforward with a family member, believing they’re being protective of the patient.” But Roberta Springer Loewy, UWW ’81, argues that “‘sparing’ a patient the truth is usually a cop-out” and only fuels the fear that most haunts many elderly people: loss of selfdetermination. Loewy, on the bioethics faculty at the University of California at Davis, is co-author of The Ethics of Terminal Care: Orchestrating the End of Life (Kluwer/Plenum, 2000). Siegel says physicians generally expect their clients “to be well-informed and/or to want to participate in care decisions.” For Skidmore’s Crystal Moore, this patient—or caregiver—autonomy only works well when communication skills are honed. “A physician may tend to look skeptically at family members’ insights,” she says. But helpful partnerships can be forged, “if we can coach caregivers to be organized, appropriately assertive, and objective.” Along with the input of family caregivers, elderly people are relying more and more on written advance directives to be followed if they became unable to communicate their preferences in person. “Top of the list,” asserts lawyer Frank Yunes ’94, “are a health-care proxy and a durable power of
attorney.” If no one has been designated to make care decisions for a patient who can’t communicate, “it becomes a decision by committee, and as we saw in the Terri Schiavo case, they might not all agree.” A power of attorney authorizes a proxy to manage a full range of legal and financial matters for the ill person. Certainly finances are a pressing concern for many retirees. A Merrill Lynch survey of soon-to-retire Baby Boomers shows that while only 17% worry about dying, 48% worry about winding up in a nursing home and 53% about paying for health care. As ethicist Loewy quips, finding good health coverage is something of “a Nietzschean crap-shoot.” A New York Times editorial last year suggested policies to help older people pay for in-home care by taking out “reverse mortgages,” whereby money is borrowed against their home equity but only paid back from the proceeds of selling the house, which usually happens after the owners die. While many older people prefer to set aside their homes or savings to pass on to their children, financing their own care might have to come first, agrees Yunes. It can be tricky, he says: “Say a son comes to my office with his elderly mom, and she says, ‘I want my son to inherit my assets.’ Well, she’s my client, not her son, so I want to help her live as best she can, even if that means she spends every cent to ensure proper care for herself.” As for specific health-care decisions in a crisis, Yunes cautions that a living will isn’t legally binding in all states. Still, “it’s a comfort for those making the decisions, to see how you’ve expressed your wishes.” Yunes also recommends his older clients sign a HIPAA authorization (referring to the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’s privacy restrictions) in order to give a friend or family member full access to their medical records. “With the Baby Boomers starting to retire—like my parents—I have more and more clients coming in for estate planning,” Yunes says. “Nobody likes talking about death. But it doesn’t have to be morbid. Advance directives are acts of love for your family, to make things easier for them.” But not always easier for ethicists. Roberta Loewy’s book brings up a thorny conundrum. “Is the gentleman in a nursing home, quietly vegetating in the sunshine while being fed raspberry sherbet, still the same sturdy professorial type who ten years before decided that this was not a way he was willing to endure?…This man now barely recognizes his family and is unable to read, though he still apparently enjoys sunshine and raspberry sherbet.…If the present person has no real connection (other than a physical one) with the former, is the former entitled to decide for the latter?” Everyone’s idea of a terrible fate changes over time (as Loewy writes, “many teenagers think that being fifty qualifies”). And for some people, mind-body is a crucial fault line: If we lose all four limbs, our being the same person would not be questioned, she explains, because “intuitively we hold the psychosocial to be the essence of personhood.” It’s when we lose our memory of the past or our relationship to the present that we become perhaps a different person. Therefore, Loewy argues, advance directives are hardly an ideal solution when
it’s
12:30 ON A HOT FLORIDA NIGHT in the 1990s, and Mary Winters Cooper ’60 has gone to bed. Her phone rings. It’s the assisted-living facility where her mother is staying. Her mother has had a breathing crisis and been sent to the hospital by ambulance. It’s not the first time, but that doesn’t soften the jolt and worry. Cooper bundles herself into the car and drives to the hospital, where her mother is upset not only from respiratory distress but from rush and commotion. She’s given some oxygen, her condition stabilizes, and the next day she’ll be discharged back to her residence. In the wee hours Cooper makes the reverse drive home, concerned for her mother’s well-being and knowing she faces another sleep-deprived day at the office. It seems there’s always somebody in each family who fills this role. When her widowed mother began needing help, Cooper’s two sisters were out of state, but she lived nearby. Luckily, she says, “my mother and I had always been very close.” In fact, “I felt it was a wonderful privilege and joy to be able to be her devoted caregiver.” But her mom was even luckier: Cooper had an inside line as a career professional in elder-care planning and policy-making. She started as a nursing-home activities and social-services director, later was the ombudsman coordinator for long-term care facilities in a seven-county region in Florida, and then was executive director of the Health Planning Council of Southwest Florida. She taught legal and ethical health-care issues at colleges. She was appointed to the White House Conference on Aging, and she was Florida’s delegate to the first national Conference on Women and Aging. Cooper’s first husband, a clergyman, served as volunteer chaplain for the hospice program in Naples. Widowed in 1993, she then married a longtime friend, a fellow widower who took care of his aging mother as well. Armed with those experiences and her professional perspective on elder care, she saw her mother’s ambulance trips “as a revolving door—and a stupid use of resources.” Cooper knew that hospice nurses typically have more training and more advanced licensure than the staff of an assisted-living facility, so she thought if her mother were enrolled in a hospice program its nurses could “come to her and provide the respiratory treatment she needed, and she could stay in her own room.” Easier said than done. Eligibility for hospice care requires two physicians to attest that the patient is terminally ill and is likely to live six months or less. “Her doctor was vehemently opposed,” Cooper recalls. “He insisted she was not terminal.” But Cooper and a sympathetic nursing director found two other doctors to certify her for hospice. As she expected, “it was the best thing for her,” Cooper says. “She kept an oxygen tank next to her bed, and hospice nurses would arrive immediately to administer medication or treatments that comforted her until the crisis passed.” At the same time, Cooper adds, she continued her relationship with the staff of the assisted-living facility. “I felt enormous appreciation and respect for their dedication, and this helped us communicate well.” g
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patients lose mental capacity. But, she allows, given the “poor, bad, and atrocious” options, honoring the person’s own, previously expressed wishes is “the least troubling.” The rise in advance directives also gives pause to bioethicist and physician Michael Felder ’77, a professor at Brown University Medical School. After the Patient Self-Determination Act became law in 1991, public-interest groups touted the trend and equated it with an improvement in care, Felder says. “But the downside I saw was that doctors’ values infiltrated into these conversations more. There was a presumption by doctors, nurses, med students that if patients were old and sick their quality of life must be low, their suffering was worse than death, and it would be a kindness to limit treatment and recommend CMO, or ‘comfort measures only.’” When medically there’s “nothing more to do,” fellowethicist Loewy fears that clinicians may be tempted to essentially abandon what they see as a hopeless case. She counters, “There’s always something we can do, and good palliative care takes a lot of doing.” Moreover, she writes, hope takes many forms: patients at the end of life “can, with justification, hope that what remains of their life can be made more rather than less meaningful,” through a deepening of relationships or attainment of certain goals. Caregivers should stay involved with patients, “supporting their justified hopes and gently speaking about their unfulfillable hopes.” Philosophically, Felder points out, individual entitlement might legitimately lead some older patients to reject the notion of medical hopelessness and assert a right to the same ambitious treatment as younger patients, while “others might feel that at a certain age you should yield your claim to a cure and just maintain a claim to care.” Consider Oregon’s policy of allocating health-care resources according to a list of cure rates, treatment efficiency, and so on. Felder says, “I might argue that a wealthy, compassionate society should treat all patients. But if we accepted the premise that we can’t afford full health coverage for all, then it would be justifiable to ask, ‘What can we accomplish? What’s fair? What will help the most?’” Less logical, perhaps, given the coming swell in the older population, is which medical studies get handsome funding and which are left begging. For Felder, “It’s scary. Funding is painfully slim for aging-related health research.” On the question of resource allocation, Skidmore scholar Crystal Moore says there’s evidence that social services—hospital intake and discharge planning, communication help,
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referrals, education—can pay for themselves in reduced emergency-room visits and hospital admissions. But so far, medical insurance plans rarely reimburse for such services; in fact, most pay a piece rate, rewarding for the number of patients and procedures, not for the time spent on each. Columbia’s Karolynn Siegel adds, “With ‘managed care’ and shorter hospital stays, there may be no time to meet with the facility’s social worker. Often the family visits in the evening, and the social workers go home at 5 p.m.” Moore says the value of social services is being acknowledged lately, but talk is cheap. She’s a reviewer for a new social-work journal addressing end-of-life and palliative care, but, she notes, “I haven’t yet seen this care put into practice much, because it’s not a covered expense.” Indeed the American medical system’s basic instinct and pointed focus is “diagnose, treat, and cure.” But as PBS’s Frontline notes, that standard of care can be downright irrelevant for the very elderly. Medicine hasn’t established a standard based on comfort, aid, and support. To fill the gap, independent (and costfree) patient-advocacy organizations and support groups have mushroomed in popularity, especially online. (Even Skidmore is in on the act: Class of ’61 Professor Denise Smith, on the exercise-science faculty, and a group of ’61 grads are planning a summer symposium titled “Women’s Health and Fitness in Retirement.” Smith and colleagues will discuss such topics as heart, bone, and muscle health; students and faculty will describe their exercise-science research; and an alumni panel will share strategies for wellness in retirement.) Ethicist Loewy maintains, “Pain is felt more intensely and is more readily translated into suffering when the social situation is neglected.” Staying involved with others and feeling useful, in a family or an advocacy group, can help elderly people see themselves not just as patients but also as active doers with responsibilities and autonomy. Assisting people “to find meaning even as they approach their end,” she writes, is the duty of clinicians, loved ones, and other supporters. “Every day I speak with an elder is a day that I see the benefit of home-care and community services,” declares Gillian Carter ’06. A case manager for the Boston area’s Bay Path Elder Services, she says caregiver stress is “easily observed during home visits when caregivers spend the majority of the time talking about themselves and the amount of work they do, not about the help that the elder might re-
mAry
WINTERS COOPER, a pro at helping the elderly live meaningful lives, says her strategies with her mother included a car-phone conversation each weeknight as she drove home from work, plus a few hours each weekend “taking her fresh beds of pansies, giving her pedicures, reading to her, taking her for a stroll in her wheelchair, or taking her (and sometimes others from the facility) out in my car for ice cream or a tour of the neighborhood Christmas lights.” But not all the residents had such individual attention. Inadequate elder-care staffing is a problem that Cooper has seen worsening since the 1980s or so. Especially in her area, “an affluent community in Florida, there’s fierce competition for good staff,” she says. “When I first moved here we had two nursing homes in town, and we now have probably six; our one hospital is now three; instead of one assisted-living facility, we have an abundance of them.” She adds, “Sure, we have more workers now, but we have an explosion of need.” For her family, hospice exceeded the need and provided “a beautiful experience,” she says. “The day before my mother died, my daughter and her husband came in the morning and brought their cat to put in her lap. I spent about eight hours with her that afternoon and evening. She was very tired, so I helped her to bed and held her hand. She awoke with a start, but when she saw I was still there, she said, ‘Oh, my, Mary. I love you so much.’ Those were her last words to me. Eight years later, I can still hear them in my heart. The hospice nurses stayed with her through the night, until she stopped breathing; they were wonderful. And the facility staff members were thoughtful and kind.” Cooper also appreciated the bereavement support offered to her through hospice. The social worker waited for her to arrive at her mother’s bedside, to help remove her wedding band and sort out practical matters. She says, “The way hospice embraces the whole person and extends to the entire family is both empowering and comforting.” Having seen both of her parents spend their last years in long-term care, Cooper is an advocate of “making as many arrangements as we can, ahead of time, to ensure our dignity and comfort in the years ahead.” She and her husband have purchased long-term care insurance—it’s expensive, she says, but will help preserve their assets for their children to inherit. Most importantly, she finds, “I have come to accept my own death as one more step in the continuum of life. I have witnessed a number of ‘good deaths,’ and those often seem to be the end result of a life lived with a maximum of faith and good deeds and a minimum of guilt.”
quire.” Then when home-care workers pitch in on some chores, her elderly clients tell her “how grateful they are to enjoy time with their former caregivers who can now simply be loving family members instead of full-time assistants.” As Karolynn Siegel explains, “There’s a norm of reciprocity in our society. If people are old or sick and can’t reciprocate a favor, they’re reluctant to ask, or they feel they’re a burden to their family.”
Skidmore’s Crystal Moore says, “Families are beanpoles, not trees. Unlike a large clan or institution that can spread the duties widely, a nuclear family concentrates the weight of caregiving on one or a few people.” Siegel remarks, “For the sandwich generation—people in their forties and fifties (mostly it turns out to be women) who haven’t finished raising their children and are also looking after their elderly parents—it’s a Herculean task.” But lately Americans are having fewer children. And paid care workers are spread paper-thin. The US Health and Human Services Department predicts that the long-term care workforce, about 1.9 million people in 2000, must reach 2.7 million by 2010 and 5 million by 2050 in order to meet demand. And whether handled informally by family and friends or professionally by elder-care agencies, it’s no easy task to manage chronic symptoms, coordinate care with multiple doctors and therapists, help maintain function—and ensure empathy and dignity as function wanes—for each individual. Moore asks, “Can we keep up (or in fact catch up) to help so many patients and caregivers cope?” She’s got her doubts, unless the medical and insurance establishment begins to pay for social-work services the way it pays for acute care now. At least the notion of more outpatient care and more patient and caregiver education is being bruited about, and her research did win major funding. Also Moore and her colleagues are hard at work teaching young people about elder issues. “For many students,” she concedes, “gerontology sounds like a big snooze. But when you look at the family dynamics around it, of course that’s of interest to all ages.” According to Tamara Smith, a fellow gerontologist on Skidmore’s social-work faculty, “Students are more interested in this than they used to be, in part because it’s now a job market that’s in the news.” Certainly new graduate Gillian Carter got into her case-work job after volunteering as a student at Mary’s Haven, an end-of-life home in Saratoga Springs. Carter says, “I am convinced, now more than ever, that our country needs to become more invested in the care of our elders. We should be preserving the value of their lives, as they so greatly affect ours.”
For more information, Prof. Crystal Moore recommends: • A Caregiver’s Challenge: Living, Loving, Letting Go, 2nd ed., by Maryann Schacht, Feterson Press, 2005 • Caring for your Parents: The Complete AARP Guide by Hugh Delehanty and Elinor Ginzler, Sterling, 2006 • National Family Caregivers Association, www.thefamily caregiver.org • National Alliance for Caregiving, www.caregiving.org • US Administration on Aging, www.aoa.gov • www.eldercaremediators.com • “Study to Understand Prognoses and Preferences for Out comes and Risks of Treatments (SUPPORT),” reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association 274 (20), 1995
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connections I N T E R C O N N E C T I O N S
Time to reappear ah, reunion. The quinquennial selfimprovement program… the recurring nostalgia fest… the cut-and-comeagain social marathon… It’s a Skidmore Groundhog Day, and I’m already in training. I’m facing an astonishingly highnumbered reunion this year—my thirtyfifth, to be exact. I have become an “older alum.” Funny thing is, I don’t feel any older than when I first got dropped off at Skidmore Hall in September 1968. True, it was Skidmore Hall the elder, the one at Circular and Spring Streets, on the old downtown campus. Regardless of ages (mine or Skidmore’s), what I like best about Reunion is that the weekend is a nonstop oral
dramatic, even radical transformations. But I think each class has a similar story, tracking the social changes of the times. (Change? Oh, yeah. It never lets up. There are only two male alumni in our class, and one of them now has a son in Skidmore’s class of 2010.) I’m proud of what Skidmore has become, but I also loved what it was. My classmates and I will recount our history again (fondly, with laughter and tears), when we gather for Reunion in a few weeks, May 31–June 3. I hope you’ll be there for your own oral histories, all you 2s and 7s: it’s time to return. Peace, love, and shag haircuts. Deb Sehl Coons ’72 Alumni Association President
history. I’m so familiar with my class’s collective experience that I can add to any recitation by any of us. At some point a classmate is certain to begin: “Remember as freshmen we had to do mealtime community service at Father’s Hall, the dorms had housemothers, our dates were announced by hall phone, Happy Pappy was the best weekend of the year, and no one was around on other weekends because we all were road-tripping at men’s colleges? But by the time we were juniors, boy, had things changed!” It’s a familiar litany that we never tire of repeating, or hearing. During our college years American society and campus culture were both engulfed by
TODD FRANCE ’89
8 CLUB CONNECTION: NEW YORK, N.Y.
Alumni, parents, and friends peer at details in the renovated Grand Central Terminal during a sold-out tour conducted by the Municipal Arts Society in January. Among the 75 participants was Geraldine Osnato ’99, who learned that the famous whispering gallery by the Oyster Bar & Restaurant “was just a happy accident, not by design.” Jessyca Dudley ’06 was intrigued by one dirty spot on the otherwise clean ceiling that was left that way intentionally, “to remind everyone what it looked like before.” The prevalence of acorns (a Vanderbilt family symbol) also impressed her. “Crazy to live in this city and not know such interesting things,” said photographer Todd France ’89 after hearing that “all the stone work was simply a facade to cover modern engineering of iron and cement.” Christine Wilsey Goodwin ’67 remembered when the terminal was “sadly rundown and home to the homeless in the 1970s” and was eager to see it “with new eyes.” Pat Kennedy Snyderman ’54 was enticed by “a bank of elevators with no directory. I know there are tennis courts up there, and some fascinating offices,” she said, vowing to investigate—someday. —MTS
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It’s not too late (but the clock is ticking)
You can still sign up to come to Reunion
May 31–June 3 Visit skidmore.edu/ alumni/reunion2005 or call 800.584.0115 (We’ll even take walk-ins. So don’t miss out!)
Think Polo (and leave Marco out of it)
28th Annual Palamountain Benefit Polo Match to support Skidmore’s Palamountain Scholarships July 31 at 5:30 pm at the Saratoga Polo Fields Contact Mary Solomons, director of donor relations 518-580-5619 or msolomon@skidmore.edu Create Opportunity—Fund a Future
It’s right around the (next) corner REUNION 2008 May 29–June 1 Now’s the time to join your classmates for a weekend at Skidmore, to plan your next big get-together
1. Milestone Reunion Planning Weekend (for classes 1958, 1968, 1983, and 1998) July 27–29, 2007
10TH ANNIVERSARY THE SKIDMORE COLLEGE
SARATOGA CLASSIC HORSE SHOW I: JUNE 20–24 II: JUNE 27–JULY 1 Be part of a historic tradition featuring many of the country’s best horses and riders. Come watch, or ride in our alumni division. We’ll even provide a horse if you need one!
2. Reunion Planning Weekend (for 1963, 1973, 1978, 1988, 1993, and 2003) August 3–5, 2007 For more information call 800.584.0115
For a prize list and information, contact Adele Einhorn ’80 at saratogaclassic@skidmore.edu or 518.580.5632
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Summer in Saratoga
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May 31–June 3
Reunion
June 3–23
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Co.
June 15–17
SaratogaArtsFest
June 23
FOSA golf and tennis tournament
June 23-24
Freihofer’s Jazz Festival (30th anniv.)
June 23–July 7
Jazz Institute (20th anniv.)
June 25–July 6
Camp Northwoods 1
June 27–July8
Lake George Opera
June 30–July 3
Lake George Opera
June 30–August 3
Precollege classes
July 2–27
NYS Writers Institute
July 3–7
NYC Ballet
July 6–8
Lake George Opera
July 8–14
Science Institute for Girls
July 9–20
Camp Northwoods 2
Skidmore alumni affairs 518-580-5610
Skidmore special programs 518-580-5590
www.skidmore.edu
www.skidmore.edu
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SPAC 518-587-3300
Racetrack 518-584-6200
Joint venture 518-580-8010
www.spac.org
www.nyra.com/ saratoga
www.saratogaartsfestival.org
Summer in Saratoga July 10–14
NYC Ballet
July 15–21
Science Institute for Girls
July 17–21
NYC Ballet
July 22–August 18
SITI theater workshop
July 23–August 3
Camp Northwoods 3
July 25
Racing season opens
July 29–August 4
Flute Institute
July 31–August 19
Saratoga Chamber Music Festival
July 31
Palamountain Scholarship Benefit polo
August 1–4
Philadelphia Orchestra
August 5–11
Chamber Music w/ Euclid Quartet
August 6–10
Camp Northwoods 4
August 8–11
Philadelphia Orchestra
August 15–18
Philadelphia Orchestra
August 25
Travers Stakes
September 3
Racing season closes
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W H O, W H AT, WH E N
JOSEPH LEVY
MOVERS AND SHAKERS? Who are these Skidmore people? And what are they doing? Did you ever try similar activities in your student days? If you have an answer, tell us the story at 518-580-5747, srosenbe@skidmore.edu, or Scope c/o Skidmore College. We’ll report answers, and run a new quiz, in the upcoming Scope.
FROM LAST TIME
GEORGE S. BOLSTER COLLECTION
Ivories and ebonies? Several alumni instantly recognized the legendary Prof. Stanley Saxton, the composer, pianist/organist, and organ designer who taught music at Skidmore from 1928 until 1969. Lynn Allen Chamberlin ’42 says he was “an excellent teacher and much loved” by students, who enjoyed his “wicked sense of humor.” Peg Colby Doig ’46 also recalls that he was “greatly admired” by his students. Phyllis Friedman Levenson ’45 kept in touch with Saxton until he died in 2002. Chamberlin believes the student playing the organ is June Dodenhoff Bernst ’42, whom she remembers as “a tiny little person, but her whole dimension changed when she sat at the organ console.” And Bernst herself says, “If this picture is not of me, it certainly bears a remarkable resemblance.” Chamberlin adds that the other organ major in her class was Lesley Templeton Johnson ’42—and that’s who Dorothy Lodgen Halpern ’42 says is actually the student in the photograph. Either way, the timing is right:
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the photo’s label dates the scene to January 1940. Whoever the student, there’s no question that she’s in College Hall. As Lorna Gordon Myers ’62 says, the photo immediately “took me back to the chapel where I studied and practiced the organ.” Joanne Teale Snell ’53 remembers well “the four-manual organ that was such a fun instrument to play. I had a lesson once a week, but I didn’t get to practice much: I’d walk over to College Hall and someone else was already playing it; that was so disappointing. There was another organ in Stanley Saxton’s office—a two-manual one—but someone was usually practicing on that one too.” Peggy Downie Banks ’72 studied organ with Saxton in her freshman year—the last year before he retired— and then with Benjamin Van Wye. “I remember practicing on the College Hall organ before Dr. Van Wye started giving organ lessons at the Episcopal church.” Banks wonders what ever became of the College Hall organ…
[ c l a s s n o t e s s ta r t h e r e ]
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MARTIN BENJAMIN
S A R AT O G A S I D E B A R
T HE S ARAH P EDINOTTI
BAND DELIVERS JAZZ AT
O NE C AROLINE STREET B ISTRO .
NOW HEAR THIS one of my favorite memories of growing up near Saratoga is going to hear a jazz pianist and her acoustic-bass accompanist at a side-street bistro, back in the early 1980s. I’ve forgotten her name now, but she took requests and she was awesome. Around the same time, I also started hanging out at Caffè Lena, when its legendary owner, Lena Spencer, was still alive and introducing all the acts. I remember thinking how cool it was to hear such great music, so close to home, so far from big-city life. Saratoga may be a hot spot for horse lovers and springwater aficionados, but it’s a legitimate music destination too. The performing arts center (SPAC) has been around since the 1960s, as has the Caffè. When Universal Preservation Hall—currently undergoing a transformation from rundown church to performing arts venue—and Skidmore’s soon-to-come Zankel Music Center (see page 18) are up and running, there will be that many more concert offerings to choose from. But there are plenty of lower-key listening rooms too, where live music and epicurean fare team up for a memorable evening. Most nights you can be assured of catching a band someplace in town, either on or off the main drag. Try the Wine Bar (piano music on Fridays and Saturdays) or Circus Café (jazz on Wednesdays), both on Broadway, and Bailey’s Café (various bands on the weekends) at the corner of Phila and Putnam Streets. In summertime many bars and restaurants open their patios, and the music wafts out into the streets. In fact, if your pockets are empty—or you prefer staying clear of crowds—you can just lean on a signpost or wander up and down the sidewalks and take in the (sometimes competing) sounds of various bands. Instead, you might contribute your own talents: Lena’s and the Circus Café each have an open mic every Thurs-
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day, and the Parting Glass has Celtic jam sessions twice a month. Meanwhile, if you’re downtown and itching to hear some music, consider these locations: One Caroline Street Bistro (www.onecaroline.com), set below street level where Caroline meets Broadway, showcases some of the area’s best jazz players five nights a week. Vocalist Sarah Pedinotti, accompanied by piano, bass, and drums, is a regular and well worth going to hear. The place is hip enough—with copper-top tables, sultry lighting, red walls with black-and-white portraits of musicians, a menu featuring local and organically grown ingredients—to make you think you’re in a bigger-city jazz club—in Montreal, perhaps. A block east of Broadway is another jazz spot: 9 Maple Avenue (www.9mapleavenue.com). The intimate forty-seat club, between Lake Avenue and Caroline Street, presents some fine combos on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s known also for its fermented offerings (150-plus singlemalt scotches, 200-plus martini styles, monthly whiskey tastings), and there’s a Skidmore connection at the bar itself: a porcelain tap head thrown by ceramic artist Regis Brodie. A short walk away is the Parting Glass (www.partingglasspub.com) at 40–42 Lake Avenue (Rt. 29), on the corner of Henry Street. A Saratoga mainstay for more than twenty-five years, it serves up quintessential pub grub, including beer-battered fries, nachos, soups, and burgers. On the tunes front, it’s traditional Irish and American roots music most weekend nights. A perennial Glass favorite are hometown headliners the McKrells. Next time you’re in town, perk up your ears. —MTS
THIS
DIONYSIAN STAGE—A HUGE NEST OF WILLOW, METAL, FURNITURE, AND FOUND OBJECTS— IS FEATURED IN THE SHOW MARTIN KERSELS: HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION, ON VIEW AT THE TANG THROUGH JUNE 17.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GALERIE GEORGE-PHILIPPE ET NATHALIE VALLOIS, PARIS; PHOTO BY ARTHUR EVANS
8PICTURE
MARK MCCARTY
For some students, “away at college” can be across Case Green from dad’s office. See page 10.
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