CHRIS WALLJASPER: THE REST OF THE STORY

There’s a neat and tidy way to picture the journalism career of Chris Walljasper ’07, a Chicago-based reporter for the Toronto-based Reuters news agency who covers U.S. food production, supply chain, U.S. hunger and farm labor.

There he is in the 1990s, delivering the Fort Madison Democrat to half of his small hometown of Donnellson, Iowa, while his friend covered the other half.

There he is on his high school yearbook staff, and there he is at Monmouth College, majoring in communication and having a blast into the wee hours of the morning on the College radio station with his friend Brian Wilcoxon ’07.

Then a master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and Reuters snapped him up.

But all that would be, to put it politely, a crock, said Walljasper.

“What I like to tell students is that I can tell two stories,” he said. “One would be that as a kid, I threw papers, and then I worked on the yearbook, did radio at Monmouth and got my master’s — that it was a straight line. But that would be the furthest thing from the truth.”

Even his four years at Monmouth weren’t well thought out or scripted.

“I had three majors — communication, religious studies and music — because I couldn’t make up my damn mind,” said Walljasper. “I wouldn’t recommend that as a good course of action.”

The real story

So it’s a circuitous route that brought Walljasper to Reuters, where in 2022 he parlayed his experience in radio into hosting a twice-a-day, 10-minute pilot podcast – which is “innovative in terms of its frequency” — for the news agency.

“They wanted proof of concept. They liked it,” said Walljasper of the work he did for a few months last year. “I got to talk to all these people — a correspondent in Brazil during that country’s election, the guy on the ground in Ukraine — and turn it into a podcast.”

The podcast was on pause during the holidays but returned on Feb. 27.

Following graduation, Walljasper took his three Monmouth majors back to Iowa, selling advertising for the Muscatine Journal. A fellow named Samuel Clemens had written for the newspaper more than 150 years before, and neither Walljasper nor the future Mark Twain stayed there very long.

Walljasper also sold advertising for the River Cities Reader in Davenport, Iowa, with its small staff depending on his sales acumen to receive their paychecks each week.

The power of journalism

On the one hand, Walljasper was pleased to be in the news industry, but the more he learned about it, the more he realized he wanted to be on its editorial side.

“To prove to future employers that I’m a writer,” Walljasper took the very convincing step of enrolling at the Medill School of Journalism.

One of the highlights of that experience was being part of a team of Medill students who examined the deadly legacy of the United States’ use of landmines and cluster bombs around the world and its $3.2 billion effort to clean them up. The students reported the series from Cambodia, Iraq, Ukraine and Mozambique.

“I was in Mozambique to attend a United Nations conference in Maputo, and I connected with a guy from Australia who was going to travel six hours north of the city to check out a landmine site,” said Walljasper. “He asked me if I wanted to go, and I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ I contacted my instructor to ask if he was cool with that, and he said, ‘I’m not sure I am.’”

But Walljasper went anyway, and on the trip, he met a young woman, Florencia Artur Manhiça, who had lost a leg to a land mine that had been missed in the clean-up efforts. Walljasper used Manhiça as the peg for his deep 3,600-word dive into the subject.

Flash forward to a year later, when Walljasper was contacted by a non-profit agency that provides prosthetics to people in developing countries.

“They told me, ‘We’d like to give that young woman an opportunity to receive a leg.’ Not long after, they found her, flew her to their site and fitted her for a new leg. Without that story we did, no one would’ve known her. It gives me chills when I think about it.”

Joining Reuters

After Medill, Walljasper worked for Farm Journal, was involved in “a radio startup with some old WGN guys,” and worked for the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. Definitely not “straight line” stuff. Nor, for that matter, was the start of his career at Reuters, which hired him in February of 2020, a month before the pandemic.

“I said, ‘Hold on. We’re eight-and-a-half months pregnant. Can I hold off a few weeks?’” said Walljasper of he and his wife, Annie Shortridge Walljasper ’07. “They agreed, and my first day was March 16. I basically went in and got my laptop, and they told me to go home. There was a lot of remote work after that.”

Growing up in southeast Iowa, Walljasper has a pretty firm grasp of corn and soybeans. But his work for Reuters has exposed him to many other developments in agriculture.

“I’ve learned about lettuce growers in Arizona and potato farmers in Washington and even date farmers in Coachella,” he said.

And, as the pandemic raged, “supply chain” became a constant topic.

“If you’d brought up supply chain three years ago in casual conversation, people would’ve looked at you like you had three heads,” said Walljasper. “We all want things fast, now and on time. It turns out that what we were sacrificing for that was resiliency. It wasn’t redundant — there was a frailty there. If we didn’t have the truckers to get, say, lettuce from the Yuma Valley (in Arizona) to Hy-Vees (grocery stores) in the Midwest, it completely upended the whole system.”

Every day, he uses the critical thinking skills that he learned to apply at Monmouth.

“I tell my longer story to say this. Monmouth College gives you a well-rounded focus to weather all that. I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said.

JAIRE SIMS: MORE THAN ‘GETTING BY’

Jaire Sims ’16 was a straight-A student at Perspectives Charter School in Chicago, but that doesn’t mean his teenage years were easy.

His website describes that period as a time when his “quiet nature and social anxiety made him a prime target for bullies.”

Flash forward to four years beyond his time at Monmouth, when Sims published his first novel, Getting By. It was a finalist in the African American Fiction category at the 2021 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

Sims hopes Getting By will reach readers in demographics who share commonalities with him. He wishes to inspire such like-minded individuals to draw inspiration from their life experiences and perhaps someday create a story of their own.

“Monmouth was the first time I was in a place where everybody didn’t look like me and everybody didn’t have the same experiences I had,” said Sims, who was assisted in the admission process by admission counselor Peter Pitts

Among the faculty who influenced his time at Monmouth was Chris Goble in communication studies.

“Although very quiet, you could see that Jaire was searching for a way to express himself,” said Goble. “I could see that in his projects in my media courses. I was so happy and proud to see him find a voice and share his story. And from that, helping others share their story through his courses he is offering on his website.”

Sims completed Getting By during his junior year at Monmouth

“It’s not an autobiographical story, but it does combine some of my experiences from high school and college, as well as my own creativity and imagination,” he said. “I spent my senior year revising it,” then spent a few years saving up to publish the work.

His main character’s “decisions and options on the cusp of adulthood create a compelling, uplifting, realistic story of a potentially successful young man and introvert who faces pressures and influences beyond those usually wound into African American coming-of-age stories,” wrote Diane Donovan for Midwest Book Reviews.

Sims was asked what he says to others who are considering creating a story of their own.

“Just start writing, even if it’s just a little bit every day — a page or a paragraph,” he said. “If you don’t, you’ll find excuses not to write. Develop a discipline and a routine, and figure out what’s the story you’re eager to tell the world.”

Sims gives plenty of other advice on writing and self-publishing through the courses he offers on his website, jairesims.com. When he’s not working on the site, his writing course or revisions to the sequel of Getting By, Sims works in downtown Chicago for Mercer, a company that provides trusted advice and solutions to build healthier and more sustainable futures for its clients, colleagues and communities.

STUDENT NOVEL WRITERS: 50,000 WORDS

Three Monmouth students put the “Yes” in NaNoWriMo.

During the month of November, the trio all produced 50,000 words of fiction, spurred on by NaNoWriMo, which is short for National Novel Writing Month, an annual online event held each November.

Seniors Jan Abel, Jennie Nichols and Kestral Woeltje reached the goal. Another student, freshman Dawsyn Wilson — who also writes for the College’s communications and marketing team — got halfway there.

A descriptor on the organization’s website reads: “Writing a novel alone can be difficult, even for seasoned writers. NaNoWriMo helps you track your progress, set milestones, connect with other writers in a vast community, and participate in events that are designed to make sure you finish your novel.”

The Monmouth authors even felt that sense of community on campus, gathering regularly throughout November.

“We met twice a week for an hour, sometimes typing together and sometimes just talking, and even, if the situation dictated, commiserating,” said Nichols, while seated with the other writers in a ring of comfortable chairs in Hewes Library. “(Director) Sarah Henderson here at the library really supported us, too.”

Mapping out a schedule

NaNoWriMo says it “provides tools, structure, community and encouragement to help people find their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds — on and off the page.”

“We designed the books’ covers in October, which they say is motivation to help you finish your novel,” said Abel.

“Part of it is just getting the story out — just getting the words out,” said Nichols. “There are parts that I thought turned out really wonderful, and other parts where I did better in sixth grade.”

The students needed to average writing 1,667 words per day for each of November’s 30 days. Woeltje’s chart was nearly a perfectly straight diagonal, steadily rising from 0 in the bottom left-hand corner of the graph to 50,000 in the upper right-hand corner on the month’s final day.

Abel and Nichols reached the goal in more dramatic fashion. Abel, in fact, zipped through the 50,000 words by Nov. 17, then let her work sit for a week before going back to make edits on Black Friday. Nichols had a few zeroes along the way, but made up for the deficit with a 6,000-word day and eventually reached the goal a day early.

This was the sixth time that Nichols had participated in NaNoWriMo. She, Abel and Woeltje had the added experience of the College’s “Advanced Creative Writing” course, which they took last spring with David Wright.

“That course is when it really started,” said Abel of her novel. The students’ work was showcased during the 2022 Scholars Day poster display.

“The class is called ‘Building Stories, Building Worlds,’” said Wright at the poster display. Wright noted that in recent years, students, perhaps influenced by the Harry Potter series, have enjoyed “living in a world that’s not the one they’re in.”

MARK DUFFIELD: A CHRISTMAS SPECIAL

Fifteen years ago, famous actor Richard Thomas walked into a Boston gift shop coowned and managed by 1971 Monmouth graduate Mark Duffield

Rather than ask the actor who portrayed John-Boy on the TV show The Waltons for his autograph, Duffield instead described a project he was planning to Thomas, who helped him add a vital piece to the elaborate puzzle.

That piece became the book The Last Shepard and Tales of the Tenth Ornament: A Wee Yarn of Wonder at Christmastime

And the project became so much more.

“My inspiration to write anything can be traced back to Monmouth College in the late 1960s,” said Duffield. “I wrote a story I called ‘The Chameleon,’ and English professor Murray Moulding praised my work and urged me to continue writing.”

So is that what Duffield did?

“I did not. I became a commercial fisherman on Nantucket Island after graduation. I traveled the world, visiting 65 countries,” he said.

Some of his adventures included living with tribes in Africa, crossing the Sudan in a truck and traveling down the Amazon River in a small boat. He then became director of business development at Boston public TV station WGBH, funding programs such as Nova, Frontline and The American Experience

In 2006, Duffield became co-owner of Blackstone’s, a small gift shop on historic Charles Street.

Duffield began thinking of ways to increase the shop’s business. After a chance meeting with Toronto-based ornament maker Mario Friedrich, he had an idea. He asked Friedrich to create a series of 10 Boston-themed Christmas ornaments which, when collected in full, would provide enough clues to solve a riddle. Those solving the riddle would be entered into a drawing to win $2,000 in donated gold and silver coins.

Duffield then took the riddle further, proposing to a local bank manager that the riddle and coins be kept in a bank vault and dramatically opened five years later at the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve.

Duffield then had his second chance meeting, this time with Thomas. The actor gave Duffield the idea to write a story that accompanied the ornament project, with a separate riddle and with cliffhangers that would keep families returning to the story each Christmas Eve to learn what happened next. Those families had signed on to participate in the Blackstone’s Christmas Mystery Ornament program.

“We turned strangers into friends and friends into meaningful relationships that last to this day,” said Duffield, whose third chance meeting, with cartoonist Don Sherwood — famous for his work on The Flintstones — gave him his book’s illustrator.

Starting with Christmas in 2007, the families for the next five years received their two ornaments and a photocopied chapter of the wonderfully illustrated story. Many readers from across the United States traveled east in 2011 for the “big reveal,” which was held at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel.

Duffield has also authored a series of As I Recall titles, which he drew from the title of his father’s memoir. On Amazon.com, As I Recall: Wings of Remembrance debuted No. 1 as a book on fatherhood.

CHRIS PIO: WHAT’S IN A NICKNAME?

Former Monmouth coach and sports information director Chris Pio ’84 of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is now two-thirds of the way through a project of writing about the nicknames and mascots of colleges and universities in the three divisions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

Pio recently completed Gorillas, Gators and Greyhounds: The NCAA Division II Nickname and Mascot Menagerie. The book followed by one year his debut text, Gryphons, Gorloks & Gusties: A History

of NCAA Division III

Nicknames and Mascots

“The reception to (Gryphons, Gorloks & Gusties) really gave me the encouragement and energy to continue on with my project goal,” said Pio. “If that one would’ve fizzled, I don’t know if I would have had much initiative to do the second one.”

His brother, Chad Pio, a professional graphic designer, created the cover for both books, which are available at Amazon.com.

Two-thirds is also the rough ratio of the 300-plus DII nicknames connected with animals. Pio chose to acknowledge that tendency in his title, giving first mention to the nickname of his brother’s alma mater, Pittsburg State University in Kansas, one of the few DII schools he was familiar with before starting the 263-page project.

Through his research, Pio learned that the school chose its nickname for an unexpected reason.

“They’re the gorillas not because of the animal, but they had a spirit group – a pep group – on campus in the 1920s, and back then, Prohibition times, a gorilla was a slang term for a rowdy individual,” said Pio. “Their pep group was called ‘The Gorillas,’ and that became their (teams’) nickname. ... Their football stadium is known as ‘The Jungle’ because of the gorilla theme.”

That’s just one of the 302 stories in Pio’s book, which has taken him on what he called “a fascinating journey.” He’s learned about the Javelinas of Texas A&M University-Kingsville — a wild pig, not the instrument thrown by track and field athletes — the Ichabods of Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, and the Nanooks of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. The nickname at the latter school is simply a native word meaning “polar bear.”

“It’s been a fascinating journey reading about mascots and nicknames,” said Pio. “It started when I was in college as a student-athlete but more so, it really started to take off when I was the SID there. I researched the origin of ‘The Fighting Scots’ — that was the first nickname that I researched. It just kind of took off from there.”

SYLVIA ZETHMAYR SHULTS: LOOKING OVER YOUR SHOULDER

Your mind tells you that the long hallway you’re staring down has been deserted for half a century, but you can’t shake the feeling that — somehow — you’re not alone in the building. Did a light just flicker a few doors down on the right? Was that a footstep you heard right above your head?

Or is it possible that you’ve just been reading too many books by Sylvia Zethmayr Shults ’90? A librarian at the Fondulac Dis- trict Library in East Peoria, Ill., by day, Shults is the author of horror stories and paranormal non-fiction, mostly by night.

“I sit in dark, spooky places so you don’t have to, then I come out and tell you all about it,” said Shults of her method of research.

Her recent book, Days of the Dead: A Year of True Ghost Stories, won first place last year in the Bookfest Awards. The work represented a shift for Shults, who had previously authored several shorter, fictional ghost stories.

“I’m lucky enough to live within 10 minutes of one of the most haunted places in Illinois – the Peoria State Hospital,” said Shults of the building, shuttered in 1973, that was once one of the finest facilities in the world for the care of the mentally ill.

Her new book, Grave Deeds and Dead Plots, a collection of true crime stories with a twist of paranormal, is the first book in a series.

“I’ve actually collected enough material for the next four books or so,” she said. “There are going to be at least five books in the series, which is really exciting for me. I never thought I’d be writing a series, but here we are.”

Shults said she has always wanted to be a writer. Growing up, she would keep herself company by telling herself stories while she did her chores.

“Ever since high school, I’ve had the dream of being a writer,” she said. “It grew out of hearing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories, and it just kind of evolved from there into telling a lot of stories.”

Her love of her genre came from horror stories she heard as a child.

“I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, so my father would always tell me stories of the Resurrection Mary and the screaming mummy at the Field Museum and all these wonderful Chicagoland ghost stories,” she said.

What fascinates Shults the most is the history within the ghost stories.

“Because the history, these lived experiences, are why we have the ghost stories,” said Shults, who was a classics major at Monmouth. “And sometimes the ghost stories help us understand the history a little better. That’s what I want people to take away from my books – that history is this treasure trove of these amazingly incredible stories.” and role of cities in a globalized world while exploring the history, methods, classic texts and current discussions in urban anthropology.

Chapters in Kuppinger’s 148-page book examine urban dwellers’ lives, work, culture and experiences in different yet closely linked cities worldwide.

This concise introductory treatment illustrates how anthropologists address a wide range of questions, such as: What does it mean to work in an informal market in Lomé? How does gentrification affect a Mexican American neighborhood in Chicago? How do people experience urban environmental degradation and injustice? How do race and ethnicity shape the experiences of urbanites? How do immigrants create new urban religious communities?

BOB SIMMONS: LENDING AN EAR TO DEMAGOGUES

Students who occasionally miss a deadline for an assignment will be pleased to know there is at least one Monmouth professor who can lend a sympathetic ear.

More than a year after he was granted a three-month deadline extension, classics professor Bob Simmons can now hold in his hand a copy of his book Demagogues, Power, and Friendship in Classical Athens: Leaders as Friends in Aristophanes, Euripides, and Xenophon

PETRA KUPPINGER: UNDERSTANDING CITY SPACES

The development, transformation and role of major cities and regional centers in a globalized world is the topic of the latest book by Monmouth anthropology professor Petra Kuppinger, who authored Cities and Spaces: An Introduction to Urban Anthropology. The college-level textbook was published by Waveland Press.

Global cities such as New York City and Tokyo, national capitals such as Cairo and Dakar, and regional centers such as Bangalore and Barcelona are powerful economic, political and cultural hubs. Cities and Spaces surveys the development, transformation

“Amusement, relief, satisfaction,” replied Simmons, when asked how it felt to actually have possession of the book, which he received Feb. 9 from Bloomsbury Publishing.

The book examines ways in which a demagogic leadership style based on personal connection became ingrained in ancient Greece, drawing on close study of several genres of literature of the late 5th and earlyto-mid 4th centuries BCE.

What Simmons described as a 17-year process of completing the scholarly work was extended by three months when a variety of circumstances combined to change his response to his Bloomsbury contact.

“They contacted me early in the fall (of 2021) and asked if I was going to make my

Dec. 31 deadline, and I said, ‘Yes! Yes!’” said Simmons. “Then I spoke with them later in the fall, and they asked again if it would be finished, and I said, ‘It’s just not.’”

The pandemic alone might’ve been a good reason, as Simmons said, “It took four times as long to teach during that time as we prepared for in-person and remote learning.” But he was also doing the prep work for new courses, teaching more courses than normal, organizing another successful award-winning Classics Day, working on other scholarly projects, and helping to plan a College-sponsored trip to Italy.

“Unfortunately, the trip to Italy that was also going to be led by art professor Janis Wunderlich got canceled because of COVID,” said Simmons. The silver lining, though, was, “It opened up 10 days of my life.”

For three of those days, Simmons worked diligently on the book from the solitude of a hotel room in Las Vegas. When he returned to Monmouth, there was more good fortune. His spring semester teaching load was lighter, and a trio of his “conscientious and thoughtful” classics students lent a hand, either by handling some professional tasks he could delegate or by helping convert parts of the book, such as the bibliography, to Bloomsbury’s editorial style.

“I’ve looked at it way too much, and I’ll never read it again,” said Simmons the day after he received his finished work. “Now it’s at the mercy of the world. I’ve put myself in the kitchen, and we’ll see what kind of heat there is.”

Editor’s Note: This is from the five-part “Life in 2100” series, which was published in June on the College’s website. The series, which was inspired by Michio Kaku’s book Physics of the Future, can be read at monmouthcollege.edu/Lifein2100.

BY BARRY MCNAMARA

Developments in artificial intelligence are occurring at a mind-blowing pace.

“It’s almost ludicrous to make predictions with AI,” said Monmouth computer science professor Logan Mayfield “The kind of pace that the technology is being developed is pretty astounding.”

Consider this: Humans had the upper hand when it came to playing the ancient strategy game Go for around 2,500 years. But fed only very basic rules information, a computer recently taught itself to play at a world-class master level in a remarkably short time span.

“Using reinforcement learning, it progressed from nothing to master level in just three days, which is wild stuff,” said Mayfield.

Or this: In the decade since Mayfield was first interviewed about life in 2100, AI has certainly had its share of headlines. But ChatGPT, a form of AI released a mere eight months ago, recently soared past one billion (that’s with a “b”) Google search hits, with no signs of slowing down.

“AI is big business,” said Mayfield. “It’s barreling along with discoveries, and there are real problems that could arise from it. It’s not clear when or how we’ll step back and have a conversation about it.”

In his wide-ranging discussion on the pros and cons of AI, Mayfield expressed a pair of sentiments shared earlier in the “Life in 2100” series by his faculty colleagues on other futuristic issues – one regarding “who will have access” to the artificial intelligence and the other being “it could be good or bad, depending on what people do with it.”

He also focused some of his thoughts on a pair of common activities –baseball and driving.

“Automated vehicles will become more and more commonplace,” he said. “It’s easy to underestimate the impact that will have.”

The first domino to fall in the automated driving world, Mayfield believes, will be knocked over by companies.

“I feel pretty confident we’ll have automated commercial driving. We’re already seeing it, and the technology is getting better and better. And there are ramifications to that with things like roadside infrastructure. With an automated driver, trucks don’t need to stop for sleep. You’ll have less of a need for truck stops and hotels. These are life-changing impacts.”

Further down that road, so to speak, Mayfield said the self-driving revolution could lead to businesses that allow a human to get behind the wheel and experience the nostalgia of driving.

“There’ll be places you can go and actually drive a car,” he said. “I can see that becoming a thing.”

As time marches on toward 2100, that consumer could be driving for the first time, experiencing what it was like in “the old days” they’d only heard stories about, much like how we think of the way our 19th-century ancestors traveled on horseback and in stagecoaches.

Human employees striking out?

It was around the time of the stagecoach’s heyday in the United States that professional baseball captured the attention of the general public. Starting in