Nebraska Magazine Winter 2015

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PRESCRIPTION FOR EQUALITY IN HEALTHCARE / WRITING CONTEST WINNERS

NEBRASKA Magazine EXCLUSIVELY FOR MEMBERS OF THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA-LINCOLN

Having the

Times of her

LIFE LaSharah Bunting, ’00 New York Times Senior Editor

Volume 110 / No. 4 /Winter 2015 huskeralum.org

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INSIDEWINTER 6 University Update 18 Alumni Authors 38 Alumni News 45 Chapters & Affiliates 47 Class Notes 49 Alumni Profiles Marvin Almy, ’67, ’70 Jennifer Burt, ’08 Dick Hanzel, ’59 Christopher Jeffers, ’12 Nancy Forst Williamson, ’78

Husker volleyball players celebrate winning the third set en route to an upset of #3 seed Washington that snapped the Huskies’ 34-match home win streak and advanced the Huskers to the Elite Eight in the NCAA Volleyball Tournament.

(MATT RYERSON/Lincoln Journal Star)

20 22 24 32

The Legend has Left the Stadium

It looked like rain might hold off for Cornhusker Marching Band practice that day back in the 1980s, as a campus icon jogged around the track. But when the icon finished his run and walked under the cover of the stands, writing contest winner Karin Lockhart-Durkee recalled, the downpour commenced.

The Comedy of Journalism

When he’s not working as a Web developer for BreakingNews.com, Andy Boyle takes the stage as a stand-up comedian. With close to 300 performances under his belt, he finds comedy a retreat from the often weighty nature of hard news, according to writing contest winner Jenifer Calandra Willis.

A Visionary Doctor’s Rx for Equality in Healthcare

At the tender age of 28, Christine Ngaruiya, M.D., is already a practicing physician working daily in the emergency room at Yale University New Haven Hospital. The UNL and UNMC grad is also a fiercely dedicated social activist who spends most of her free time fighting for equal access to healthcare.

Having the Times of Her Life

When LaSharah Bunting was an undergrad in the late Dick Thien’s Copy Editing 101 class at UNL, he told her that if she worked hard and applied herself, she had enough talent to make it in the world of big-time journalism. He was right. Today Bunting is a Senior Editor at the New York Times.

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 3

alumnivoices NEBRASKA Magazine For alumni and friends of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Shelley Zaborowski, ’96, ’00 Interim Executive Director, Nebraska Alumni Association Andrea Wood Cranford, ’71 Editor Move Creative Design Kevin Wright, ’78 Layout and Photography; Class Notes Editor A.T. Greer Advertising Sales Nebraska Magazine (USPS 10970) is published quarterly by the Nebraska Alumni Association, the known office of publication is 1520 R St., Lincoln NE 68508-1651. Alumni association dues are $50.00 annually of which $10.00 is for a subscription to Nebraska Magazine. Periodicals postage is paid at Lincoln Nebraska 68501 and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster send address corrections to: Nebraska Magazine in care of the Nebraska Alumni Association, 1520 R St., Lincoln, NE 68508-1651.

Requests for permission to reprint materials and reader comments are welcome.

4 WINTER 2015

Winter 2015 n Vol. 110, No. 4

Send mail to: Nebraska Magazine Wick Alumni Center / 1520 R Street Lincoln, NE 68508-1651 Phone: 402-472-2841 Toll-free: 888-353-1874 E-mail: nebmag@huskeralum.org Website: huskeralum.org

Ashley Stone, ’14, Asst. Dir., Student Engagement

Jessica Erstad, ’96, Lincoln

Andy Washburn, ’00, ’07, Sr. Dir., Operations

Rick Grady, ’98, ’98, ’04, New Albany, Ohio

Judy Weaver, Assistant to the Executive Director

Pam Hemann, ’70, Pasadena, Calif.

Sara Werner, ’14, Executive Assistant

Troy Heuermann, ’92, Saint Paul, Minn.

Katie Williams, ’03, Director, Alumni Relations

Jane Hirt, ’89, Chicago, Ill.

Hilary Winter, ’11, Digital Comm. Specialist

Greg Johnson, ’89, ’93, Denver, Colo.

Views expressed in Nebraska Magazine do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Nebraska Alumni Association. The alumni association does not discriminate on the basis of gender, age, disability, race, color, religion, marital status, veteran’s status, national or ethnic origin, or sexual orientation.

Kevin Wright, ’78, Director, Design

Ka’Ron Johnson, ’00, Houston, Texas

Alumni Association Staff Shelley Zaborowski, ’96, ’00, Interim Exec. Dir. Claire Abelbeck, ’09, Director, Digital Comm.

Alex Cerveny, ’13, Alumni/Student Relations Coord.

Andrea Cranford, ’71, Sr. Director, Publications Charles Dorse, Custodian Derek Engelbart, Director, Alumni Relations Paul Goedert, Venues Coordinator A.T. Greer, Director, Alumni Development Sarah Haskell, ’09, Assoc. Dir., Alumni Relations Ryan Janousek, Venues/Operations Specialist Wendy Kempcke, Administrative Assistant Carrie Myers, ’03, ’11, Director, Venues Larry Routh, Alumni Career Specialist Deb Schwab, Associate Director, Venues Sarah Smith, ’11, Assoc. Dir., Brand Comm.

Lauren Kintner, ’92, Papillion

2014-2015 NAA EXECUTIVE BOARD

Jeffrey Kratz, ’03, Washington, D.C.

Bill Mueller, ’77, ’80, President, Lincoln

Duane Kristensen, ’76, ’78, Minden

Erleen Hatfield, ’91, ’96, New York City, N.Y.

Desi Luckey-Rohling, ’81, Edgerton, Wis.

Bill Nunez, UNL

Steven Miller, ’81, Lincoln

L.G. Searcy, ’82, ’91, Lincoln

Bill Mueller, ’77, ’80, Lincoln

Joe Selig, ’80, ’87, NU Foundation

Emily Murtaugh, Current Student, Omaha

Judy Terwilliger, ’95, ’98, Lincoln

Gregory Newport, ’76, Lincoln

Steve Toomey, ’85, ’89, Lenexa, Kan.

Mike Pate, Omaha Jamie Reimer, ’03, ’08, Papillion

2014-2015 Alumni advisory council

Russ Ripa, ’99, Lincoln

Damon Barry, ’00, Westminster, Colo.

Paul Schreier, ’00, ’01, Boston, Mass.

Graten D. Beavers, ’71, ’74, Kearney

Robert Scott, ’94, Lincoln

Stephanie Bolli, ’89, Omaha

Christine Scudder Kemper, ’87, Kansas City, Mo.

Lynn Canavan, ’86, ’90, McKinney, Texas

L.G. Searcey, ’82, ’91, Lincoln

Jennifer Christo, ’97, ’99, Omaha

Lee Stuart, ’91, Lincoln

John Clarke, ’74, Mitchell, S.D.

Judy E. Terwilliger, ’95, ’98, Lincoln

Daniel Dawes, ’06, Mableton, Ga.

Dale Tutt, ’88, Wichita, Kan.

Megan Dreyer, ’03, Lincoln

Mat Weekly, ’84, ’87, ’91, Aberdeen, S.D.

Kendra Eberhart, ’79, Peoria, Ariz.

Enter the 2015 Nebraska Magazine Writing Contest and compete for a byline!

The Categories

• Alumni Profiles: Write about a Nebraska grad with an interesting hobby or career.

• Nostalgia Pieces: Tell us about a memorable student activity you participated in at UNL, or write about a favorite professor.

The Prizes Three prizes will be awarded in each category, and the winning articles will be published in Nebraska Magazine.

• 1st Prize: $500 • 2nd Prize: $250 • 3rd Prize: $100

The Details Articles must be 750 to 1,000 words in length, typewritten.

Entry deadline is April 15, 2015. Submit entries, along with the author’s name, address and phone number.

•

• • •

By mail: Magazine Writing Contest, Wick Alumni Center, 1520 R Street, Lincoln, NE 68508-1651.

By e-mail: nebmag@huskeralum.org

By FAX: (402) 472-9289 Online: huskeralum.org/writing-submission

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 5

DEPARTMENT OF ATHLETICS

UNIVERSITY UPDATE

Mike Riley Named Nebraska Football Coach “Coach Riley is a great fit at Nebraska. He’s a first-class man who has been one of the most underrated coaches in the country for a number of years!”

Kirk Herbstreit, ESPN College Gameday Host

By Randy York, ’71

the integrity and values that we cherish at Nebraska. I have no doubt that Mike will assemble a tremendous staff and lead our student-athletes to win Big Ten titles and compete for national championships in the years ahead.”

Great fit is an easy expression to use, but a difficult one to describe.

Those two words emerged often after University of Nebraska Director of Athletics Shawn Eichorst announced Riley’s Skills More Than Coaching that Mike Riley was Nebraska’s new “His resume sparkles with coaching head football coach on Dec. 4. achievements,” said Eichorst who The positive theme was quickly looked at the totality of the man he reinforced by America’s wide world of sought rather than just the simplicity college football experts. Ranging from of his win-loss record. Looking for directors of athletics to former Huskers more than coaching skills, Eichorst who played for Riley in the NFL, “great immersed himself into understanding fit” was a popular descriptor that every aspect of Riley’s career looking painted the portrait of Riley, a man for the right teacher, coach, leader and that Eichorst researched diligently man. and found to have all the traits that he In his search, Eichorst focused wanted for the University of Nebraska. on coaching and character. “It’s not “There was one coach who fit all always about outcomes. It’s about the characteristics that I was seeking people,” Eichorst said when he to lead our tradition-rich football introduced program,” Riley at a news Eichorst said.

“Mike Riley has a proven record conference “Mike Riley inside Memorial has a proven of success, a sound approach Stadium on Dec. record of to football and teaching, an 5. “Mike Riley success, a understanding of the educational is a tremendous sound approach football coach, to football and mission of our university, and the a man of high teaching, an integrity and values that we character understanding of cherish at Nebraska.” and virtue, the educational a wonderful mission of our Shawn Eichorst husband and university, and 6 WINTER 2015

father, and the son of a football coach.

We have an elite football coach who now has an incredible history behind him, incredible resources, and a passionate fan base.”

Eichorst was looking for a leader who had a track record of developing the total student-athlete experience.

“Simply, we will win with Mike, but more importantly our student-athletes will have an amazing experience under his leadership.”

Riley Played for Legendary Bear Bryant Riley played for coach Bear Bryant at Alabama. “During his time, they won three Southeastern Conference titles and a national championship before Mike embarked upon a coaching career that has spanned almost four decades,” Eichorst said. “As an

UNIVERSITY UPDATE

in-a-lifetime opportunity to coach at one of the nation’s most storied football programs and I can’t wait to get started. My sincere thanks to Chancellor Perlman and Shawn Eichorst for their confidence in me and I look forward to becoming a part of the Nebraska family and building upon this great history and tradition.”

Photos courtesy of Nebraska Media Relations.

assistant coach Eichorst said.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime and as a head “Mike has coach, both at had many opportunity to coach at one the collegiate opportunities to of the nation’s most storied and professional leave Corvallis football programs and I can’t level, Mike’s for other teams played destinations, but wait to get started.” sound physical chose to stay Mike Riley football, and in his adopted Mike has a track hometown and record of evaluating and developing build a solid and respected winner,” talent.”

Eichorst said. “It would take a special Eichorst learned that Riley is place and a perfect fit for him to move, held in high regard for his football and we are fortunate that he found that intelligence on both sides of the ball, in Nebraska.” for his approach in teaching the game, Coach Riley listened intently to and for his ability to get the most Eichorst at his introductory press out of his student-athletes. “He’s conference with his left hand on the a great recruiter, a great motivator, shoulder of his wife, Dee. “It is truly an and I am confident his staff will only honor to join the University of Nebraska complement his exceptional abilities,” family,” Riley said. “This is a once-

40 Years of Experience a Big-Picture Plus for Nebraska Before accepting the Nebraska job, Riley was the longest-tenured coach in the Pac-12 Conference and had the seventh-longest coaching tenure of any head coach in the FBS ranks.

Riley coached Oregon State twice in 14 seasons (1997-98 and then from 2003 to 2014) and has nearly 40 years of coaching experience. Riley took over an Oregon State program that was mired in a streak of 26 consecutive losing seasons. He quickly changed the culture in Corvallis and led OSU teams to upsets of No. 3 USC in 2006; No. 1 USC in 2008 and No. 6 Arizona State in 2014.

Sandwiched in between those separate stays in Corvallis were a threeyear stint as the San Diego Chargers head coach and a one-year stop as the New Orleans’ Saints assistant head coach. He also coached the Winnipeg Blue Bombers to two Grey Cup Championships, the Canadian Football League’s equivalent of the Super Bowl. Riley has a reputation of being one of the most professional and nicest men in the profession, but his coaching acumen also speaks volumes.

Coach Riley owns the most wins ever at Oregon State with 93, while leading the program to eight bowl appearances.

“I was looking at the big picture,” Eichorst said, “although I think at a place like Nebraska, with all this great history and tradition, experience matters.”

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 7

Selection Triggers Rave Reviews from National Media Eichorst’s assessment of Coach Riley was confirmed by national media. In addition to Herbstreit, the national media’s overwhelming support of the hiring of Riley is rooted in the relationships Nebraska’s new head football coach has made and the respect he receives from fellow coaches, players, administrators, media and fans.

USA Today columnist Paul Myerberg said “Mike Riley is the most optimistic, pleasant, gracious, accommodating head coach in college football.”

Joe Schad, ESPN’s national college football reporter who frequently appears on the network’s “College Football Live” show, said “Nebraska not only hired an excellent coach in Mike Riley, but one of the most approachable, level-headed, likeable coaches on the planet.”

Sean McDonough, another highly respected ESPN announcer said, “He’s the nicest guy in coaching. He did an amazing job at Oregon State, where he built one of college football’s worst programs into a winner. I’m excited to see what he can do at Nebraska with its resources and tradition. I am certain the great Nebraska fans will embrace this man of enormous character and integrity. This is a great hire!!”

now an assistant special teams coach for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, calls Riley an “excellent hire” because “he’s a man of great integrity. He’s a man who really respects tradition and a coach who knows how to get the most out of his players.”

A 2001 inductee into the Nebraska Football Hall of Fame, John Parrella spent 13 years in the NFL as a defensive tackle. The Grand Island (Neb.) Central Catholic graduate played eight years with the Chargers, including three under Riley. A former Super Bowl starter with the Raiders, Parrella compressed his thoughts to describe Riley.

“Great man! Great coach! Great hire for Nebraska!”

“Great man! Great coach!

John Parrella Great hire for Nebraska!” he said.

The overwhelmingly positive response did not come as a surprise to Eichorst, who said Coach Choice Pleases Former Huskers Riley has been on his radar for probably Who Played for Riley 10 years. “He’s a teacher and he puts Carlos Polk, a Nebraska first-team himself and others around him in a All-America middle linebacker from position to be successful.”

Rockford, Ill., played eight years in the NFL, including his first seven as a Charger. His first year in the NFL was Riley’s last year at San Diego. Polk,

8 WINTER 2015

UNIVERSITY UPDATE

Riley: People, Place and Time Converge While Riley had opportunities to leave Corvallis, he said Lincoln was the right place and the right time to move. “We are in this together to build young men and win championships, and they don’t have to be exclusive of one another,” Nebraska’s new head coach said. “We’re going to do it right.

We’re going to work hard. One of the basic ingredients for success is hard work. That always feels good when you can accomplish something after doing that.”

While Riley-coached teams have won six of Oregon State’s eight bowl games, he did not coach the Huskers in the Holiday Bowl. “We will obviously begin the recruiting process for our new staff and not have a long time ahead of us to do it,” Riley said.

Mike and his wife, Dee, are the parents of one son, Matthew, and one daughter, Kate. They also have a grandson, Elijah Jo. Matthew, an Oregon State graduate, is currently employed at the University of Texas.

Kate, a 2011 OSU graduate, resides in Corvallis.

4H SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Wearable Technology Has Arrived Sensor-embedded shirts. Bluetoothenabled shoes. Camera-equipped glasses.

The age of “wearable technology” has arrived, and with it a potential avenue for engaging elementary students in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

With nearly $1 million of support from the National Science Foundation, an interdisciplinary team from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and University of Nebraska at Omaha is crafting a curriculum that will allow students to learn the science behind the fashion-forward technology.

Spanning both classrooms and afterschool programs, the three-year project will offer inquiry based activities to roughly 900 students in grades 4-6 who attend public school in Nebraska.

The curriculum will give students access to kits featuring conductive thread, LED lights, sensors and other components commonly found in hightech garments. Students will also work with microcontrollers, which include miniscule circuit boards that can be programmed to direct the various devices attached to them.

The research team envisions such activities helping students learn basic principles of engineering design – including electricity and circuitry – that they can then apply to create LEDencrusted bracelets and other apparel.

“It’s hands-on, minds-on (activity), and all of the technology is exposed,” said Brad Barker, UNL associate professor and 4-H science and technology specialist. “They’re manipulating an object in the real world. We’re hoping to teach these students to think like engineers, and wearable technology is the vehicle that we’re using to do it.

“The next science standards specifically focus on engineering, but engineering traditionally is not taught in schools, especially at these grades.

We saw an opportunity to fill that gap with this new curriculum.”

The research team will subsequently examine whether the curriculum enhances students’ engineering-related knowledge, skills and attitudes – particularly their interest in the field’s many potential careers.

“This is an age when students are very impressionable,” Barker said.

“By fourth or fifth grade, many are self-selecting out of science and engineering. We think an intervention at this age group could be especially

UNIVERSITY UPDATE

of engineering professionals as a whole, Barker said. Yet he also noted that this trend runs counter to the exponential prospects of wearable technology, which industry experts have projected could grow from $12 million to more than $18 billion in annual sales by 2017.

The multidisciplinary nature of the technology is reflected in the composition of Barker’s team, which includes Gwen Nugent, research professor at UNL’s Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools; Carl Nelson, UNL associate professor of mechanical and materials engineering; Jennifer Melander, UNL assistant professor

Brad Barker (right), Jennifer Melander, Carl Nelson and Michelle Krehbiel show off examples of wearable technology designed by 4-H students using microcontrollers.

(Craig Chandler | University Communications)

important for keeping them interested.”

Barker’s team also aims to determine whether wearable technology encourages more STEM participation among females and other traditionally underrepresented groups. A pilot study conducted in the summer found that girls constituted roughly 60 percent of participants.

The historical lack of female engineers mirrors an emerging shortage

and science literacy specialist; Neal Grandgenett, UNO community chair of STEM education; Kim Larson, coordinator of professional development for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program; and Michelle Krehbiel, UNL assistant professor of youth development.

– Scott Schrage, University Communications

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 9

UNIVERSITY UPDATE

The piece in the “Illuminating Lincoln” public art project was installed in front of the Lied Center in November. Artist Gina Egenberger’s work is entitled “Incandescent Flight.”

LIED CENTER FOR PERFORMING ARTS

Arts Center Marks 25th Year “In time, some citizen might erect a lovely theater and auditorium for us…

Someday, a hall for fine arts with art galleries, music studios, and audition rooms will be built…”

– Chancellor E.A. Burnett (1933) It took another 50 years, but in 1982 NU Foundation chair D.B. “Woody” Varner got an idea while reading the newspaper that would lead to what was at the time the largest grant in University of Nebraska-Lincoln history. He hoped to erect a statewide performing arts center that would serve not only the people of Lincoln but the entire state of Nebraska.

Varner wrote to Christina Hixson, trustee for the estate of NU graduate Ernst Lied. There was no response for some time but eventually the trust agreed to support “something tangible and lasting as a memorial to Lied and his parents, E.M. and Ida K. Lied.”

A $10 million Lied trust grant was awarded on the condition that Varner and others raise another $10 million challenge grant.

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The entire state rallied behind Varner’s dream. The Nebraska Legislature appropriated $7 million and another $3 million came from private donations. Construction on the 150,000-square-foot Lied Center for Performing Arts began in 1986, and all aspects were carefully planned.

The stage – one of the largest in the Midwest region from Chicago to Denver, contains 13,000 square feet and eight stories of fly space (the empty space above the stage used to attach and house flying scenery). The main curtain measures 90 feet by 32 feet and weighs 2.5 tons, and the main stage features five layers of soft wood in a grid pattern covered by battleship linoleum, which provides a sprung floor for dancers.

The main performance hall seats 2,259, with 1,304 seats on the main floor and 955 in the balcony.

The colors used throughout the Lied Center were chosen by Donald Kaufman, a professional colorist from New York City, who said that the earthy tones reflected the spirit and warmth

of the state of Nebraska.

But every aspect of design came second to the acoustics of the hall.

The acoustician, Paul Veneklasen, examined and tested every detail to assure the greatest natural sound possible. With no parallel walls in the Lied Center, a unique acoustic space was created that lends itself to a resonant audio experience.

As Lied Center construction neared completion, Nebraska native, UNL graduate and late night television legend Johnny Carson personally provided a major gift. The Johnny Carson Theater, a black box theater, was added to the facility, providing a secondary performance space for UNL students to rehearse and for smaller scale com-

DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY/COLLEGE OF LAW

Law-Psychology Celebrates 40th Year The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has a 125-year tradition of firsts in psychology – and the Law-Psychology Program is one of those firsts.

In 1974, Bruce Sales and a group of faculty from both the Department of Psychology and the College of Law led the way for the founding of a unique, new program focused on interdisciplinary training in psychology and law.

This past October, alumni, affiliates, faculty and current students gathered to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the program and look to the future.

The three-day event included several panel discussions, a showcase of current student work, a celebratory dinner and a football tailgate.

Professor Bob Schopp was honored as the faculty member who has served on the most dissertation committees for students in the Law-Psychology Program. Professor Alan Tomkins

munity and experimental productions to take place.

The Lied Center for Performing Arts opened in 1990, but the enhancements continue today.

Thanks to a $2.5 million gift from the Ernst F. Lied Foundation Trust, the Lied Commons was built in 2011 adding another 8,100 square feet for student learning, artist interactions

UNIVERSITY UPDATE

All four directors of the Law-Psychology Program participated in a panel discussion at the reunion. They are, left to right: Bruce Sales, Steven Penrod, Gary Melton and Richard Wiener.

moderated a panel of all four program directors – Bruce Sales (1974-1981), Gary Melton (1982-1993), Steve Penrod (1995-2001) and Rich Wiener (2002- present).

At the celebration banquet, alumni from each director’s era spoke about the impact the LawPsychology Program had on them as undergraduates. Then, Richard Blunk,

’76, announced the establishment of the Bruce Sales Law-Psychology Program Excellence Fund in honor of the mentoring and influence Sales had on Blunk’s life and career.

On the final day of the gathering, the group celebrated at a tailgate before, during and after the Husker football win against Rutgers.

and patron development. A gift from the John W. Carson Foundation in 2013 is funding a complete renovation of the Johnny Carson Theater lobby and entrance.

In the last few years, substantial “behind-the-scenes” work has included roof replacement, a new sound system, an upgraded lighting system, a new stage floor and an improved HVAC system. Future plans include enhancements to hearing assistance services to help patrons with hearing loss as well as updates to exterior elements of the building, including more LED signage.

Today the Lied Center is recognized as one of the top 100 performing arts centers in the world. Over the past 25 years, the center has hosted some

of the greatest artists and thought leaders in the world including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Isaac Stern, Philadelphia Orchestra, Bernadette Peters, Bill Cosby and more.

It also is a space where UNL students and community members can engage with world leaders and hear the insights of political and religious scholars; a setting where new artistic works are created and developed; a place where Nebraskans can relate to and learn from the greatest artistic minds of our time; and the site where thousands have experienced the arts for the very first time.

– Troy Fedderson, University Communications

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 11

DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY

Time Capsule Sheds Light on Pioneering Chemist

UNIVERSITY UPDATE

yearbook. That For Mark Griep and the University of mystery was solved Nebraska-Lincoln community, Rachel by a 1916 article in Lloyd was an enigma. the Red Cloud Chief, It was in a passing conversation in 1997 that Griep, associate professor of describing a time the American Chemical Society to chemistry, learned that Lloyd had been capsule included in establish Lloyd as a National Historical the date stone of Avery Hall on City possibly the first American woman to Chemical Landmark.

Campus. The article explicitly said a hold a doctorate in chemistry and that “She and her husband were religious photo of Lloyd had been included. she had taught at Nebraska for seven and were focused on missions and Griep gained permission to dig out years, even serving as acting chair of what they could do for the greater the time capsule and did so in May. the department from 1892 to 1893. good,” Griep said, citing Clement The contents were revealed this fall Griep, who enjoys researching family Lloyd’s book. “Her husband died after – and much to Griep’s surprise, the and community history, was intrigued only five years of marriage and she manuscript he’d been searching for with Lloyd’s story and wondered why eventually decided to there seemed to be no He (Griep) pieced together information about Lloyd’s academic teach. official photo held by “She became a the department or the and family history, her groundbreaking research into Nebraska science teacher at university. sugar beets and her years at the university, from 1887 to 1894. a girls’ school in He pieced together Philadelphia because information about But many things still remained a mystery. He couldn’t find any her husband had Lloyd’s academic and information on why she pursued chemistry nor could he explain been a chemist, and family history, her she believed she groundbreaking research why she retired after only seven years. could best honor his into Nebraska sugar memory by making it her mission to was also included. Despite nearly 100 beets and her years at the university, teach chemistry to girls. As a result, it years of encasement with chemicals, from 1887 to 1894. But many was the first girls’ school to conduct photos, old newspapers and other things still remained a mystery. He laboratory experiments in chemistry.” materials, the white book was in couldn’t find any information on why Griep also made sure Rachel Lloyd’s excellent shape. she pursued chemistry nor could he efforts are recognized on campus by Ecstatic over the find, Griep worked explain why she retired after only seven having her portrait hung among those with staff from the UNL Libraries and years. of the other chemistry department A 1901 article from the Philadelphia the Center for Digital Research in the chairs in Humanities. Mary Ellen Ducey, an Times advertised the publication of CONNECTION BOX Hamilton Hall.

Lloyd’s biography by her brother-in-law, archivist, and Andy Jewell, associate “She was go.unl.edu/0ed0 professor of digital projects, University Clement. Griep searched the country a pioneer her Libraries, took the manuscript and for the manuscript, but came up whole life,” he said. digitized it. empty-handed.

– Deann Gayman, University Griep finally had the answers He also didn’t have a good photo Communications he’d been looking for – and he was of Lloyd; the only photo he’d been able to find was in an old university

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impressed enough to work with

UNIVERSITY UPDATE

BRACE LABORATORY OF PHYSICS

Forgotten Door Décor Returned to Brace The renovation of Brace Hall has returned a forgotten piece of campus history to prominence.

When it opened in 1905, Brace Laboratory of Physics featured a variety of unique design elements, including a cast iron screen over its east door.

That screen was counted among the architectural details lost to 109 years of general maintenance and upgrades.

“We knew the screen was a part of the building in 1905, but figured it had been removed with other terracotta and cast iron work,” said Dale Bowder, a project manager with Facilities Planning and Construction. “That changed when work began on the new entryway.”

There, under layers of plywood and insulation (probably added in reaction to the 1970s energy crisis, Bowder said), the slightly rusted cast iron screen was uncovered still in place over the door.

Carefully removed, the screen – which features simple scroll work and the words “Physical Laboratory” – was sent to Kaser Blasting and Coatings in Lincoln for refurbishment. The piece was blasted clean with glass beads, then powder coated with colors that closely match the original. It returned to its place over the east Brace Hall door the week of Oct. 27.

“We mounted it exactly where it was originally placed in the early 1900s,”

A cast iron decoration uncovered during a renovation has been refurbished and returned to its place over the east door to UNL’s Brace Hall. The screen is original to the 109-year-old building. (University Communications)

said Chad Lea, lead project manager/ designer for Facilities Planning and Construction. “It is a good symbol of what we tried to do in terms of updating Brace into a modern learning facility while maintaining the existing integrity and history of the building.”

– Troy Fedderson, University Communications

NEBRASKA LITERARY LAB

Digital Team Studying One Million Novels

Matthew Jockers

A “dream team” of digital humanities researchers that includes Matthew Jockers of the University of NebraskaLincoln will study the development of the novel, thanks to a $1.8 million grant from the Canadian government.

The award means the Nebraska Literary Lab will be “a key player in a network of research centers that will provide the next great advances in literary text mining,” said Jockers,

an associate professor of English and director of the literary lab.

The six-year grant from Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council will be matched by contributions from other participating institutions, putting the total project at $3.1 million.

Called NovelTM, the project involves 11 investigators from three universities in Canada and six in the United States, including UNL. Several other organizations, such as Cengage Learning, Compute Canada, Harvard University and the HathiTrust Research Center are joining in the effort.

According to project director Andrew Piper of McGill University in Montreal, the investigators will crunch data derived from more than 1 million books dating from the 18th century to the present. The novels include largely forgotten popular schlock as well as timeless literary classics.

Jockers said the grant will enable digital humanities researchers to tackle some of the most difficult problems of large-scale text mining of novels. Text mining allows researchers to identify large-scale patterns among hundreds of thousands of works, in contrast to analyzing individual works through close reading.

The professor and his students have already begun to use text mining to examine characters in novels and how they are depicted. A spring 2014 class studied how gender influenced character.

“We discovered male characters have a set of actions typical to them and female characters have actions typical to them,” he said. “We can analyze how they change over time.”

– Leslie Reed, University Communications

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 13

UNIVERSITY UPDATE

Jinsong Huang (Photo by Craig Chandler, University Communications)

MECHANICAL AND MATERIALS ENGINEERING

Groundbreaking Solar Energy Project Funded The gap between solar energy’s promise and fruition once seemed equal to the distance separating its source from the Earth. That gap has narrowed significantly in recent years and work continues to close it further.

Jinsong Huang, associate professor of mechanical and materials engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has earned a four-year, $1.2 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy SunShot Initiative to do his part by improving the efficiency of solar cells.

Huang’s project will focus on refining solar cells that feature perovskite, which refers to a type of atomic structure and any material that has such structure. Silicon-based cells, the current industry standard, typically convert about 20 percent of captured solar energy into usable electricity.

By overlaying silicon cells with a thin film of specially fabricated perovskite, 14 WINTER 2015

Huang aims to increase that efficiency to at least 30 percent.

The perovskite readily soaks up sunlight and allows electrons to move freely within it, Huang said, which facilitates the conversion of solar radiation into electricity. The fact that the material is naturally abundant also makes it relatively inexpensive, an important consideration for an industry that continues striving to lower costs, he said.

Because the two materials capture different wavelengths of light, pairing silicon with perovskite allows a cell to harvest a broader spectrum of solar energy than either material could alone.

Yet Huang said he intends to up the ante even further by making perovskite itself more efficient.

In 2013, Huang introduced techniques that allowed the material to convert a then-record 16 percent of solar energy into electricity. His current

project, which includes collaborators from Iowa State University, will look to achieve 20 percent efficiency for perovskite solar cells and 30 percent for tandem solar cells.

Huang has developed a new lowtemperature fabrication process designed to boost crystallinity and size of the perovskite cells. The fabrication process will produce perovskite in the form of a liquid solution, a fact that should ultimately make it more affordable and accessible.

“You could use the solution like you would ink CONNECTION BOX in a printer or energy.gov/sunshot copy machine,” Huang said.

“Think about how quickly you can print out a newspaper. With this solution, we can hopefully use existing technology to print out solar cells in the future.”

– Scott Schrage, University Communications

NEBRASKA INNOVATION CAMPUS

City, UNL Create Renewable Energy at NIC Through a unique renewable energy system, University of NebraskaLincoln students and Lincoln residents help provide energy to heat and cool Nebraska Innovation Campus when they shower and flush.

The Centralized Renewable Energy System, or CRES, warms and cools buildings by exchanging heat from treated wastewater discharged from a city facility next to the research park.

“It’s part of the culture we want to build at Innovation Campus,” NIC executive director Dan Duncan said.

“We need to do things differently and we need to think about things differently.”

Under construction on the former state fairgrounds near UNL’s city campus, NIC is adjacent to the Theresa Street Wastewater Facility, which serves 70 percent of Lincoln, including nearly all of UNL. The facility releases treated effluent into Salt Creek, which runs along the north side of the campus.

The designers of Nebraska Innovation Campus recognized the plant as a potential asset. They worked with city of Lincoln officials and state environmental officials to safely utilize the wastewater stream without harming Salt Creek.

Tetrad Property Group, the company developing phase I of the campus, worked with Olsson Associates to design the system. Designers said there are less than a

dozen similar projects in the United States, with none quite like NIC’s system.

The system serves as a geothermal ground loop that uses wastewater, instead of the ground, as its heat sink.

The plant discharges effluent at up to 15,000 gallons per minute during daytime peaks. Water temperatures range from 57 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the time of day and year.

The effluent water is pumped from the plant’s discharge point to a heat exchanger building on campus. There, it is used to heat or cool a second stream of water that circulates through campus in a 6,000-foot loop of pipe.

On a typical summer day, it might cool the system water from 88 degrees to 78 degrees, creating 10 degrees of cooling for campus buildings. Initial infrastructure can serve up to about 1.1 million square feet of laboratory and office space, with additional expansion available later.

UNIVERSITY UPDATE

The two streams circulate in selfcontained loops so that the effluent is returned for discharge into Salt Creek without mixing with water that circulates through campus. An existing environmental permit prohibits water being discharged into the creek at more than 90 degrees. The system has been engineered so that the water will not exceed 85 degrees.

The project cost $12 million, with construction and operating costs to be paid through tenant utility charges equivalent to existing electric and natural gas rates. It is expected to reduce heating costs by about 30 percent and cooling costs by about 25 percent compared to traditional systems in the long term. Tenants also will have more usable space in their buildings because they don’t need bulky chillers and boilers.

– Leslie Reed, University Communications

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 15

CAMPUS BRIEFS KUDOS n The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture has honored UNL’s Nebraska Agriculture Water Management Network with an Innovative Programs and Partnership Award for its groundbreaking water-management work and contributions in advancing agricultural science. Suat Irmak, H.W. Eberhard Distinguished Professor and a faculty fellow at the Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Institute, leads the UNL Extension-based network, which was launched in 2005 and is made up of farmers, natural resources districts, crop consultants, irrigation districts and USDA conservation officials. The group creates and implements effective water-conservation strategies and tools on roughly 1.7 million irrigated acres of farmland in Nebraska. n Ronnie D. Green, IANR Harlan Vice Chancellor at UNL and University of Nebraska vice president, has been appointed to a national task force that will advise the federal government on the use of antibiotics in production agriculture.

students studying within the Raikes School. The entrepreneurs met and began collaborating while studying at the Raikes School. Their gift represents the single largest donation ever made to this program from its alumni.

In October the school announced the Thomas E. Lauerman Endowed Scholarship, made possible with a major gift from UNL alumnus Tom Lauerman of Leawood, Kan. It will fund annual scholarship awards for students, enabling the Raikes School to provide at least one full-ride scholarship every year. n A gift from Norman and Sharon Timmerman of Indianola creates the Leo O. and Irene Timmerman Feedyard Management Specialization Program Fund as a permanent endowment at the University of Nebraska Foundation.

Annual income from the endowment will support the feedlot management

program, provide scholarship awards to interns and help recruit students to the program from Nebraska and surrounding states. Funds will also be used to provide a stipend award in support of a doctoral student who will coordinate and help expand the internship program. n UNL’s Center for Electro-Optics and Functionalized Surfaces received a $563,131 NASA Nebraska EPSCoR grant, as well as a combined $375,000 from the mechanical and materials engineering and electrical engineering

GRANTS AND GIFTS n The Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was the recipient of several scholarship gifts this fall. In September, the Nebraska sports technology company Hudl, founded by UNL alumni David Graff, Brian Kaiser and John Wirtz, made a $500,000 gift that permanently endowed the Hudl Scholarship Fund to provide annual scholarship awards for 16 WINTER 2015

Left to right: Brian Kaiser, David Graff and John Wirtz.

departments and UNL’s Office of Research and Economic Development to research the fashioning of metallic surfaces to help spacecraft operate more efficiently. Led by Dennis Alexander, professor of electrical engineering, the research team also includes George Gogos, professor of mechanical and materials engineering; Sidy Ndao, assistant professor of mechanical and materials engineering; Troy Anderson, research assistant professor of electrical engineering; and Craig Zuhlke, a post-doctoral research Left to right: George assistant in electrical Gogos, Sidy Ndao and Dennis Alexander. engineering.

BOOKS n Paul A. Johnsgard, Foundation Regents Professor Emeritus in the School of Biological Sciences at UNL, is the author of more than fourdozen books, the latest of which is “Seasons of the Tallgrass Prairie,” published in 2014 by the University of Nebraska Press.

Johnsgard crafts essays featuring snow geese, owls, hummingbirds and other creatures against the backdrop of Great Plains landscapes. He describes prairie chickens courting during

predawn hours and the calls of sandhill cranes; he evokes the magic of lying upon the prairie, hearing only the sounds of insects and the wind through the grasses.

From reflections following a visit to a Pawnee sacred site to meditations on the perils facing the state’s finite natural resources, “Seasons of the Tallgrass Prairie” celebrates the gifts of a half century spent roaming Nebraska’s back roads, trails and sometimes-forgotten places.

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 17

Body and Nation

Emily S. Rosenberg, ’66,

and Shanon

The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century Duke University Press, 2014, (paper) $26.95 www.dukeupress.edu

Fitzpatrick

The idea that bodies and bodily characteristics are heavily freighted with values that are often linked to political and social spheres remains underdeveloped in the histories of America’s relations with the rest of the world. In “Body and Nation,” the contributors provide historically grounded insights into the transnational dimensions of biopolitics. Their subjects range from the regulation of prostitution in the Philippines by the U.S. Army to Cold War ideals of American feminine beauty, and from “body counts” as metrics of military success to cultural representations of Mexican migrants in the United States as public health threats. By considering bodies as complex, fluctuating and interrelated sites of meaning, the contributors to this collection offer new insights into the workings of both soft and hard power.

ALUMNI AUTHORS 18 WINTER 2015

The Calamities of Kalamity Kate Leta Powell Drake ’67

A History of Nebraska’s Children’s TV Shows J&L Lee Co., 2014, (paper) $19.95 info@leebooksellers.com

Leta Powell Drake’s nearly 50-year career in broadcasting in positions from program host to producer/director, began in Duluth, Minn. With her move to Lincoln in 1960 for post-graduate studies, she worked at KLIN radio and KOLN-TV, staying at the latter for 28 years. It was during that period that she created Kalamity Kate whose “Cartoon Corral” was a popular feature from 1967 through 1982. Stories include her interviews with Captain Kangaroo, Art Linkletter and Jerry Lewis as well as hundreds of Nebraska children. This book is a fascinating insight to the Golden Age of television and a veritable trip down memory lane, filled with first-person anecdotes ranging from the humorous to the poignant.

Jalos, USA Transnational Community and Identity University of Notre Dame Press, 2014, (paper), $27

Joel Alfredo undpress.nd.edu Mirandé In “Jalos, USA,” Alfredo Mirandé explores migration between the Mexican town of Jalostotitlán, Jalisco, and Turlock, Calif., and shows how migrants retain a primal identity with their community of origin. The study examines how family, gender, courtship, religion and culture promote a Mexicanized version of the “American Dream” for la gente de Jalos.

After introducing traditional theories of migration and describing a distinctly circular migration pattern between Jalos and Turlock, Mirandé introduces a model of transnationalism. Residents move freely back and forth across the border, often at great risk, adopting a transnational village identity that transcends both the border and conventional national or state identities.

Leaving the Pink House

Ladette Randolph

’86, ’91, ’99

A Memoir

Lincoln’s Early Architecture

University of Iowa Press, 2014, (paper) $18

Arcadia Publishing, 2014, (paper) $21.99

www.uiowapress.org

www.arcadiapublishing.com

In September 2001, Ladette Randolph and her husband bought a dilapidated farmhouse on 20 acres outside Lincoln and set about gutting and rebuilding the house themselves. They had nine months to complete the work. The project, undertaken at a time of national unrest and uncertainty, led Randolph to reflect on the houses of her past and the stages of her that played out in each, both painful and joyful.

In the newest addition to Arcadia Publishing’s popular Images of America series, the early Matthew history of Lincoln comes to life through Hansen, more than 200 historic images. “Lincoln’s ’98, ’00; Early Architecture” was authored by three James local historians: Jim McKee, Edward Zimmer McKee, ’63; and Matt Hansen. Together these authors and Edward assembled historic photographs primarily Zimmer drawn from their private collections to tell the story of the city’s beginnings more than 150 years ago.

Along the Pathways Writings

Global Entrepreneurship

Bellowing Ark Press, 2014, (paper) $18 PO Box 55564, Shoreline, WA 98155

James Hobbs ’68

Using autobiographic prose-poetry, James Hobbs is a chronicler of time and place, an observer of character and mores. His writings are specific, describing the times, the land and the people of the Midwest, Nebraska and Colorado particularly, in memorable, telling detail.

Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, 2014, (paper), $95 www.kendallhunt.com

Shawn M. Carraher and Dianne H.B. Welsh, ’88

“Global Entrepreneurship” explains the principles that come from international business, cross-cultural management, strategy, exporting, international education, international economics and environmental concerns, and leadership. This second edition is organized into four sections that include a broad overview, a discussion of specific topics, area studies coverage and a case study.

Show US YOUR TALENT Featured books are not sold or distributed through the Nebraska Alumni Association. Publishing information is provided to help consumers locate the title through local booksellers or online retailers unless otherwise noted.

To be considered for inclusion in Alumni Authors, send a complimentary copy of a book published in the last year and a description of its contents to: Alumni Authors Editor, 1520 R Street, Lincoln, NE 68508-1651 Please include the author’s full name, class year, current mailing and e-mail addresses and telephone number.

The author must have attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 19

Nostalgia WINNER, Second Place 2014 Writing contest Karin Lockhart-Durkee graduated from UNL in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in education. She was in the Nebraska Marching Band from 1982-1985. She is the director of social media for Corporate Gray, a company that helps transitioning military veterans connect with civilian employers. She is also an IT consultant and author of the book, “Social Media and Your Job Search: Maximizing Your Network for a Successful Transition.” Lockhart-Durkee lives in Fairfax Station, Va., near Washington, D.C., with her husband, Darren, and two children.

Cornhusker Marching Band performing in 1985.

The Legend Has Left the Stadium

By Karin Lockhart-Durkee, ’86 I have many great memories from being in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Marching Band in the 1980s. The band is called “The Pride of All Nebraska,” and I have always felt great pride to have been a member. It was exciting to be a part of the Nebraska football program and provide entertainment to recordbreaking crowds of 77,000+ fans on game day. (That was before the last few stadium expansions.)

20 WINTER 2015

Lockhart-Durkee with her parents on game day.

The Cornhuskers, as they were known back in the day, were one of the nation’s best football teams and topped the Big Eight several years in a row (yes, the Big Eight – way back when!).

During my tenure in the marching band, we traveled to two Orange Bowls and a Sugar Bowl, as well as other fun and memorable road trips. We even played a medley of Beach Boys songs during halftime while the actual Beach Boys (in town for the State Fair) stood with us in the center of the field.

As exciting as the games, road trips and many victories were to experience, my most memorable moment in the band occurred not while playing saxophone during halftime at a National Championship game, but on an overcast morning before an average, everyday practice…

It was early on a fall morning as the sun was just coming up.

The band had early rehearsals on the field before football practice began. On this particular morning, as the band was gathering in Memorial Stadium before practice, Coach Bob Devaney was jogging on the track surrounding the field. Coach Devaney was the Athletic Director while I was at UNL. He was a Hall of Fame football coach and led Nebraska to eight Big Eight titles, two national championships, and nine bowl games. By the time I was in school at UNL he was, to say the least, a legend.

Whispers floated among the band members as we realized we were watching “the legend” take a morning jog. There he was, a 70-year-old lifetime athlete, still enjoying a good workout in the stadium where he’d made history.

It was impressive and inspiring to watch him jog around “his” stadium. We weren’t surprised to see him, because every once in a while before practice, we would have a Bob Devaney sighting.

But this morning something happened to make the sighting memorable.

The sky was overcast and threatening rain. We were trying to decide if we should take our band instruments with us onto the field or leave them under the protection of the stands during

practice. Was it going to rain or not? Though the atmosphere felt like rain, it was holding off for the moment. Maybe we’d get lucky and stay dry.

As we pondered the instrument dilemma, Coach Devaney finished his jog and walked off the track and under the stands.

We watched his every move with awe and respect as we prepared to take the field for practice.

As soon as he was under the shelter of the stands, the skies opened up and the rain started to fall. It was as if on cue.

Someone in the band exclaimed, “He is God!” That brought some chuckles as we all took the field in the rain. Of course the comment was meant as a joke, but it was a nice thought that maybe God, Mother Nature, or some higher being was looking after Nebraska’s legendary coach.

I practiced that morning in Memorial Stadium with a greater appreciation of the tradition and greatness of the Nebraska football program of which I was proud to be a part. Although I got soaking wet during practice, it didn’t dampen my spirits after witnessing our legend being respected by God himself.

Of course, I didn’t really believe God had a hand in keeping Coach Devaney dry during his jog, but I did feel the wonder and reverence of being in the presence of someone so respected and admired. Coach Devaney’s dedication to and accomplishments in the Nebraska athletic program put him in the legendary category.

I knew that morning’s episode would be a lasting memory that I’d share with my family and friends for years to come. And now here I am 30 years later submitting this story for an alumni writing contest. What better place than the Nebraska Magazine for sharing a treasured story of being part of one of the greatest and classiest football programs in the country.

Thanks for the memories, Coach Devaney – you will never be forgotten in Nebraska. v

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 21

Profile WINNER, Second place 2014 Writing contest Jenifer Calandra Willis earned a bachelor of arts in communication from Truman State University in 2008 and a master of arts in journalism-news editorial from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2010. She currently works as a marketing coordinator for education at The New York Botanical Garden and resides in Mamaroneck, N.Y., with her husband Bryce, also a UNL alumnus, and their dog, Scout Finch.

The Comedy of Journalism

By Jenifer Calandra Willis, ’10 Until recently, Andy Boyle thought the restaurant was called “Pope Yes Chicken.”

That’s what he declares in one of the opening lines of his stand-up comedy routine, at least.

“It’s not the funniest joke ever, but every time you see a Popeye’s, you’re going to remember it,” said Boyle, a 2009 graduate of the College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Boyle has worked in the journalism field since graduation, doing stints at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, The New York Times Regional Media Group, the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune. Although he’s a traditionally trained reporter,

22 WINTER 2015

during his senior year of college he became interested in the data side of journalism, which involves culling information from spreadsheets rather than from interviewing individuals.

Currently, Boyle is a Web developer for BreakingNews.com, a part of the NBC News Digital Group. Put simply, he creates Web pages and applications to convey data in interesting, newsworthy ways.

In 2011, while living in Boston and working at the Boston Globe, Boyle started collecting his funny life stories and jokes into one document. Then, he tried stand-up comedy.

The first time he performed at an open-mic night, he told himself, “I can do this! These people are terrible.” He got on

stage and realized he had some delusions of being funnier than he thought. But it presented him with a unique opportunity to use his job skills to perfect what would become his hobby and, hopefully, his future career.

“What’s really cool about comedy … is we’re user-testing,” he said. “I’m testing these jokes out at open-mics and at shows to see if people laugh and see if people find them funny. Just like we do in Web development, we try to see [if ] users know how to use this website properly. Are they clicking the right thing? Are they following our workflows? Is anything confusing to them?”

Now, approaching his 300th performance, Boyle has had plenty of time to practice and find a way to track the quality of his humor, using data, of course.

“I have a huge spreadsheet to keep track of every show I’ve ever done,” he said.

The spreadsheet includes the name and location of the venue, whether he got paid, how many people attended and which jokes he told. It’s a tool he created to improve his performances, he said, citing Bill Cosby’s post-show tradition of methodically going through each joke with his manager to figure out how to make his routine funnier for next time.

In fact, one of Boyle’s earliest memories is watching a Bill Cosby comedy special after school.

“All I could do was quote it for the next, you know, forever,” Boyle said. “I’d go on the playground and try to do these Bill Cosby routines I had heard one time, and try to explain to kids why this was funny.”

Boyle calls himself a relatively clean comic, staying away from the gross, the topical and the political. And by now, it’s objective to say he’s funny; he recently earned second place in The Great American Comedy Festival’s Chicago Satellite Round. Had he won, he would have competed in the national round – in Norfolk, Nebraska.

It was a big step toward proving he’s cut out to be funny, like when he proved his Web developer chops working on a project at The New York Times Regional Media Group that won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. The project, which was featured on the Tuscaloosa News website, helped locate missing people and provided real-time updates after a tornado hit the area in 2012. Boyle helped build the application within 24 hours of the tornado’s touchdown, and then worked to collate and forward information to the appropriate authorities so people could get the help they needed. It was serious work for such a funny guy.

Comedy, for Boyle, is a retreat from the so often weighty nature of hard news.

“I like the lighter side of news, and a lot of what I’ve done in journalism is incredibly heavy, emotional stuff,” he said. “I had to write about a

murder every other day when I was a reporter down in Florida, and that was a bummer, and that makes you really sad.”

Much like comedy is a great experiment for Boyle, he recognizes that journalism and Web development also are great experiments.

There’s no right or wrong way to “create the Internet,” as Boyle sometimes refers to his most simplified job duty.

He remembers the day he realized the editor of a newspaper he worked for was once the editor of a college newspaper. Boyle, who was once a section editor of The Daily Nebraskan, had no idea what he was doing then, he said.

“And then I realized that guy probably didn’t know what he was doing then, either,” Boyle said. “And then I thought, ‘Does he know what he’s doing now?’”

It’s a similarity he draws to comedy.

“We’re more or less guessing and trying, and that’s kind of freeing in a way,” he said. “Some people have better practices, but for the most part, we’re winging it. And that’s kind of cool and uplifting.” v

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 23

24 WINTER 2015

A

VISIONARY DOCTOR’S

R

x for EQUALITY in HEALTHCARE At the tender age of 28,

Christine Ngaruiya, M.D.,

is already a

Yale University New Haven Hospital. She’s also a fiercely dedicated social activist who spends most of her free time fighting for “equal access to healthcare.”

Born in Omaha but raised mostly in Nairobi, Kenya, Ngaruiya is a tireless champion of the dispossessed – and a practical-minded, down-to-earth ER doc whose burning dream is “equal access to medical care” for everyone on Planet Earth. practicing physician working daily in the emergency room at

TOM NUGENT © MICHAEL PARAS PHOTOGRAPHY By

Photographs By

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 25

Christine Ngaruiya confers with colleagues Vanesa Colon and Thomas Kimberly.

O

When the patient arrived, she took a quick look at the situation and then felt her own pulse beginning to speed up.

Uh-oh, she thought. Not good. This is going to be a tough one.

The patient was a very large, very obese gentleman with the kind of problem that every ER doctor fears: a “difficult airway,” and asthma, along with a dangerously irregular heartbeat.

As the “attending physician” in the ER on this summer evening in 2014, Ngaruiya was the doc in charge. This was her patient, live or die; and she would have to make rapid decisions in order to determine how

ne night last summer, around three a.m., Dr. Christine Ngaruiya (pronounced “Gar-EE-yah”) was working an overnight shift in the busy ER at Yale University New Haven Hospital when a loudspeaker announced the imminent arrival of a medical patient in one of the resuscitation rooms.

The patient was in immediate danger of dying.

Ngaruiya didn’t hesitate. Jumping up from her desk, she walked rapidly to the resuscitation room to begin preparing for the patient’s arrival. Although she had only limited knowledge about his status, she knew that the ER team might soon find itself in a struggle to keep him alive.

26 WINTER 2015

best to handle this challenging case.

Moving swiftly, the former UNL premed student called for resuscitation and an artificial breathing device – standard medical procedures designed to make sure that enough oxygen flowed through the patient’s cardiovascular system to prevent death or disability.

No sooner was the sick man stabilized, however, than the young doctor faced a perilous choice: should she launch a “rapid sequence intubation” (RSI) of the struggling patient, or not?

Usually performed via passage of a plastic tube inserted directly into the patient’s windpipe, in order to allow him or her to breathe directly from the tube, this procedure If you want a lightning-quick look at Dr. Christine could hopefully skirt the blockage caused Ngaruiya and her high-velocity approach to solving by the airway problem and allow for greater the problem of “disparities in healthcare,” all you control of the patient’s breathing. have to do is click on her Twitter Feed at: https:// But as Ngaruiya knew from both personal twitter.com/calmesante. experience and her four years of M.D. Along with a nifty photo of Ngaruiya wearing her training at the University of Nebraska favorite sun hat, you’ll find a ringing statement of her Medical School in Omaha, airway intubation overriding goal as a physician: Pursuing ... equitable also presents several hazards of its own ... and care for all.

Impossible? especially in patients who are extremely obese You’ll also find a passionate voice that talks in and afflicted with asthma. urgent tones about finding ways to provide equal Unfortunately, this patient fit into both access to healthcare in the United States and all of those categories ... which meant that the across the globe ... along with an urgent appeal young doctor now faced a difficult decision. for “social justice” and more enlightened public If she proceeded with the intubation, the health policies.

In the space of only a few words, patient could suffer serious complications she addresses crucially important health issues from an unsuccessful intubation and from such as treating mental illness, improving health the artificial ventilation that is particularly education and battling chronic health conditions like difficult to manage with asthmatic patients. hypertension, diabetes, heart disease – and more And the ensuing complications might soon recently, Ebola. become lethal. But if she held off on the Some eye-catching examples from Ngaruiya’s emergency intubation, she might then lose Twitter Feed: him to eventual oxygen deprivation – a potentially fatal condition that can also cause One in four people has a mental illness. You can’t disabling brain injuries and other problems, just make them go away. (Tweeted on World Mental even if the patient survives.

Health Day, Oct. 10, 2014.)

Remembering that supremely difficult moment in the ER room, Ngaruiya smiled The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledged and shook her head. “As soon as I saw what $50 million to fight Ebola in West Africa. (Sept. 10, we were dealing with, I knew we were in for 2014) a long night.

“It was one of those cases that every ER 60 percent of people needing mental health physician dreads,” she added, “because an services in the U.S. don’t get it, often because of the asthmatic’s lungs aren’t acting like a normal stigma of seeking help. (Aug. 14, 2014) person’s lungs, and once you insert the tube, everything can go downhill fast. No matter Going on ... in 30 minutes to join the panel on what happens later, you know that once you Robin Williams and suicide in our society. Tough day. start that intubation, you’re in for a long Hopeful for a change. (Aug. 12, 2014) struggle.”

For a few moments that night, the Save Elephants no ivory @Huffington Post. (Aug. struggling doctor felt a ripple of anxiety. But 12, 2014) then she took a deep breath. “You can’t let yourself be crippled by fear,” she said later. “If Still work to do but I’m incredibly optimistic when you let that happen, who’s going to do your it comes to Africa! (March 2, 2013) job?”

After thinking the situation through for a

Dr. Ngaruiya’s Twitter Feed: Some Hard-Hitting Tweets!

l l l l l l

Continued on Page 29 NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 27

Researching Healthcare Disparities as a Youthful Sociology Major at UNL When Christine Ngaruiya signed up for Julia McQuillan’s undergraduate course, “Sociology and Health,” she never dreamed that she and her UNL professor would wind up as the co-publishers of a major healthcare research study.

But that’s exactly what happened.

Ngaruiya’s astonishing journey from college sophomore to published researcher began in a university classroom in 2004, when Professor McQuillan – today the chair of the UNL Sociology Department – described some data she’d been gathering on women’s access to healthcare. The data seemed to indicate that minority women were less likely to make regular visits to a medical doctor than majority white women ... and that the minority women were also less likely to trust their doctors, when they did manage to visit one.

As the youthful Ngaruiya listened to her professor’s description of the data and ways to interpret it, she felt a surge of curiosity – followed by a passionate desire to “dig deeper” into the problem of “disparities in women’s healthcare” in the United States.

Soon she was champing at the bit ... and staying after class to ask the bemused professor if she could get her hands on the national survey data gathered from more than 5,000 U.S. women of child-bearing age.

“I didn’t know a thing about healthcare disparities when I signed up for that course,” Ngaruiya recalled during a recent interview at the Yale University New Haven Hospital, where she’s currently working as an Emergency Room attending physician and continuing her health research.

“But whenever Professor McQuillan got onto the topic of inequality in women’s access to care, I kept asking myself, why, why?

“After a while, I became totally immersed in the subject – and I wound up writing my senior thesis on it. And Dr. McQuillan was extremely helpful and generous with her time. She told me: ‘If you’re willing to commit to the project, I’ll take you on.’”

What followed was a remarkable scientific adventure that culminated in a published article in the journal Family Medicine in 2009. Co-authored by McQuillan and Ngaruiya, the study

(“Odds of Having a Regular Physician and Perceptions of Care: Ethnic Patterns for Women,” http://www.stfm.org/fmhub/ fm2009/April/Karina271.pdf) broke new ground in the study of gender-and-ethnicity-based healthcare disparities.

For McQuillan, the co-publication with a researcher who’d been her undergraduate student was an exciting example of how “creative research collaboration” between UNL faculty and students can pay huge dividends on both sides of the enterprise.

“Christine is just amazing,” said McQuillan the other day in her office at UNL. “She went far beyond the original research project we had planned together, and she spent huge amounts of time and energy working with the data. She just hung in there because she was so determined to understand this healthcare problem and begin finding ways to solve it.

“I think that project with Christine reflects our continuing commitment in the UNL Sociology Department to collaborative research between faculty and undergraduate students.”

But the story doesn’t end there.

In a postscript that McQuillan found especially rewarding, her former student invited her to a festive graduation party in Omaha – soon after the former sociology major concluded her studies at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and became Christine Ngaruiya, M.D. “I went to the party and it was thrilling to congratulate her on becoming a medical doctor,” said the sociology prof. “There’s something very powerful about working with students on research projects, and knowing that Christine is now out there continuing her efforts to help eliminate healthcare disparities is extremely encouraging for all of us who conduct research at UNL.”

She felt a surge of

curiosity -- followed by a passionate desire to “dig deeper” into the

problem of disparities

in women’s healthcare in the United States.

28 WINTER 2015

Christine Ngaruiya in Kenya. (Courtesy Photo)

Continued from Page 27 few minutes, and by now feeling calm and clear-headed, she launched the intubation.

What followed wasn’t pretty. The heavyset patient did, indeed, have difficulties with the artificial ventilation, and Ngaruiya and the ER and ICU team had to fight through several difficult hours before he finally stabilized and was admitted for further care to the intensive care unit.

Although the ailing asthma patient spent several months in the hospital after his long night in the ER, Ngaruiya said he was eventually discharged and is “doing fine” these days.

Fortunately for her, she seems to have a natural talent for transforming high stress into creative action.

“One of the things I learned about myself at med school,” she said, “and then later during my residency in emergency medicine [at the University of North Carolina Hospital in Chapel Hill] is that sometimes I can be good at internalizing my fear and then letting it come out as productive energy.

“As a doctor who’s responsible for the care of her patients, I’m very grateful that I do seem to have the ability to stand up to that kind of pressure, while doing everything I possibly can to help the person I’m treating.”

BUFFETED BY CULTURE SHOCK ON FOOTBALL GAME DAY Born in Omaha to Kenyan parents who’d come to the

Midwest to attend college and then stayed on (her father wound up working as a computer engineer at Mutual of Omaha), Ngaruiya spent her formative years – from second grade until she returned to Nebraska to attend UNL in 2002 – in the fast-growing world of Nairobi, the bustling capital of multi-ethnic Kenya and its 43 million residents.

“I grew up [in Nairobi] because my parents wanted their children to experience the Kenyan culture,” said Ngaruiya, whose grandfather had been an Anglican bishop there in the 1950s. “Ours was one of those homes where education was everything. If you got an A- in school, it needed to be an A. But there was a lot of love behind it [the demand for excellence], and I’m very grateful today for both the support and the challenges I got at home.

“At each stage of my life, it seems there was always somebody who believed in me, even if I wasn’t doing that great. My teachers and parents were always saying: you’re gonna do it!”

After arriving on the UNL campus and moving into Sandoz Hall, Ngaruiya plunged into an exhilarating whirlwind of courses and social activities as a relentlessly determined premed student. In class after class, she not only excelled academically but also pushed the envelope as much as she could ... while volunteering for extra-credit assignments and interesting research projects whenever possible.

Continued on Page 31

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 29

Ngaruiya’s Idea of Relaxation: Running 13-Mile Half-Marathons As an emergency room attending physician, a medical writer and a research fellow at the Yale University New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, Dr. Christine Ngaruiya each day confronts a work schedule that would leave most of us face-down on the sofa, quivering with exhaustion.

So what does she like to do in order to unwind and relax?

Believe it or not, she runs 13-mile half-marathons.

“Running is a great way to relax and recharge your batteries,” said the 28-year-old medical phenom, who grew up in Kenya ... where some of the world’s most accomplished long-distance runners have made international names for themselves in recent decades. (Since the early 1990s, in fact, the famed yearly Boston Marathon men’s race has been won by Kenyans no fewer than 19 times.)

Dr. N’s best time in the 13-mile event: two hours, flat.

30 WINTER 2015

Continued from Page 29 One such encounter – with Professor Julia McQuillan in the Sociology Department – so energized the excitable Kenyan that she decided to major in the discipline ... and went on to conduct some cutting-edge healthcare research with her new mentor. “That experience taught me that I wanted to focus on disparities in access to healthcare as a medical researcher,” she said, “and that’s basically what I’ve been doing ever since.”

Quick-witted, enthusiastic and energetic, Ngaruiya adjusted quickly to the brave new world of Lincoln in the 21st century. In her final year at UNL, she was a “campus student leader of the year” nominee. But she couldn’t escape the culture shock of living in the Cornhusker State entirely ... and she still remembers the amazement she felt on her first football “game day” in Lincoln.

“I looked around at what was happening in the streets and around the stadium,” she said, “and that’s when I realized that in some ways, Nebraska was very different from Kenya, after all!”

and getting depressed about it,” she said. “Instead, I get to work, and pretty soon I’m looking for possible solutions.

“For me, problems like the health problems of refugees in Nebraska are a challenge to overcome, that’s all.”

These days, while putting in regular nine-hour shifts in the ER at Yale Hospital, Ngaruiya is also hard at work on a master’s degree in tropical medicine as an Emergency Medicine Global Health and International Medicine Fellow. And in spite of the horrific health problems she studies daily – including the deadly Ebola epidemic now unfolding in West Africa – she said she remains “extremely hopeful” about the future of healthcare in both this country and the rest of the world.

“What’s happening in West Africa right now is a dire tragedy; there’s no doubt about that,” she said near the end of the interview. “But thankfully, we have the medical resources in the U.S. and Europe to assist these struggling countries in eventually stopping the epidemic.

LAUNCHING A HEALTHCARE PROGRAM FOR REFUGEES With her UNL degree firmly in hand – and barely 20 years old – the unflappable Ngaruiya headed off to Omaha and medical school in the fall of 2006. While earning her M.D. and spending hundreds of hours working on research related to equal access to healthcare, she also played a major role in the launch of a uniquely original non-profit organization designed to help educate Nebraska’s large population of refugees from foreign countries.

Known as “Bridge to Care,” the Omaha-based service-and-advocacy agency now provides educational assistance to hundreds of displaced Nebraska residents each month. Fueled by a major U.S. State Department grant and the energy of dozens of ardent volunteers, BTC has so far assisted more than 5,000 Bhutanese, Sudanese, Somali, Burundian and East European refugees in locating and then obtaining critically needed healthcare.

As a medical student who was particularly interested in non-communicable diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and cancer, Ngaruiya soon discovered that this “very large population around Omaha and Grand Island, especially, was struggling with the kinds of language and culturaladaptation problems that can make it difficult to find a doctor or a clinic to meet your healthcare needs.”

Her solution, as always, was to leap into action and quickly begin developing the organizational structure and outreach capability that eventually led to Bridge to Care.

Ask her why she took on such a huge task (while also attending medical school, mind you), and she’ll respond with a peal of infectious laughter. “I guess I’m lucky in that when I see a problem, I don’t just sit there worrying

“The key to doing that, in my view, is education,” she said, citing the supportive nature of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Yale, which continues to support important international health work and prioritizes it as such.

“As we learn more about the causes and progression of diseases like Ebola – and also about the social and cultural conditions that contribute to them – we’re going to get better and better at improving the health of affected populations all across the world.”

Then, with a huge smile of cheerful determination: “There’s a new world coming, and it’s going to change everything we know. I am determined that we can be much more successful at solving the problem of equal access to healthcare, and we’re getting closer to a world in which equality and social justice are taking hold everywhere.

“But it won’t happen overnight, and it certainly won’t be easy. If we’re going to make these wonderful things happen someday, we have to get to work right now!” v NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 31

Having the of Her Life

By Tom Nugent

Times Square – the Crossroads of the World!

As she hurried along New York City’s Seventh Avenue – on this chilly morning in February of 2004 – LaSharah Bunting (B.A. ’00) could hardly believe her eyes. Before her loomed a vast, swirling mob of pedestrians ... part of the more than 39 million visitors and Big Apple residents who each year shoehorn themselves into this world-famous hub of frantic commerce and huge-eyed tourism.

Darting sideways in order to avoid a candy apple-red sightseeing bus, the 25-year-old UNL grad scanned the flashing landscape. In every direction, jumbo-sized electronic ads glowed and sizzled, burning with incandescent fury beneath a lowering winter sky. A moment later, enraptured, she was reading a string of tall black letters that rolled one by one across an enormous screen:

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT

Like any other new arrival in Gotham City, Bunting just plain gawked. But there was no time to waste; she had to get to work. Shouldering her way through the mob and fighting to hang onto her swinging purse, she looked up, craned her neck and then spotted it: the Times building and her destination on this wintry morning 11 years ago.

Bunting was about to report for her first day on the job as a brand-new copy editor at the New York Times.

“It was amazing,” she recalled a decade later, as she sat talking to a reporter from Nebraska Magazine. “It was overwhelming. Like a fairy tale. As I walked toward the paper that morning, I kept thinking: ‘How does this little girl from Omaha wind up at the New York Times?’

“And now, after nearly 11 years here, I still pinch myself each morning when I walk in that door. In journalism school [at UNL] we learned about the Pentagon Papers [1971], and we learned about New York Times v. Sullivan [the key Supreme Court case in 1964 that protects freedom of the press in America].

g

32 WINTER 2015

Photographs by Soo-Jeong Kang

“I thought about those cases and that history on the first day I came to work here. It was awe-inspiring and it was intimidating. But I told myself: just do your best. Just give it everything you have. Try to have fun ... and try not to have fear!”

She plunged.

And so it began – 11 years at “The Grey Lady,” the tradition-rich newspaper that many media pundits will tell you is the most powerful and most influential print news organ in the world today.

Bunting survived.

Indeed, she did better than that – she prevailed. Just this fall, in fact, LaSharah Bunting was named a Senior Editor at the 163-year-old journalistic colossus of Manhattan ... which means that she’s now part of the team that will be running the paper day in and day out.

“Some days, I have trouble believing this is real,” she said with a burst of excited laughter, as she reflected on her amazing odyssey from Omaha North High School to her cubicle in the huge Times newsroom. “Is it a fairy tale, or what?”

‘OH MY GOD, I’M ACTUALLY DOING THIS!”

g

Born and raised in Omaha, Bunting grew up in a household where “education was extremely important – you were expected to get good grades and to really push yourself hard with your schoolwork. My older sister Mickaela [B.S. ’94] and my brother, Loren, and I were very fortunate, because our dinner table was a place where the conversation was about books and ideas and politics on both the national and local level.”

But the youthful Bunting also benefited enormously, she said, from two factors that helped to shape her journalistic destiny. First, her mother, Deborah (an artist and arts administrator at the Nebraska Arts Council to this day), was a “news junkie” who was constantly reading and watching –

When LaSharah Bunting was an undergrad in the late Dick Thien’s Copy Editing 101 class at UNL, he told her that if she worked hard and applied herself, she had enough talent to make it in the world of big-time journalism.

Thien was right.

Today Bunting is a Senior Editor at one of the world’s largest and most influential newspapers, the New York Times.

“I feel very lucky,” she said, reflecting on the 11 years she’s spent working at the national “newspaper of record,” as it’s often described. “I feel like I’m having the kind of amazing adventure I once dreamed about!”

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 33

and then talking about – newspapers and network TV news.

“My mother couldn’t get enough news, and I blame her for all of this,” joked Bunting. “There were a couple of places in downtown Omaha where you could get the Des Moines Register and the Kansas City Star, and of course we got the Omaha World-Herald delivered to our house every day. So I can remember getting up on Saturday mornings and jumping in the car and hurrying downtown, just so we could load up with newspapers! It was all very exciting and interesting ... and I soon found that I loved reading through the paper and talking about the events of the day.”

But Bunting said she was also greatly influenced by her late father, Ralph Bunting, Jr., a radiological engineer at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and then later at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Omaha. “He was really into technology,” she recalled, “and by the early 1990s, we already had a dial-up Internet connection – and he was forever leaving notes on the phone – ‘Don’t pick this up!’ – because it would break the Internet connection he was using.

“I’m really grateful to my mom because of what I learned about the news media from her, and my dad got me interested in everything electronic ... which is probably why I began learning about digital technology at the Times

five or six years ago and eventually became a Digital Editor there.”

By the time she landed at Omaha North High (1992), Bunting had already become an unstoppable newshound.

And it was here that she had the good fortune to link up with “a truly dedicated and committed teacher,” journalism instructor Michael Krainak, whose passion for the craft “quickly rubbed off” on her. “He loved telling stories,” she remembered, “and he loved bringing truth to power – and his energy and excitement about what good reporting and editing can do and how it can change the world ... well, that was just mesmerizing for me.”

After arriving on the UNL campus and moving into Abel Hall in the fall of ’96, the eager newspaperwoman-wannabe signed up for several “Intro” courses in journalism. And it was then that she got the break of her life, she said.

“I wound up taking this copy editing course with Dick Thien,” she recalled, “and he became the major inspiration of my college years, as well as my mentor. He loved everything about newspapering, and during our first class or two he started getting excited as he told us about his years as a founding editor of USA Today, and he was really fired up.

“He told us: ‘Just remember – newspapering is the most

While ‘Scrolling Through the AP Wire’ When she read the headline on the Associated Press newswire, New York Times Senior Editor LaSharah Bunting experienced a moment of shock ... followed by a moment of deep sadness.

34 WINTER 2015

Dick Thien, a Founding Editor of USA Today, Dies

The first paragraph beneath the headline announced: Richard “Dick” Thien, a veteran journalist who played a pivotal role in developing USA Today for Gannett Co. Inc., has died. He was 73.

As she read that line from the AP, Bunting was sitting in her editor’s chair at The Times and remembering the kindly UNL journalism instructor who’d once told her: “You’re so talented, kid – you’re gonna go far!”

For Bunting, who was recently named NYT Senior Editor for the paper’s digital training and global recruiting efforts, studying the craft of newspaper copy editing under Thien at the UNL College of Journalism and Mass Communications in the late 1990s was “an unforgettable learning experience that helped to give me the skills – and the self-confidence – required for a career as a journalist.”

At first glance, however, Thien was an intimidating figure.

“The first day I walked into his Copy

Editing 101 class,” she recalled, “I thought, ‘He’s straight out of Central Casting – he’s the gruff old newspaper editor!’ But he turned out to be the nicest man. He put me under his wing, and I think he saw something in me that no one else saw.

“He taught us that journalism was serious business, and he taught us that being accurate and asking the tough questions and speaking truth to power is a responsibility for anyone who works on a newspaper.”

Thien, a journalistic legend who’d been one of the founding editors of USA Today before arriving on the UNL campus in 1991, spent more than 15 years helping student journalists to “learn their chops” – by insisting on clarity, accuracy and concise writing in his popular editing classes.

When Bunting read of his death while editing copy at The Times in August of 2013, she told herself: “My God, he’s dead.” But then she settled back in her chair and thought about the late 1990s in Lincoln and the teacher who’d helped her so much. “And then all at once I started laughing because I realized that it was perfect ... the fact that I’d learned of his death while scrolling the AP wire.

“I don’t think he would’ve wanted it any other way!”

fun you can have with your clothes on!’ and I still laugh out loud whenever I remember that line. I put it up on my Facebook page awhile ago, and everybody loved it!”

Encouraged by the fun-loving but no-nonsense Thien – who also demanded “rigorous accuracy and clarity in every word we wrote” – Bunting soon became one of his star pupils. But the road ahead wasn’t without bumps.

Example: she said she’ll never forget her first “live” reporting assignment ... as a summertime intern at the Omaha WorldHerald.

“I was assigned to cover the first day of the College World Series that summer,” she recalled, “and I remember thinking, ‘oh my God, this is going to be a bylined story – I’m actually doing this.’

“So I went and talked to the people in line waiting for tickets and then I hurried back to the newsroom. And it was just a whirlwind. The editors were looming, and the clock was ticking, and time was running out and I was furiously typing. But I got it done somehow, and I’m sure it was heavily edited. And then I realized that I loved the process.

“And that story ran on the front page. It was my proudest moment ever as a student. There I was on the front page of my hometown newspaper with my own byline.”

But then, as she recalled the moment when her late father told her “I’m so proud of you for living your dream,” Bunting’s eyes grew misty and her mouth trembled a little.

“He died in August,” she said quietly, “and that was very tough. But he left me his gift of passion for what you love ... and he left me that all-important message: try to live your dream!”

g

FROM COPY EDITOR TO ‘DIGITAL CZAR’

In her wildest dreams, Bunting could not have imagined what came next. After graduating from UNL in 2000 and landing a job as a beginning copy editor at the Dallas Morning News, she spent the next two and a half years learning the ins and outs of reading and marking up stories at a large regional newspaper.

The job went well, and somewhere in her third year, Bunting noticed an ad on the journalismjobs.com website for a copy editor at the New York Times. “I knew that I probably didn’t have enough experience yet,” she said, “but I still sent in my resume. I figured that maybe they’d get back to me in a few more years.”

Instead, the Times sent her a “take-home editing test,” liked the results and then brought her to New York for a solid week of further testing and exhaustive interviews.

Hired in January of 2004, she spent the first year editing stories in the paper’s Metro section, then moved on to assignment editing stints in Arts and Culture. Here she learned the delicate art of stroking the often-fragile egos of some of the Times’ most famous journalists (including mega-star columnist Frank Rich, whose column she edited).

It took plenty of courage to stand up to journalistic giants such as Rich, but Bunting looked within and found what she needed to get the job done. “Editing stories at the Times is certainly a daunting assignment,” she said with a smile, “but I’ve always told myself: trust your gut! And I wasn’t afraid to tell a famous writer: ‘I love what you’ve done in the first half of your story ... but these three paragraphs aren’t quite clear – can we talk about them?’”

After three or four years on the job, Bunting also discovered that she’d inherited a useful trait from her

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 35

“In many ways, what we’ve been seeing at the Times is reflective of the vast changes that are now taking place in American business and culture as a whole.” ~LaSharah Bunting

36 WINTER 2015

beloved father: a powerful curiosity about the workings of the Web. Fascinated by the ongoing digital transformation that was revolutionizing daily operations at the Times, she started hanging around after work and putting lots of extra hours into learning everything from Web production to HTML coding and the nuances of digital storytelling.

Within a few years, her colleagues in the newsroom were noticing that whenever they bumped up against a technical problem, it was “LaSharah” who came up with the solution.

Promoted to News Editor on the National Desk about three years ago and then later to the department’s Digital Editor, Bunting eventually wound up as the “go-to person” for the paper’s rapidly evolving menu of digitally based journalistic offerings.

When the Times finally launched its successful “metered paywall” in 2011, Bunting was positioning herself as a digital leader as the newsroom developed its strategy for getting “all the news that’s fit to print” onto the nation’s iPhones, Facebook pages, iPads and other rapidly evolving platforms on the wild and wooly techno-landscape of wired America.

Recognizing her expertise and her highly developed skills as a diplomat who knows how to “interface” between the journalists and the tech-heads without ruffling feathers on either side of the divide, Bunting was recently named NYT Senior Editor in charge of digital training and recruitment at the Times’ 1,000-strong newsroom in the paper’s new building on Eighth Avenue.

It’s no secret, of course, that the paper has been undergoing a huge convulsion in recent years with leaked digital-strategy memos and controversial firings making news almost daily. “In many ways, what we’ve been seeing at the Times is reflective of the vast changes that are now taking place in American business and culture as a whole,” said Bunting, while describing the tumult she’s witnessed all around her in the newsroom. “But I try to stay out of the politics and just focus on the question: How can we make each day’s newspaper as good as it can possibly be for our readers?”

While putting in a typical ten- to twelve-hour shift, Bunting these days is responsible for educating and empowering Times journalists on digital tools and storytelling. She’s also recruiting the next generation of digital journalists who can bring new ideas and new skills into the newsroom of a paper that’s changing rapidly – and often dramatically – right in front of her eyes.

“Really, when I look back on my life in Omaha and all the years of hard work I’ve put in at the Times, I just feel very fortunate,” she said with her instantly recognizable, radiant smile.

“When younger people ask me about careers in journalism, I tell them: follow your dream. Live your passion. But also learn the skills – above all, learn the writing skills, because everything starts with being able to tell a story.”

That’s a message she also carries back to the UNL campus from time to time, where as a member of the College of Journalism’s Professional Advisory Board, she frequently shares her expertise with academicians in the ongoing effort to make the J-School program as good as it can be.

“For me, attending UNL and then going on to a career at the Times has been all about living my dream,” she said near the end of the interview. “That was my father’s wonderful advice, and I love to share it with students whenever I can!” v

What They’re Saying About LaSharah Bunting ... At the New York Times Chuck Strum, Deputy National Editor: “How can you resist LaSharah? She’s smart.

She’s intuitive. She’s a master at interoffice collaboration. In an era when print journalism and online journalism are still trying to find ways to merge – to venture well beyond mere co-existence – LaSharah is the person you want driving that car. She speaks both print and Web fluently.

“We’ve sat next to each other for more than three years on the national desk. Her desk is the neat one. It’s also a magnet for anyone on the news department’s third floor with a sweet tooth. She maintains a candy stash (I won’t reveal where) from which she replenishes a tidy glass bowl. Chocolate predominates, but for the finicky there’s also LaffyTaffy.

“She’s helped lift our department into the multi-media arena, working with two Web producers on the national desk as well as editors in The Times’ social media department. She speaks their language fluently, which has been a real plus, especially for those of us who have spent more years in print than online.”

Dana Canedy, Senior Editor: “LaSharah hasn’t just helped all of us achieve this transition [from print to digital media]. In many ways, she has helped to define the transition. She’s extremely skillful [as an editor], of course. But she also brings a level of enthusiasm to the job that is unmatched.

“She’s remarkably high-spirited and energetic. How do I account for it? Upbringing! If you’ve ever met her mother [Omaha arts administrator Deborah Bunting], you’ll know what I mean.”

A Walk Down ‘Pulitzer Hallway’ If you want to know what it’s like to work as an editor at the legendary New York Times, all you have to do is take a brief stroll along “Pulitzer Hallway” with Senior Editor LaSharah Bunting.

There you’ll find the framed photographs of more than 100 former Pulitzer winners – some of the most accomplished journalists on Planet Earth.

“The first time I walked down this hallway [after being hired as a Times copy editor in 2004], I was just amazed,” said Bunting during a recent visit to the Pulitzer shrine at the paper’s offices on Eighth Avenue in New York City. “These are some of the greatest figures in the history of newspapering ... and just working in the same building with these photos is an inspiration.”

More than 100 of the fabled Pulitzer winners are honored in the Hallway, including:

•

David Halberstam, 1960s, for “Distinguished Reporting” on the Vietnam War.

•

Walter Kerr, 1970s, for “Distinguished Criticism” in theatre.

•

Bill Keller, 1980s, for “Distinguished Reporting” on the Soviet Union.

•

John F. Burns, 1990s, for “Distinguished International Reporting” on the war in Bosnia.

•

Gretchen Morgenson, 2000s, for “Distinguished Beat Reporting” on Wall Street.

•

Jeffrey Gettleman, 2010s, for “Distinguished International Reporting” on famine and war in East Africa.

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 37

NEWS

New YAA Class Introduced The NAA’s third Young Alumni Academy class has 38 members who are now getting a behind-the-scenes look at Nebraska’s incredible progress over the past decade plus the exciting growth that lies ahead.

YAA kicked off the year with an orientation session and meeting with Chancellor Harvey Perlman in October, a look at food science and technology and the PGA Golf Management Program in November, and a visit to athletics and Husker Vision in December.

The schedule for the rest of the year includes: January 15 Nebraska Museum/Planetarium February 12 Office of Research & Economic Development March 5

Admissions, Nebraska Alumni Association, University of Nebraska Foundation

April 16

Student Affairs, Campus Recreation

May 14 Nebraska Innovation Campus and year-end social

38 WINTER 2015

Members of the Young Alumni Academy class of 2014-15 with class year and current city of residence are: Elizabeth Akert, ’11, Papillion; Leigh Becher, ’11, Lincoln; Blake Becher, ’11, Lincoln; Matthew Boring, ’11, Lincoln; Kriston Burroughs, ’11, Lincoln; Brian Cassata, ’11, Omaha; Darby Davidson, ’13, Fairbury; Jessica Forch, ’09, Lincoln; Kevin Forch, ’08, Lincoln; Jonathan Geier, ’13, Lincoln; Stephen Gildersleeve, ’06, Lincoln; Lindsay Grams, ’09, Lincoln; Jonathan Hanseling, ’09, Lincoln; Matthew Hilgenkamp, ’12, Lincoln; Shelby Hinze, ’14, Lincoln; Autumn Hunt, ’14, Lincoln; Maggie Jobes, ’12, Lincoln; Bess Jones, ’12, Omaha; Brianne Keller, ’13, Lincoln; Sheena Kennedy, ’08, Elkhorn; Rachel Manning, ’12, Omaha; Philip McEvoy, ’07, Bennington; Clay McPeak, ’10, Martell; Kayla Moore, ’11, Lincoln; David Painter, ’11, Lincoln; Mary Claire Rice, ’13, Lincoln; Mitchell Rodgers, ’07, Lincoln; Mary Rye, ’14, Lincoln; Ashley Sitorius, ’11, Omaha; Tyler Schmidt, ’14, Lincoln; Erin Smith, ’13, Beatrice; Ryan Stoner, ’10, Lincoln; Brian Sunderman, ’13, Lincoln; Klare Veath, ’04, Lincoln; Morgan Walgren, ’12, Omaha; Katherine Weander, ’12, Omaha; Timaree Wiederspan, ’13, Kearney; Nicole Zotto, ’06, Chicago. v

Homecoming 2014 NEWS

More than a thousand students crammed the Student Union Plaza for the 2014 Homecoming Pep Rally in September.

HHE Volunteers Needed

NAA interim executive director Shelley Zaborowski (center) presented UNL class rings to the 2014 homecoming king and queen – Jeffrey Story of Omaha and Shelby Kruse of Lincoln – at the halftime of the football game with Illinois.

Homecoming Jester judges Ron Kellogg, III, and Johnny Rodgers strike the Heisman pose with Cassie Irwin, the winner in the fifth annual jester competition. As the third judge, the athletic department’s Randy York, noted: “She was voted Homecoming Jester for being a master rapper who moved the judges so dramatically that all three gave her a standing ovation.”

If you believe a stronger university is important to the future of Nebraska, we encourage you to volunteer for Huskers for Higher Education. Our volunteers communicate their support of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s priorities to Nebraska legislators and the governor.

Volunteering CONNECTION BOX for HHE is easy. huskeralum.org/hhe We’ll explain any issues that impact the university, you decide your position and we will even provide suggested language to use when contacting your legislative representatives. Your influence can have a lasting impact on your university. v

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 39

Join Alumni For Husker Baseball in Arizona and Texas

NEWS

Cindy McCaffrey, retired vice president of marketing at Google, held a “fireside chat” with NWLN members at their fall 2014 meeting in Lincoln.

Spring NWLN Conference Set The Nebraska Women’s Leadership Network, formerly known as Cather Circle, is accepting applications for new members and we want you to join us at our Spring Conference, March 12-13, 2015.

The Network, a program of the Nebraska Alumni Association, connects current UNL female students with alumnae and friends CONNECTION BOX to create a huskeralum.org/nwln worldwide shaskell@huskeralum.org network

for mentoring and professional development.

Two conferences per year – fall and spring – allow alumnae and students to hear from accomplished keynote speakers, participate in hands-on workshops and have the opportunity to network and learn from one another.

The program also offers local monthly programming, as well as online engagement to encourage interactions and connections with members all over the country. v

The Nebraska Alumni Association will host events prior to Husker baseball games in Arizona and Texas in March.

Nebraska plays a series with BYU in Peoria, Ariz., Feb. 19-21. On Saturday, Feb. 21, we’ll hold a tailgate buffet at the Peoria Sports Complex from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. First pitch is at 12:05 p.m. In addition to the buffet, the event will include plenty of Husker spirit and appearances by university dignitaries.

On March 6-8, the Huskers travel to Texas for the Houston College Classic where the opponents will be Texas A&M, LSU and Hawaii. The tailgate buffet is at Minute Maid Park (home of the Astros) from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., and the first pitch is at 12:05 p.m.

Once again we’ll have lots of Husker spirit and university guests at our tailgate.

Check huskeralum.org for full details on both tailgates beginning Jan. 5.v

Online Tool Lets You Practice Interviewing Through the NAA’s partnership with UNL Career Services, we are pleased to introduce you to Interview Stream. This interactive tool allows you to simulate job interviews, respond to pre-recorded questions and practice both verbal and non-verbal communication skills all in the privacy of your home or office.

Check out other free professional development resources on the NAA’s website. v

Alumni of the university’s Centennial Education Program returned to Lincoln Oct. 10-11 for a reunion, highlighted by presentations at the Nebraska Champions Club from grads Robin West, Curt Micka, Alexandra McClanahan and John Shively, and Howard Rosenberg.

40 WINTER 2015

CONNECTION BOX unlinterviewstream.com

NEWS

New Events and Faces for Scarlet Guard The Ultimate Cornhusker Compass Competition – a cross-campus scavenger hunt styled somewhat like CBS’s “Amazing Race” – made its debut among Scarlet Guard activities in October. Answering clues and competing in challenges related to traditions within the Cornhusker Compass, teams of students raced tricycles around the tractor test track, scaled a climbing wall and devoured UNL Dairy Store ice cream in a quest to win the title of Ultimate Cornhusker Compass Competition Champions.

Scarlet Guard also welcomed a number of new faces to its leadership team this fall. For the first time ever, freshmen were allowed to apply for the board of directors – a rare leadership opportunity across campus for freshmen during their first semester. New board members include: Paige DeDecker, freshman music and accounting major, Flower Mound, Texas; Taylor Gehring, freshman accounting major, Waukee, Iowa; Kelsey Koski, freshman business administration major, Omaha; and Kelsey Moss, freshman civil engineering major, Omaha.v

To draw attention to its new website, the NAA held a “Capture the Flag” competition in October, offering a Husker flag to the first person to respond from each state and several foreign countries.

Sebastian Kuck, ’03, claimed a flag for the Netherlands and flew it outside his house in Central South Amsterdam during the Nebraska-Purdue football game.

Legacy Program Now Future Huskers Remember the NAA Legacy Program where you enrolled your children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews for birthday greetings from campus? It’s now called Future Huskers – and if you haven’t share your Nebraska pride with the children in your life, now’s the time to sign up.

Future Huskers membership is still free for NAA members’ young relatives, and the benefits are better than ever.

Enrollees now receive free Husker-themed gifts every fall

during back-to-school season and a special greeting the month of their birthday.

This is a great way to get and CONNECTION BOX keep your loved ones excited huskeralum.org/future-huskers about UNL. And, we share the information with the Office of Admissions, so your future Husker will be contacted by the university when it is time to consider college choices. v NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 41

Celebrating 50 Years of NEWS

Alumni Masters Week, a program sponsored by the Nebraska Alumni Association, Scarlet Guard and the Chancellor’s Office, celebrated its 50th anniversary Nov. 19-21 when 10 outstanding alumni return to campus to share their experiences and knowledge with students. Since 1964, 400 alumni have participated in the program and 56 of those past participants were on hand for the celebration. This year’s Alumni Masters included:

Matthew L. Blomstedt, ’94, ’98, ’13 Matthew Blomstedt was named commissioner of education by the Nebraska State Board of Education on Jan. 2, 2014. He previously served as executive director of the Nebraska Educational Service Unit Coordinating Council. Blomstedt also was the first full-time executive director of the Nebraska Rural Community Schools Association and a research analyst for the education committee of the Nebraska Legislature. For the past 16 years, he has worked closely with policy makers, school district officials and numerous educational stakeholders across Nebraska. In 2001, he was appointed to the Nebraska School Finance Review Committee as a school finance expert and served in a number of other educational advisory capacities in state government and higher education. Blomstedt holds a Ph.D. in educational leadership and higher education and a master’s in community and regional planning, both from UNL. Tom Christiansen, ’84 Tom Christiansen is the sage grouse program coordinator for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and has been with the department for 29 years.

Christiansen serves as the chair of the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies’ Sage and Columbian Sharptailed Grouse Technical Committee and serves on the Rangewide Interagency Sage-Grouse Conservation Team, the Wildfire and Invasive Species Working Group, and the Science and Policy Implications of Climate Change to

42 WINTER 2015

Sage Grouse Working Group. The conservation of sage grouse has major environmental, economic and cultural ramifications across the western United States. Christiansen earned a bachelor of science degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, majoring in agriculture, journalism and natural resources.

Victoria L. Collier, ’02 Victoria Collier established her own law firm in 2002 – The Elder & Disability Law Firm of Victoria L. Collier, PC, in Decatur, Ga. She also has been admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court

of Appeals for Veterans Claims. A certified elder law attorney, Collier has chaired the Georgia chapter of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys NAELA, the State Bar of Georgia elder law section and the Atlanta Bar Association elder law committee. Recognized as a rising star in the 2005 and 2009-2012 editions of Georgia Super Lawyers, she is a Fellow of NAELA and was appointed to the Georgia Council on Aging. Collier is co-founder of Lawyers with Purpose, Lawyers for Wartime Veterans, Veterans Advocates Group of America and Trust Associates Inc. She served in the U.S. Air Force from 1989 to 1995 and the Army Reserves from 2002 to 2005.

Alumni Masters Week Terry Connealy, ’94 Terry Connealy was appointed senior vice president of Mutual of Omaha Bank in April. He leads the strategic growth and management of the bank’s non-traditional sales channels for mortgage, including creating a direct sales channel with Mutual of Omaha insurance agents. He also works with the virtual mortgage team, develops relationships between the mortgage lending team and community association banking, and creates and implements marketing plans using the insurance channel. He previously was with Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, rising through the ranks from private mortgage banker to branch/area manager to market development manager to regional sales manager. A Husker football alum and two-time Academic All-American who played defensive tackle from 1991-1994, Connealy was a member of the Nebraska football

Seven Alumni Masters gave their perspectives on success during a panel discussion at the Nebraska Champions Club.

NEWS

Terry Connealy shared ideas with students during an Alumni Masters lunch.

radio broadcast team for Pinnacle Sports Productions from 1996 to 2002.

He also co-hosted a nationwide radio call-in show.

Angie Klein, ’01 Angie Klein is vice president of marketing and sales for Verizon’s Northeast Area, where she leads more than 2,600 employees accountable for regional marketing strategy, revenue plan execution, direct sales and customer service for more than 25 percent of the Verizon Consumer & Mass Business Wireline unit. Klein is responsible for annual revenue of more than $5 billion, and leads call center operations and the strategic acquisition channels for customers across New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. She holds bachelor’s degrees from UNL in both business and journalism and has served on the College of Business Young Alumni Board, the Nebraska Alumni Association Board of Directors and the Alumni Advisory Council. Klein is also a member of the Nebraska Women’s Leadership Network and serves on the Lower East Side Girls Club Board of Directors in New York City. In 2011, she received the Nebraska Young Alumni Achievement Award.

Edward J. Kodet Jr., ’68 Edward Kodet Jr. is president of Kodet Architectural Group Ltd., a 20-person Minneapolis firm he founded in 1983.

Academic, community and professional service have framed his professional life. Kodet has served the College of Design at the University of Minnesota and the College of Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he currently chairs the Professional Advisory Council. He previously led the advisory council at Minnesota. A Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, Kodet also has served as an officer for local, state and national chapters of the AIA and presently chairs the AIA College of Fellows Young Architects 2+2 Program and is a member of the National AIA Design Committee. In 2010, he was AIA Minnesota’s Gold Medal recipient, and he has won a number of AIA Design Merit Awards.

In his community, Kodet has been treasurer, vice president and presidentelect of the Minneapolis City of Lakes Rotary.

JoAnn Martin, ’75 JoAnn Martin is president and CEO of Ameritas Mutual Holding Company and chair, president and CEO of Ameritas

Continued on Page 44 NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 43

Continued from Page 43 Life in Lincoln.

Martin joined Ameritas as a manager in the audit division in 1984, and rose through the ranks.

In 2008, she assumed her present position with Ameritas Life Insurance Corp. and, in 2009, her current position with Ameritas Mutual Holding Company. A UNL business grad, Martin serves on the boards of the National Research Corp., the University of Nebraska Foundation and the Nebraska Innovation Campus Development Corp.

Among her many honors are a Public Service Award from the Nebraska Society of CPAS in 2013, the Dr. Barbara Hibner Trailblazer Award in 2012, recognition as Insurance Networking News’ Top Ten Women in Insurance Leadership in 2011, a CBA Leadership Award in 2011, induction into the UNL School of Accountancy Hall of Fame in 2004 and an NAA Alumni Achievement Award in 2002.

NEWS

Ayman Sahli, ’94 Ayman Sahli is CEO of Gulf Pharmaceutical Industries Julphar in the United Arab Emirates. After earning his Ph.D. at UNL, Sahli worked in process development in Syngenta, Ala., 1995-2000, and Wyeth, N.Y., 20002004. In 2004, he joined Hikma, a

leading multinational pharmaceutical company founded in Jordan and offering both branded and generic pharmaceuticals with an outreach spanning from the Middle East to the USA. He was appointed deputy general manager of the Jordan Unit, a post he held until 2008 when he joined Gulf Pharmaceutical Industries Julphar as chief executive officer. Sahli extended the company geographically as well as through an investment of $150 million into biotechnology. The launch of “Julphar Diabetes” in 2012 marked Julphar as the only company in the region to venture into recombinantDNA Insulin production. Sahli plans to increase Julphar’s regional manufacturing bases in strategic locations such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Algeria.

Dawn Schaefer, ’99 Dawn Schaefer is the executive art director for CBS, where she has been for 14 years. Her credits include “Survivor,” “Price is Right,” “Bold and the Beautiful,” “Rock Star: INXS,” “On the Lot” and “The Apprentice Live Finale” in Los Angeles, as well as other corporate events and local shows such as CBS News, CBS This Morning and local affiliate KCAL-9.

Schaefer has been with “Survivor” since the beginning in 2000, and is the art director for the live reunion shows and some of the cast photo

shoots. In 2003, “Survivor: Thailand” was nominated for an Emmy Award in Outstanding Art Direction for a Variety or Music Program. In May, Schaefer juggled three events at once – the “Survivor” finale live reunion, CBS Upfronts and a CBS Shareholders meeting. A native of Parkston, S.D., she holds a master’s degree from UNL. Don Voelte, ’75 Don Voelte is managing director and CEO of Seven Group Holdings, deputy chairman of Seven West Media and chairman of Nexus Energy, with 38 years of experience in the global oil and gas industry. Before retiring in June 2011, he was managing director and CEO of Woodside Petroleum. Prior to joining Woodside, Voelte held a number of senior executive positions at Mobil Corp., Atlantic Richfield Company and Chroma Energy Inc. based in Houston.

He is a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Chi Epsilon Honor Society, and is a Foreign Fellow to ATSE FTSE and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors AICD. A UNL civil engineering graduate and Engineering Alumni of the Year in 2002, Voelte also is a University of Nebraska Foundation trustee. In 2012, the Government of Australia appointed Voelte an honorary officer AO within the general division of the Order of Australia. v

Alumni Master Don Voelte spoke to a class in the College of Engineering.

44 WINTER 2015

ALUMNI

CHAPTERS & AFFILIATES ROTC Affiliate to Provide Honor Cords Starting with December 2014 Commencement, UNL has offered a new salute to graduating military veterans and students receiving ROTC commissions. All graduates with military service are eligible to wear a red, white and blue honor cord as part of commencement regalia. The cords are free, with funding provided by the NAA’s ROTC & Military Affiliate.

The salute was organized by UNL’s Student Veteran and Military Task Force and the Nebraska Alumni Association.

“The military cord is a great way for the university to acknowledge those who have served, are serving or are about to serve,” said Rich Thomas, commanding officer of the UNL Naval

ROTC unit. “Every graduate who wears the cord will do so with pride, knowing that the university respects and honors their service and sacrifice.”

More than 20 graduates donned the cords during commencement exercises on Dec. 20. UNL is one of eight Big Ten Conference universities that use the cords to salute graduating veterans and ROTC students.

“Our ROTC affiliate jumped at the opportunity to salute graduating veterans and those who will serve in the military,” said Shelley Zaborowski, interim director of the Nebraska Alumni Association. “All of us in the alumni association are excited to be a part of this new tradition.” v

ENJOY NEW PERKS UPGRADING TO LIFE MEMBERSHIP! Now when you upgrade from an annual to a life membership, you’ll not only receive a lifetime of Husker connections, but also a NEW life member kit complete with some new (and exclusive) Husker alumni swag. Join today and stay connected for life!

Learn more at huskeralum.org/membership or by calling 1-888-353-1874.

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 45

ALUMNI

CHAPTERS & AFFILIATES Chancellor Visits Washington Cornhuskers UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman joined the Washington Cornhuskers for an evening Husker football watch party at the Lucky 7 in Kirkland, Wash., Oct. 18.

Alabama Nebraskans gathered at the home of John and Cathy Matras in Huntsville, Ala., on Sept. 6 to watch Nebraska’s football game with McNeese State.

Washington Cornhuskers President Kevin Boldt (left) posed with Chancellor Perlman at the Lucky 7.

The Oregonians for Nebraska held their summer picnic at Dabney Park in Corbett, Ore., Aug. 9.

With nearly 120 fans in attendance, Perlman spoke briefly during halftime of the Nebraska-Northwestern football game and was presented with an official Washington Cornhusker T-shirt and coin. The group thanked him for his support of the Nebraska Legends Scholarship Program. v

Iowans for Nebraska helped out with the Meals From the Heartland Project Aug. 27.

During a two-hour shift, the group packaged more than 6,000 meals for distribution.

46 WINTER 2015

CLASSNOTES 1945

Jewel Hardt of Lincoln marked her 90th birthday Oct. 5, 2014.

1948

Wes and Winnie Furrer, ’44, Lincoln, marked 70 years of marriage Nov. 30, 2014.

1949

n Duane and Irene Larson of Lincoln celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary Aug. 31, 2014.

1953

Walter Witt of Lincoln turned 93 on Dec. 2, 2014.

1954

News/Weddings/Births/Deaths

n Bill White, president of The Austin Company Inc. in Milford, has been elected to serve a three-year term on the board of governors for Nebraska Wesleyan University.

1960

Robert and Patricia Green Grimit, ’67, of Lincoln noted a half century of marriage Aug. 30, 2014.

1961

n George Holdren of Lincoln turned 90 on Nov. 20, 2014. n Ronald and n Camilla Svobo-

da, ’65, of Lincoln noted their golden wedding anniversary Nov. 28, 2014.

n H. Nicholas Windeshausen, professor emeritus of marketing and management in the College of Business Administration at California State University, Sacramento, was honored at the 50th year of accreditation ceremony for that college in 2013. Windeshausen was recognized for his contribution in achieving accreditation in 1963 and subsequent, ongoing support of CBA.

n Sue Tempero, Indianapolis, was one of two recipients of the 2014 Diversity Advocate Award, presented by the United Way of Central Indiana.

1957

n James and n Ruth Lewis of

Beverly Keever of Honolulu, Hawaii, author of “Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting,” was honored by having that work named the 2015 One Book One Nebraska selection. One Book is a program that promotes a culture of reading and discussion in Nebraska by bringing the state together around one great book by a Nebraska author.

1959

n Juanita Reed-Boniface, Cedar, Minn., received the National Association of Extension 4-H Agents Life Member Award at their national conference in Minneapolis, Oct. 30, 2014.

The award recognizes service to NAE4-HA as an active member and a life member, and service to 4-H and the community as a retiree.

1963

n Arnold and Lynne Baird Garson of Sioux Falls, S.D., marked their 50th wedding anniversary on Aug. 15, 2014.

1964

St. Cloud, Minn., celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary Dec. 19, 2014. In 2004 they established the James and Ruth Lewis Endowed Scholarship Fund with the University of Nebraska Foundation.

n Walter William Mullen Jr., and Linda Garrels Mullen, ’67, of Fairbanks, Alaska, marked their 50th wedding anniversary Feb. 16, 2014.

Rich and Elaine Peters, ’65, of Lincoln celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary Sept. 2, 2014.

1965

n Judith Johnson Baumgarten

has sold her accounting firm and retired after 48 years as a certified public accountant. She lives five months of the year in Hawaii and the other seven in Huntington Beach, Calif.

■ Indicates Alumni Association Life Member

■

■ Darrell

and Mary Buss of Lincoln observed their 50th wedding anniversary Nov. 22, 2014.

Connie Spellman, the founding director of the urban design and environmental nonprofit, Omaha

by Design, was the 2014 honoree of the Omaha Press Club’s “Face on the Barroom Floor.”

1967

Jim and Barb Farber of Lincoln celebrated a half century of marriage Nov. 21, 2014. n James M. Walters, Atlanta, has

been selected by his peers for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America 2015. Walters is a senior partner in the Atlanta office of Fisher & Phillips LLP.

1969 ■ Brian

K. Ridenour is an attorney of counsel for the Lincoln law firm Kinsey Row Becker & Kistler LLP, where he focuses on business law matters. n Jim Paulson is co-owner of the Fremont farm management and real estate company Lallman, Paulson and Brettmann, which was named the 2014 Ag Business of the Year by the Fremont Area Chamber of Commerce.

1971

Steven D. Burns, Lancaster County (Neb.) district court judge, was presented the 2014 Service to the Community Award by the Nebraska Supreme Court.

Matt Williams was the 2014 recipient of the Bruning Award, presented by the American Bankers Association for outstanding leadership in agricultural banking. Williams is the president of the Gothenburg State Bank.

1972

Patrick L. McNair, a financial adviser with Continuum Financial/Mass Mutual, has been recognized as a Blue Chip Council member of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, an honor granted the top five percent of the total company field force.

Indicates Alumni Association Annual Member

Gary B. Randall, Omaha, Douglas County (Neb.) district court judge, was presented the 2014 Service to the Judiciary Award by the Nebraska Supreme Court.

1973

n Michael J. Tavlin was elected assistant treasurer of the board of directors for the Woods Charitable Fund Inc., a private grant-making foundation located in Lincoln.

1974

n Laurence Blake of Laramie, Wyo., has been appointed director of facilities planning and university architect at the University of Wyoming.

Marilyn Wimer has rejoined Nebraska Land Title and Abstract, a wholly owned subsidiary of HomeServices of America Inc., a full-service title insurance and escrow closing operation.

She is an escrow officer with the company.

1975

Joan Cannon has been added to the employee benefits and executive compensation team of attorneys for the Omaha-based law firm McGrath North. n John L. Kopecky has joined NebraskaLand National Bank as senior vice president-chief financial officer/chief risk officer.

Timothy D. Loudon, an attorney in the Omaha office of national law firm Jackson Lewis PC, was recognized as one of Best Lawyers® 2015 Lawyers of the Year.

Robert Rutan of West Gate Bank in Lincoln has been installed as the president of the board of directors for the Nebraska Mortgage Association. n Doug Samuelson has joined the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Athletic Department as a guest relations/security specialist. Samuelson also serves as the public address announcer for the Husker wrestling program.

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 47

CLASSNOTES n Daniel J. Wintz, Papillion, is an attorney with the Omaha law firm Koley Jessen where he practices in the area of employee benefits as well as on the estate and business succession planning team.

1976

Michael P. Ferris, an ear, nose and throat surgeon, has been named chief medical officer at CHI Health St. Elizabeth in Lincoln.

1977

Cheryl Brandenburgh, Lincoln, has been named the 2014 Nebraska Economic Developers Association Professional of the Year in the service provider category. Brandenburgh is an external affairs manager for Black Hills Energy, a local natural gas utility.

Joseph S. Dreesen, an attorney in the Omaha office of national law firm Jackson Lewis P.C., was recognized as one of Best Lawyers® 2015 Lawyers of the Year. n William J. Mueller and n Kim

M. Robak of the Lincoln law firm Mueller Robak LLC have again been selected for inclusion in the 2015 edition of “The Best Lawyers in America,” in the field of government relations law.

Bruce Wiles of Plattsmouth has been certified by the American Society of Agronomy as a certified crop adviser (CCA). To attain this honor, he passed an international CCA exam and the Nebraska CCA exam.

1978

Vena Genuchi Alesio, president of the Lincoln-based management development consulting firm Alesio & Associates LLP, has expanded that company by aligning with Vistage International, a global firm expressly dedicated to the growth and development of CEOs, executives and business owners. In her role as Vistage chair, Alesio becomes chief executive peer group leader and coach, and a senior executive coach and mentor.

48 WINTER 2015

Doug Kunzman is a financial adviser/vice president-investments in the Lincoln office of Wells Fargo Advisors.

n Kent Hofferber of Core Bank of Bellevue, has been elected to the Nebraska Mortgage Association board of directors.

n Gary L. Novotny, owner of Gary Michael’s Clothiers in Lincoln, was selected to be one of 13 men’s clothing stores from the United States to participate in an export project endorsed by the Italian government.

n Rosann Park-Jones, Winnetka, Ill., has joined Bryan Environmental Consultants Inc., an environmental consulting firm in the Chicago area.

n Mark Schoenrock recently retired as a member of the United States Army team, completing 40 years of service.

Schoenrock began his training to be an Army officer in August 1974 upon entrance to UNL. After service in many locations around the world, he and his wife have retired to Diller.

1979

Scott Brettmann is co-owner of the Fremont farm management and real estate company Lallman, Paulson and Brettmann, which was named the 2014 Ag Business of the Year by the Fremont Area Chamber of Commerce. n Bryan Slone, an attorney of counsel for the Omaha law firm Koley Jessen PC LLO, has been elected to the board of directors of the Ameritas Holding Company.

1980

■ Ronald

Roland, Del Rey Oaks, Calif., is the co-founder and president of Rolands & Associates Corp., a company that designs, develops and supports modeling and simulation applications that have civilian and military usage.

1981

David Van Pelt has been hired as vice president of the Lincoln office of Midwest Bank, which is headquartered in Pierce.

1982

Diane Gernstein, Interiors Joan & Associates, Omaha, was the recipient of a silver medal at the 2014 Nebraska/Iowa Chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers’ Annual Awards Dinner.

n Carmen Shively of Paul Daniels Interiors of Lincoln was the recipient of a silver medal at the 2014 Nebraska/Iowa Chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers’ Annual Awards Dinner.

Dave Witters has been promoted to vice president in the information technology department with American National Bank of Omaha.

1983

Orville Jones III was elected vice chair of the board of directors for the Woods Charitable Fund Inc., a private grant-making foundation located in Lincoln. n Barbara Mueksch has been hired by Lincoln Financial Group as a senior HR business partner for their Group Plan Division.

Kelli Swick of Cornelius, N.C., is a finalist in the 2014 Martha Stewart American Made Awards, presented to makers, craftspeople, small-business owners and innovators from across the country in four categories: crafts, design, food and style. Swick is the owner of Queen of Oats, an artisan baking company.

1984

Kristin Grosskopf has been elected treasurer of the 2015 PFLAG Lincoln.

1985

Jon Miller has joined the Lincoln office of Wells Fargo Advisors, where he a financial adviser/vice president-investments.

1986

David Smith, Clancy, Mont., has been bestowed with the highest

honor for rail industry environmental professionals, the Association of American Railroad’s Professional Environmental Excellence Award. Smith is the manager of environmental remediation for BNSF.

1987

n Jerry Byers, senior vice president, finance, was named chief financial officer for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska.

Byers is a resident of Papillion.

■ Greg

Eaton, Moscow, Idaho, has retired at the rank of captain from the U.S. Navy after more than 27 years of honorable service. The ceremony was held Sept. 12, 2014, and Eaton was retired by his brother, Cmdr. Mike Eaton, ’83, USN (ret.), who was Capt. Eaton’s commissioning officer at the Military and Naval Science building in May 1987.

1988

Jeff Rezac is vice president of the specialty finance group of American National Bank in Omaha.

1989

Paula Fankhauser was welcomed to Bryan Medical Center in Lincoln as director of benefits.

Mike Reilley has been selected as the director of the new Cronkite News-Digital Production Bureau at Arizona State University in Tempe. n Patricia (Trish) Bloemker Sowers was recently promoted to director of development and strategy for the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa.

1990

Ron Sabatka of Wahoo has been named an Encirca certified services lead for the western region. Sabatka and his team assist corn and soybean growers in adopting crop-management technologies from DuPont Pioneer.

BY KATHLEEN RUTLEDGE, ’70

Alumni Profile ’67, ’70

Curiosity Never Retires Marvin Almy

Marvin Almy had come a long way from the farm he grew up on seven miles north of Waverly.

He had come a long way from Cedar Hill, the one-room school he attended through the seventh grade, and from the basketball court at Waverly High School.

And he had come a long way from the campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and where he was tackled for the Innocents Society by Frank Partsch, future opinion page editor of the Omaha World-Herald.

On that pivotal day, Almy was far from Nebraska in an Akron, Ohio, meeting room, talking with Goodyear officials about their contract with the trade association he had directed for 11 years. It was all very familiar to him – too familiar.

Almy had had a successful career after finishing law school at UNL. He first worked for a parts distribution business based in Omaha and then became executive director of the trade association, Parts Plus, in Memphis, Tenn.

“I enjoyed it. I was an industry leader. We did some innovative things.

It was fun,” he said.

But then came that day in Akron, that day when he was 50 and at the top of his game.

“I thought to myself, ‘I have been here before. I have heard this. This is getting tired and repetitive.’ ” He had spent 25 years selling automotive parts for other people and suddenly he realized he was done, he no longer felt challenged.

“I wanted to find something more satisfying to my soul,” he said. It

Marv Almy / Photo by Greg Nathan, University Communications.

turns out his soul yearned for home, and human stories, and the joys of lifelong learning.

These days, he lives in Waverly rather than Memphis. When he travels, he goes to the Great Wall of China or New Zealand. Instead of running a warehouse in Des Moines or computerizing an entire company, he has run the Human Services Federation in Lincoln and served as the refugee program coordinator for Lincoln Literacy.

Almy became so interested in the stories and life experiences of refugees that he started attending meetings of the New Americans Task Force. That led him to a joint project with the Good Neighbor Center on North 27th Street, which serves the Arabic community in Lincoln. Soon he was on its board, then chair of the board.

Along the way, he decided to enroll in a Great Decisions course offered by the Osher Lifelong Learning

Institute at UNL. It’s a membership organization that serves people over 50 for whom “curiosity never retires.”

He spoke up in class, so it wasn’t too long before he was invited to join the Curriculum Committee. Then he was developing courses on politics with John Comer, emeritus UNL professor of political science, and Randy Moody, retired lobbyist for the National Education Association. The trio has offered some of the best-attended courses on the institute’s roster.

Almy is still putting those popular courses together but he’s also taken on a bigger role with the institute: president of the advisory council. It’s a volunteer position but he finds that in these early days of his term, he’s doing something almost every day for the institute.

It’s a perfect fit for a guy with years of experience working with membership organizations. Whether it’s Parts Plus or the Human Services Federation or OLLI, he said, it’s all

Continued on Page 50

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 49

CLASSNOTES curiosity never retires Continued from Page 49

n Tom Svoboda was elected president and chief executive officer of Farris Engineering, located in Omaha.

in January 2013, after having served in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs since 2007.

about setting objectives and providing logistics and support. Then you listen and set to work trying to meet members’ goals and expectations, building consensus.

Given what he found to satisfy his soul after Parts Plus, it makes sense that he wants to foster diversity in the institute and continue a strong travel program for members.

He’d like it to be an organization in which anybody over 50 can feel comfortable and enjoy its offerings regardless of race or culture or country or origin. “I think that’s good for OLLI,’’ he said.

His work with the institute fits right into a long Almy family history with the University of Nebraska.

Generation after generation, Almys have attended the university. An ancestor, John Edwin Almy, was a professor of physics there beginning in the 1890s.

Marvin Almy’s sister, a retired educator and OLLI member, said the family puts a high value on the university and on continuing to learn throughout their lives.

“He’s been the best example of that in our family,” she said. “He has really been the epitome of lifelong learning.”

Almy is leading the lifelong learning institute at a time of vigorous growth in membership. It has evolved from a cozy few hundred members to about 1,200 and counting.

“We’re really lucky in that we’re riding the crest of the World War II baby boom,” he said. “That puts pressure on us to become more professional in our offerings,” he said, and to recruit more volunteers for this member-driven organization, and eventually more staff. The question is: “How do we do that in a controlled and organized manner?”

Dean Marjorie Kostelnik, dean of the College of Education and Human Sciences that is home to OLLI, once told the council that where she decides to live after she retires will be influenced by whether that community has a lifelong learning institute.

“How do we meet the expectations of a seeker like her?” Almy said. It’s yet another challenge for someone who has always liked a challenge. v

1991

n Robert Scott, co-manager and principal at WRK LLC in Lincoln, has been elected to a three-year term on the Nebraska Wesleyan University Board of Governors.

Lisa Cooper, with Interiors Joan and Associates of Omaha, took the “Judge’s Choice – Best of Show” award for her gold medal project of designing a penthouse in Omaha’s historic Beebe + Runyan building. The honor was presented at the 2014 Nebraska/Iowa Chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers’ Annual Awards Dinner.

Mollie Protzman has been hired

by Albers Communications, an Omaha-based public relations firm, as an account manager.

1992

n Nelle Woods Jamison is a member of the board of directors for the Woods Charitable Fund Inc., a private grantmaking foundation located in Lincoln.

1993

“Brad” Shafer, Charlottesville, Va., is the vice president of development for The College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Foundation at the University of Virginia.

1995

Michael Dames of First State Bank Nebraska of Lincoln has been appointed to the board of directors for the Nebraska Mortgage Association.

Matt Easley was added to the Lincoln sales team for SolutionOne, which provides customized solutions for the network IT equipment and document management technology of businesses.

Ernie Castillo is a member of the board of directors for the Woods Charitable Fund Inc., a private grant-making foundation located in Lincoln.

■ Susan

Mike Koehn is the director of marketing for Lambert Vet Supply of Fairbury.

Victoria Pierce of Paul Daniels Interiors of Lincoln was the recipient of a silver medal at the 2014 Nebraska/Iowa Chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers’ Annual Awards Dinner.

Kris R. Loberg has joined Assurity Life Insurance Co. of Lincoln as regional sales manager for Assurity at Work in Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Deborah Webster has been promoted to executive vice president chief operating officer for West Gate Bank of Lincoln.

1994

n Jessica Walcott Murray

received her Certificate of Advanced Study in Information Innovation-Social Media from the School of Information Studies (iSchool) at Syracuse University. Murray joined the iSchool’s external relations team as development associate 50 WINTER 2015

■ Bradley

McBride Krab has retired after 15 years working in IT for the Ogallala Public Schools and will focus on her family and her fight with MS.

Tim Steffen is a civil engineer in the Lincoln office of The Schemmer Associates, a regional architecture/engineering/ planning firm headquartered in Omaha.

1996

Carl Eskridge is a member of the board of directors for the Woods Charitable Fund Inc., a private grant-making foundation located in Lincoln. n Gail Graeve has joined Mutual of Omaha as executive director of the Mutual of Omaha Foundation.

BY ANTHONY FLOTT

Alumni Profile ’08

Talking the Talk

Jennifer Burt There came a time when Charlie Burt thought Grandma Darlene ought to … button up.

Zip it.

Pipe down.

Charlie was only 2 then. He and Grandma were walking. And Grandma – as usual – was talking.

We’re walking down the hallway!

We’re at the elevator!

We’re walking onto the elevator!

We’re going down!

That was enough for Charlie.

“Grandma,” he said, “will you please stop talking!”

Charlie’s mom, Jennifer Burt, recounts the story with a laugh – and some measure of sympathy. Grandma Darlene did the same thing to her growing up.

But that’s more than OK. It’s essential.

“She didn’t come from the most enriching environment, but she created that for us and taught us to value education and learning,” Jennifer Burt said. “The importance of language in a home is so important for helping

Did you know …

At 2 months, a baby should begin smiling at others.

At 9 months they understand what “no” means.

At 18 months infants can say several single words.

At 3 years children can follow instructions with two or three steps.

Jennifer Burt (right) and Kristen Carson, a psychology intern at UNMC’s Munroe-Meyer Institute, review developmental milestones in toddlers. Photo courtesy of UNMC.

kids develop optimally. One of the most important things you can do with a baby is just talk and talk and talk.

My mom did that and still does it with her grandchildren.”

Today Burt, an assistant professor of pediatrics and psychology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Munroe-Meyer Institute, is among the nation’s go-to experts when it comes to childhood development.

That’s one reason why in September the 2008 University of Nebraska graduate was appointed the state’s Act Early Ambassador for the CDC’s “Learn the Signs. Act Early” (LTSAE) program.

There are just 30 LTSAE ambassadors throughout the United States.

Their goal is to promote early identification of developmental delay and disabilities such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), Asperger Syndrome, ADHD, cerebral palsy, hearing or vision loss or intellectual disabilities.

The LTSAE campaign promotes awareness of developmental milestones in early childhood, offers tools for tracking development, and points the way to services that, if accessed soon enough, can offset costly intervention requirements later in life.

As Nebraska’s ambassador, Burt will assist in getting quality, free, research-based materials to parents while working with partners in rural

and urban communities across the state. That includes the university’s Nebraska Autism Spectrum Disorders Network.

“Our role is to be the face of the campaign in our state and try to promote parents really understanding healthy child development and getting involved in being the leader in developing and monitoring for the child,” Burt said. “Early identification of not just developmental disability but also development delay is really critical for kids to get the support they need early and to have optimal outcomes.”

Early action is critical – perhaps more than ever. Today, according to the CDC, about one in 68 children has been identified with autism. In 2000, one in 150 children was identified.

Overall, about one in six children, aged 3 to 17, has a developmental disability, often not identified until after they begin school.

“So you miss two to three years where they could have been receiving services that help them reach those milestones and have optimal outcomes,” Burt said. “Research shows if we give kids and families the support they need early they have a much better trajectory through school and through life. The wait-and-see approach is not nearly as effective.”

Burt, who joined the UNMC faculty in 2010, spends half her time working

Continued on Page 52 NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 51

CLASSNOTES talking the talk Continued from Page 51

Luke Peters has joined Dow AgroSciences of Indianapolis, as the corn herbicides product manager.

directly with children with developmental disabilities and genetic disorders at the Munroe-Meyer Institute.

It’s not the arena she anticipated as a career when she started college. The native of Mankato, Minn., first was a business major at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. That didn’t fly.

“I was bored to tears,” she said.

She switched to psychology and, as an undergraduate, helped coordinate a tutoring program in a local school district.

She had found her niche.

“I love kids. I love education. I love learning.”

She graduated in 1999, then enrolled at the University of Notre Dame working toward a master’s degree in education. That occurred while serving as a volunteer for Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education teaching third graders in Shreveport, La. CONNECTION BOX She earned a master’s cdc.gov/ncbddd/actearly from Notre Dame in 2001 jburt@unmc.edu and made her way to UNL and its six-year doctoral program in psychology.

She has high praise for UNL Professor Susan Sheridan, director of the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools. Burt took part in Sheridan’s early childhood grants and was a Head Start consultant helping parents and teachers.

“Working with Dr. Sheridan was phenomenal,” said Burt, the UNL School of Psychology Student of the Year in 2006. “I had the opportunity to get involved immediately working with kids and families on intervention. She really taught me the importance of valuing a family and meeting the family where they’re at, helping them grow from where they’re at.”

Burt’s first association with the CDC came in the late 2000s when she joined others contributing to a Milestones Moment booklet, which included suggestions and activities for parents to promote those milestones. After being named an ambassador this year, she received training at the CDC in Atlanta.

She also can speak from personal experience. She and her husband, Jon Burt, executive director of the Aksarben Foundation, have three children.

You can bet there’s plenty chatter in the Burt household. “All children, they’re sponges,” Burt said.

“They soak things up.”

Something Grandma Darlene has known all along. v

John E. Philo, Lozier Corp. of Lincoln, has been elected to the 2014-15 board of directors for the CFA Society of Nebraska, and will serve as treasurer.

Julie Odermatt of D3 Interiors Inc. of Omaha was the recipient of silver and bronze medals at the 2014 Nebraska/Iowa Chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers’ Annual Awards Dinner.

1997

2000

Andrew V. Frahm, First National Wealth Management of Lincoln, has been elected president of the 2014-15 CFA Society of Nebraska board of directors.

Nick Schulz, an architect in the Omaha office of regional architecture/design firm RDG Planning & Design, was selected as a partner.

Scott Hedrick is a sales and leasing associate and property manager with P.J. Morgan Real Estate in Omaha.

Carl Witte was named manager, process control engineering for Lincoln Industries, a provider of products requiring high-performance metal finishing.

Tracie Beck has transferred to the Lincoln branch of Wells Fargo Advisors, where she is a senior registered client associate.

1998

Tara Benes of Waverly has been added to the staff of Horizon Physical Therapy in Lincoln as a therapist. n Stephen Davis, a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force, assumed command of the 28th Operational Weather Squadron at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., on July 30, 2014.

Shawn Lang of Liberty First Credit Union of Lincoln has been selected as a member of the Nebraska Mortgage Association board of directors.

Amber Rinehart has been promoted to vice president and actuary at Mutual of Omaha and oversees the Medicare supplement product line.

Scott M. Vogt, general counsel and vice president for CBSHOME Real Estate and HomeServices of Nebraska, was welcomed to the board of directors of the YMCA of Greater Omaha.

1999 ■ Daniel

E. Frost, Union Investment Management Group of Lincoln, has been elected to the

52 WINTER 2015

2014-15 board of directors for the CFA Society of Nebraska.

Joseph M. Lionberger, Ameritas Investment Partners of Lincoln, has been elected secretary of the 2014-15 CFA Society of Nebraska board of directors.

2001

Gwen Ahrens with The Interior Design Firm, Omaha, won a bronze medal at the 2014 Nebraska/Iowa Chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers’ Annual Awards Dinner.

2002

Holly Hassel of Wausau, Wis., a professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Marathon County, was recently awarded the UW Colleges 2013-14 BarringtonMusolf Faculty Research Award for her article “Research Gaps in Teaching English in the TwoYear College.”

Margaret Hobelman has been promoted to cashier at West Gate Bank of Lincoln.

Tina Stokes is a part of the copywriting team in the Kearney office of SCORR Marketing.

Becki Wiechman has been named to the national board of directors of the American Society of Interior Designers.

Wiechman is a partner with the Interior Design Group in Omaha.

BY COLLEEN KENNEY FLEISCHER, ’88

Alumni Profiles ’59

Helping Young People Succeed

Dick Hanzel This envelope comes as a surprise.

“Oh, wow.”

He tears it open and reads the handwritten note out loud: Mr. Dick Hanzel, As a recipient of this year’s Hanzel Scholarship, I would like to offer you this sincere thank-you for your donation. Your generosity has created this scholarship that will ease the cost of attending school. …

Mr. Dick Hanzel smiles.

A 1959 graduate of UNL’s College of Business Administration, Hanzel didn’t know he’d be reading a note like this so soon. It’s from a young man named Jared Maguire of Norfolk, Neb., who’s the first of many recipients of the Hanzel Scholarship – a full-ride scholarship for finance and accounting majors at UNL. This is the first of many such notes that will come to the Hanzel home in Indianapolis. … The recognition of both my academic and co-curricular work through this scholarship is a blessing. …

His home on the north side of this city is not too far from the national headquarters of Top Value Fabrics, the company Hanzel co-founded in 1974 when he was still a young man and then made into one of the nation’s

Photo courtesy of the NU Foundation.

leading wholesale suppliers of fabrics for industrial, marine and active outwear uses.

Hanzel sits in a favorite leather chair near a front window.

He likes this city and this state.

It’s where he made his fortune.

But to him, Nebraska will always be home, too. Nebraska gave him values that helped him make it in the business world. Nebraska gave him an education. Nebraska is where his blessings began. Nebraska, he said, imprinted on him for life.

His wife teases because he still waves at strangers, still does that Nebraska farmer’s wave.

And it’s good to hear from a Nebraskan again. … I have always seen college as an investment into my future. …

Hanzel was born the youngest of seven to a farm family who lived just outside of Dodge, Neb. The land had been homesteaded by his grandfather, who’d immigrated from Czechoslovakia. Hanzel’s grandfather must have been a man who cared about education, because he donated an acre to create District 41 and the country schoolhouse. It’s where Hanzel first went to school.

Hanzel was shy. He attended five different schools in the first five years.

Kids bullied him because he always was the new kid. He didn’t fit in.

But that ended up being the best training for what he would become.

An entrepreneur. A millionaire. In the business world, he said, you don’t want to fit in. You don’t want to follow the crowd.

You want to stay hungry.

Continued on Page 54 NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 53

CLASSNOTES helping young people succeed Continued from Page 53 … Having more than my own personal investment put into my education gives me all the more motivation to succeed. …

Over the years, Hanzel, 76, has mentored young people in the business world. Some went on to become millionaires, too. The ones who’ve succeeded, he’s noticed, had a lot in common with him. They were willing not to fit in, they were willing to risk their own money upfront, and they stayed hungry.

Hanzel’s family wasn’t poor. He was never truly hungry. But he always felt his family’s lack of money. His parents ended up owning the movie theater in Beemer, Neb. Hanzel saw how his dad kept a log of every penny he made and spent. That’s when Hanzel first saw the importance of having accounting skills.

His first job at the theater was as the cleaning boy. He worked his way up to the popcorn machine and then to the projection booth. He saved every penny he could and that money, along with the ROTC money he made, helped pay his way through UNL. He made certain conditions for the Hanzel Scholarships: • He wants them to go to students majoring in finance and

accounting, because those fields, he feels, lay the groundwork for

business success.

• He wants them to go to students from rural Nebraska – hard-working

students who really could use

the help. The students can’t be in a fraternity or sorority. He wants

the kids who want to change their

status in life.

• He wants the underdogs.

54 WINTER 2015

He and his wife, Judy, didn’t have children, so he sees this Hanzel Scholarship as an opportunity to help young people succeed.

That’s the nature of Nebraska, he said: Parents forego their own comfort to make sure the next generation succeeds. … The added opportunities this scholarship will present me are going to help me grow and reach my educational goals. …

As a kid in the projection booth of his parents’ theater, Hanzel loved watching the war movies. He imagined himself as the hero running up the hill with a machine gun, blasting everybody off the hilltop.

His time in Vietnam changed that.

It took maybe 10 years to get over the stress of losing people and the stress of knowing that the pretty leaves on the paths through the jungle could be camouflaging traps – holes with sharp, feces-covered bamboo poles sticking up, waiting for him to fall.

He didn’t.

When you first get to a combat zone, he said, you start out hypersensitive.

Then you become overconfident. Then you become humble, and you hope that the humble sets in before somebody shoots you. … Among other activities, I will now be able to participate in a study abroad program which was previously out of my financial reach. …

Hanzel had a mentor in the business world when he was a young man. The mentor’s name was Victor. Hanzel worked for Victor for almost seven years in Indianapolis after returning from Vietnam and earning his MBA from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.

“Pull the cotton out of your ears, and put it in your mouth,” Victor would say.

“Let other people speak. Then you’ll know what you know, and you’ll also know what they know.”

Victor was a great man who wanted to help God do His work on Earth. But his sons, Hanzel said, weren’t as great. And they didn’t like Hanzel.

One day, Victor fell. He broke a hip.

One of the sons took advantage of that and fired Hanzel on the spot.

That happened on a Thursday, and Hanzel opened Top Value Fabrics on the following Monday.

He started at the bottom with just two chairs, a card table and a phone. … I greatly appreciate your contribution to these opportunities and to my college career as a whole. …

Decades ago, during his own college career in Lincoln, Hanzel used his grades as the “scorecard” to measure success. Later, the scorecard became the money he made with Top Value Fabrics.

But money itself, he said, is not an ideal goal. You also have to give back.

You have to give back to the people and places that helped you along the path. That’s why he’s giving so much now to UNL’s College of Business Administration and to the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University.

You can give back by being a mentor, and you can give back by helping a young person like the one you used to be.

Like the one whose story arrived this day in an envelope. … Thank you for your generosity.

Sincerely, Jared Maguire Mr. Dick Hanzel looked up from the note.

“This is fantastic,” he said, still smiling. “Can you imagine how good that makes me feel?” v

CLASSNOTES 2003

Daniel R. Carnahan is an attorney with the Lincoln law firm Woods & Aitken LLP, where he focuses on estate planning, real estate matters and business transactions.

Kevin Krohn is a supply chain coordinator with Hoegemeyer Hybrids, a seed company located in Hooper.

2004

Rebecca Appleford has joined Wahoo-based engineering/ architecture/planning firm JEO Consulting Group, where she serves as a hazard mitigation planner.

Matt Clay has been promoted to managing officer of the credit card department for Union Bank & Trust of Lincoln.

Kevin T. Grosshans, orthopaedic physician, has joined the staff of OrthoWest, an Omaha orthopaedic care company.

Todd Mulliner, senior vice president and general counsel for Nebraska Economic Development Corp. (NEDCO), has been recognized for his dedication to that company. NEDCO is a nationally recognized, certified, development company that provides business financing and access to capital markets for the state of Nebraska business community.

Jake Muhleisen is the vice president-commercial lending for Union Bank & Trust of Lincoln.

â– Luke

2006

Stokebrand, Luveen, Ariz., is director of marketing for the Bill Luke Auto Group in Phoenix.

â– Aaron

Storo is a manager in the capital projects service group for Accenture in New York City.

2005

Nate Custard was promoted to senior writer/producer in the Lincoln office of marketing communications firm Swanson Russell.

Andy Wildman has been added to the Lincoln office team of Tetrad Property Group as a design and project manager.

Tetrad is a regional real estate company focusing primarily on the Midwest.

Emily Bausch of Adams is the economic development coordinator in the Lincoln office of Olsson Associates, a regional engineering and design firm.

Erin Wolfe has joined Premier Bank of Omaha as a deposit and loan officer.

2007

Kevin Andersen is a planner in the planning department of the Lincoln office of JEO Consulting Group, an engineering/ architecture/planning company

headquartered in Wahoo.

Steve Arens has joined JEO Consulting Group of Wahoo as a structural engineer.

Erin Dobesh has been hired by the Lincoln architecture firm Berggren Architects as a project architect and public relations coordinator.

Kimberly Leighton, Lincoln, was inducted as a fellow in the Academy of Nursing Education for her work in patient simulation education. Leighton is the assistant dean of research and simulation faculty development for the Institute for Research and Clinical Strategy at DeVry Education Group and is a past president of the International Nursing Association for Clinical Simulation and Learning (INACSL). She is widely published, presents at conferences around the world and is involved in numerous research studies.

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 55

CLASSNOTES James Mowitz is a commercial loan officer at the 14th and N streets branch of Pinnacle Bank in Lincoln.

Brittany Tran has joined Tabitha of Lincoln as director of the Adult Day program.

2008

Linsey A. Camplin has joined the Lincoln law firm of McHenry, Haszard, Roth, Hupp, Burkholder & Blomenberg as an associate.

Megan Freeman has been hired

by Lincoln Industries as a project engineer.

Sean Heard is talent specialist for Lincoln Industries, which supplies products requiring high-performance metal finishing.

Mike Houston, an architectural intern in the Omaha office of regional architecture and design firm RDG Planning & Design, was recently named a stockholder.

Dillon Small, La Habra, Calif., has graduated from the commissioned officers training course. Small is a captain in the United States Air Force.

Nate Wieting has been promoted to assistant trust officer in the personal trust and wealth management department of Union Bank & Trust of Lincoln.

2009

Joslyn Dalton of West Hartford, Conn., ran in the 2014 New York City Marathon as a member of the ESPN/Team V group that raises money for cancer research.

Laura Essay, Elkhorn, has joined First National Bank Fremont as a senior adviser in the Wealth Management Department.

Paul and Stephanie Jarrett, ’05, were selected as the 2014 Downtown Lincoln Association Young Entrepreneur Award winners. The couple founded Bulu Box, which provides vitamins and other health and nutrition products in sample sizes via 56 WINTER 2015

monthly or annual subscriptions.

Cassie Kohl is a commercial loan officer at the Omaha branch of Union Bank & Trust, a Lincoln-based bank.

2010

Brandon Boetel has been hired

by Lutz, an Omaha accounting firm, as a staff accountant.

■ Ben

Eddy is the chief operating officer for Ambassador Health, a skilled nursing and rehabilitation facility located in Omaha.

Jordan Kaiser is an associate interactive designer in the Lincoln office of marketing communications firm Swanson Russell.

Sheena Kennedy of Elkhorn co-authored an article “Earning While Maintaining Family Ties: Black Women’s Reflections on the Transition Into College” along with Rachelle WinkleWagner. It was published in the September 2014 issue of the NASPA’s Journal About Women in Higher Education.

Michael G. Kuzma is an attorney with the Lincoln firm of Johnson Flodman, where he focuses on estate planning, probate, business transactions and tax.

Angela Rasdal is an affiliate marketing manager with the Omaha-based Internet marketing agency Intertwine Interactive.

Belinda Wright has joined Agent, a Lincoln-based brand idea company, as a brand manager.

2011

Emily Blomstedt has been added to the lineup of associates at the Omaha law firm Fraser Stryker.

Joseph Robine is a hazard mitigation planner with JEO Consulting Group, an engineering/ architecture/planning company headquartered in Omaha.

Jacob Williams is an account executive as the result of a recent promotion at Cornerstone Printing & Marketing of Lincoln.

2012

■ Curtis Adams of Lincoln is serving as an adult probation drug technician at the Nebraska Supreme Court and is studying for a master’s degree in forensic science at Nebraska Wesleyan University.

■ Haley Juma has joined the Omaha office of Five Nines Group as a senior account executive. Five Nines is a Lincoln-based firm that offers management IT services, IT projects and procurement.

Kayla McClure of D3 Interiors Inc. of Omaha, was the recipient of silver and bronze medals at the 2014 Nebraska/ Iowa Chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers’ Annual Awards Dinner.

Omaha office of Kutak Rock, a national law firm.

■ Christen Nino de Guzman has taken a position as coordinator with SOL REPUBLIC in San Francisco, where she manages their college marketing program.

Zach Trede is an electrical engineer in the Lincoln office of JEO Consulting Group, an engineering/architecture/planning company headquartered in Wahoo.

2014

Sarah Bishop has been hired by Cornerstone Printing & Marketing of Lincoln as an account manager for its sales and customer service team.

Wesley A. Goranson is an attorney with the Lincoln law firm Harding & Schultz PC LLO where he previously worked as a law clerk.

Robert Powell Jr. is a member of the audit department at Omaha-based accounting firm Lutz.

■ Jamie Huss has been added to the Omaha office of Renaissance Financial as a financial adviser.

Jaren Rief has been hired by Oxbow Animal Health, a Murdockbased supplier of premium life-staged foods and supportive care products for small exotic animals. Rief will work as a quality operations specialist.

Garrett Johnson is a project engineer in the Lincoln office of JEO Consulting Group, a Wahoo-based engineering/architecture/planning firm.

■ Robert Seybert, an associate attorney with the Lincoln law firm Baylor, Evnen, Curtiss, Grimit & Witt, LLP, has earned his human resource certification as administered by the Lincoln Human Resource Management Association.

2013

Alli Carlson is an account executive with the Omaha advertising agency Redstone and serves as the primary contact for a number of the firm’s clients.

Dan Grossman has joined Intertwine Interactive, an Internet marketing agency in Omaha, as PPC account manager.

Patrick Krebs has been added to the real estate team at the

■ Sarah Richter has joined the audit department of Lutz, an accounting firm based in Omaha.

Tara Soe of Omaha was a winner of gold and bronze medals at the 2014 Nebraska/ Iowa Chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers’ Annual Awards Dinner.

WEDDINGS

Chad McCammon, ’03, and Sinead Tully, July 12, 2014.

The couple lives in Chicago. n Matthew Olson, ’05, and Nicki LaPorta, July 12, 2014. The couple lives in Lincoln.

Jacob Adkins and Sarah Mathews, ’08, May 24, 2014.

The couple lives in Dearborn, Mo.

BY LINDSAY BRONSON

Alumni Profile ’12

Guardian of the Skies

Christopher Jeffers He has a new view on the so-called fly-over states where he was proudly born and raised, because now he soars above them at supersonic speeds and heights most can only dream of reaching. This 2012 University of Nebraska-Lincoln graduate has tested the limits of what men can do up in a world where they are a temporary guest, an entrancing world that dwells far above us.

A day at the office for Lt. Christopher Jeffers and his colleagues consists of aerobatics that test physics and formation flying – bringing the pilots within mere feet of one another.

Another day on the job may entail flying to Europe at the speed of sound to perfect his skills as a guardian of the skies. And as far as the daily grind for this young man … the only thing he is grinding is the enemy – those who wish to do harm to this nation and the ones we love.

Jeffers’ roots are planted in the small town of Ogallala; his roots in The Good Life have given him the foundation to grow and thrive on the road to becoming one of our nation’s F-16 Fighter pilots. He has already taken his Husker pride around the nation and looks forward to, one day, spreading it across the world.

As a young Nebraskan, Jeffers

dreams took shape through reading books and came alive on his enchanted train set. As he grew, so did his fascination with creating contraptions and building structures. This inquisitive fascination stayed with him as he began to discover and explore the remarkable miracle of flight. Both curiosities would eventually bring him to UNL. He was always a Husker at heart and he couldn’t wait to enter the doors of his home state university.

Jeffers knew this was the place for him because it afforded him the ability to not only explore flight, but to continue creating and building as a civil engineering major. More importantly, he was able to strengthen the foundation for a future and a life of accomplishment – a Good Life, of which to be proud.

Jeffers’ time at the university provided appropriate challenges as he prepared to take on the real world for the first time as a young adult. He spent time as an engineering mechanics tutor for advanced engineering classes, social chair for Chi Epsilon civil engineering honors society and teaching assistant for a water resource engineering class. He was also a proud, hard-working member of the UNL Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps (AFROTC), as well as president of the university’s Arnold Air

Society (which advocates the support of aerospace power).

In due time, he was able to hone not only his skills as a professional but also, through the variety of organizations offered at UNL, the skills of a constructive community member and productive citizen. He completed his civil engineering degree in four years, excelling in the curriculum and graduating in the top of his class. And through UNL’s AFROTC program, the young man whose dreams of flying would never diminish, simultaneously earned a commission as an officer in the Air Force.

“Integrity First, Service Before Self, and Excellence In All We Do.” These are the three Core Values of the United States Air Force, imprinted on the hearts and minds of Air Force officers all around the world – officers willing to lay it all on the line for the nation they love, for the homes they grew up in, and for those places in their hearts they forever hold dear.

Lt. Christopher Jeffers is ready to tackle the world – a goal instilled in him as a young boy but only made possible by the opportunities afforded him through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. v

NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 57

CLASSNOTES John Spehn, ’09, and n Lindsey Eastwood, ’10, June 14, 2014.

The couple lives in Omaha.

DEATHS

Zachary Gould, ’09, and Valerie Schick, April 26, 2014. The couple lives in Hyannis.

Merle E. Lipe, ’47, Lincoln, Oct. 24, 2014.

Richard W. Guhin, ’50, Plano, Texas, Feb. 22, 2014.

Emily Frandsen Griffing, ’39, Lincoln, Nov. 2, 2014.

Keith N. Sturdevant, ’47, Drummond Island, Mich., Aug. 14, 2014.

Alfred N. Hall, ’50, Racine, Wis., Oct. 26, 2013.

Charline Dein Nelson, ’39, York, Sept. 21, 2014.

Joanne Rapp Wanamaker, ’47, NaperviIle, Ill., Aug. 21, 2014.

Gene A. Garrett, ’40, Clarinda, Iowa, Aug. 17, 2014.

James R. Brownell, ’48, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, May 19, 2014.

Roland E. Meyerott, ’40, Los Altos Hills, Calif., Sept. 4, 2014.

Lois Heuser Corning, ’48, Lincoln, Oct. 29, 2014.

Robert L. Rothwell, ’40, Lincoln, Oct. 28, 2014.

Roland E. Hermann, ’48, Golden, Colo., July 1, 2014.

Dorothy A. Anderson, ’42, Los Altos, Calif., Sept. 3, 2014.

David T. Kinsman, ’48, Phoenix, Aug. 29, 2014.

Hazel D. Arpke, ’42, Beatrice, Sept. 8, 2014.

John C. Lind, ’48, Lincoln, Aug. 3, 2014.

Harold N. Bacon, ’42, Gulfport, Miss., Jan. 11, 2014.

Lola J. McCracken, ’48, Lincoln, Sept. 11, 2014.

Hal L. Hill, ’42, San Francisco, April 5, 2014.

Omar Perez, ’48, Canton, Ohio, Sept. 23, 2014.

Kenneth E. Holland, ’43, Lincoln, Sept. 1, 2014.

Bonnie Compton Todenhoft, ’48, York, Pa., Oct. 29, 2014.

Joshua Lorimer and Kelsey Baker, ’14, June 21, 2014. The couple lives in Lincoln.

Bernice Spahn Mushlitz, ’43, Omaha, Sept. 12, 2014.

Wilbur C. Copeland, ’49, Columbus, Ohio, Oct. 20, 2013.

BIRTHS

Margaret Fowler Tansey, ’43, Ottawa Hills, Ohio, July 1, 2014.

Jack Dill, ’49, Denver, Aug. 26, 2014.

Anderson Washburn, ’02, their second child, first daughter, Claire Elizabeth, Sept. 13, 2014. The family lives in Lincoln.

Doris Falk Hale, ’44, Jackson, Ohio, Oct. 23, 2014.

Weldon D. Frankforter, ’49, Wyoming, Mich., Nov. 4, 2014.

James W. Howe, ’44, Frederick, Md., Jan. 24, 2014.

Arthur S. Gorai, ’49, Seattle, June 10, 2014.

Rob and n Jacqueline “Jacqui” Meadors, ’02, their second child, a daughter, Nora, Aug. 28, 2014. The family lives in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Patricia Cole Sinkey, ’44, Lincoln, Nov. 4, 2014.

Ann T. Miyamoto-Gorai, ’49, Seattle, Nov. 9, 2013.

Robert W. Wood, ’44, Billings, Mont., Oct. 6, 2014.

Walter G. Palmer, ’49, Tulsa, Okla., July 26, 2014.

Wade and ■ Carol Matas Park, ’02, their second child, first daughter, Nora Isabelle, Oct. 4, 2014. The family lives in Hays, Kan.

Bernardine Bailey Patterson, ’45, Winfield, Ill., April 26, 2014.

Paula Little Thorson, ’49, Taylor Lake Village, Texas, March 10, 2014.

Andrew Rasmussen, ’11, and Melanie Fichthorn, ’13, June 6, 2014. The couple lives in Lincoln.

Kirk Christenson, ’12, and Morgan Bullington, ’13, Aug. 9, 2014. The couple lives in Lincoln.

■ Timothy Pieper, ’12, and ■ Kimberly Folk, ’13, Oct. 18,

2014. The couple lives in Omaha.

Josh Ketter and Kendra Busboom, ’13, June 28, 2014. The couple lives in Houston.

Colton Hahn, ’13, and Nicole Retzlaff, ’12, Oct. 11, 2014.

The couple lives in Orchard.

Joe Spooner and Jamie Jones, ’13, Aug. 8, 2014. The couple lives in Lincoln.

n Andy, ’00, ’07, and n Ashley

Marybelle Cates Kuehn, ’38, La Mesa, Calif., Feb. 19, 2014.

Mary Weaver Thornton, ’46, Lincoln, Sept. 21, 2014.

Quentin H. Bierman, ’47, Alexandria, Va., Aug. 15, 2014.

Leesa Olson Crnogorac, ’47, Mechanicsburg, Pa., Oct. 7, 2014.

Charles J. Kroll, ’47, Littleton, Colo., Oct. 17, 2014.

58 WINTER 2015

Lois Gillett Williams, ’49, Milford, Oct. 24, 2014.

Donald J. Baker, ’50, San Jose, Calif., Sept. 4, 2014.

Thomas M. Brownlee, ’50, Winter Park, Fla., Aug. 7, 2014.

Helene Reifschneider Emery, ’50, Boulder, Colo., April 30, 2014.

Emil J. Kluck, ’50, Everett, Wash., Oct. 15, 2014.

Clarence Lemmon, ’50, Peoria, Ariz., June 18, 2014.

James A. McConnell, ’50, Lincoln, Aug. 20, 2014.

Curtis B. Sieck, ’50, Clive, Iowa, Nov. 7, 2014.

Alan R. Woolworth, ’50, Minneapolis, Aug. 13, 2014.

Donald W. Ericson, ’51, Grand Rapids, Minn., Oct. 27, 2014.

Alan D. Farmer, ’51, Lincoln, Oct. 4, 2014.

Glen A. Fiebig, ’51, Alliance, Oct. 4, 2014.

Marilyn Smith Janousek, ’51, Lincoln, Oct. 24, 2014.

Joyce Lindley Lemkau, ’51, Rock Island, Ill., Sept. 5, 2014.

William E. Reinsch, ’51, Plattsmouth, Sept. 25, 2014.

Kenneth C. Willits, ’51, Omaha, Nov. 3, 2014.

Joseph V. Benak, ’52, Omaha, Aug. 23, 2014.

Daryl G. Bohl, ’52, Truth Or Consequences, N.M., Oct. 1, 2013.

David M. Hamilton, ’52, Pratt, Kan., Sept. 25, 2014.

Harold W. Kay, ’52, Lincoln, Sept. 23, 2014.

Mary Rooney Sweet, ’52, Lincoln, Sept. 6, 2014.

Roger D. Cook, ’53, Belle Plaine, Iowa, Sept. 4, 2014.

Gerald M. Dunn, ’53, Westerly, R.I., May 5, 2013.

Francis L. Gowin, ’53, Lincoln, Sept. 20, 2014.

BY RUTH RAYMOND THONE, ’53

Alumni Profile ’79

the many lives of...

Nancy Forst Williamson

Out of the liberation movements of the 1960s into the resolution and centeredness that continue to define her life today, has come Nancy Forst Williamson, 1979 UNL graduate with a B.A. in women’s studies and children’s literature through University Studies.

One of my favorite stories of this adventurous spirit, now 62 years old, mother of Gabriel and David Williamson, married to Ron Osmond, and gifted practitioner of a diverse range of mind-body disciplines, comes from the days she studied in Tel Aviv, Israel, with Moshe Feldenkrais.

During a ten-day break from a summer session in Israel, where she loved being “immersed in an ancient culture,” Forst Williamson took a bus to Cairo. There she wisely bought and wore an off-white embroidered caftan and scarf as she took the night train to Luxor on the Nile River. She remained hidden under her voluminous garment as she took a large risk – that of a Western woman traveling alone in a conservative Arabic country.

Becoming a Feldenkrais practitioner consumed four inspirational years.

This genius Jewish scientist/teacher developed a method for using small movements and touch to inspire the brain to direct new or more efficient function.

Forst Williamson is also heir to the Alexander Technique in Lincoln, mentored for more than 20 years by Marjorie L. Barstow, F.M. Alexander’s first graduate. Originally a method of affecting minute changes in how actors speak, with less effort and more accuracy, Alexander Technique

advocates now include performers, artists, athletes and ordinary people who find more refined coordination and options for conscious choice, ease and comfort in their daily activities.

Barstow, a UNL graduate, held a summer program on the campus that attracted thousands over its tenure.

Now in its 40th year, the program has been directed by Forst Williamson since 1995. She describes herself as “Marj’s only native Nebraska teacher in her lineage, though many [others] took lessons.”

“The years I spent with her in apprentice-style training brought a sense of order and comprehension to how I move through life,” she explained, “and gave me a great gift to share with all whom I touch.”

BACK TO THE ’70S Forst Williamson’s first job was with her hometown weekly, The Crete News, before this ambitious young woman headed into a journalism major at UNL. In 1970 she was selected to be a member of Centennial College, an experimental living-learning program headed by the late, storied professor, Robert Knoll.

Forst Williamson also remembers the administrator of the program, the late and renowned Sally Gordon, “for the light and kindness she brought to every day.”

UNL’s Centennial College was the

milieu of open-minded inquiry that inspired Forst Williamson to study at the Esalen Institute south of San Francisco, then begin study with Barstow in Lincoln, lead the way as one of the founders of Lincoln’s Open Harvest Cooperative grocery store, and talk her way into a job at Freewheelin’ Bike Shop after reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

She landed in southwest Lancaster County in 1978 where she and a cohort purchased Flying Fish Farm, an acreage surrounded by Wilderness Park. It began life as a cooperative household and continues today as a home for other such seekers.

“A lot of creative energy was liberated by having a stable home,” Forst Williamson said. “The people who lived there were diverse but unified in our agreements about sustainable living, organic gardening, being a non-smoking vegetarian household, and sharing chores and expenses.”

She went on to receive a UNO certificate of specialization in gerontology; worked for Madonna Day Services, the Lancaster County Community Mental Health Center and Lincoln Services for the Elderly; and opened a private practice in Somatic Education and Therapy. She later practiced in Baltimore, and studied craniosacral therapy with Dr. John Upledger. In 1987 she opened her

Continued on Page 60 NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 59

CLASSNOTES the many lives...

Continued from Page 59 current office, the Center for Well-Being, in Lincoln.

She also earned a master’s degree in mental health counseling.

In addition to Centennial College, Forst Williamson’s identifies the untimely deaths of her parents as a significant turning point in her life.

“I equated personal goodness with good worldly outcomes,” she said. “My spiritual beliefs were challenged and refined as a result.”

Also significant to her were “being part of the leading edge of the Human Potential Movement, Feldenkrais training, Alexander work, marriage, parenting, and learning not to be afraid to make mistakes.

“Each life stage has come as a natural progression,” Forst Williamson explained.

While she was part of the counterculture, she was also a responsible member of the community, supporting herself, and volunteering for social causes.

“Many trappings of the mainstream are not available to someone young or working at minimum wage,” she said. “Co-operative living let me discover other choices and save for education and travel.”

About visiting 48 states with her Great Dane and her 1966 and 1978 VW campers as her rolling house, Forst Williamson recalled coming upon the word “wanderlust” in a high school German class and thinking, “‘So that’s what it is.’ I’ve always had the urge to see what else is out there, but I love to come home. Nebraska is an excellent foundation.”

Married for the first time at 35, CONNECTION BOX she said, “Having BarstowAlexanderTechnique.com mature parents was a great advantage to my sons. My husband’s support and living on an acreage through our children’s early life allowed for creative and nature-based play and work, influenced by Rudolph Steiner’s educational philosophy.

“My favorite time of life is always right now. I appreciate every day. I came of age during the time of Vietnam protests, civil rights, women’s liberation, sex, drugs and rock ’n roll. Consciousness raising worked for this small-town Nebraskan,” Forst Williamson explained.

“I’ve taken the road less travelled all over the world and been privileged to know and work with many people of great depth in heart and soul. I do creative and meaningful work, thanks to an education that opened my mind to endless possibilities, and I treasure the authenticity and love of my family, friends and students. They are the substance of my life.” v

60 WINTER 2015

Francis J. Nagle, ’53, Madison, Wis., Aug. 15, 2014.

Gerald H. Rainforth, ’58, North Loup, Sept. 11, 2013.

Frederick F. Paustian, ’53, Omaha, Nov. 2, 2014.

Joan Grass Schwalm, ’58, Lincoln, Sept. 20, 2014.

Donald K. Smith, ’53, Hood River, Ore., Oct. 19, 2014.

Kay M. Watson, ’58, Council Bluffs, Iowa, Dec. 15, 2013.

Marie Lindgren George, ’54, Crete, Oct. 22, 2014.

Paul O. Yeutter, ’58, Eustis, Nov. 7, 2014.

Irene Mackintosh Hulicka, ’54, Brighton, Mich., Oct. 2, 2014.

LaVerne M. Krueger, ’59, King of Prussia, Pa., Oct. 22, 2014.

Hubert H. Rodman, ’54, Colorado Springs, Colo., Sept. 10, 2014.

Gordon H. Lloyd, ’59, Bolton, Conn., Aug. 10, 2014.

Joseph H. Schaf, ’54, Lincoln, Oct. 10, 2014.

Leota Sneed Strong, ’59, Tucson, Ariz., Oct. 28, 2014.

Robert A. Stewart, ’54, Menlo Park, Calif., Sept. 14, 2014.

Robert W. Ebbers, ’60, Bartlett, Tenn., Sept. 29, 2014.

David J. Beynon, ’55, Lincoln, Oct. 12, 2014.

Gale Schlaht Hubka, ’60, Beatrice, Oct. 11, 2014.

Pearl Schaaf Goldenstein, ’55, Lincoln, Oct. 6, 2014.

Emil J. Koval, ’60, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Oct. 1, 2014.

Ronald W. Hunter, ’55, Bellevue, Nov. 6, 2014.

Karl V. Meyer, ’60, Omaha, Sept. 8, 2014.

William W. Garber, ’56, Sidney, Oct. 22, 2014.

John W. O’Neill, ’60, League City, Texas, Aug. 18, 2014.

Mark S. Martin, ’56, Midland, Texas, Oct. 19, 2014.

Helen Ahlschwede Plucknett, ’60, Lincoln, Oct. 29, 2014.

Robert E. Roeder, ’56, North Platte, Aug. 26, 2014.

Glen H. Sanders, ’60, Bennington, Nov. 3, 2014.

Frederick E. Bruening, ’57, Omaha, Aug. 27, 2014.

Herbert F. Schliesser, ’60, Lincoln, Nov. 9, 2014.

Henrietta Hoff Carroll, ’57, Charleston, Ill., Aug. 30, 2014.

Leonard D. Sholes, ’60, Marion, Iowa, Aug. 27, 2014.

Robert F. Getsfred, ’57, Valley, Nov. 7, 2014.

Dorothy Lavicky Meduna, ’61, Wahoo, Dec. 14, 2013.

Donald J. Lehr, ’57, Ashland, Nov. 10, 2014.

Douglas H. Moore, ’61, Brentwood, Tenn., Sept. 14, 2014.

Janet Kuska Macy-Egri, ’57, St. Paul, Minn., Oct. 14, 2014.

Ralph R. Russell, ’61, Omaha, Oct. 14, 2014.

James E. Rodgers, ’57, Lincoln, Sept. 22, 2014.

G. Bradford Cook, ’62, Bethesda, Md., Aug. 28, 2014.

Wendell R. Wertz, ’57, Trenton, Sept. 8, 2014.

Joan Myhren Hughes, ’62, Rapid City, S.D., Feb. 8, 2014.

Robert R. Yates, ’57, Gering, Sept. 6, 2014.

Michael L. Lazer, ’62, Omaha, Oct. 28, 2014.

E D I R P R E K S U H r r u o o f Y d r Show official ca ends i e r h f t d h t n a wi i n m u rd. a l c t a i r r ove rever e c e s i h k D w s a e Hu ard like the Neborwasykour Husker pforirdyou: ®

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NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 61

CLASSNOTES Jerald D. Loseke, ’62, Gainesville, Texas, Nov. 3, 2014.

Robert J. Brichacek, ’66, Columbus, Nov. 5, 2014.

Randall G. McEwen, ’62, Lincoln, Sept. 26, 2014.

Eber O. Cooper, ’66, Schuyler, Oct. 2, 2014.

Harold I. Mosher, ’62, Lincoln, Oct. 18, 2014.

Duane Everrett, ’66, Lincoln, Oct. 26, 2014.

Jerald A. Hurtz, ’63, Omaha, Sept. 22, 2014.

Doris Gies George, ’66, Polson, Mont., Sept. 3, 2014.

Elaine Johnston Jacobsen, ’64, Kearney, Sept. 10, 2014.

Gerald E. Krotter, ’66, Fairport, N.Y., Oct. 13, 2014.

Ivan H. Prigge, ’64, Overland Park, Kan., Sept. 26, 2014.

John N. Ramsey, ’66, San Pedro, Calif., May 1, 2014.

Donald E. Goodrich, ’65, Hastings, Oct. 25, 2014.

Teresa Holtgrewe Jokerst, ’67, Pleasanton, Calif., July 26, 2014.

Howard G. Sachs, ’65, Port Saint Lucie, Fla., Oct. 16, 2014.

Ocleris Simpson, ’65, Guthrie, Okla., March 14, 2014.

Thomas A. Tolen, ’65, Ord, Oct. 4, 2014.

William R. Welton, ’65, Hastings, Sept. 28, 2014.

Carrol F. Krause, ’67, Rapid City, S.D., Oct. 12, 2014.

Jean Peterson Yost, ’67, Colorado Springs, Colo., Sept. 22, 2014.

17, 2014.

Ronald P. Schardt, ’68, Deshler, Nov. 2, 2014.

Russel L. Thompson, ’68, Marion, Ky., Jan. 20, 2014.

Sara M. Cuadrado, ’69, Omaha, Sept. 8, 2014.

William J. Fankhauser, ’69, Humboldt, Oct. 24, 2014.

Gary L. Gray, ’69, Klamath Falls, Ore., Oct. 11, 2014.

Robert A. Rhodus, ’69, Redlands, Calif., Sept. 4, 2014.

Michael A. VanHouse, ’69, Omaha, Sept. 2, 2014.

James F. McLeod, ’70, Springfield, Mo., June 19, 2014.

Richard J. Zbaracki, ’70, Scottsdale, Ariz., Aug. 13, 2014.

Allan L. Harms, ’68, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, June 14, 2014.

Timothy J. Aldrup, ’71, Hardy, Nov. 2, 2014.

Charles H. Richardson, ’68, Mount Pleasant, Mich., June

Delwyn D. Dearborn, ’71, Lincoln, Aug. 20, 2014.

Thomas L. Ediger, ’71, Nebraska City, Aug. 20, 2014.

Paul C. Ellison, ’71, Trent, Texas, Oct. 10, 2014.

Garfield J. Fricke, ’71, Lancaster, Va., Nov. 2, 2014.

Wayne A. Weiss, ’71, Grand Island, Nov. 6, 2014.

Joan Harbert Wiiest, ’71, Moorefield, Feb. 28, 2014.

Marvin S. Blair, ’73, Nashville, Tenn., Nov. 3, 2014.

Myrna Boehmer Faulder, ’73, Beatrice, Oct. 24, 2014.

Lyle E. Shaughnessy, ’73, Sun City West, Ariz., Oct. 12, 2014.

Duana Klein, who lives in Michigan, sent the Nebraska Alumni Association a stadium blanket and pins from the 1913 Nebraska-Oklahoma football game (won by NU, 13-9). The items belonged to her grandparents, Nebraska alumni La Vern Brubaker Brown, ’24, and Carl L. Brown, ’26, whom she says would have been thrilled to know the blanket and pins are “back home” for future generations to enjoy.

62 WINTER 2015

Elouise Hoff Soukup, ’73, Hastings, Oct. 25, 2014.

Duane H. Westerholt, ’73, Lincoln, Oct. 12, 2014.

Gary E. Zaruba, ’73, Kearney, Oct. 17, 2014.

Curt W. Brandhorst, ’74, Jefferson City, Mo., Oct. 19, 2014.

Lynn P. Weskamp, ’74, McCook, Sept. 15, 2014.

Mollie Mossman Baldwin, ’75, Lincoln, Nov. 9, 2014.

Norman L. Busse, ’75, Stillwater, Minn., Oct. 1, 2014.

Barry L. Marts, ’75, Weston, Sept. 26, 2014.

Jack L. Mayfield, ’75, Omaha, Oct. 31, 2014.

Browning A. Robertson, ’76, Lincoln, Nov. 5, 2014.

Joseph J. Toczek, ’77, Grand Island, Sept. 20, 2014.

Glen L. Sullivan, ’78, Colorado Springs, Colo., Aug. 17, 2014.

Suzanne Loseke Meyers, ’79, Kansas City, Mo., Sept. 10, 2014.

Louise Wallace Dannehl, ’80, Lexington, Sept. 1, 2014.

Kathleen S. Foley, ’80, Blair, Nov. 8, 2014.

Michael L. McCarty, ’80, Grand Island, Nov. 6, 2014.

Kathy Wrightsman Barron, ’81, Lincoln, Aug. 21, 2014.

Sharon Flowers Nore, ’82, Lincoln, Aug. 29, 2014.

La Verne Chittim Rudell, ’82, Lincoln, Oct. 23, 2014.

Hershel J. Shapiro, ’82, Aurora, Colo., March 5, 2014.

Maurice C. Rayer, ’83, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Nov. 5, 2014.

Terance J. Gardner, ’86, Clive, Iowa, Oct. 12, 2014.

Deborah S. Nienkamp, ’86, Columbus, May 9, 2014.

Lester L. Schulz, ’87, Springfield, Mo., Oct. 6, 2014.

Blaise R. Roy, ’88, Perrysville, Ohio, Sept. 24, 2014.

CLASSNOTES Sally L. Johnson, ’90, Lincoln, Nov. 5, 2014.

Warner K. Myers, ’01, La Vista, Aug. 27, 2014.

Maurice Tate, ’90, Springfield, Mo., Sept. 24, 2014.

Taylor J. Went, ’11, Creston, Aug. 13, 2014.

Norman L. Arnett, ’91, Crete, Sept. 20, 2014.

Michael G. Shaw, ’13, Papillion, Oct. 26, 2014.

William M. Wroblewski, ’93, Lincoln, Nov. 5, 2014.

Colin S. Hays, ’14, Beatrice, Nov. 5, 2014.

Patricia L. Donaher, ’95, Leavenworth, Kan., Nov. 4, 2014.

FACULTY DEATHS

Mary Bonebright Gilmour, ’95, Lincoln, Aug. 28, 2014.

John A. Shafer, ’95, Apache Junction, Ariz., Oct. 26, 2014.

Erin R. Wagman, ’97, Denver, Oct. 19, 2013.

Christopher J. Bauer, ’00, La Vista, Aug. 13, 2014.

Daniel E. Bergman, ’00, Highland, Utah, Sept. 5, 2014.

CLASS NOTEPAD Tell us what’s happening! Send news about yourself or fellow Nebraska alumni to: Mail:

Class Notes Editor, Nebraska Magazine, Wick Alumni Center,1520 R Street, Lincoln, NE 68508-1651

E-mail: kwright@huskeralum.org

Harry Allen, director of Institutional Research at UNL 196583, Jerusalem, Aug. 10, 2014.

Online: huskeralum.org

Norman Geske, director of Sheldon Museum of Art 1956-83, Lincoln, Sept. 6, 2014.

Spring Issue: January 15 Fall Issue: July 15

Herbert F. Schliesser, professor emeritus, speech pathology and audiology, Lincoln, Nov. 9, 2014.

All notes received will be considered for publication according to the following schedule: Summer Issue: April 15 Winter Issue: October 15

Items submitted after these dates will be published in later issues.

Dale Schwartzendruber, professor emeritus, agronomy and horticulture, Kalona, Iowa, Oct. 21, 2014.

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NEBRASKA MAGAZINE 63

N E B R A S K A

A lu m n i A s s o c i at i o n

Wick Alumni Center 1520 R Street Lincoln, NE 68508-1651

Nebraska Innovation Campus Conference Center

T

he Nebraska Alumni Association is partnering with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Nebraska Innovation Campus (NIC) to manage the new NIC Conference Center. This historic building has been reconstructed to provide a unique full-service conference center to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Nebraska business community.

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64 WINTER 2015