Northland College Magazine

Northland College MAGAZINE

TRAILBLAZERS Pg. 10

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GREAT MOMENTS IN SPORTS Pg. 16

SPRING 2018

ALUMNI ISSUE

9 BIGGEST BLIZZARDS Pg. 18

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BUILD THE MIKE MILLER & MARY TRETTIN SCHOLARSHIP FUND

"We understand the difficult financial choices students face when deciding if they can afford a college education.

Scholarship funds can make or break a family’s budget."

—Mike Miller and Mary Trettin

GIVE MORE STUDENTS ACCESS TO A NORTHLAND COLLEGE EDUCATION

SUPPORT THE NEXT GENERATION OF CRITICAL PROBLEM SOLVERS

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Note from the Editor There are so many good stories from the last 125 years of the College’s history, that started here, and are ready to be told.

Of living Northland College alumni—classified as anyone who attended college here for two or more years—there are roughly 8,667 of you living in all fifty states, plus the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands; and in thirty-six countries around the globe.

This issue is not comprehensive or complete by any stretch. Think of it as a patchwork of profiles we’ve amassed and stitched together via Linkedin profiles, websites, blogs, word of mouth, newspaper articles, and email and telephone interviews. I take credit for all errors and omissions—I look forward to your corrections.

Stay Connected As a Northland College alum you’re part of a big family. And we want to know what you're up to. So, stay in touch. Keep us posted on where you are and what you’re doing.

Go to: northland.edu/keep-in-touch to submit your information And you can follow Northland on social media to stay current on all the news from campus. Find us at:

@northland_edu

@northland_edu

facebook.com/NCAlumni

I want to acknowledge the people and departments that have made this special issue possible and encourage you to touch base with them.

Jackie Moore ‘05, director of alumni relations, has been with me every step of the way on this issue. Gathering information and sharing what she knows. You should send her an email at alumni@northland.edu and update your information.

Stacy Schaefer Craig ‘04, coordinator of applied learning, has been collecting alumni names and bios as part of her internship program for students and the alumni speaker series for the last four years. She is always looking for ways to connect students and alumni. If you’d like to get involved and work with current students through mentorships or internships, contact her at scraig@northland.edu.

Ori-Anne Pagel ‘69, Don Chase ‘62, and Dan Crawford ’76 have been an invaluable resource for information, photos, and ideas. These three volunteers have created an official Northland College archival space, and since 2012, have been sorting, cataloguing, and systematizing the history and memories of this place so enmeshed in the history of northern Wisconsin. If you have something you’d like to donate, including your time, contact alumni@northland.edu.

The three things I know from putting this issue together: Northland College is a pretty special place, weather makes an impression, and students turn into incredible alumni.

Enjoy.

Julie Buckles Director of Communications jbuckles@northland.edu

Northland College Magazine SPRING 2018 Mission

Northland College integrates liberal arts studies with an environmental emphasis, enabling those it serves to address the challenges of the future. © 2018, Northland College

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Olson Unpacked On October 21, 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act. Sigurd Olson, who attended Northland College from 1916-18, had a lifelong relationship with the Boundary Waters, celebrating his honeymoon there in 1921, guiding numerous trips on its waters, living and raising his family near its borders in Ely, writing about it in magazine articles and his celebrated collections of essays, and advocating for its protection on numerous occasions. This collection of his personal items, housed at the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute, signifies his connection and affection for the border country he held so close.

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1) Voyageur Sash 2) Pocket-size copy of Walden by Henry David Thoreau 3) Sports Afield-July 1939 (with an article written by Sig) 4) Pocket watch and lanyard 5) A 1926 Guide's License for Quetico Provincial Park 6) Sig's iconic felt hat worn on paddling trips through out the border country 7) A camp ax 8) Pipe 9) Membership cards in the Explorers Club, American Canoe Association, and Northland College Alumni Association 10) The John Burroughs Award

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Photo by Sara M. Chase, Ashland Daily Press

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UW-Madison Highlights Sigurd Olson Sigurd Olson (1899-1982) was featured as part of UW-Madison’s state-wide campaign this past fall, thanking the seventy-two counties for sending them their best students.

Olson grew up in northern Wisconsin and, following his brother Kenneth, attended Northland College from 1916-18.

Olson completed his education at UW-Madison, earning a degree in agriculture in 1920.

Olson was a life-long advocate for wilderness and played a significant role in the creation of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, now celebrating its fortieth anniversary. He was also a teacher, wilderness guide, business owner, and prolific writer, who published nine books, including a New York Times bestseller.

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11) A map of the boundary waters printed on cloth.

12) Snowshoes. On January 13, 1982, Sig died of a heart attack while snowshoeing near his home, leaving this note (which reads "A new adventure is coming up and I'm sure it will be a good one.") in the typewriter in his writing shack in Ely, Minnesota.

Throughout his life, Olson returned regularly to northern Wisconsin and the homestead of his wife’s family in Seeley. In 1961, Northland College awarded Sigurd Olson an honorary degree in science. Olson helped create the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute in 1971 at Northland College.

UW-Madison chose Olson to represent Ashland and Bayfield counties because he “developed an appreciation for wild places and waterways and for living life connected to the woods, lakes, and streams that characterized the upper Midwest before modern development.”

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IN THE MAIL April 21, 2017 I want you to know I really enjoyed reading your spring Issue. Of special interest to me was the picture of Dr. Brownell because he married my parents in 1919 when my father returned from World War I. My granddaughter is adding it to the family scrapbook she is keeping. I graduated in 1944 and there has been a great deal of growth on the campus since then. Dr. Bobb was one of my favorite professors and even though I am almost 95, I still garden and compost!

Keep up the good work.

Sincerely, Margaret Perrin Abrams ’44 Burton, Michigan

Margaret Perrin Abrams '44

Dr. Brownell

November 7, 2017 I’m sending this a brief postscript response to a recent article on Bro family connections (Northland College Magazine Fall 2017). As the youngest of four children of Albin and Margueritte, and the only one born in this country, I read the piece with great interest. And it prompted recall of additional Bro input.

Before heading to China as a Disciples missionary, Albin persuaded his parents in Prentice to send his youngest brother, Oscar, to Northland. There, “Och” met “Lib,” or Elizabeth, whom he married, and with whom he celebrated a long career as a professional photographer. Part of that career was spent during World War II aboard ships, assigned to assist the great American photographer, Edward Steichen.

That connection later put Och in touch with another Northland alumnus, John Szarkowski*, longtime curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. For several decades Och and Lib maintained a studio in Scotch Plains, New Jersey.

My oldest brother, Harmon, followed our father’s steps toward ordination by the Disciples of Christ, and meeting and marrying a Northland student, June Larsen ‘43, from Ironwood, Michigan. June was a gifted musician and concert pianist . . .still is, living today at 96 with their oldest daughter in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Growing up for many of us meant sweet summers on Cable Lake in south Bayfield County. Northland was a magical, almost mystical name for a place where giants taught and worked. Nice to read about the legacy programs the college is doing today.

Best wishes, Andy Bro Rev. Andrew H. Bro Lake Carroll, Illinois *See following page for story about John Szarkowski

After Northland College, June Larson Bro ’43 went on to study classical piano in Chicago where she trained to be a concert pianist and during World War II, performed with the NBC Symphony Orchestra weekly radio concert broadcasts. Following the war, she and her husband Harmon Bro ‘41 decided they wanted to spend one year devoted to creativity and the fine arts. They moved to Northfield, Minnesota, where they sang and toured with the famous St. Olaf Choir, and studied choral music. It has been reported that June has a lovely alto solo voice with naturally perfect pitch. Harmon passed away in 1998. June now lives with her daughter in Virginia. In 2013, she performed a remarkable program in Chicago to honor her sister-on-law’s ninetieth birthday.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR PAC K YO U R B AG S CALL YOUR FRIENDS

SEPTEMBER 28-30, 2018 6

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Changing the Way We See

Northland College students interview John Szarkowski, holding cigarette, for the Northland College radio program at the Ashland WATW radio station. Left to right: Mike Erspamer ‘63, John Szarkowski, Carol Cordy Holmes ‘63, Roberta Malcheski Olson ‘62, Dick Chula, and Ethan Erdman ‘63.

Ashland native John Szarkowski showed America a new way to look at photographs When John Szarkowski began as director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1962, photography was considered a utilitarian median, a means to document what existed. He elevated the photograph as a legitimate form of art.

“Szarkowski’s thinking, whether Americans know it or not, has become our thinking about photography,” wrote US News & World Report in 1990.

And it all started here. In Ashland.

Szarkowski was born Thaddeus John Szarkowski on December 18, 1925, in Ashland, Wisconsin.

Growing up, he biked all of Ashland County, fished the

local streams, built balsa wood airplanes, and tied his own flies.

At eleven, he got a brownie camera and began taking pictures, soon afterward doing his own processing. In high school, he photographed deer in the snow on Madeline Island and played clarinet in the band.

He attended the University of Wisconsin, interrupted his studies to serve in the Army during World War II, then returned to earn a bachelor’s degree in 1947, with a major in art history.

His sister Georgiana attended Northland College, graduating in 1941. He began his career as a staff photographer at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and in 1954, he received his first Guggenheim Fellowship—to photograph what remained of the architecture of Louis Sullivan.

This allowed him to live and work in Chicago, where he wrote The Idea of Louis Sullivan.

Next, in 1957, came his book, The Face of Minnesota, a pictorial representation of Minnesota’s one hundred years of statehood.

student.

In 1958, he returned to Ashland, where he taught American Literature at Northland College, filling in for English Professor Lydia Peterson, says Northland College historian Don Chase ‘62, who sat in on that class as a

In 1962, when Szarkowski was offered the position of director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He had just received his second Guggenheim Fellowship to work on a

landscape photography project.

In a letter to Edward Steichen, then curator of the department, he accepted the job, registering with his signature dry wit: "Last week I finally got back home for a few days, where I could think about the future and look at Lake Superior at the same time.

No matter how hard I looked, the Lake gave no indication of concern at the possibility of my departing from its shores, and I finally decided that if it can get along without me, I can get along without it."

He curated and directed photography for the next three decades and was the author and contributor of books that continue to be required reading in art history courses, including, The Photographer’s Eye and Looking at Photographs.

In 1990, Szarkowski returned to Northland College to receive a doctor of humane letters.

Szarkowski died July 7, 2007. He was eighty-one years old.

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Wild Lives: A Partial but Inspiring List

Whitewater Rafting for the USA

Exploring the Mackenzies

Jon McLaughlin ‘01 joined the USA Men’s Whitewater Raft Team-Masters Division in July 2017 and in October placed eighth in the 2017 IRF World Whitewater Rafting Championships in Japan. The team is currently training for the US National Championships that will be held on the Gauley and New rivers in West Virginia in September—a qualifying race for the 2019 World Championships in Australia. McLaughlin lives in Ashland, Oregon, where he owns Therapeutics in Motion, a business focused on massage and bodywork for athletes, and is on staff at Southern Oregon University.

Against all advice, Chad Lorenz ‘09 and Dan Hoffman ‘10 and two others hiked and pack-rafted their way through the Mackenzie Mountains in northern Canada, connecting little-explored rivers through impassable mountains. “Despite warnings from a local guide service, the lure of untouched whitewater and remote hiking deep in the Canadian wilderness was too big a draw,” Lorenz wrote in a blog post for the NOLSie News.

“I had to find out if this scheme I’d concocted, to link a pack and paddle route across the Mackenzie Mountains, would actually work.” Short answer: it did.

Oldest Living Alumni Alice (Gibeau) McCabe ‘40 will turn 100 in December.

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Like a Rolling Stone There is no moss growing anywhere near Hannah Fanney ’13. As a sophomore, in 2011, she biked around Lake Superior (see pg. 13), competed as one of only two women in 2015 in the Duluth, Minnesota, Lester River Race, a downriver kayak race in class IV-V rapids (the other woman was her sister, Rachel). Since then, she’s completed a 114-day sea kayak expedition along the Inside Passage from Washington to Alaska, and completed a twenty-day kayaking circumnavigation around Lake Nipigon in Ontario. She currently works as an instructor at Aerie Backcountry Medicine and as ski patrol at Big Sky Resort in Montana.

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alumni are employed at Northland College in staff and faculty positions

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Out There

From the Yukon to Cuba and Back Again Calling themselves the Paddlin Madelines, Mitzi Peine ‘14 and a friend competed as the first all-women canoe team in 2014 to attempt the Yukon 1000, the world’s longest paddling race on the Yukon River in Alaska. Five hundred miles in, they made the decision to withdraw from the race due to a rotator cuff injury. Recently, Mitzi sailed to Cuba on a ship named Wolf, with a captain who was returning to Cuba for the first time in over fifty years. A documentary about the journey, The Old Man and the Sea Return to Cuba, will premiere May 21 in St. Paul.

Peine is now a guide for Alaska Mountain Guides.

Biking Cross Country, Hiking up the Coast Alex Miller ’09 and his partner, Annie, biked 3,000 miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific this past winter to raise money for a refrigerated food storage shed on site at the Alan Day Community Garden in Norway, Maine. They are now hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, south to north.

When people think of careers in bioremediation, they may envision a postindustrial clean-up site or toxic spill. However, in countries that have experienced war, bioremediation starts by identifying and disarming explosives, Raye Lahti ‘74, a geophysicist with Amec Foster Wheeler, explained to students at the 2017 Fall Festival on campus.

For the past several years, Lahti and his teams have been working to clean up former war zones like the one left from the Gulf War, where Kuwait’s oil refineries were set on fire by opposing forces, leaving expansive oil spills and damage to the environment.

Serial Tripper Derek Carr ’99 can’t list all of his trips but here are few he can rattle off: a combination packraft and backpack trip from the Brooks Range to the Arctic Ocean, ending at Kaktovik, Alaska, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; a week-long solo trans-Sierra backpack trip; a week-long northern California bike tour and a backpack trip on California's Lost Coast; six Grand Canyon river trips; a solo river trip on Canada's South Nahanni River; a solo bike tour across Michigan; and an October river trip on Peru's Maranon River near the headwaters of the Amazon. “I like to keep busy,” he said.

Cleaning Up After Conflict

Paddling Speed Records Dan Hoffman ’10 holds the speed record for canoeing across Lake Michigan: fifty-one miles in eleven hours, twenty-two minutes. He did it as a training run, in preparation for an attempt at breaking the seven-day, tenhour speed record for paddling the 814-mile Rhine River from Switzerland to Holland—he had to forfeit last minute due to a complication with his support crew.

Up, Up in the Air Rocco Altobelli ’89 has put his environmental and adventure education degree to good use.

He is a flight paramedic and director of the Alpine Institute in Missoula, Montana, focusing on wilderness and outdoor medical education and risk management.

Lahti’s career as a consulting geophysicist with interests in mineral exploration, ground water resource investigations, salt water intrusion mapping, and geophysics in support of environmental investigations and remediation, have taken him all over the world: from working on water resources in Hawaii and Guam to Central America, South America, and Africa, to legacy military sites such as the Rocky Flats nuclear site.

Monitoring Trees from Space NASA Senior Scientist Shannon Franks ’01 is with the Goddard Space Flight Station, studying and improving metrics for monitoring forest disturbance.

His most recent work showing how the prevalence of burn scars has increased in Saskatchewan in more recent years and how it has changed the landscape was featured in the popular remote sensing journal, PE&RS. “At Northland, I realized that I was able to combine my passion for the environment with my interest in higher level mathematics and sciences,” he said.

Drilling at Sea Sarah Spinelli ’14 works twentyone to twenty-eight days at a time on an exploratory drilling rig all over the Gulf of Mexico.

This is a 24/7 operation so she puts in twelve-hour shifts, monitoring real-time surface data to determine downhole stability during drilling. She also identifies rock cuttings that come to surface while drilling, which include identifying rock type and presence of hydrocarbons.

The Emptiest Place on Earth John Maier ’79 cites his winters in Ashland as the start of his passion for exploring polar environments. A regular traveler to Antarctica, he is a senior scientist to the National Science Foundation US Antarctic Program, working on environmental impact assessments, waste management and minimization, and permit preparation. “It’s the windiest, driest, coldest, emptiest place on Earth, but it is also the last pristine environment on the planet. Antarctica really is isolated from the man-made world, and part of my job is to make sure our presence there doesn’t change that.”

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TRAILBLAZERS Tribal, Environmental Leader Michael “Mic” Isham Jr. ’87 arrived at Northland College as a self-described punk kid who wanted to play basketball. During his time, he connected with the professors turned mentors— most notably, Native American Studies Professor Joe Rose ‘58—played intramurals, studied socio-political and environmental studies, and served as president of the Native American Student Association for two years.

Ornithology Pioneer Ornithologist Susan Haig ’79 has spent more than thirty years working on avian species facing the brink of extinction and now she’s taking on one of her biggest challenges: leading an international team to develop recommendations for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as part of their efforts to enforce environmental laws in the Kingdom.

Her research addresses the genetic and demographic factors needed to plan appropriate recovery actions for small populations. In graduate school, she managed to get the endangered shorebird, the piping plover, listed as endangered in Canada and led recovery teams for the piping plover for over fifteen years. She continues her research on the species to this day.

Haig is one of only three women holding the rank of senior

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scientist in the US Geological Survey. She is also a professor of wildlife ecology at Oregon State University and a research associate of the Smithsonian Institution. Haig and her students continue to integrate the fields of conservation genetics, climate change, wetland conservation, and understanding migratory connectivity to design conservation strategies for as many species as possible.

Haig credits Northland College for helping her find her vocation.

“I worked for Biology Professor Dick Verch in the greenhouse for four years, which led to my first teaching assistant position in graduate school and a lifelong love of plants and gardening,” she said. “By working for Dick in the greenhouse, I got to tag along on his birding adventures which resulted in my becoming an ornithologist. Among other courses, I took Genetics from Dick Verch and am currently sitting across the hall from my own genetics lab.”

the number of married Northland alumni couples

He also worked in two different internships with the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC), an agency representing Wisconsin’s eleven tribes and the protection of their sovereignty rights. And now, in full circle fashion, he’s recently accepted the position as the executive director at GLIFWC. During the twenty-years in between, he has taken leadership roles in politics, nonprofit work, and civic life, always pushing for the big picture.

He has served on the Lac Courte Oreilles (LCO tribal council for

the last twenty years—including, most recently, two terms as tribal chairman. The Obama administration named him to the Great Lakes Advisory Board, where he advocated for protection versus restoration in regards to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. He served for more than a dozen years on the GLIFWC Board of Commissioners and on the Voigt Intertribal Task Force.

He coaches basketball, football, and baseball, and founded the LCO Boys and Girls Club in 1995—something he considers one of his shining achievements.

Breaking the Silence Kelly Martin ’86 was one of sixty “Silence Breakers” named Time magazine’s 2017 Person of the Year for her role in speaking out against sexual harassment.

Now the chief of fire and aviation management at Yosemite National Park, Martin first experienced sexual harassment in the workplace early in her thirtythree-year career with the National Park Service and United States Forest Service.

In September 2016, Martin testified in front of the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that at least three times she had been harassed during her career and detailed gender biases and a hostile work environment prevalent at Yosemite. She also mentioned that women are often forced to report incidents at professional, personal, emotional, and financial expense.

“I just thought, ‘If it’s not me, then who?’” Martin told The Journal Standard. “If not now, when?”

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Elevating Sustainable Design Ben Shepherd ’00 is taking design to new levels: integrating sustainability, functionality, beauty, and community planning.

He’s been working in the green building and sustainable design field since his Northland graduation, first at the nonprofit, research think tank, Rocky Mountain Institute, then overseas to gain an international green perspective.

For the last ten years, he’s been at Atelier Ten, an international sustainable design company in New York City, where as director, he manages projects for clients around the world and closer to home, like the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, to the Museum of American Revolution in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 2015, he was the recipient of ENR New York’s 2015 Top 20 Under 40 rising star awards, given to those making a positive impact on design and construction.

recent endeavor, she’s putting her writing degree directly into play: Smith and her husband became publishers of Edible Alaska, a quarterly journal that highlights Alaska’s regional food producers.

“Authentic connections are everything, and Northland taught me that. We can do good work together in some sense because we share a solid foundation,” says Ganchoff Smith.

Seafood and Sustainability Mary Ganchoff Smith ’94 has been advocating and communicating the concepts of environmental and social sustainability to the larger seafood industry for the last fifteen years and is a 2008 recipient of the Seafood Choices Alliance’s Seafood Champion award for her efforts. She has worked in Alaska for six years as a commercial fisherman and coowned Springline Seafood, which she sold last year. For her most

Argentina’s Only Environmental Learning Center As a young man, Peter Dunn knew he wanted to start the first and only environmental learning center in his home country of Argentina. Drawn to Northland College for its environmental mission and for the environmental education component at the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute, he studied here in 1991, then went on to work with Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center

Shepherd received an MA in environmental management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 2006, and teaches one course each semester at Cornell University and the Pratt Institute.

Shepherd joined the Northland College Board of Trustees in 2017.

The most memorable thing about attending Northland College? “Above all it would have to be, and continues to be, the close friendships I made while attending Northland. We have a great group of friends who still regularly keep in touch…often via massive group chain texts. We stay connected even though we all have our own commitments, families, and we’re geographically spread from coast to coast. We visit each other when traveling, and have used recent college reunions and events to enable most of our large group to be organized and get back on campus.”

in Finland, Minnesota, Audubon Center of the Northwoods in Sandstone, Minnesota, and consulted with others.

And then he and his wife, Nicole, started La Lucena in the village of La Pampa north of Cordoba, Argentina, the only environmental learning center in Argentina. Similar to the models he experienced at Wolf Ridge and Audubon, Peter developed La Lucena to offer environmental education to visiting school groups in an outdoor setting in the foothills of the Andes Mountains.

This program has become so successful, that over the last twenty-five years, Peter and Nicole have developed satellite programs in other regions of Argentina and South America and have built La Lucena into the place that is known for environmental education in Argentina.

Dunn has reached out to Northland and is working with faculty to develop educational opportunities for students to travel, work, and teach at La Lucena in the future.

Corporate Responsibility for Big Oil Anita Burke ’83 introduced the idea of sustainability and corporate responsibility to Shell Oil, and the rest of the oil industry followed suit. She was a first responder on the Exxon Valdez spill and paid a huge price with her health. She’s since founded the Catalyst Institute, an organization dedicated to the creation and development of sustainable businesses, green building and community development, and corporate social responsibility, for starters.

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From left to right Mary Dexter Hepner '50, Henry Fitzgibbon '51 , and Rosemary (Hogan) Scheel '50 dressed for a dance performance. Inset: a newspaper article about Fitzgibbon early in his career.

Leader and Mentor to the Next Generation Nancy Franz ’81 was tired of being the only woman at the table so she did something about it. She created the Women in Leadership internship, a partnership between Northland College and the National Park Service to support women pursuing outdoor careers.

On Broadway!

Fitzgibbon's Life in the Arts With one trio, two duets, two solos, and pages of dialogue, the Captain in Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore is considered one of the largest roles ever written for an actor.

And one Saturday afternoon in 1954, twenty-something Henry Fitzgibbon ’51 found out with no time to prepare, that he would be performing that role on a Broadway stage.

He had studied the role as an understudy but had never performed it. “Now, even without a glance at that role, I was going to perform the Captain that very afternoon—on Broadway!” said Fitzgibbon, ninety-one, who as far as he knows, is the only Northland College alum to have ever performed on Broadway.

Add in the stage movements and dance steps, all while singing and speaking—it’s a complicated, nuanced role to play, even with months to practice. And yet, somehow, Fitzgibbon performed it flawlessly before an audience of a few hundred people. And then did it again in the evening.

“To this day, I have no idea how I was able to do that—doing it totally cold, without a run through,” he said.

Fitzgibbon grew up in Menasha, Wisconsin, in a musical household; his dad played banjo

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and two sisters sang harmony— the third was already away, singing in Milwaukee. In high school, he worked at Kimberly Clark Corporation, studied piano, and was active in choir and drama club.

His childhood friend Mary Dexter Hepner ’50, had gone on to attend Northland College.

Dexter wrote to Fitzgibbon and asked him to think about applying. None of his family had ever attended college and he hadn’t considered college as part of his future. Until that letter.

In the fall of 1947, he headed to Northland College, where he studied English and music, joined the Blue Masque drama club and sang baritone in the choir.

The more he performed, the more Fitzgibbon began to think about the possibility of acting as a career. After graduation, he attended the Academy of Theatre Arts in Pleasantville, New York, getting a crash course in ballet, fencing, stage craft, and acting.

He auditioned and landed the part of the genie in Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp, touring the country for the next nine months. When he returned to New York, he earned a spot in a professional Gilbert and Sullivan repertory company, called the Masque and Lyre Light Opera Company, presenting all of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in sequence—a different one every week.

Renamed American Savoyards in 1952, the company traveled from Florida to Maine, performed in college towns, and in Chicago and Milwaukee, always returning to perform in New York City.

In addition to Broadway, Fitzgibbon worked at the Institute of Physical Medicine, and was the director of information for the International Society for Rehabilitation of the Disabled, he sang as a paid member of a quartet at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church and later for the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, and attended Hunter College in Manhattan, receiving a master of music.

In the fall of 1967, after sixteen years in New York City, Fitzgibbon returned to Wisconsin to take a teaching position at Cumberland High School and two years later, Lincoln Junior High in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, where he taught general music, formed a boys’ choir, and established a chorus in each of the grades in junior high—seventh, eighth, and ninth.

Fitzgibbon retired in 1989 and now lives in Florida.

Asked if he has a favorite theatrical character, Fitzgibbon says he’d have to choose the Captain in H.M.S. Pinafore, but he can’t name a specific favorite moment on Broadway—“for me the entire scene of ‘doing theater’ in New York City was, well, just amazing in itself.”

Franz graduated from Northland with a degree in outdoor environmental education, then went on to earn a master of education and professional development from UW-Superior and a PhD in agriculture, extension, and adult education from Cornell University. She now serves as professor emeritus in the School of Education at Iowa State University.

She is by all accounts, a fierce advocate for women in leadership in the outdoors.

Franz raised funds, including her own, among alumni and others who support the idea behind the Women in Leadership internship: having young women gain experience in natural resources management and interpretation, receive professional development, and receive leadership mentoring.

And it’s already working.

Northland College student Abby Keller recently completed the inaugural Women in Leadership internship at the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

“I've made some great connections and gained invaluable knowledge and experience within the federal job realm,” Keller said. “Being able to observe all of these amazing women serving as strong leaders in such a male-dominated field has inspired me to not let anything or anyone hold me back from my career aspirations.”

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The Right Side of History Alpha Sigma sorority sisters take a stand for equality When Laurel “Johnnie” Fisher ‘72 was looking for colleges, she went to the Internet of her time—the incredibly thick and heavy 1967 version of Barron’s List of American Colleges and Universities. Her only criteria: that she experience another part of the country. So, she closed her eyes, opened the book, and pointed her finger right at Northland College.

Then, she convinced her best friend Beverly Harris ’72 to join her. Together, in the fall of 1968, the two African-American women and their mothers rode the bus thirty-three hours from New York City to remote Ashland, Wisconsin. They arrived at midnight on a Saturday night. “I had never seen so many stars,” Fisher said.

The next morning Fisher and Harris left the dorm with other new freshman and began introducing themselves around the campus. “There was and still is an intimacy on the campus which makes it very easy to meet fellow students and make new friends,” Fisher said.

Fisher and Harris took in their extra-curricular choices, including three local sororities and three national fraternities.

Harris pledged and joined Gamma Nu Omega sorority and Fisher pledged and joined Alpha Sigma which was in the process of becoming a chapter of the national Delta Zeta sorority.

“We had paid our dues, gotten our pins, and been inducted into Delta Zeta,” said Jan Witthuhn ‘70, who was incoming president of Alpha Sigma at the time.

One of the conditions of belonging to a national chapter was that all new recruits had to be approved by the national office. But time passed and no approvals came.

Finally, Witthuhn and JoAnn Vogel ’69, who was the outgoing Alpha Sigma president, phoned and spoke with the national president and demanded an answer for the delay.

“I'll never forget her response,” Witthuhn said. “The woman said something like, ‘Well, my dear, none of us has anything against Blacks in general or these two girls in particular, but you must understand that anyone we accept into one of our chapters must be acceptable to all of our members.’”

“I am proud to this day that our group stood up for what we believed in.”

The Delta Zetas were hosting a statewide gathering and invited the new Northland College Iota Chi chapter. And, so, all the women— included Fisher and another African American student, Alberta “Bert” Kennedy ’72, piled into three cars and drove to St. Norbert College near Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Fisher most remembers the Delta Zeta women all wearing navy blue dresses and matching jackets. “It impressed us to no end, and our welcome to the event appeared to be genuine.”

Witthuhn did not flinch. “That told us what we needed to know,” she said.

After bringing this news to Fisher and Kennedy in Memorial Hall, Witthuhn and Vogel brought all the Alphas together to break the news. “The news stung and was

a deep reminder of what was going on in this country—and continues to plague this country,” Fisher said.

Witthuhn and Vogel reported the outcome of the phone call to the Student Affairs Office who supported Alpha Sigma’s unanimous vote to de-pledge Delta Zeta and return to being Alpha Sigma.

“I am proud to this day that our group stood up for what we believed in,” Witthuhn said.

“Jan’s response showed an understanding and maturity level beyond her years,” Fisher said. “Jan took the bull by the horns in telling this national organization where to take their rule and where to put it—in the most professional and courteous manner.”

Fisher said the moment remains a positive point in her life. “Jan stood strong and Northland College, without hesitation, backed her up,” Fisher said. “I have never forgotten what this young woman showed me in how she handled herself in an extremely difficult situation. I am most grateful.”

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Around the Lake

Circumnavigating Lake Superior is such a uniquely Northland College student experience that we couldn’t let an alumni issue go to print without talking about it.

In addition to the Superior Connections program that includes a May trip around the lake, there are Northlanders who go on their own by kayak, bike, and even on foot. There’s no official ledger of Northlanders who have traveled around the lake under their own power but here’s the ones we know about.

2013 • Kayak Mariah Christensen ‘06 and Justin Brewster ‘07

2000 • Kayak Ian Karl ’03, Jenny Ulbricht ’01 and Jesse Beightol ’99,

2008 • Kayak Brian Castillo ‘07 and Alissa Weitz ‘04

2011 • Bike 14

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Hannah Fanney ‘13 and Allissa Stutte ‘13

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Smooth Sailing

By Mark Gross '83 Life is full of chance meetings and events, coupled by very conscious decisions. The proximity to Lake Superior, and Northland understanding that the variability of my high school grades showed engaged passion essential for my success, brought me to Northland College.

2016 • Foot Evan Flom ’14, Allissa Stutte ’13, and Andy Butter ’15

My stepmother suggested getting a job in Bayfield in the sailboat charter service, partly trading on a family friend owning a boat there, and my love of sailing.

Later as a Northland graduate looking for work in a laboratory, I called numbers out of the yellow pages and landed a job making sodium hyaluronate, a component in the fluid in your eyeballs. The president said he approved me because of my sailing experience, and included me on sailing trips with his financial advisor’s customers.

I am still a part of that group today.

Today, every day, my company, Formacoat LLC., works with sodium hyaluronate as a medical device coating. And I sail with my two sons every chance we get. One of those sons, Brontë Goodspeed Gross ‘17, is now himself a Northland College graduate that turned his college major and our family passion, sailing, as his way of working through college—in Bayfield, Wisconsin, teaching sailing! The circle has made a revolution.

2015 • Bike 2016 • Bike Liz Downey ‘13

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Laura Rethmann ‘17 and Olivia Garceau ‘17

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Great Moments in Northland Athletics 3

Where Are They Now Barry Casper ’74 lives in Studio City, California with his wife and still keeps in touch with his Northland classmates.

1 As a sophomore from Mamaroneck, New York, Barry Casper ‘74 captured the national wrestling win at 118 pounds in the 1972 NAIA mat championship. Casper faced some of the toughest competition in the history of the College and lost only once the entire season.

The women’s volleyball team celebrated a national championship victory in 1982. The team was coached by Steve Franklin ’81, his first season as coach.

The 1991-1992 men’s soccer season got off to a rocky start with four losses but then they came back with ten straight wins. Their record 12-4-1 gave them a high ranking in the National Small College Athletic Association National tournament.

They won the tournament and for the first time in Northland’s soccer history, a national title was brought home.

4 2 The College football team ended 1973 with a 7-2 record with Howard Rodney Warren ’75 rushing over a thousand yards.

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Howard Rodney Warren ’75 was a pre-med student at Northland College. Later in his athletic career, he was named to the Wisconsin Independent College Association's all-conference football team, selected as an Outstanding College Athlete of America, and chosen by the Northland athletic staff for the Milton Gardner Award as the College's most outstanding student athlete of 1975. He went on to earn his master degree at Atlanta University and then a medical degree from Meharry Medical College in Nashville. After completing his residency and starting his practice, he contracted cancer. He died at the age of thirtyseven in 1990. In 1991, Northland College inducted him into the Northland College Athletic Hall of Fame.

Steve Franklin ’81 not only played soccer at Northland College but he was instrumental in getting it started at Northland. He is still in the record books as the all-time leading scorer. After Northland College, he received his master degree in kinesiology from Indiana University, served as the men’s soccer head coach at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, and is currently the director of coaching education with the Indiana Soccer Association.

Almost 1/4 of alumni participated in

With a remarkable 7-0-1 season, the 2016 women’s soccer team won the Upper Midwest Athletic Conference title for the first time ever. And in the inaugural season of the new Ponzio Stadium.

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ATHLETICS

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Innovators Solutions for Asbestos Identification In 2012, New York State Department of Public Health announced that any material containing ten percent or more of vermiculite, a mineral used for protection against fire, would need to be reported as an asbestos containing material and was no longer acceptable within the insulation of New York buildings.

Girls Gotta Run Why shouldn’t a girl have a pair of sneakers?

That’s the question Dr. Patricia Ortman ’71, a Washington DC-based retired women’s studies professor and artist, pondered in 2006 before she founded Girls Gotta Run Foundation, the only nonprofit organization in Ethiopia using the national sport of running as an innovative approach to creating safe spaces, ending child marriage, and expanding access to secondary school for vulnerable girls.

Ortman was inspired to start GGRF after she read a 2006 article in the Washington Post describing the lives of teenage girls in Ethiopia who enter into early marriage, multiple pregnancies, and manual labor, sometimes starting as young as twelve. The article also reported that many young women long to run competitively. The would-be runners interviewed by the Post ran early in the morning, before starting their chores—and often did so barefoot because their parents couldn’t afford sneakers.

“Something about that just made me think, ‘Well, it’s just a pair of shoes,’” Ortman told a reporter later. “There should be a way to get these girls some shoes. It didn’t seem like an overwhelming thing.”

Girls Gotta Run Foundation continues to cultivate projects that empower Ethiopian women runners, their families, and their communities, and helping them reach their full potential.

UNITED STATES of AMERICA

On the ground, this meant that New York needed to develop a way to test asbestos in vermiculite.

ASAP. About the same time, Hurricane Sandy hit the city and all business and property owners across New York City were faced not only with flooding but with costly maintenance testing under the new regulations.

Empowering Communities, Individuals After Hurricane Katrina, the medical director of the Alabama Outward Bound School approached Jason Luthy ’06, who was working at the school, about developing a wilderness medicine training program to prepare coastal communities in how to respond during natural disasters, when emergency medical personnel are delayed.

The two started Longleaf Wilderness Medicine as a way to train communities in remote medical training. In 2011, Luthy took full ownership and moved the business to Sandpoint, Idaho, with the mission of providing wilderness medicine education for both individuals and communities. Luthy is currently focused on program and curriculum design.

CANADA

Enter Bill Esposito, ’84, president of Ambient Group, Inc., an environmental and water treatment consulting company he founded just two years after graduating from Northland with a biology degree. (He later went on to earn a master degree in environmental safety and health from Hunter College and a doctorate in public health at Columbia University.)

The Real Estate Board of New York approached Esposito as someone who could assist.

After two years of analyzing over 120 samples, Esposito discovered an inexpensive way to detect asbestos in vermiculite. In 2014, the Department of Public Health approved the new method for its time efficiency, cost reduction, and dependability.

New York has now incorporated Esposito’s method for testing into all of its buildings benefiting members of the business industry and vermiculite manufacturers alike. The new method is accessible for everyone to disprove the containment of asbestos in the streets of New York City.

Esposito, who joined the Northland College Board of Trustees in 2017, credits the College for steering him toward a successful and fulfilling professional life. “Northland gave me a strong sense of self,” said Esposito. “It started me on my career path.”

JAPAN

SWEDEN

INDIA

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UNITED KINGDOM & CROATIA SPRING 2018 (tied for 5th)17

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Weather Watchers The dramatic shifts in weather in northern Wisconsin and around Lake Superior have inspired more than one career at Northland College.

Wayne Feltz ’91 studied earth science at Northland College then went on to earn an MS in atmospheric science in 1994 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he worked as a scientist ever since. In 2013, he became the executive director for Science at the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, directing a group of researchers/ scientists toward the goal of using current derived satellite based meteorological products to improve forecasting of aviation weather hazards.

Mikayla Duarte ’17 got interested in weather when she was in elementary school. A storm system went through southwestern Wisconsin, producing tornadoes.

She remained glued to the TV, watching the local meteorologists report on the storm. When the tornado sirens went off, she wanted to rush outside, rather than go to the basement. She got to experiences some serious weather at Northland College the summer of 2016. “I was an intern at KBJR News in Duluth when the July flooding happened in northern Wisconsin and getting to experience this kind of extreme weather event while on the job helped me learn so much."

9 Most Memorable Blizzards of the last 50 Years

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A week later, a straight-line wind event ripped through Ashland overnight. “Surveying the damage walking through campus the next day, was something I’ll never forget,” she said.

Duarte planned on going into broadcast meteorology but her career took a different direction. Instead she is a software engineer for the Air Force Weather Agency. She says her meteorology background has been critical to the team’s success in creating diagnostics for weather maps.

Jonathan Wolfe ’04 remembers keeping track of daily snowfall totals at his childhood home in Two Harbors, Minnesota, during the winter of 1996, which ended up breaking snowfall records. He now gets paid to track weather at the National Weather Service in Duluth, along with colleagues and fellow Northland alums Kevin Huyck ’03 and William Mokry Jr. ’12.

Wolfe is responsible for developing a piece of software called the Enhanced Data Display, or EDD, which is being used in the National Severe Storms Laboratory Hazardous Weather Testbed as a key component of advancing tornado and severe thunderstorm warning forecasting. “This software integrates a wealth of data into ‘storm objects’ that provide much better timing and threat communication of storm risk and their statistical probabilities of impacting geographical areas,” he said.

Nathan Lynum ’16 will graduate in May from the School of Mines and Technology in South Dakota with a master of science degree in atmospheric and environmental sciences. His thesis research has been focused on the influences and different physical processes within a large single supercell interacting with extreme wind events that are created as part of severe storms. The goal is to enhance the warning of straight line winds.

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3 4

January 1969 No school but skiing was fabulous! And huge mountain of snow at McMillan and lunch trays made for great sledding! —Jackie Davies Anderson ‘71 “And yes, Cabbies was open.” —Stuart Goldman ‘69

November 9-10, 1975 “The first blizzard I encountered at Northland was the same that sank the Lake Superior freighter Edmund Fitzgerald,” says John Maier ’79 (see pg. 7). “There were a couple of feet of snow, it was blowing like crazy and even on campus, you couldn’t tell where you were. I found it fascinating.”

“Only time I saw classes called off as Bobb Hall's entrance was sealed off by a drift that went to the roof.

Blizzard party at the Office Bar.” —Dave Kretzschmar ‘77

January 22-23, 1982 Nineteen inches of snow.

“I remember jumping from the roof of McMillan into the drifts...good times and memories.” —Jeff Grossman ‘82

Post-Thanksgiving 1985 “I remember we rearranged so that there were rooms available for stranded motorists, and that we were directing people from the main road into campus, who had been told to come to Northland by hotels that were full.”

—Marion Reid ‘88 “That was the year of the "cattle paths" on campus, snow neck high beside the walkways.

Also, the last time I remember being able to sled out the second story windows of Fenenga.” —Kim Rose ‘87

Hottest Day on Record: August 1, 2001 105 degrees • Coldest Day on Record: January 17, 1981 -41ºF

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Geomagnetic Storms

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Halloween Blizzard of 1991 What began as rain turned to freezing rain then snow— seventeen inches of it.

“I was on a geology field trip at Montreal River Gorge with Professor Goetz when snow started coming down. Drove back at ten miles an hour in Tom Sandblom's '95 Subaru wagon with one headlight.” —Jon Flynn '95 “I think it was almost two feet and the snow didn't melt until May 1992. Craziness!” —Lynette Judd ‘92

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The Winter of 1995/1996

“We got somewhere between two and three feet of snow and Northland was closed/classes canceled. Also, not blizzard-related, but in '96 or '97 there was a stretch where temp with wind chill was -75°F (classes weren't canceled).

—Jennifer Lindner ‘99

“The 95/96 winter had snow past ground floor Fenenga windows. It was an awesome winter.” —Al Krause '99 “I recall some people dug out their car and dragged people behind on sleds down the streets.

Gave new meaning to 'crack the whip'!” —Jaime Corbisier '98

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Fall 2001-October 25-26 An early season storm combined with lake effect snow brought more than a foot of snow.

November 26-27 Twenty inches of snow.

“2001 was such an epic snow year! I swear we got like four feet in twenty-four hours.” —Kari Molter '03

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Northern Lights are best viewed in winter when the nights are long and dark and there is a higher chance of clear skies.

Following the sun cycle of eleven years, northern lights also go through periods of high and low intensity. The last peak was during 2013 and the next will be in 2024.

Auroras are seen when the aurora oval passes over northern Wisconsin.

The exact location of the oval changes due to shifts in solar wind. It generally does not move far enough south for Ashland to see the lights unless there is intense geomagnetic activity occurring, such as: The Halloween storm of 2003 was a period of intense geomagnetic activity between October 19 and November 7.

Northern lights were seen as far south as Texas and Florida.

In March of 2015, another intense solar storm cause northern lights across much of north America, extending south to Tennessee.

March 13-14, 2006 Thunder snow enhanced a late season blizzard that dropped twenty-seven inches of snow.

“I had never seen snow plow drifts that high before. At one point, it got so cold everything was canceled/shut down because it was too dangerous to have bare skin outside. Man, I miss snow.” —Nikki Jeske '09

April 20, 2013 Blizzard Eighteen to thirty-one inches of snow fell across the northland, making for a crazy April morning.

“My senior spring semester finals were postponed thanks to this gorgeous storm!!” —Madeline Jarvis '13

Leah Kiser is a first-year meteorology student and assisted with research regarding weather-related events and meteorologists.

Flooding: July 11, 2016 10 inches of rain combined with straight-line winds caused $1 million in damage to roadways and infrastructure.

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Creative Class A biology major and a studio art minor, Madeline Weibel '12 has found ways to combine her passion at the New York Academy of Art, where she’s working on her MFA. Recently she completed a forensic anthropology project, where she used a 3D printout of an unidentified skull and gave it a face using anthropological and statistical information.

Weibel says that she is truly appreciative of the faculty at Northland, specifically Don Albrecht. She says he was a true mentor and she will always cherish her memories of him during Superior Connections and photography class.

April Lee Stone ’95, Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa, began teaching herself black ash basket weaving in 1998 from books, museum collections, and images. At the time, she could not find a practicing basket maker in her community. Her journey and discoveries along the way as she became a black ash basket weaver have inspired her concern and advocacy for the environment. The black ash is now at risk of being wiped out due to the invasive emerald ash borer, meaning her art, and an entire class of artistry, may be threatened by a loss of media. To note this environmental change, she set up shop on Main Street in Ashland last summer and for a month, invited the public to watch her work, as she created a burial casket made from black ash—a symbolic act, on her part.

When Cait Irwin ’05 spoke to students at the 2017 Fall Festival, she had one main message: if you can’t find a fit for your style, then create your own path. Irwin knew she was meant to be an artist, so when her roadkill art show was rejected by galleries, she realized her stuff just didn’t work in most galleries. So, she took a chance. She spent one summer traveling the country, visiting Northland College alums, and asking them to help set up art openings. It worked. She found her groove and started her own business, Irwin Artworks, specializing in large murals and sculpture, most often reflecting the wonders of the natural world.

“[Without black ash] I can’t make these baskets, I can’t pass along how to make the baskets,” Stone told reporter Rick Olivo at the Ashland Daily Press.

NORTHLAND HAS

8667 LIVING ALUMNI

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Mary Schaubschlager ’12 earned her BA in studio art in 2012, then moved to the Twin Cities for an internship at High Point Center for Printmaking. She's now a freelance illustrator and designer as well as a yoga instructor. Her work has been published in The Egoist and Rain Taxi—and she just illustrated her first children’s book, Little Bear Teddy. "I eat a lot of ramen noodles and walk a lot of dogs to make room for art in my life," she says.

Abe McCowan ’07 said he followed Professor Jason Terry’s advice and went to grad school, earned an MFA in printmaking, worked hard, and now has a successful printmaking studio specializing in prints from the natural world. "Northland College was the best thing I ever did," he says. "It has inspired my prints to reflect everything I love about my natural environment."

Since her decision to attend in 2001, Saleema Hamid ’05 of Pakistan, has stayed a steady course on the road less traveled.

She studied natural resources but has pursued photography and her own style of art. Living in a neighboring town of Islamabad, she’s creating multi-media pieces, blending photography, calligraphy, painting, and printmaking. “Saleema brings an unrivaled light into the world, encouraging everyone to be their best and to never sell themselves short,” says longtime friend and college roommate Jackie Moore ‘05, who is the Northland College alumni director. “

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Q&A

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How One Class Changed My Life

By Terry Daulton ’81 In ninth grade, we were assigned a career research project. I picked wildlife biologist.

When Northland College sent a brochure with students paddling a wild river, I was hooked. At Northland I found great friends and mentors. Dr. Lee Stadnyk guided my path through environmental studies. Spring courses paddled the Boundary Waters.

A friend encouraged me to take Drawing 101. That class changed my life. Paul Hubinsky, head of the art department, became a mentor and friend. I took an art minor, an untraditional but profoundly fulfilling choice.

After graduation, I worked for several federal agencies, finished grad school, and returned to work at the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute. Then I met my now husband, Jeff Wilson '76, a biologist with a crazy adventurous streak. We took off for one year, traveled, volunteered for research projects, explored, and met amazing people.

Returning, we moved to a remote cabin and I became immersed in bringing art and science together.

In 2006, I had an opportunity to test the communication power of art. With twenty-six artists and scientists, we created Paradise Lost?

Climate Change in the Northwoods an exhibit seen by over 100,000 people. Success inspired longer term collaborations with the University of Wisconsin called Drawing Water, which explores lake science through art.

In 2011, even more controversial, a massive open pit mine was proposed near Lake Superior. Twenty-one artists worked with historians and scientists to create Penokee: Explore the Iron Hills to encourage citizens to envision a sustainable future for the region.

Most recently, I have leaped into a new project called Wisconsin’s Green Fire, a coalition of natural resources professionals working to elevate science in decision making in Wisconsin.

Julie Anderson ’00 explores climate change, genetic modification, and the excessive use of natural resources in her stunning and unusual sculptures. Her artwork is influenced by her mountain environment in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where she co-owns and operates a small studio art space with her husband.

As a biology major, how did you get introduced to ceramics?

I had a minor in art and was required to take ceramics for my minor, which I dreaded at first. I was always into drawing and painting, but never thought I would like sculpture or 3D work. Stan Samuels was my instructor at Northland and he taught me how to throw on the potter’s wheel, which immediately got me hooked.

At what point, did you decide you would take this direction—one as a gallery owner, instructor, and artist?

I came here to do an internship in ceramics. Initially I was just planning to take a break from biology and then take the GRE to apply to grad schools for plant ecology. I ended up working at a production studio, Ceramic Design Group, and teaching ceramics at Colorado Mountain College in Steamboat. I began to realize how complex and fascinating this medium was and that I could easily study it for the rest of my life.

Was there any moment or particular influence on your current work that you can connect back to Northland?

Absolutely. Dr. Jim Meeker was one of my favorite professors at Northland and he gave me some great experiential learning opportunities working in the forests and identifying plants. I learned to pay attention to the tiniest details of plants and notice subtle changes in the forest ecosystems. Many of these changes were based on the availability of water.

Plants, ecology, cells, chemistry, and water are regularly the subject of my current work. Without my biology background, my work would not be what it is today.

Arts and sciences have always evolved together. Writing, arts, and music can move people to consider science and our role in the world in new lights. I feel lucky that I attended a liberal arts environmental college.

It inspired my career, and mostly gave me joy in life that comes from creative processes.

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Changing Lives

Students at a school in the Minneapolis area. Ed Morales '10 has worked with students at more than a dozen schools in the Twin Cities as a social worker, therapist, advocate, and trainer.

Collaborative Problem Solving for Kids Since graduating, Ed Morales ’10 has worked with more than one-thousand kids and a dozen schools in the Minneapolis, Minnesota-area as a school social worker, school-based therapist, community advocate and trainer.

In 2017, he founded Socorro Consulting to address gaps in quality mental and behavioral health support for young people, collaborating with school systems and youth-focused organizations across the Twin Cities to develop systems that better serve the most challenging kids in our communities.

Morales was recently asked to be the keynote speaker the Wings to Fly Conference, designed for practitioners providing skill-based support for children and youth, at Rochester Public Schools in Minnesota. “As a single foster parent of two amazing sisters, Ed has put collaborative problem solving to the test in his own home and credits the approach with maintaining peace and stability through even the most turbulent times,” the school wrote in a press release.

Morales earned his degree from Northland in peace, conflict, and global studies, a master of social work from the University of Minnesota in 2013, and a master of public policy from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs in 2014. Morales recently accepted a full-time position with the Minnesota Department of Human Services as a Child Welfare Foundations Trainer.

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Helping Dogs Help People After years of training, volunteering, and working with dogs that help people with disabilities, Lea Ann Shearer ’97, who studied outdoor education at Northland, specifically diversity and accessibility, created the nonprofit, Paws for Freedom. She intensively trains Labrador retrievers to work with specific people to perform needed tasks. For instance, one dog was trained to press a button to call 9-1-1 if its person stopped breathing.

Family Advocate Having come from a large high school where she sometimes felt invisible, Carolyn Geer Goodridge ’70 says her experience at Northland College gave her the confidence to discuss issues, explore information, and have empathy for others. As a life-long social worker, she’s been an advocate for families and children. She’s found permanent homes for 254 children and continues to have contact with many of the families she helped. She also fought to improve adoption laws and public policy around the country. She worked on a committee for the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, that shifted emphasis toward children’s health and safety concerns.

A Life of Nonprofit Work Stuart Barnes Jamieson ’81 has worked in the nonprofit world for most of his adult life. “Now, as I get older, I want to support the next generation of non-profit organizations and their leaders. This quest has me engaging with young leaders from places like Northland College about the value and potential of a career in nonprofit leadership,” he said.

“Practically every Northland student I have met recently has impressed me with both their competence and their attitude toward the future.”

Helping Recruit, Retain Women in Nontraditional Industries As the associate director of women’s initiatives at Dunwoody College of Technology, Maggie Whitman ‘09 manages several initiatives to recruit and retain women in non-traditional industries where women make up fewer than twentyfive percent of the workforce.

Whitman studied sociology and gender studies at Northland, then worked for two years at AmeriCorps VISTA, before taking this position. “My time at Northland shaped my worldview and helped me realize that I wanted my work to make the world a better place somehow,” she said. “My role at Dunwoody allows me to put the feminist and social change theories I learned in college into practice.”

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The Ocean as Therapy

Manoa, receiving his master of art and PhD in American studies.

Matt Claybaugh ‘87 (above center) is the co-author of a chapter in Stories from the Field: A History of Wilderness Therapy, and the president and CEO of Marimed Foundations, an organization that has changed the lives of at-risk Hawai`i youth, the majority of whom are native Hawaiian, through ocean wilderness therapy for the last twentyfour years, and now adults through a mariner training program.

“I always worked with the most disenfranchised and challenged kids in the state and that led me to Marimed in 1993,” he said.

“Living on islands, the ocean is everpresent—we do have woods and wild places—but none of them compare to the ocean’s challenges and gifts in my mind,” he said.

Claybaugh was born in Wisconsin but moved to Hawai`i when he was seven.

He spent most of his waking hours surfing the north and east shores of O’ahu and then every other summer, he explored the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness at his family cabin on Gunflint Lake.

In high school, he wanted to be a forester. “Northland sent me a brochure and I was sold on the fact that I would be in the north woods and go to college,” he said.

Here he studied history and secondary education, and paddled and surfed kayaks on Lake Superior.

Out of college, Claybaugh taught high school on the big Island of Hawai`i then returned home to O’ahu in 1991 to attend the University of Hawai`i,

210 alumni are the parents of Northland graduates & 13 alumni are the parents of current Northland students

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Claybaugh joined the team as program director and spearheaded a two-year joint venture with a ship-based, rolling admissions program for twenty-eight, court-referred youth from several states, including Hawai`i.

He helped create Kailana (Calm Seas) a residential adolescent behavioral healthcare program that incorporated boat building and daily ocean-based activities like rowing, sailing, and outrigger canoe paddling, with individual and group therapy sessions.

“I was hoping to help create an ocean-going wilderness school for at-risk youth, reflective of the ocean wilderness I had grown up in,” he said.

And it worked. Between 1993-2017, Marimed treated more than two thousand young people. “I run into them all the time—many are doing well and claim that their time with us transformed their lives,” he said.

The Kailana model became and continues to be Marimed’s therapeutic template, blending western therapy methods, outdoor adventure, and culturally-aligned traditions into one treatment model.

Marimed decided last year to shift its focus to training native Hawaiian men and women for careers in the maritime industry. The field is experiencing a high demand for labor and they are high wage careers, Claybaugh said of the decision. Some 220 future mariners have graduated from the program in the last five years.

“There is no better role model or example than to see your parents put on their gear and head out the door to work every day,” he said. “I think there are many ways to break the cycle of poverty and having exemplary role models cannot be overstated.”

Q&A Alex Alvarez ’85 majored in sociology and outdoor education at Northland College and went on to pursue sociology at the University of New Hampshire. He is a professor at Northern Arizona University in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and was the founding director of the Martin Springer Institute for Teaching the Holocaust, Tolerance, and Humanitarian Value. He is currently working on the Genocide Resource Project and is the author of six books including, Unstable Ground: Climate Change, Conflict, and Genocide.

How did you get interested in genocide, violence, and homicide? You must make one heck of a dinner guest.

As a grad student I was assigned to a faculty member who was conducting research on homicide in the US. I found the work fascinating and continued to research lethal violence in the US for years. Over time, however, I began realizing that I could apply traditional criminological perspectives to genocide to help make sense of this form of collective violence.

Consequently, I began to shift my research into work on mass atrocity crime. You are also correct. I'm just a hoot at dinner parties.

Are there elements of your Northland education that influenced your career or that stick with you?

Northland first raised my awareness about the natural world and environment that has always stayed with me. Since Northland, I have had a deeper appreciation of and sensitivity to environmental issues, ecology, and climate. Usually, that was largely part of my personal life. Recently, however, my personal concern and my professional research have blended together. My most recent book concerns climate change and the risks it brings for conflict and mass violence and, in many ways, it reflects the influence Northland College has had on shaping my awareness and thinking.

Tell me more about your involvement with the Genocide Resource Project.

This is a passion project that is still developing and taking shape. In part, it is intended that it will be a clearinghouse for genocide related information and resources. It will include the only complete digitized location of Der Stürmer, a Nazi propaganda newspaper that will be translated and tagged so that visitors can search the database for specific issues and themes, as well as a GIS based tool for searching for genocide related locations around the world with links to further resources. As of yet, however, it isn’t really accessible to the public.

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Environmental Guardians

Conserving Lions Empowering People Large cat conservationist Tina M. Ramme ’90 is currently the director of the Center for Lion Conservation and Research in Kenya and is the president of the Lion Conservation Fund. Since initiating this program in 2006, not one lion has been killed by retribution—one of the best records in East Africa.

She initiated the Lion Warrior Project in 2003, training and paying Samburu warriors as field assistants and scouts to monitor and protect lions, mitigate human-wildlife conflict in their communities, and implement conservation education in local schools and villages for over fifteen years—all while keeping their cattle safe. “Samburu warriors herd cattle, placing them at the interface of humanwildlife conflict,” Ramme said.

“They frequently face lions while herding cattle, often their family’s only means of survival in a harsh semi-arid climate.”

The project has been a success, eliminating retribution killings and providing a model for other predator conservation who have implemented it with comparable success.

With nearly twenty years of experience, Ramme now spends most of her time in wildlife research, ecological restoration, and large cat conservation in eastern and southern Africa and is a professor of biology in the Boston area.

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But even with Ramme’s success in reducing retribution killings, the outlook for big cats is tenuous.

“In just two decades, lions have declined forty-five to ninety percent in some parts of the African continent and have been completely extirpated from others,” Ramme said.

“When a species like the African lion, which is a prolific breeder and has a great deal of dietary and habitat requirement variation, exhibits rapid population declines, it heralds a very dire situation for the planet and all wildlife,” she said.

Litigating River Access for the Public Representing the Utah Stream Access Coalition, Bert Ley ’79 presented before the Utah Supreme Court in 2017 on a case regarding public access to a stretch of the Weber River in Utah. The high court affirmed the lower court's ruling that based upon the historical evidence presented at trial, Utah's Weber River is navigable and open to recreational use by all. “The implications stretch far beyond this one river since most of our major waterways were used for commerce (the floating of logs for use as railroad ties, etc.) prior to statehood, and thus, should all be open to recreational use by the public,” Ley said.

Resolving GrizzlyHuman Conflicts

Tackling the Asian Carp Invasion

Kerry Gunther ‘81 is the coauthor of Yellowstone Grizzly Bears: Ecology and Conservation of an Icon of Wilderness, a book he’s well qualified to write.

Gunther is a member of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and has worked in grizzly bear and black bear research and management in Yellowstone National Park for thirty-five years. As Yellowstone’s bear management biologist, he has assisted in the investigations of seven fatal and dozens of nonfatal bear attacks. His goal is to reduce the number of conflicts, conserve bears, and find practical solutions for bears and humans.

As the aquatic nuisance species program manager at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources for the last seven years, Kevin Irons ‘87 has taken the lead on Asian carp work in the Chicago waterway system, which includes the Chicago diversion canal.

He’s working on the complicated problem of finding solutions to control and manage Asian carp with an overall goal to keep reproducing populations of Asian carp from Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes Basin.

Protecting Wetlands Former secretary of the interior, Sally Jewell, awarded Tom Dahl ’76 the highest honor of the Department of the Interior, the Distinguished Service Award. As a senior scientist for wetlands and chief of the National Standards and Support Team with the US Fish and Wildlife Service for thirty-four years, Dahl led a geospatial technical team to advance wetland science and support the department's mission and he “authored a number of influential scientific reports that have resulted in federal action to reduce wetland losses and promote public awareness,” Jewell noted.

Food Resiliency Andrew Van Gorp ’13 founded Sustain DuPage, a regional advocacy organization that promotes resiliency for people living in this Chicago suburb.

Their victory garden project helps community members learn how to grow their own food, cook fresh fruits and vegetables, and have access to clean, healthy eating. In other words, they promote good food in the neighborhood. Several other initiatives work to achieve social, economic, and environmental sustainability for their region.

THERE ARE NORTHLAND ALUMNI LIVING IN ALL 50 STATES (Wisconsin has the most!), Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, and several US Embassies and military bases.

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The SOEI Interns The Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute has been a part of the Northland student experience for the last forty-six years. Sigurd’s wife, Elizabeth, contributed $50,000 to the Sigurd F. Olson Fellowship Endowment, a program to offer paid internships to students to give them the needed experience. Looking back, we’re not surprised to discover that many of these student interns have gone on to careers in social justice, conservation, and public service. Here’s just few examples.

Tara Ward ’83 is the program coordinator at SEEDS, a program to provide high quality programming for high school and middle school students in Traverse City, Michigan. This includes creating opportunities for students and community members wishing to learn more about sustaining and supporting our natural and human environments.

Kary Schumpert ’97 worked for eleven years as a classroom-based and outreach environmental educator at Eco-Cycle in Boulder County, Colorado; and for two years with BioVan, focused on the Rio Grande and its watershed.

She taught zero waster concepts, including composting, recycling, source-based reducing, and reusing. This year she made a big switch and is working as a freelance educator and writer, while attending massage therapy school.

Abe Lloyd ’02, an ethnobotanist and director of Salal Cascadian Food Institute, recently completed his master’s degree in ethnoecology at the University of Victoria. Lloyd now lives in his hometown of Bellingham, Washington, where he researches, promotes, and eats the indigenous foods of his region,.

As the community programs director at Walking Mountains Science Center, Lara Carlson ’03 is an interpreter and environmental educator with a

passion for introducing others to the beauty and wonder found in nature.

Stacy Schaefer Craig ’04, coordinator of applied learning at Northland College, is currently pursuing a masters of divinity degree through the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.

Anna Hochhalter ’06 is a designer in landscape architecture at AECOM New York Metro. She has a particular interest in the confluence of public infrastructure and ecological projects.

Adam Yates ’07 has worked to make the world more inclusive—through an alternative spring break in the Blue Ridge mountains to his current position as an openly gay pastor at the Episcopal Church of Connecticut.

He received his master of divinity from Chicago Theological Seminary in 2010.

Scott Wold ’09 earned a Juris Doctor in environmental law from Vermont Law School and is the director of planning and environmental services in Redwood Falls, Minnesota As the climate program manager for the Neighborhood of Affordable Housing in the Greater Boston Area, Gabriela Boscio-Santas ’09, is the climate and sustainability expert with a keen interest in social and environmental justice, racial and gender equality, resilience, sustainable food systems, and urban agriculture.

Tiffany Kersten ’10 (pictured above right) is the manager at the McAllen Nature Center in Texas.

She spends most of her free time fighting the proposed border wall that would cut off Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge from any visitor access.

Amanda Wold ’11 is a district technician at Brown Soil and Water Conservation District in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota.

Q&A As an environmental specialist with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources from 2007 to 2014, Dan Norris ’05 directed over $1 million of long-term air sampling of the Bridgeton Landfill in St. Louis, Missouri—a long, complicated, and continuing environmental story outlined in the 2018 HBO documentary, “Atomic Homefront.” Filmmakers interviewed Norris, as someone who evaluated the site, lived in the community, and is publicly critical of the US Environmental Protection Agency and the State of Missouri for not aggressively addressing this environmental hazard.

You are a witness for the State of Missouri in a legal case regarding the landfill. Why? In 2013 the State of Missouri filed a lawsuit against owners Republic Services and Bridgeton Landfill. Although the landfill owner has subsequently spent over $170 million on managing issues related to the smoldering fire, the fire still continues to spread. I issued a Notice of Violation to the Bridgeton Landfill in 2012, which can be viewed online, which alleges violations of state environmental laws prohibiting methane migration and air pollution (combustion of trash). The landfill owner did not sit idle during the fire, but the owner was also not receptive to collaborating with the state or trying alternate approaches that the state suggested. All parties failed to provide adequate outreach to the affected community.

Tell me about living near the landfill.

There were a lot of long days collecting samples and managing data. We had to watch for benzene, carbon monoxide, radiation, and the odors were terrible. On bad days, the odors could be smelled as far as five miles from the landfill. The smell would keep people in their house and would make people want to run the other way. When components failed at the landfill, they failed in a major way. I observed leachate (garbage juice) spills, black contaminated groundwater, and pressurized plastic cover material full of landfill gas. The landfill produced so much garbage juice each day that it had a seven-mile-long pipeline to convey the leachate to the downtown St. Louis wastewater treatment plant.

Why did you leave to go work in Montana?

The primary reason was the state’s handling of the Bridgeton Landfill fire. In my opinion, the regulatory agencies Missouri DNR and US EPA failed to provide any meaningful outreach and communication with the citizens of the community, while taking a very passive role and allowing landfill owners to stay firmly in the driver’s seat.

This resulted in a lack of trust between many of those involved. When I left my job with the State of Missouri, I wrote an open letter, which became front-page news in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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Modern Scribes Becky Brun ‘00 wrote her first stories as an undergraduate for the student newspaper, Drifts, and the Northland College magazine. So, when she moved to Portland, Oregon, she was ready and skilled enough to start pitching stories. She got the assignments and eventually become the editor of Outdoors NW magazine and Sustainable Industries magazine.

The House that Kicked Off a Career As a cub reporter at the County Journal in Washburn, Rocky Barker ’75 found himself at the right place at the right time on March 2, 1977. There were plans to move a seven-room, fully furnished house using a thirtyton truck, across the ice from Port Superior to LaPointe on Madeline Island.

They were moving the house on a Wednesday, the day the County Journal went to press.

Barker drove out onto the ice road in his VW bug to get a shot of the truck driving the house across the ice. But the sevenroom, fully furnished house made only three of the four miles on the ice before it tilted off the driver’s side and the truck sank.

Barker raced back to the newspaper office in Washburn and yelled to Editor Don Albrecht, “Hold the presses!” The photo of the house sitting crooked in the broken ice ran in newspapers from Miami to Tel Aviv. The Los Angeles Times ran it on the front page.

Barker’s future in journalism was sealed. Barker has been an environmental reporter at the Idaho Statesman for the last twenty-one years, covering

stories about endangered species, salmon recovery, wilderness, wolf reintroduction, grizzly bear management, fire, and climate change.

Ten years ago, she switched from journalism to marketing then started her own company, Pitchfork Communications, employing a team of strategists, writers, and designers to work with small business owners and nonprofits.

Andrea Robertson ’00 received her Northland College degree in history before getting her PhD and taking an assistant professor position at Macalester College.

She began writing novels after a horse broke her foot. Eleven books later, she believes that horse must have been an agent of fate. Writing under the name Andrea Cremer, she is a New York Times bestselling author for her book Nightshade and now is a full-time author for Penguin Books.

He was part of a team of reporters chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and the Wilderness Society awarded him the Aldo Leopold Award for Distinguished Editorial Writing in 2014 for his “honest, no nonsense reporting on Idaho’s environmental issues.”

He writes a blog called Letters from the West and is the author of several books including, Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America.

“Rocky is a single-minded chronicler of our evolving understanding of humans in the ecosystems of the west,” said Dean Miller, development director at North Olympic Land Trust. “Few have devoted as much time and attention to western issues and even fewer have spent as much time as he has out in the wild places where the stories unfold.”

As for that house, it sunk. “It ended up in pieces off the Bayfield shoreline,” Barker said.

The truck, however, was salvaged and used again.

Dave Olesen ’79 took the road less traveled when he chose to live along the Hoarfrost River, located on northeast tip of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada. For twenty-five or more years, he’s lived the bush life, flying bush planes, mushing dogs—at least once in the Iditarod—and living off grid. He’s written about his life in several books including Kinds of Winter: Four Solo Journeys by Dogteam in Canada’s Northwest Territories and North of Reliance.

An excerpt from his blog at bushedpilotblog.wordpress.com, dated February 25, 2018:

A few days ago, it was just a chickadee, fluttering in the branches of a birch tree. I was standing inside the warm workshop, looking out, and then I was staring, and then I was astounded. I picked up a notepad and jotted: I am perhaps to easily astounded.

Today it was just this chickadee, Fluttering and feeding in the low branches of a white birch Ten feet outside the window, At minus forty-four!

(Is anyone going to try to convince me That this tiny warm bird, alive and aloft in that dense cold air, Is not a fact almost beyond comprehension?

If so, good luck.)

He goes to tell the reader that he has since learned, with a little checking, that the body temperature inside a chickadee is somewhere around forty-two degrees Celsius, or 108 degrees Fahrenheit.

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SYMPATHY TO THE FAMILIES OF: Stanley F. Janowski '50; Zapata, TX; 6/15/2014 Geraldine (Wickman) Janowski '51; Zapata, TX; 2/11/2016 Robert E. Anderson '65; Mount Vernon, IN; 3/11/2016 Ann (Abrams) Lutz '76; Maplewood, NJ; 3/27/2016 Donna (Nicholson) Hellman '81; Jackson, MI; 7/4/2017 Verona (Liebelt) Lind '65; Tripoli, WI; 8/21/2017 Judith (Carkeek) Vander Zanden '64; Lanse, MI; 8/21/2017

Northland College Alumni Association See what's happening and stay in touch. Follow the Northland College Alumni Association on facebook at: facebook.com/NCAlumni

Thomas M. Reykdal '62; Hudson, MN; 8/29/2017 Margaret J. Zerbst '69; Hale, MI; 9/9/2017 George R. King '52; Shell Lake, WI; 9/19/2017 Jack A. Kull '43; Inverness, IL; 9/20/2017 Peter N. Margitan, Jr. '53; Rochester, MN; 9/25/2017 Br. Patrick T. Shea '70; Springfield, IL; 9/29/2017 Lorman L. Lundsten '64; South Saint Paul, MN; 10/6/2017 Jerome J. Colletti '67; Chicago, IL; 10/15/2017 Patricia (Berg) Oien '49; Middleton, WI; 10/22/2017 John H. Bloomquist '69; Ashland, WI; 10/25/2017 Diane (Gordon) Defoe '92; Bayfield, WI; 11/10/2017 Gloria (Swanson) Fleischfresser '71; Butternut, WI; 11/27/2017 Robert W. Strom '46; Cincinnati, OH; 11/29/2017 Douglas E. Harder '85; Glendale, AZ; 11/30/2017 Frank H. Hunter '62; Bettendorf, IA; 11/30/2017 Lois (Morey) Strom '71; Washburn, WI; 12/1/2017 Nancy (Hoecker) Dodd '53; Altadena, CA; 12/9/2017 William J. Oestreicher '65; Rice Lake, WI; 12/26/2017 George O. Bonitz '51; Northridge, CA; 1/5/2018 Kenneth V. Laurion '50; Duluth, MN; 1/10/2018 Rev. George A. Luciani '59; Chelsea, MI; 1/10/2018 Joshua H. Munter '98; Ashland, WI; 1/17/2018 James A. Utpadel '64; South Range, WI; 1/20/2018 Tracey (Corbley) Niehaus '02; Mercer, WI; 1/28/2018 Kenneth D. Swanson '66; Port Wing, WI; 1/30/2018 Marie H. Van Guilder '48; Ashland, WI; 2/2/2018 LaVern (Ledin) Utegaard '65; Mellen, WI; 2/9/2018

Alumni Association Board of Directors: Craig Mullenbrock ’77 (President) Beverly Harris ’72 (Vice President) Gail Fridlund ’15 (Secretary) Laurel “Johnnie” Fisher ’72 Nancy Franz ’81 Ivan Gaikowski ’14 MaryJo Gingras ’00 Blake Gross ’96 Mark Gross ’83 Richard Harguindeguy ’78 Madeline Jarvis ’13 KayDee Johnson ’16 Katherine Jenkins ’96 Max Metz ’10 Peter Millett ’69 Travis Moore ’11 Jaime Moquin ’98 Sam Polonetzky ’70 Kaeleen Ringberg ’12 Stuart Schmidt ’17 Patti Skoraczewski ’74 Leanne Wilkie Shamszad ’04

David J. Weir '54; Augusta, GA; 2/22/2018 Marion (Strom) Zinnecker '49; Ashland, WI; 3/2/2018 Dennis M. Langley; Shawnee Mission, KS; 6/13/2017 – Former Trustee, 2001-2004 Imogene P. Johnson; Racine, WI; 3/3/18 – Former Trustee, 1970-1975 Annette Stoddard-Freeman; Milwaukee, WI; 12/15/2017 – Trustee Emeritus Vinson "Bud" Simpson; Green Valley, AZ; 1/1/2018 – Trustee Emeritus

For additional alumni stories and events, go to: northland.edu/alumni

Northland College Archive The Northland College Alumni Association is dedicated to preserving the proud history of the College by maintaining and expanding the archives housed on campus. For more information about the collection, email alumni@northland.edu.

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Help us out! Tell our archivists what’s happening in any of these photos or who is in them at alumni@northland.edu.

The Archivists—Ori-Anne Pagel ’69, Don Chase ‘62, and Dan Crawford ‘76 can be found most Thursdays on campus. In the last six years, this volunteer crew have made order from chaos by collecting, organizing, and cataloging Northland College’s 125-year history. They continue to sort, identify, and catalogue whatever comes through their door and have become an invaluable resource for campus and for researchers—including one person who spent weeks digging through information about the Wheeler family for a book she’s working on and another researching the history of the environmental movement.

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