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I remember the day my older brother came back from the Navy. This was long ago. He was twenty. I was eleven. He had been in the Navy for the summer. I had a postcard he had written me under my pillow and I read it every night and never folded it or let any of our other brothers touch it because it was mine and it had been sent to me from his ship and it was mine. He slouched in his chair, my older brother, tanned and weary and dismissive and friendly. I wanted to say something amusing to make him see me but no words came so I just sat there and stared. His eyes were closed. I knew nothing of what was happening, that soon he would quit the Navy, and so be eligible to be fed to the war, and that he would stand before the draft board and speak bluntly about his conviction that war was a criminally stupid way to solve problems, and that he would serve his nation during the war instead as a teacher and coach in a school in mountains so remote that many people there could not read or write. He seemed much taller and leaner since he had come back from the ship. I sat there staring. He must have felt my gaze because he opened his eyes and said something witty and dismissive and I laughed although I was not sure what he meant. I asked him if he wanted a sandwich and he said sure and I ran to get one. Sandwiches were a way of talking in our family. He was in the Navy and our dad had been in the Army. Our dad had been in not one but two wars. Our dad was proud of my brother when he left the Navy. He was proud of my brother when he stood before the draft board and spoke bluntly about war being a criminally stupid way to solve problems. That’s the kind of dad he is. He came home from work a few minutes later, after I had given my brother the sandwich and resumed staring at him from across the room. When our dad came through the front door he took his hat off with his left hand and brushed his son’s left shoulder with his right hand and my brother opened his eyes and reached his right hand up and touched my dad’s hand. You would think that you could never remember such a small gesture after so many years but I remember it as if it happened four seconds ago. You would think such a gesture would get lost but it didn’t and there is my father saying something with his hand to his son and my brother saying something back to his dad. Probably then there were words spoken but I don’t remember anything else spoken that day except that which was said without words. You would think not much can be said without words but it turns out probably the most articulate things we say are said without words. This is an amazing thing and the only way I can get close to explaining it is to say here, sit with me on the couch and watch as my tall quiet father comes through the front door and removes his fedora with his left hand and reaches down his right hand like a net and touches the mountainous ridge of my brother’s shoulder and my brother opens his eyes and reaches up his long tanned hand and touches our dad’s hand. See? There they are, reaching for each other again and again. They never stop. n Brian Doyle (bdoyle@up.edu) is the editor of this magazine, and the author most recently of a novella, Cat’s Foot.
PHOTO: TAMARA LISCHKA
WHAT WE SAY WITHOUT WORDS
F E A T U R E S 16 / Paper Cranes, by Betsy Johnson-Miller Sixty-seven summers ago, on the southern coast of Japan... 18 / Clinicals, photographs by Jeff Kennel The University’s nursing students at work at Portland’s Bud Clark Commons, Trinity Church, Troutdale School, Grant High, and Columbia Nursing Home.
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22 / To Lead Out, by Father Tom Doyle, C.S.C. What does the University expect from its students? Why are we different? 24 / The University’s Holy Cross Brothers, 1902-2012 Some of the gentle creative diligent calm efficient self-effacing gents whose quiet salt and holiness have added a subtle wonder to thousands of lives on The Bluff. page 18
30 / Doubts & Wonders, by Thomas Lynch “We are all fellow pilgrims, in search of a way home...” 34 / Levitating the Cat, by Laura Oliver On believing past any country where reason can go.
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4 / The late great Roger O. Doyle, 1939-2012 5 / The estimable Frederik Willem de Klerk, on The Bluff 6 / The Voices of Priests: Father John Donato, C.S.C. 7 / July 2, 2011, Anchorage, Alaska, 6:37 p.m. 8 / Virginia Asuncion, saint: Father Patrick Hannon, C.S.C. 9 / The noted American painter Annie Dillard 10 / The Fertile Ballet: Vatican astronomer George Coyne, S.J. 11 / The imaginative Alonso Quijano, better known as Don Quixote 12 / Mister Kelley’s Park: an essay by Ronault Catalani 13 / Living with students: Father Charlie McCoy, C.S.C. 14 / Sports, starring the excellent Pilot baseball team 15 / The University as the best bargain in Oregon, and etc. 37 / Lieutenant John Mangas ’41, United States Army Air Corps 48 / The late great Sister Jean Lenz, of the Franciscans C3 / The late great Sister Mary Griggs, of the Holy Names
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Cover: “The Gathering,” artist unknown. University biology professor Terry Favero was in Zambia several years ago, delivering gobs of soccer balls and equipment to children while assessing an AIDS prevention program there, when he saw and purchased this painting in a market. We thank the artist and the professor. We are all cousins in the Light, are we not?
Summer 2012: Vol. 31, No. 2 President: Rev. E. William Beauchamp, C.S.C. Founding Editor: John Soisson Editor: Brian Doyle Lofty Opinionated Amused Designers: Matt Erceg & Joseph Erceg ’55 Moaning Assistant Editors: Marc Covert ’93 & Amy Shelly Harrington ’95 Fitfully Contributing Editors: Louis Masson, Sue Säfve, Terry Favero, Mary Beebe Portland is published quarterly by the University of Portland. Copyright ©2012 by the University of Portland. All rights reserved. Editorial offices are located in Waldschmidt Hall, 5000 N. Willamette Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97203-5798. Telephone (503) 943-7202, fax (503) 943-7178, e-mail address: bdoyle@up.edu, Web site: http://www.up.edu/portland. Third-class postage paid at Portland, OR 97203. Canada Post International Publications Mail Product — Sales Agreement No. 40037899. Canadian Mail Distribution Information—Express Messenger International: PO Box 25058, London, Ontario, Canada N6C 6A8. Printed in the USA. Opinions expressed in Portland are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University administration. Postmaster: Send address changes to Portland, The University of Portland Magazine, 5000 N. Willamette Boulevard, Portland, OR 97203-5798.
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L E T T E R S IS THE UNIVERSITY WORTH IT? Editor’s note: We get lots of letters, which seems like a mark of a healthy magazine; we also get lots of How Dare You! letters, which also seems healthy. Some are unsigned, which usually means they are unpublishable, but this one leaped out at me, for its tart honesty, and for the absolutely pressing issue at its heart. Is an expensive University of Portland education worth the cost? First the anonymous letter: “In the Spring 2012 issue there are photos of smiling undergrads holding up numbers that show how deeply their parents are in debt for their ‘extraordinary’ education at the University. This is hugely offensive to me. If parents can afford to send their children to the University, then I say more power to them. But if they cannot afford it, then to incur such debt is a poor financial model. There is no nobility in the fact that these parents are underwater by over $10 million this year alone. No doubt many have plundered their retirement accounts, taken loans from financial institutions, or otherwise obtained funds they do not have — all for the sake of helping their beloved children savor this extraordinary educational possibility, as your text has it. And for good or ill, that is their choice. That is their right. However, for the University to promote its fundraising cam-
paign with this kind of debt glorification, and to hold it up as some sort of badge of honor, is tasteless and offensive. If parents choose to overextend themselves on such an extraordinarily expensive education, why should others be called upon to ‘ease debt [and ease] worried parental minds and worried students’ futures’? Worried parents and students would be better served by taking a reality check to consider what is appropriate and affordable, and to consider that an exorbitantly priced educational experience is not the guarantor of a happy or successful life. This ‘college at all costs’ mindset is damaging to both parents and students, and the fact that the University of Portland has chosen to use it as a promotional point is cynical and manipulative. As a parent I would not be proud that I put my family’s security in financial straits for the sake of a college education. And as a student I would not be proud that my family had done so. But apparently your smiling students do not feel the same.” And now some notes, from the editor, who also has a student at the University of Portland, and so is very interested indeed in the University’s bang for the buck. (a) The magazine, and the University, never “held up debt as a badge of honor,” or “glorified” debt. That’s silly. We ran those photographs
to show the incredible commitment students and their parents make to an education here. We thought readers perhaps did not realize how crucial financial aid is, how crucial Campaign gifts to financial aid are, or how the single biggest target of the University’s $175 million Rise Campaign is financial aid for students. So we showed photos of students who need readers’ help. We will do it again and again. (b) Bloomberg Businessweek named the University of Portland the top school in Oregon for “return on investment” in 2011. The magazine estimated that the 30year net return on investment for graduates of University of Portland is $779,600 —or approximately half a million more dollars than their education cost. (c) U.S. News & World Report magazine has ranked the University among the best fifteen educational bargains in the 17-state West for 15 years. There are more than 500 colleges and universities in the American West. (d) The number of applications for admission to the University has risen every year since 1994, even as its total annual price, without grants and scholarships, also rose, to today’s $45,000. Last year’s record number of applications for 800 freshman spots will be topped this year. Are those students and their parents rich enough to easily pay tuition and room and board on The Bluff? No: 95% of our students need some form of financial aid. Are parents all foolish enough to endanger their financial security to send their child to the University? Are they all deluded? I think not. I think perhaps they see the University as an educational bargain, a rare jewel, a unique chance, an extraordinary launch pad. (e) “An exorbitantly priced educational experience is not the guarantor of a happy
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LETTERS POLICY We are delighted by testy or tender letters. Send them to bdoyle@ up.edu. or successful life.” Absolutely true. But the University of Portland does not and never did guarantee a happy or successful life to its graduates. It can guarantee nothing of the sort. It can endeavor to offer a thorough, challenging, first-rate university education. It can make every effort to provide career preparation and training in the collegiate context. It can make every effort to protect its students from danger, stimulate their intellectual, cultural, and spiritual selves, and provide the best women’s soccer in America. That’s about all it can do. To pay for an education here is essentially to bet on the possibility that your son or daughter seizes the opportunities and makes the most of them. Many parents consider this a good bet. In this vein it is interesting to note that parents of students who have graduated have given the University a great deal of money in recent years, mostly for scholarships. These are gifts to the University after their child’s bills were paid. You think maybe they thought their child’s education on The Bluff was a good bargain? (f) An editor’s response to a letter, however angry the letter, ought to be courteous and short. I write bluntly and long here because I think the issue is at the very heart of the University’s life, work, and future. It is a conversation that will never end. But after twenty years of watching the University at work, and a year paying bills myself as a dad, some things should be said bluntly and at length. Brian Doyle, bdoyle@up.edu
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“I am sorry I ran from you,” writes the American genius Annie Dillard, to God. “I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge…once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.” Whew. See page 9. ¶ “I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority,” writes the deft E.B. White, born in summer, 1899. ¶ Pilot summer sports camps start in June: see portlandpilots.com for times and fees. ¶ The annual Alumni Reunion is June 21-24; among the events are the Athletic Hall of Fame induction dinner, a tour of Oregon wine country, two shows of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Gondoliers, a men’s basketball alumni game, a tour of gleaming awesome Shiley Engineering Hall, a Mass for the late great Father Pru (see page 47), and o dear so much else. Call 503.943.7328.
ARTS & LETTERS On stage in Hunt Theater June 1 through 24: Gilbert & Sullivan’s hilarious light opera The Gondoliers, as the annual Mock’s Crest show. Info: 503943-728, magohuntboxoffice@up.edu. Mock’s Crest founder Roger Doyle died on April 30, and the whole run is dedicated to his verve and humor and soaring love for the silly magic of G&S. See page 4. ¶ Hosted by the alumni office: evenings at Broadway musicals at Keller Auditorium
perb mock trial team coach: political science professor Steven Taylor ’78. ¶ Honored with the University’s four annual professorial lauds: German professor Laurie McLary as Teacher of the Year; political scientist Lauretta Frederking as Outstanding Scholar; engineering’s Mark Kennedy received the Culligan Medal for stellar service; and Father Art Wheeler earned the Deans’ Award, presented by fiat of the University’s seven deans for service across academic borders.
STUDENT LIFE Summer Session Two begins June 25; among the classes offered are ornithology, genetics, sustainability, taxes, finance, chemistry in art (!), neuroscience, Shakespeare (in Ashland), electrical circuits, Dante (in Rome), pathophysiology, fluid mechanics, astronomy, and moral heroes. ¶ Off to Germany, India, Spain, Austria, and England this summer: the University’s nine winners of Fulbright and Austrian-American grants. ¶ Starting their tenures this summer: new Beacon editor Elizabeth Tertadian ’13, returning Log editor Lauren Seynhaeve ’13, and KDUP Radio manager Jana Peters. ¶ August 27, 8:10 a.m.; the University’s 111th fall semester begins. August 31: last day to drop classes without penalty.
THE FACULTY Away to New Zealand next year, on the University’s twelfth Fulbright faculty grant in the last fifteen years: biologist Katie O’Reilly, to teach at the University of Auckland and study little blue penguins (really). ¶ Promoted from associate to full professors: education’s Karen Eifler, political science’s Gary Malecha, and theater’s Lawrence Larsen. ¶ Retiring this summer after 20 years as the University’s su-
THE UNIVERSITY On The Bluff August 1-5: the annual Mount Angel Summer Conference, now resident at the University every summer. Theme this year: resurrection! Keynote: the cheerful visionary poet and scholar Father Jeremy Driscoll, O.S.B. Among the faculty: University tennis coaches Aaron and Susie Gross, theologian Sister Kathleen McManus, O.P., and stainedglass master Bill Zuelke. See summerconferenceportland. org. ¶ The City of Portland will study the University’s new master plan proposals this summer: among the University’s plans for the next 20 years are a jump to 5,000 students (there are 3,200 undergrads and 700 grads this year) and development of the river campus with sports fields and a science lab complex. ¶ The University will sponsor not one but two August 31September 9 trips to Ireland this year, both including the Notre Dame/Navy football game in Dublin: a golf outing with University president Father Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C., and a cultural and religious tour around the island. For the golfing jaunt, contact Colin McGinty, 503.943.8005, mcginty@up.edu. For the bigger voyage, call Laurie Kelley, 503.943.8332, kelleyl@up.edu.
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FROM THE PAST Born on the cusp of summer in 1929, in Indiana: the late artist Ralph Angus McQuarrie, whose paintings of George Lucas’s Star Wars dreams allowed the movies to be made. Ralph was wounded in the Korean War, worked on many other movies, and even had a toy named for him: the rebel leader General McQuarrie, from The Empire Strikes Back. ¶ Born August 2, 1932 in Connemara, Ireland: Peter Seamus Lorcan O’Toole, one of the great actors of our time. Raised Catholic, he still reads Shakespeare’s sonnets daily, follows rugby and cricket, and recently told The New York Times that “No one can take Jesus away from me...” ¶ July 7, 1965: Economcs professor and Christie Hall pastoral resident Father Jim Fogarty, C.S.C., died after nearly forty years on The Bluff. Jim, annoyed that the University did not have a lovely standalone chapel, started a fund for just such a purpose; the Chapel of Christ the Teacher, built in 1986, is the result. Thanks, Jim. ¶ July 12, 1904: Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto is born in Chile. He is better known now as the glorious poet Pablo Neruda. ¶ July 13, 1964: Brother Ferdinand Moser, C.S.C., dies; he was, among many other campus duties, the man who planted camellias and sequoias on The Bluff (see page 29). ¶ July 27, 2006, Pat Chadwick dies. Testy, gentle, flinty, gentle, Pat taught nursing and was dean for thirty years. Tough cool lady. Do we welcome gifts in honor of her sweet flint? Sure. See rise.up.edu. ¶ Among summer’s saints: Arcadius, Abibas, Agapitus, Agilberta, Attracta, Armagillus, Badulfus, Arnulf of Eynesbury, Hippolytus of Porto, Resitutus, Pandwyna, and Moses the Black. You could not make this up. One of the joys of Catholicism is its open honesty about saints: there are many whom we recognize and sing, and far far far more that we will never know about; thus All Saints Day. Bless its soul.
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downtown. August 4 is Jersey Boys. Info: 503.943.7328. ¶ In Mago Hunt Theater July 26 through August 19: not one but two Jane Austen adaptations for the stage by alumnus Connor Kerns for his Quintessence theater company: Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. Info: 503.285.2826, info@qlit.org, www.qlit.org.
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He was a great man. He was funny and booming and exuberant and ebullient and impatient and avuncular. He taught music and singing and art and enjoyment here for nearly forty years. He died on April 30, shriveled by Lou Gehrig’s disease, but we’ll never forget Roger O. Doyle. “Why did we create it?” he said, when we asked why he and his beloved wife Kay created a music scholarship on The Bluff. “To open a door for a kid who might not find such a door. To add a little more musical joy to the world. We wanted to share that joy, invite the next generation into it, to assure that a kid would have a chance at it, you know? and how often can you make sure a kid has a chance at the thing that gives you such pleasure and pride?” Amen, brother. We will see you again, brother. Sing loud again now, brother. We will hear your laugh again and that will be a joy and a prayer, brother. We loved you, brother. Yes we did. Portland 4
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On campus in February: Frederik Willem de Klerk, the last president of a South Africa where human beings were legally categorized by their skin color. Against all his training and history he had the courage to free Nelson Mandela, dismantle apartheid, and allow all citizens to vote. “Peace does not fare well where poverty and deprivation reign,” he has said. “It does not flourish where there is ignorance and a lack of education and information. Repression, injustice, and exploitation are inimical with peace... Racial, class, and religious intolerance and prejudice are its mortal enemies...” Amen, Frederik.
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A PRIEST IS A WORK OF ART From Grace and Faith in Action: Portraits of Priestly Formation, a dissertation by Father John Donato, C.S.C., the University’s associate vice president for student affairs. In his book Donato listens to four pastors in particular; here are some of their remarks. Faced with tragedies, I try to remember that we are to be Godlike — to make ourselves vulnerable and bring forth life. That is the answer. That is the beauty of it all. * A priest is a work of art continually being created. * God has a vision for me and my adventure is to try and figure it out. * In serving others you will find joy. In giving you will receive. In loving you will be loved. So instead of waiting for God’s voice to come crashing down from the heavens, try serving. When you find where you are called, you will know it. * I don’t have to stare at the books as much, celebrating Mass now. I pray it more. I can lift my head up. I want to embody the Mass, from the heart. * I am trying to model God’s love. I am going to screw it up, and I tell people I screw it up all the time. * It’s more important, in a parish, that the parishioners feel empowered than that I be right. And it’s more important for me to love them than to be right. * The training of a priest and the life of a priest are very different. In real life as a priest I know that I am a sinner and so I don’t pretend to be perfect. * When you get married, that’s a big step, but when you have a baby, that’s a huge step. When you become a priest, that’s a big step, but when you become the pastor, that’s a huge step. * As pastor, I know I am not the be-all and end-all. But people really do hang on your words. So what words am I giving them?
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* For me, ministry starts with weakness. There is no real ministry until you say I am a human being, I am weak. Then you can say all are welcome here, this is a place where God loves broken, sinful human beings. * When I was a kid I was stealing stuff from a store and I felt so bad about it I went running across the open fields home to Mom, to confess that I had sinned. She embraced me with open arms and said, “It’s all right, we can make the situation better.” That is what God is like. * You need to take care of yourself, because no one else is going to…you will be chewed up and spit out by the work if you do not care for yourself, and you will lose what you wanted. You are giving, giving, giving, and where do you receive love? And where are you cared for? * I knew that celibacy was doable, that it would come down to friendships, to communion with folks, but I have friends who are wiped out by the loneliness. That’s the huge, huge issue. But I am hardwired independent. I don’t know if I’d be great being married to one person rather than to the many people of my congregation. * Everything I learned in the seminary was used up in my first few weeks of being a priest. * God is calling all creation back to communion. I want to live and die for that. * My study of science drew me closer to God. As I studied science, I tried to understand how things work and fit together and it became clear to me that there was something greater under all this, something better, bigger… * I suppose one of my sins is being a workaholic. You don’t know other priests like that? * It can be lonely at times. What do I do with that? I don’t medicate it. I don’t use drugs or alcohol. Neither do I dwell on it. I am not sure what I do. Sometimes, I guess, I just work. * The closest bond I have felt is with special needs folks. The people with disabilities; those are God’s people. * Portland 6
I have sensed the presence of God most in the Mass. Not often, but sometimes, and those are peak experiences. The light comes on. * There are more than seven sacraments. Sacrament is a way of life. Sacrament is the love of the Father for us. The Church is a sacrament of the love of Christ for us. I hope I am a sacrament, that somehow I make His love real, or flesh. * I am in authority; but it is the authority to serve. * The spiritual reality is the greater reality. I am sure of that. Life is about grace and mercy and prayer…. * After I was ordained, a priest I admire sat by me and said he had one important thing to tell me: don’t be a functionary. Now I know what he meant: do it for real. Don’t pretend. Either be real or get out. * I have a whole parish of dead people. I have a whole parish of people who aren’t here anymore. I buried them, but I am still their pastor. * The spirituality is in the doing. Faith is not between our ears. * I don’t think we are different from anybody else. I think priestly formation can be made too much of. People in the pews do what we do, sometimes better. * Somebody accused me last week of being a socialist because I was pushing for medical care for children. I said that’s not socialism, that’s Catholicism. * We are way too isolated. We also need to really answer to somebody. I think this is why we are in the trouble we are in. And bishops need somebody to be accountable to. Really accountable, unlike now. * I think Vatican II, with the renewal of the liturgy, made the priest, not the conduit of divine grace, but a man from the people. We are all in this together. I do not pour grace onto the people like water. In the Mass I walk from among the people to the altar. There’s no fence between me and the people, no fence between men and women. That was Jewish temple thinking. Now we all bask in the light of Jesus together… n
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July 2, 2011, Anchorage, Alaska, 6:37 p.m. — Maia Nolan-Partnow ’02: “There were exactly two people I needed to show up for my wedding: Seth the Groom, obviously, and Alicia Kaatz-Leonard Brady ’02, my soulmate, Mehling Hall duty partner, and matron of honor extraordinaire. This is the kind of woman who will fly all the way from Oregon to Alaska for your wedding, pay for your manicure, confiscate your cell phone and field all the last-minute text messages from your wedding coordinator, buy you a reindeer sausage on the streets of downtown Anchorage after you’ve had your hair done, make sure she snaps a pregame photo of you sipping Veuve Cliquot right before she zips you into your dress, and then literally dry your tears (of joy) when it’s all over. All while wearing heels, smiling for the photographer, and not once trying to talk you out of hyphenating your last name. In short, the all-star MOH for all time.” Summer 2012 7
HIS LOVE IS A RIVER By Father Patrick Hannon, C.S.C., ’82, who has been a theology professor on The Bluff, and switches to teaching literature this fall. Virginia Asuncion is 58 years old. She cleans, scrubs, mops, sweeps, dusts, and vacuums every inch of the third and fourth floors of Mehling Hall, the eight-story women’s residence hall at the University, Monday through Friday, from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. She does this 308 days a year. She has been doing this for forty years. That is 8,560 days cleaning two floors, four bathrooms, four shower rooms, and two kitchens, or 136,960 toilets, 68,480 bathroom sinks, 68,480 showers, and 17,170 kitchen sinks, floors, and countertops. Virginia Asuncion is a saint. She is an inch shorter a saint than she used to be, and her hair is salt and peppery now, and her back and knees ache a bit, but she is most certainly a saint. As a man who once spent a whole year scrubbing seminary toilets to a squeaky shine and wiping grime off of tiled shower walls and mopping tiled terrazzo bathroom floors and who is probably suffering from some kind of brain damage from inhaling chemical fumes, I think I am qualified to say that Virginia Asuncion is a saint. You have to be holy to do that kind of back-bending cartilage-scraping carpal-tunnel-syndroming kind of work day in and day out for forty years. I think it is mystic and heroic. I couldn’t do it. * I think Virginia Asuncion is the University of Portland’s Saint Martha — the kitchen hawk of the New Testament, the close friend of Jesus, sister to Mary, sister to Lazarus, and now patroness to all homemakers, dieticians, cooks, waiters, and housekeepers. Our Saint Martha. It fits. My image of Martha — gritty-grimed yet somehow sweetly scented, sleeves rolled up, sweat dripping off her brow, hands wrinkled by sink suds, the biceps of a boxer, the patience of a marathoner, a woman of both moxie and modesty — lines up nicely with my lasting impression of Virginia Asuncion, with one exception. I get the distinct impression
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from Saints Luke and John that Martha had a temper, and that she was not above telling Jesus exactly what she thought about timing as regards for example resurrecting her brother Lazarus, or his inexplicable tolerance for domestic truants such as her younger sister who hung on Jesus’ every word at Bethany and is not recorded as doing any of the housework. But Virginia Asuncion, says her twin sister Barbara, is imperturbable and indefatigable. Could Virginia be more of a saint than Saint Martha? * Virginia Asuncion has no illusion that her job is going to cure cancer or broker lasting peace in the Middle East or unlock the mystery of time travel. Virginia sees her job as a job.
It pays the bills. It has a medical and dental plan. She’s grateful that she has a job. I bet she wonders if she will ever be able to retire. She knows that she is a few paychecks from trouble. There are millions and millions of people in America and abroad like Virginia Asuncion. But forty years? Cleaning the same bathrooms, cleaning the same floors, fishing hair from the same drains? Forty years? There must be more here; there must be something deeper I am not seeing, or she is not telling me. Isn’t there? Then one day she tells me that she likes to write poetry. After a while she lets me look at a few poems. One is called “May God Bless Your Home.” Here is some of it. If you serve Him daily, He will be your Guide His love is like a river, Flowing deep and wide. So be a good example, Portland 8
And be willing to forgive. Children learn a lesson By the way they see you live. * Virginia still remembers the day she got her first job. She was five years old. “After breakfast,” she says, “our dad loaded us kids and our suitcases into the car and drove us to one of the migrant camps in Washington County, where we lived and worked with our mom for the summer picking beans and strawberries. We earned three cents a pound for the beans we collected and fifty cents for each strawberry flat.” During the school year she and her sister commuted on weekends in a church van from their home in Bonny Slope, a tiny town in the woods near the University, to Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood, where they scrubbed down guestrooms, flipped mattresses, and changed linens. It is 134 miles round trip from Bonny Slope to Mount Hood. Virginia and her sister were paid two dollars an hour. * In Virginia Asuncion’s cleaning cart in Mehling Hall: broom, mop, hand broom, dustpan, sponges, buckets, rags, disinfecting cleaner, glass cleaner, bleach, ammonia, metal cleaner, porcelain cleaner. She smiles when she shows me her cart. God only knows how many thousands of generations of microbes she has dispatched over the years. * And Virginia Asuncion volunteers at the Portland Rescue Mission, serving dinner, and drives elderly folks to church on Sundays, and dotes on her dog Levi, and collects porcelain and glass and ceramic angels, and puts them on shelves just to the right as you come in through her front door so they’re the first things you see, other than Levi, when you come home every night. * Virginia Asuncion would never describe herself as holy. I would. I think it has something to do with filling a room with cheer. I think it has something to do with not blowing a fuse when you see mud on the carpet. I think it has something to do with children, however tall those children are in Mehling. I think it has something to do with serving Him daily and elevating the menial to the meaningful and dignifying it, actually making it, whatever it is, holy work. His love is like a river, flowing deep and wide. n
JERRY HART
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OUR THANKS TO ALAN KENNISH / KEY WEST FINE ARTS
Okay, here’s a story. The photograph on top is the University’s orchestra in 1904, three years after the University was born on a September morning. We love this photograph with a deep and abiding love for its shaggy brave earnest welldressedness. We printed it happily across two pages in the December 2011 music issue of this magazine. Away across the country in Key West, one of the finest writers in American history fell in love with the photograph also, and painted it in her own sweet wild way, and sent the painting, and said sure you can print it, and here’s a summer painting also, prayers all around. Thank you, Annie Dillard. Editor
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THE FERTILE BALLET The brilliant and eloquent Father George Coyne, S.J., the Vatican’s astronomer for thirty years, was on campus recently talking about stars, brains, and God, as a guest of the University’s Garaventa Center for American Catholicism. A world-renowned astronomer, noted for his cheerfully sharp criticism of intelligent design, he is that rare soul with an asteroid named for him: 14429 Coyne. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. It contains about 100 billion galaxies, each of which contain, on average, 200 billion stars of an immense variety. As these stars live and die they provide the chemicals necessary for the evolution of life. How is a star born? A cloud of gas and dust, containing about a hundred to a thousand times the mass of our sun, is shocked by a supernova explosion, or something similar, and this causes interplay between the magnetic and gravity fields. The cloud begins to break up and chunks of the cloud begin to collapse. As gas collapses, it heats up; in this case the mass is so great that the internal temperature reaches millions of degrees and thus turns on a thermonuclear furnace; a star is born. Stars also die. A star at the end of its life can no longer sustain a thermonuclear furnace and so it can no longer resist gravity. It collapses for a final time, explodes, and expels its outer atmosphere to the universe. So stars are born and stars die. And as they die they spew star-matter out to the universe. If stars were not born and did not die, you and I would not be here. In order to get the chemical elements to make the human body, we had to have three generations of stars. A succeeding generation of stars is born out of the material that is spewed out by a previous generation. But notice that the second generation of stars is born out of material that was made in a thermonuclear furnace. The star lived by converting hydrogen to helium, helium to carbon, and if it were massive enough, carbon to oxygen, to nitrogen, all the way up to iron. As a star lives, it converts the lighter elements into the heavier elements. That is the way we get carbon and silicon and the other
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elements to make human hair and toe nails and everything else. To get the chemistry to make amoebas, we had to have stars regurgitating star material to the universe. * Do we need God to explain this? Is there a purpose behind this? As a scientist my answer is, I do not know. Science seeks natural explanations for natural events and is, therefore, completely neutral with respect to the existence or not of God. As a man, I truly believe that God is a person and revealed Himself personally to us. He did that in history, recorded, reported, remembered. God also reveals Himself in everything he made in Creation. But the only knowledge we can have of God, except for those who have mystical experiences, is indirect, and through analogy. And if that is the case, and if God does wish to tell us about Himself, then He is doing so in His creation. It follows, therefore, that I as a scientist and as a religious believer should try to use my science to see what science has to say about the God that I believe in. * I have never come to believe in God, nor do I think anyone has ever come to believe in God, by proving God's existence through anything like a scientific process. God is not found as the conclusion of a rational process like that. I believe in God because God gave himself to me. That was not a miracle. I had no private revelations. I challenged belief, I said who could ever believe that?, just like most of us do, and finally I concluded that it is not that it makes complete sense; the point is that it enriches my life. I have never come to love God or God to love me because of reasoning processes; I have come to love God because I have accepted the fact that he first made the move towards me. If that is the case, why should I not use science to try to get an idea of what God is like? It will be only a glimmer, a shadow, but it is the one thing I have to go on, and I have a passionate desire to want to know more about this being who loves me so much. And that is what I have done with my life. * God is also immanent in the universe. God made a universe that has within it a certain dynamism and thus participates in the very creativity of God. If they respect the results of modern science, religious believers must move away from the notion of a dictator Portland 10
God, a Newtonian God who made the universe as a watch that ticks along regularly. Perhaps God should be seen more as a parent. And indeed Scripture is very rich in this thought. It presents, indeed anthropomorphically, a God who gets angry, who disciplines, a God who nurtures the universe. Theologians already possess the concept of God's continuous creation. I think to explore modern science with this notion of continuous creation would be a very enriching experience for theologians and religious believers. God is working with the universe. The universe has a vitality of its own, like a child does. A parent must allow the child to grow into adulthood, to come to make its own choices, to go on its own way in life. * We do not reason our way to God, we do not earn our way to God, we do nothing to deserve God giving himself to us and calling us into the ranks of his chosen people. We can never drag God under our control. A kind of idolatry is always present in religious culture. And there is another aspect of idolatry, that of making God an explanation. We bring God in to try to explain things that we cannot otherwise explain. How did the universe begin? How did we come to be? There are many such questions, and idolatry latches onto God, especially if we do not have a good and reasonable scientific explanation. And there is an idolatry of science as well, marked by the effort, certainly in Western society, to try to establish the basis of religious belief on purely rationalistic grounds, or to make an idol of the scientific method itself. Some people think that science is the only way to true and certain knowledge. It’s nice to read poetry, they say, and nice to go to church, but when you want to know something, then the scientific method is the way to know it. But this is not science; this is scientism, making science a kind of god; again idolatry. Any practicing scientist will tell you that we struggle always to come to an understanding by using the hypothetical deductive method. We collect data, we revise our models, we do more computer calculations, we gather more data, and we find that they do not quite fit. We are always struggling to come to a more complete and more certain knowledge. But we do not have it. We do not possess the truth; we hope that we are making our way towards the truth. n
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On campus in March, sort of: the Spanish gentleman Alonso Quixano, better known to history as Don Quixote, whose remarkable adventures were recorded in Miguel Cervantes’ glorious novel of 1615. The University sponsored an epic conference on the Don as hero; among the topics were his influence on film and graphic novels, censorship of the book over the years, the vast amount of art he inspired, and influence in Brazil and China, among much else. This lovely painting is by Stan Prokopenko; for more of his work see stanprokopenko.com. Summer 2012 11
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MR KELLEY’S POINT From the essay “Rivers of Rain, Rivers of Life,” by Ronault Catalani, in the Portland magazine The Bear Deluxe. Catalani is an essayist for The Asian Reporter and the author of the book Counter Culture; Kelley Point Park is the tip of the peninsula on which the University has lived for 110 years. There’s this hand of fertile land, tapering quickly into a thin finger of sand, before ending in a dotted line of bony pier poles driven crooked into our river’s rocky bottom — that’s it, that’s all marking the extraordinary moment two grand matriarchs, Rivers Willamette and Columbia, meet. A world of confluence happens here. Billions of cubic feet of cold Pacific rain, running off stubborn windward massif, sprinting in determined rivulets, joining as agitated streams, cascade into our two patient rivers. Rivers of rain and rivers of life, silently sending all that back out to sea. And all this modestly passes by this auspicious place. Always has. Also for longer, much longer than human memory, billions of tons of elemental carbons locked into the urgent bones of single-minded chinook and coho and sockeye have coursed the other way—straight up these same rivers and streams. Sure they have. There is a roadside sign, a little larger than an aluminum cookie sheet, on North Marine Drive. Kelley Point Park, it says. I go there, first thing Saturday mornings, at the exhausted end of long weeks. There’s usually another car, maybe two. The park and picnic tables are quiet. I walk Willamette’s shore, silt as thick and rich as chocolate. River rocks here are rounded by water and time, smoothed by this fine sand. They are a treasure of variety. Some stones are sedimentary, compressed under layer after layer of inert and living refuse. Some are evidence of glaciers long ago withdrawn. Some rocks are igneous, formed when earth’s crust cracked wide and spilled them out. Then also sculpted by the slow will of water and wind and time. Whether compressed or volcanic, rocks are rocks, and no man or boy can resist what nature, maybe not so long ago, set inside these bones. I
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have to throw one. I sweep up a winner, round as a hen’s egg, and heave him as hard as I can. Then another and another, then four or six or eight more. Each sates that archaic need with a clear slap of our river’s big bright face. For ten thousand years families have fished here, have cooked and prayed here. Lived and loved here, this grand intersection of waters. These shores are as sacred as any on our planet’s pretty face. Sure they are. You can feel it in your marrow, by walking quietly here. Sure you can. I love rivers. I have followed the Nile upstream from ancient Alexandria’s delta to Khartoum’s junctions of the Blue and White Niles. I have meandered downstream with Mae Kong, Mother River, along her rich-rich rice borderlands of the Lao and Thai Kingdoms, through elegant Kampuchea and vigorous Vietnam, where she finally finds the South China Sea. And when I was only a boy, I sat my skinny bhawa on a sodden wooden underside of a beached boat, at another convergence of two other alluvial matriarchs. Rivers Yamuna and Ganga. Ganga Ma, those pilgrims on these two rivers’ shores call her. Mother Ganges. New England teacher and surveyor Hall Jackson Kelley visited here 176 years ago. During those two weeks, Mr. Kelley made a lot of noise about raising a city at the two rivers’ junction, but he didn’t have the money or the friends or the time. Then he got sick and was treated rudely and was
sent packing by Hudson’s Bay Company boss John McLoughlin. Back East, Mr. Kelley wrote about this neighborhood — without mentioning, as was the habit then and now, the greater Chinook nation. That other stream of human experience, already living and loving here. Ninety-one years later, somebody proposed naming the point after him. No one can say exactly why. And I wonder: Could Hall Jackson Kelley have recited the names of any of the River Columbia’s one hundred children? The Camas and Clatsop, the Clackamas and Klickitat? Could he see the lost salmon that no longer run now where they ran for millennia? Could he see what will become of all of us who now share these narrow river shores? As elder uncle fishermen cast their silent lures in the Columbia, as brown dads sip scalding soup on bleached logs between wives and kids on the Willamette, the rivers braid and roll west — west out to Lu’at Ibu, as my island elders say. Out to Mother Sea. Out where the tallest waves froth into mist, which thickens and lifts into rain-laden overcast swiftly blown by those same Chinook winds straight back into that perpetual cycle that makes the rivers roll, passing and passing and passing this special place. Our point. Not so much Mister Kelley’s Point. Maybe we best think longer about how we name wondrous places. Maybe names are holy ways to share our revered places. Maybe so. n
The Point, by Portland artist Bill Sharp. See billsharp.wordpress.com.
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THE GUEST AT THE DOOR The witty and gracious Father Charlie McCoy, C.S.C., is a mathematics professor, pastoral resident in Ville Maria hall, and a bloggist for the Holy Cross order: see vocation.nd.edu. Excerpts: Every year, the Villa Maria retreat begins with a game called “What’s in the Bag?” Each participant brings “a small item that has significance for you, but don’t show or tell anyone else what you’re bringing.” When we arrive at the retreat house, each man discreetly puts his item into a pillowcase. Then we form a large circle and the game begins. Each man pulls out an item other than his own. He gets one guess at whose it is; if he’s wrong, the group as a whole makes a consensus guess. If both guesses are wrong, the mystery man stands up and claims his item, and then explains to the group why his chosen item is so important to him. He then pulls the next item out of the bag, and so on. I love this game for two reasons. First, it reveals to the guys on the retreat how well they already know each other. Out of 34 retreatants this year, we probably guessed 25 items correctly. Second, and far more important, I am amazed year after year at some of the profound things we get to learn about one another. And often, these incredible lessons come from some fairly unimpressive items. For example, two years ago, an engineer-
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ing student brought a small set of pocket tools. I expected him to offer an obvious explanation about how he liked to fix things, and that’s why he was an engineer; instead, he told us about his adoptive father, who worked with him on projects in the garage and left him this tool collection before recently passing away. Last year, a junior placed in the bag a simple crucifix on a chain. He recounted how he had lost this crucifix time and time again, only to have it mysteriously return to him; it was a symbol, he said, of God’s never-failing love to find us when we are lost. And this year, a freshman contributed a hot pink shoelace. After he and all of us laughed at its garish, girly quality, he told the story of his high school basketball teammate whose mom had died of breast cancer; as a show of support, they all wore pink shoelaces for that season, and he has chosen to maintain the tradition in her memory. So our hall retreat, the first “adult” retreat for these young men, opens with something that’s little more than kindergarten show and tell, with a twist; but each year, it reveals spiritual mysteries, mysteries deeper than most of what they hear in the more formal retreat talks, or even — dare I say it — in my retreat Mass homily. And so, in this simple kids’ game, our retreat embodies Jesus’ beautiful prayer: I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. * As a professor and a pastoral resident, my official responsibilities are obvi-
Baptism of Twilight Pink sky behind pines as we sit by the old Metolius watching bats. Soon they start diving a bit close, at least for me, and so we go inside and kneel at the low window that overlooks the river. We’ll watch from here, thanks, elbows on the sill, shoulders touching, in the still house with summernight air balming in all around, holding us here at this sudden altar.
The two of us married this long, my lord. Look at us. Listening to water, smelling that dark silver flow. Batcrazy worship, is what it is, and we’d have it no other way. Here in stillness side by side, a baptism of twilight in this dimming church of now. Mark Pomeroy ’ 92
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ously to offer the best mathematics education I can provide to my students, and to offer the sacraments and guidance to the residents of my hall. I certainly do put great energy into these works, but I am consistently amazed at how some of the most significant experiences I have with students fall outside of these parameters. For instance, I just got a note from a student asking for a recommendation for postgrad study overseas. “My performance in your calculus class was poor,” he said, “but I feel like you know what kind of student and person I am inside and outside the classroom.” And he was correct on all counts. His performance in my class was mediocre at best, he didn’t live in my hall, and he never attended a Mass I said or came to me for confession. Nevertheless, through just a few long informal conversations over two years, he shared so much about his values, his faith, and his dreams that I probably do know more about what kind of person he is than any of his other professors. It was easy for me to write him a very good recommendation. I am reminded of the sower and the seed. I like to imagine that the sower in this parable scatters the seed as he does, not because he’s foolish, not because he’s wildly optimistic, but because he’s honest enough to know that he can’t tell where the seed will find the best reception. I know the feeling. I sow the fields of my classroom and my dorm chapel, but sometimes the most fertile soil is found in unexpected places. * I haven’t yet developed the important pastoral habit of leaving the doors to my apartment and my office open or ajar when I’m around; I forget that the guys in the hall or the students in my classes might be too intimidated to knock if my door is closed. (Plus, it doesn’t help that the dorm doesn’t always smell great.) But I am learning. The other night I left my door cracked about a tenth of an inch, and at midnight, to my amazement, a student knocked and came in. He had very serious matters to discuss, and I was delighted he had come to me; and when he left I remembered the Book of Revelation: Behold, says Jesus, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice, and opens the door, I will dine with him and he with me. For such a Guest we just need to leave our doors open a tiny bit. That is all He requires to enter. n
O N S P O R T S Joining the West Coast Conference in 2013: the oldest university in California, the University of the Pacific (1851), bringing the league to ten teams. The Tigers, from Stockton, are notably good at basketball. On Campus in February: former Seattle Mariners catcher Dan Wilson, speaking at the annual baseball fundraising dinner, and Greg Rybarczyk, creator of ESPN’s home run tracker software, which gauges velocity, trajectory, wind, and other factors to make distance estimates for taters. The New Athletic Director is Scott Leykam, succeeding Larry Williams, who left for Marquette. Leykam ran the West Coast Conference’s television, marketing, digital media, sponsorships, branding, and scheduling; he also has been a sportswriter, fundraiser for Stanford University athletics (where gifts went up 222% in his time), and sports journalism professor at Saint Mary’s College. Men’s Basketball Two new faces for the Pilots this fall: 6' 4'' guard Bryce Pressley, from Jesuit High in Sacramento, and 6' 7'' forward Jake Ehlers from Corvallis High. Pressley is a smooth all-round talent (14 points, 8 boards, 3 assists, 2 steals, 2 blocks per game) whose dad is former Villanova and NBA player Harold Pressley; Ehlers, twice the
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Oregon 5A player of the year, led the Spartans to two state titles. Notably back for the young Pilots are forwards Ryan Nicholas (11 points and 8 rebounds a game) and rising star Kevin Bailey (10 points per game). Baseball The Pilots were 23-16 at presstime. Senior pitcher Kyle Kraus earned his 26th career win, setting a University record; Chris Sperry earned his 300th win in 15 years as coach, and is now second all-time behind only Joe Etzel’s 378. Turner Gill, the Pride of Madras High, led the batting at .299. Women’s Basketball Off to China this summer with a college all-star team: new graduates Natalie Day and ReZina TecleMariam, “as good players and young women as we have ever had on The Bluff,” said coach Jim Sollars. Day will also be playing for the Virgin Islands in the Olympic Trials. Notably back for the Pilots when they open this fall: guards Kari Luttinen (all-WCC) and Alexis Byrd. Sollars, by the way, now has 363 career wins, by far the most in WCC women’s basketball history. Women’s Soccer In Panama this spring with the American Under-20 national team: striker Micaela Cappelle. The Yanks won that tournament and will play for the U-20 World Cup title in Japan this summer. ¶ The Oregon Female Professional Athlete of the Year: alumna Megan Rapinoe, star of the USA Women’s World Cup
One idea for the new river campus – a new Pilot baseball field. Note that a titanic home run to right center (395 feet) would actually land in what would be fun to name Beauchamp Bay. The University is actively seeking Campaign gifts for the field – call Colin McGinty at 503.943.8005, mcginty@up.edu.
team last summer. Rapinoe and Canada’s Sophie Schmidt and Christine Sinclair will be in London this summer for the Olympics. ¶ The Pilots play an incredible schedule this fall: home games include North Carolina (August 17), Notre Dame (September 9), and BYU (October 18), and USC and Santa Clara on the road. Whew. See portlandpilots for tickets and times. Men’s Soccer Among the seven new Pilots this fall: all-Oregonians Dustin Munger from McMinnville High, Hugo Rhoads from West Linn, Jaime Velsaco from Westview, and Connor Wear from Wilson. The Pilots open play in August; among the home games are Wisconsin (September 2) and Gonzaga (September 26). Track & Field Highlights of a busy outdoor track season: of the eight Pilots who ran in the Stanford Invitational, seven set personal records, six in the 5000 meters (including Olympic steeplechase hopeful Jared Basset) and Julia Fonk in the 1500m. Basset, all-WCC in cross country, is from Coos Bay, Oregon, home of the greatest American runner ever. Rowing Highlights of the Pilots’ first spring season ever: the christening of two new boats (the eight-seat shell as The Father Bill, saluting University president Fr. Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C., and the four-seat shell as The Al and Sue Corrado in honor of the gentle regents and benefactors); sophomore Mia Tarte being named all-WCC; wins by all four boats at a regatta at Dexter Lake; and a victory over the Washington Huskies, always fun to say. Tennis Earning all-WCC honors this spring for the men were Geoff Hernandez, Michel Hu Kwo, and Alex Ferrero; for the women, Valeska Hoath and freshman Nastya Polyakova were all-stars. We also ought to honor married coaches Aaron Gross (15 years coaching the men) and Susie Campbell-Gross (19 years coaching the women) for stalwart and patient teaching over many years. We do not thank coaches enough, it sometimes seems. Volleyball Back for the Pilots this fall is all-WCC hitter Ariel Usher, who averaged 10 kills a match and piled up 24 in one game against San Francisco; new faces include All-American transfer Beth Carey, originally from Adelaide, where she captained the Australian national junior team. PORTLANDPILOTS.COM
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B R I E F LY The Best College Bargain in Oregon? The University of Portland, says Bloomberg Businessweek, which again named the University best in state for “return on investment.” The magazine estimates that the 30-year net return on investment for University of Portland students is 8.6 percent, more than twice the national average. ¶ The University was also named one of most environmentally responsible colleges in North America by The Princeton Review, which gauges commitment to sustainability in academic offerings, campus infrastructure, activities, and career preparation. ¶ And we were named for the fifth time to the President’s Community Service Honor Roll; University students donated 164,000 hours of service last year, or 6,830 days, or more than 18 years. Whew. Tuition Freedom Day on campus was March 27 this year: the date when the average student’s tuition “runs out” and the rest of the school year is covered by gifts from donors, grants, and endowment income. Some 20% of the cost of an education on The Bluff is covered by funds other than tuition dollars; students spent the day writing notes to donors and filming clips to say thanks. Great day, fueled by 2,500 sugar bombs from Portland’s famous VooDoo Doughnuts. The biggest single target for the University’s Rise Campaign is student scholarships; see rise.up.edu. ¶ Tuition, by the way, crawled up 4.4% for next year, to $35,120; room and board also went up 4.9%, bringing the total package for students to about $45,000. Wow. Are we worth that? See page 2. The Rise Campaign, announced 18 months ago with a $175 million target, has raised a startling $125 million so far; among recent gifts are $100,000 from the Hearst Foundation for undergraduate research; $110,000 for scholarships from Leonard and Brenda Aplet, parents of an alumna and a student (gifts from parents, cool); $670,000 for scholarships from the late Francis Lang ’52, who left the University his house and 65 acres in Molalla (gifts of wood and soil, cool); $230,000 from the Wiegand Foundation for a learning lab in the massively renovated Clark Library (which reopens in 2013), and $500,000 for the MBA program and men’s basketball from Nancy and Andy Bryant (split gifts, cool).
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Faculty Feats Biology professor Katie O’Reilly became the first woman in University history to earn a Fulbright to teach and study abroad; Her Katieness is off to the University of Auckland in New Zealand next year to teach conservation ecology and study blue penguins. Ten other University professors have earned Fulbrights in recent years, to Chiles, China, Cyprus,Ethiopia, France, Jordan, Moldovia, Peru, and Poland. Whew. ¶ Called back to the Archdiocese of Seattle to run its schools: Father Stephen Rowan, after five years as the University’s erudite and witty arts and sciences dean. A loss; Steve is a pithy and graceful soul. ¶ Also retiring from The Bluff after longer glorious careers: Jill Hoddick, Ed Bowen, and Judith Montgomery of the fine arts department, business’s Jack Kondrasuk, and theology’s exuberant Father Dick Rutherford, C.S.C. The iUrban Teen Tech Summit, hosted by the University, was a wild all-day kick on campus in April: mobile apps, gaming, start-ups, cybersecurity, robotics, and speeches by Tuskegee Airman Flaps Berry and Nike’s Natalie Kerrigan. ¶ On campus this October 22: the great Sister Helen Prejean, C.S.J., giving a free talk, everyone welcome. Student Feats The Beacon student
newspaper won an award for the best editorials among all papers in the Northwest; they are written primarily by Caitlin Yilek ’12, who was thrilled. ¶ A startling 33% of the Class of 2012 studied abroad during their University careers; best-traveled were business majors (49% studied abroad) and least were engineers (15%). ¶ 230 business students swept University neighbor St Johns in March — literally. The annual project including tree planting, graffiti editing, ivy pulls, garbage-vanishing, and yes, sweeping the village green. Recent projects under the business school’s P4 aegis featured painting local elementary schools. ¶ The University’s nine dorms competed against each other this year to see which could cut energy use the most: Christie, down 24%, was the winner, followed by Mehling (22%) and Villa Maria (16%). The Annual $100,000 Challenge was won by mechanical engineering students Amy Flora, Shawn Ell, and Jared Johnston, whose company, Phantom Orthopedics, designed a new insert for knee replacements. The idea stemmed from the group’s senior design project in the Shiley School of Engineering. For-profit Challenge finalists are eligible to receive up to $50,000 in investment and up to $50,000 in service support.
The University lost a great cheerful gentle soul in April when the legendary Father Pru died at age 91. Born in Wisconsin, young Chester Prusynski served in the Army during the Second World War and was skiing in Utah when he realized he could not run away from his vocation; he skied down the mountain and went right to the seminary. Arriving on The Bluff in 1964, he taught accounting and served as a regent, but his great love was to be chaplain at large to all students, especially Pilot student-athletes. What a decent, gregarious, generous soul. Do we have a Pru Scholarship to sing the man? Of course we do. Call Colin McGinty, 503.943.8005.
PHOTO: DAVID PICKETT
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Sixty-seven summers ago... By Betsy Johnson-Miller
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visited Dachau as a college student studying abroad. Photographs, ovens, fences, and slaughter surrounded me, but so did grass and flowers and birds. The contrast was unsettling; how much death and destruction those few acres had witnessed, yet how alive and beautiful they were, later. I experience the same feeling in Hiroshima. People, bicycles, buses — Hiroshima crawls with life. It seems impossible that a monstrous cloud had ever hovered over it. But a building in a state of undress bears witness. It is only bare beams. A placard explains that the Atomic Dome is one of the few buildings near the hypocenter to have survived. The heat from the explosion burned the copper off the beams much the way skin was seared off human bodies. Apparently the city engaged in a long debate about what to do with this building. Many wanted it torn down; it was too disturbing a reminder standing there, naked like that. But others fought for its preservation, as a testament to what had happened that day. Testify it does. The peace museum in Hiroshima contains two wings. The first offers a surprisingly balanced presentation of facts that led up to the bombing. Maps show where Japan had invaded; graphs contain the numbers of Chinese and Koreans that the Japanese had murdered, often brutally; a narrative describes the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and hedges nothing. What takes up the most space in this part of the museum are two models in the middle of the room. The first shows what Hiroshima looked like before the bomb, with its buildings and streets, its places where lives had been lived, babies born and meals made. The second model, the one with the red
Before we step into the second wing of the peace museum, we pass through a small gift shop. There are origami paper cranes for sale. Even before we knew we were going to Japan, my daughter had read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. It’s about a young Japanese girl whose dream is to run on the junior high track team; instead, “the atom bomb disease,” or leukemia, strikes her. While in the hospital, Sadako’s best friend brings her a folded crane made out of gold paper and reminds her of the legend that a sick person who folds a thousand paper cranes will be granted her wish to get healthy again by the gods. Sadako made 644 paper cranes before she died; her classmates made the remainder, and so she was buried with a thousand paper cranes. According to the epilogue of the book, some of Sadako’s friends and other children began to dream of building a monument to the girl, and in 1958, a statue of her was erected outside the peace museum near the eternal flame for peace. Sadako’s statue holds a large angular crane. I go up to the counter and buy paper cranes for my children to hang on Sadako’s statue. The second wing of the museum is filled with stories. Here the glass cases hold lunch boxes, shredded school uniforms, even fingernails mothers kept from children who were lost. I see the famous steps where a living, breathing person had instantly been reduced to an everlasting shadow, a slight darkening on granite. Through the headset I am wearing, I hear how one mother sent her daughter to school that day, even though the daughter felt sick. The mother told her daughter it was her duty to go to school. She could not disappoint Japan, so the little girl trotted off to a school that was dead center of the blast. Toward the end of this side of the museum, I see several glass cases dedicated to telling the story of Sadako — how she really was the fastest runner at her school, how she bloated up because of the medicine she was on, how she was buried in a beautiful silk kimono her mother bought for her Summer 2012 17
just before she died. The last picture of Sadako shows her in her coffin with the folded cranes, those symbols of hope and prayer, all around her body. Because of the tears and the fistaround-heart feeling in my chest, I turn away from the glass cases and look around the room. At least three dozen school children — all in brightly colored matching caps — carry notebooks around, pointing and exclaiming. Then they scribble something down and move on and repeat. My children, who are tall and not wearing caps, are easy to spot over this neon sea of bobbing heads. My daughter has her hands clasped in front of her and her shoulders round a little. As she moves from glass case to glass case, she carries her body the same way she did at my father’s funeral. Quick nervous movements are my son’s way of telling me he is disturbed. His eyes dart; his body turns toward, then away; he rubs his fingers along the piece of skin between his mouth and his nose. I walk down a hall, hand my headset back, and sit to wait for everyone else to finish. On the wall in front of me I see paintings done by survivors. Many are crude and all are relentless: bodies draped on a well, flesh hanging like rags, red everywhere. I turn from the paintings when I hear weeping. A Japanese girl, perhaps ten or eleven years old, has stepped out of the exhibit and cannot stop sobbing. It occurs to me that everyone who walks out the door should be sobbing. Remember the scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, the one where Dill has to rush from the courtroom because he is so upset by how Tom Robinson is being treated? Outside, he and Scout meet up with the town drunk, Dolphus Raymond. Dolphus says to Dill, just give it some time. Pretty soon he won’t be upset by injustice at all. We head to the train station, to return to Tokyo. Everyone is silent. The museum has rendered us mute. Until we pass a flower bed: Look, says my daughter, purple roses. They look like a bed of paper cranes, says my son. They are beautiful, and after everything we witnessed in the museum, these flowers invite us to pause, to remember that life goes on. For some. n Betsy Johnson-Miller teaches writing at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in Minnesota.This essay is drawn from a longer essay called “A Bed of Paper Cranes,” truncated with Betsy’s cheerful acquiescence.
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
PAPER CRANES
ball representing the fire of the bomb hanging over it, looks like a giant had crushed everything to dust and then done a very poor job of sweeping the mess away. The city is there, and then not there. I think about a man we saw sitting outside on a milk crate; he had a sign around his neck that read “In-utero survivor.” How could his mother, how could anyone, have survived?
Clinicals Photographs by Jeff Kennel
H
ere’s a most amazing run of numbers. Every year 200 University nursing students invest 90 hours of personal and professional service in some 60 agencies in Oregon and Washington, for a total of nearly 20,000 hours of energetic creative compassionate gentle funny crucial service to 10,000 of their fellow citizens. Let us write the words ten thousand fellow citizens again, in amazement. “These are vulnerable, underserved populations,” says nursing professor Diane Vines, who supervises the clinical placements. “The students make home visits to single occupancy hotels. They take blood presures and weights in housing projects. They ask people to bring all their medications in a brown bag and work with the providers who prescribed the medications on any duplicative meds or meds that contradict one another or how to decrease side effects of the meds. They work in early headstart programs to do screenings for lead and other toxins. They work in senior centers with people with chronic diseases such as diabetes on the selfcare of their disease. They work with and visit mentally ill clients to try to keep them on their medications and be sure they are keeping their appointments...
“...They work with parish nurses to develop and conduct screening programs, accompany parishioners to appointments, and follow-up on the instructions given. They advocate for a law or policy change that will benefit the vulnerable community. They seek funding for projects such as the one to buy shower shoes for the homeless men in the Clark Center so they can prevent the spread of athlete’s foot. They work on education classes for women in a shelter for domestic violence victims with the goal of encouraging independence from the abusers. They work with migrant workers on how to maintain the health of the workers and their families from such threats as pesticide poisoning and injuries. They work side by side with health promotores in the Latino communities to promote healthy behaviors. They teach nutrition classes in the schools. They teach healthy behaviors to children in transitional housing. They work on health promotion with children who are blind. They work with prisoners in jails and prisons on healthy lifestyles after discharge. They work with the homeless people served by Bud Clark Commons to get tuberculosis tests so they can enter a shelter and give flu shots and other vaccinations to many homeless people who would not otherwise be protected. And more and more and more and more.” n Wow. Think maybe you can make a Rise Campaign gift to help out these students? Anything and everything helps – there are all sorts of funds and scholarships and project grants, or you can dream your own target, like here’s a gift for nursing students who help kids in shelters laugh, which they probably hardly ever get to do. See rise.up.edu, or call Diane Dickey, 503.943.8130, dickey@up.edu.
TO LEAD OUT
What does the University of Portland expect from its students? What, finally, is the point of a Holy Cross education? By Father Tom Doyle, C.S.C.
W
hen I served as a hall rector at a Congregation of Holy Cross university, some years ago, I remember the mother of one freshman in particular. No mother occupied more of my time during orientation. She would sneak away from her husband and son to ask me detailed questions making sure she had taken care of every foreseeable need. She wanted to be sure I knew what she knew: that her son was special. And he was — just like the other 96 freshmen who were moving into our hall. She sobbed in my presence before they left on Sunday afternoon. She continued to call me, almost daily, through the first weeks and months of school: questions about professors, roommates, whether he was eating enough, complaints that he wasn’t calling enough, that he was calling too much. Her calls diminished after fall break and her son made it through the semester just fine; and we will come back to her later. The word education comes from the combining of two Latin words, ex and ducere. The literal translation means to draw or lead out. In a secular sense, a Holy Cross education provides you with content and skill. But more importantly, and uniquely, a Holy Cross education extracts personal qualities from you and draws you away from conventional thinking, and leads you from a comfortable being. This year your professors, your
rector, your resident assistant, your coach, the campus minister, your lab assistant, the librarian, your ROTC commander, the man who empties the trash in your hall — they will all educate you. They will draw out and cultivate seeds of potential in you that have been planted by God, your families, your teachers. Everyone here is committed to the ideas of the Congregation’s founder, Blessed Basil Moreau, who wrote that “education is the art of helping young people come to completeness.” But we find ourselves at a cultural clash. Our culture would have us believe that college is a kind of huge time-out, where anything goes after leaving the structure of home but before you enter the real world of grownups; a time of moral indifference, no restraints, no consequences, and unfettered freedom! Our culture would suggest that in college you can drink, have sex, lie, cheat, and fight to your heart’s content, that you can have Fruit Loops and french fries for every single meal, that you’re free to never make your bed or change your sheets, that you are free to take a road trip anytime and anywhere you want, that you are free to party all night and sleep all day, including right through your classes. But a Holy Cross university is not like that. A Holy Cross university has what some would call antiquated traditions, policies, and rules, to wit: We “restrict your freedom” when we insist that you, a first-year student, live in a dormitory, with someone you have never met before. We allocate you about 100 square feet of living space per person, and expect you to make it work with your roommate; it is extremely rare that we will move you from your room and roommate mid-year, because we believe that when challenges and differences arise between people, the more important lesson is to work through difficulties. We “limit your freedom” with a strict policy of visitation hours, known as parietals, because we believe that respect for the others with whom you share space requires that the room must be a sanctuary for its members, a place to come to rest, a refuge. We prohibit violence against another person, even if some students call initiations a tradition, even if it’s only verbal, and especially if it’s directed at someone because of heritage, creed, or sexual orientation. We believe that all people are holy, period, and that all people are equally holy, period. We require you to live by an academic code of honor. We insist that you Portland 22
take responsible action when you are aware of another person violating that code. Are you your brother’s keeper? At a Holy Cross university, yes. We “impair your freedom” because intoxication and drug use here is unacceptable, no matter what your age. I can tell you from experience and from statistics that you are far more likely to find yourself in a serious disciplinary situation when you make other poor decisions after consuming alcohol and drugs, and that when you find yourself in that circumstance, “I was drunk” neither mitigates nor excuses behavior. We “impair your freedom” when we insist that sexuality is a gift from God and that the only free and appropriate context for sexual union is in the context of marriage and permanent loving commitment. So has the Holy Cross university taken so many freedoms away that we are robbing you of a truly authentic college experience? Well — we don’t think so. We define freedom not as the absence of restriction but as the liberty of principled action. We embrace freedom as “the glory of God is the human being fully alive,” as Saint Irenaeus said. Here you are free to inquire about both faith and reason, and savor the ways they are both about wonder, not about obviating each other. You are free to be emotionally and spiritually vulnerable. You are free to tell the truth, even when it’s hard, and especially when you’ve made a mistake. You are free to take the idea of honor seriously. You are free to push past selfish pleasure toward wisdom. You are free to know your professors and have them know you as a person. You are free to expand your education with lectures, plays, and concerts. You are free to take the idea of character seriously. You are free to consider that every brick in every building, every program, every scholarship dollar, every office hour set aside by a professor, every sleepless night by your rector, is a gift from the Congregation of Holy Cross and from thousands of brave and hardworking men and women over many years to make your education possible, your life wider and deeper, your existence actually and truly free, rather than notable merely for its absence of restriction. Do we have exceptionally high expectations for you? Yes. Do we place boundaries that other people or universities would describe as a limiting of your freedom? Yes. But remember why we do so; because we assume that you came here because our proposi-
Let me return to the freshman I began
with, whose mother called me every day for the first few weeks of school. He dropped his physics course before he failed it. He changed his major twice. He had more than one conversation with me about appropriate alcohol use. He was elected hall president. He was named a resident assistant. He graduated with honors. But what I most remember is that on his last day here, just after he graduated, he and his mother came to say goodbye to me. We told stories of the last four years, we tried to put them in perspective, and his mother used all the kleenex I had. We hugged each other, I blessed them, and I went to
my window to watch them walk away. I could see the mother had her face buried in her hands. Her shoulders were heaving from weeping. And at the very moment that I swore her knees were about to buckle, her son put his arm around his mother’s waist, pulled her close, and virtually carried her to the waiting car. Ex ducere, to lead out of. Remember that. n Father Tom Doyle, C.S.C., was the University of Portland’s vice president from 2004 to 2010; he was most recently vice president for students affairs at the University of Notre Dame.
NORMAN ROCKWELL, BREAKING HOME TIES ILLUSTRATION ©SEPS LICENSED BY CURTIS LICENSING, INDIANAPOLIS, IN. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
tion for the definition and purposes of freedom resonate with your own deepest-held values. We believe, as I am sure you do, that it is a lie that freedom entails no limits and no responsibilities. We believe, as I am sure you do, that the lack or absence of commitment makes true freedom impossible, and that the price of true freedom is the cost of choosing between these two roads. You would not be here if you were not drawn to the true and deep realization that real freedom entails immense effort, commitment, and discipline.
Summer 2012 23
THE GRACE OF HOLY CROSS BROTHERS
T
he year 2012, we note with quiet prayers in our mouths, is the Year of the Brother for the Congregation of Holy Cross, the order of priests and brothers that has elevated the University of Portland for 110 years, since Brother Charles (a superb carpenter) and Brother Wilfred (a fine mechanic and gardener) were among the first six Holy Cross men to arrive on The Bluff. Since then
Brothers have done every job there is at the University, and done them well, from president to the men who repaired the boilers and ran the farm that once fed University students. They have been men of rare wit and grace, men who worked without pay for many years, men who built altars and coffins, men who spent uncountable hours listening and praying with and for stu-
dents, men without whom the University would never have achieved its unique character and flavor. We bow and ask the joy of the One on their souls and songs, and join in applause for their extraordinary labors and infinitesimal egos – such a lovely combination. The Year of the Brother concludes on October 17 of this year, on the second anniversary of the canonization of
Portland 24
Saint AndrĂŠ Bessette, C.S.C.; how apt and fitting and suitable it is that the first recognized Holy Cross saint was a hard-working, salty, tireless, tart-tongued Brother who refused credit for the thousands of healings attributed to his intercession with Saint Joseph. Extraordinary labor and tiny ego...could that be a marker of deep holiness? Editor
This page: Brother Innocent Stacco, C.S.C., 1937. Like many of the Brothers in the University’s early days he was a stalwart in the library. At far left: The beloved Brother Godfrey Vassallo, C.S.C., in his physics lab. Chemist, nuclear physicist, photographer, raconteur, terrific teacher, he lit the campus from 1929 until his death in 1974. He also quietly raised money from friends for uncounted “BG Grants” to students who could not pay tuition; one reason among many why he is honored today with Brother Godfrey Scholarships for students who need help. Call Diane Dickey at 503.943.8130 if you want to chip in.
Brother Vital Cahill, C.S.C., circa 1922, in front of Waldschmidt Hall. The brothers, in the University’s early years, did all gardening, farming, carpentry, repairs, and care of the University’s cows; suffice it to say they did all the heavy lifting, usually with this kind of wry grin.
Brother Austin Guenther, C.S.C., 1960. Brother Austin, like most of the Holy Cross brothers, held several campus jobs at once, but is remembered best for his stern command of the University’s mail room.
Brother Raphael Wilson, C.S.C., the one Holy Cross brother to be elected president of the University (so far). Famous as the biologist who invented the germ-free “isolator” for children with immune system deficiencies, Brother Raphael served as president and taught biology from 1978 to 1981. He was a professor of experimental biology at Texas Children’s Hospital in 1971 when a boy named David Vetter was born there; Brother Raphael baptized David, was his godfather, and designed the “bubble” that was to protect him until he received a bone marrow transplant from his sister. The transplant didn’t work, however, and poor David spent his brief life in the bubble until his death at age 12. (See the 2006 PBS film The Boy in the Bubble.)
Brother Joe Achatz, C.S.C., 1920. The University was mostly farm in the early years, the produce going to feed the students.
The legendary Brother David Martin, C.S.C., University librarian from 1928 to 1966. At right: Brother Wilfrid Schreiber, C.S.C., king of the University’s steam plant, 1949.
Doubts & Wonders We are all fellow pilgrims, in search of a way home. By Thomas Lynch
I
was raised by Irish Catholics. Even as I write that it sounds a little like wolves or some especially feral class of creature, but I mean rather the sense of sure faith and fierce family loyalties, the pack dynamics of clannishness, their vigilance and their pride. My parents were grandchildren of immigrants who had all married within their tribe. They’d sailed from 19thcentury poverty into the prospects of North America, from West Clare and Tipperary, Sligo and Kilkenny, to Montreal and Ontario, upper and lower Michigan. Graces and O’Haras, Ryans and Lynches —they brought their version of the “one true faith,” druidic and priest-ridden, punctilious and full of superstitions, from the boggy parishes of their ancients to the fertile expanse of middle America. These were people who saw statues move, truths about the weather in the way a cat warmed to the fire, omens about coming contentions in a pair of shoes left up on a table, bad luck in some numbers, good fortune in others. Odd lights in the nightscape foreshadowed death; dogs’ eyes attracted lightning; the curse of an old spinster could lay one low. The clergy were to be “given what’s going to them,” but otherwise, “not to be tampered with.” Priests were feared and their favor curried — their curses and their blessings opposing poles of the powerful medicine they were known to possess. The only moderating influence to this bloodline and gene-pool was provided by my paternal grandmother, a woman of Dutch extraction, who came from a long line of Daughters of the American Revolution. She was temperate, Methodist, an Eisenhower
Republican — she voted for him well into the 1980s — a wonderful cook and seamstress and gardener who never gossiped or gave any scandal to her family until early in the so-called roaring twenties, when she was smitten by and betrothed to marry an Irish Catholic. This was not good news to her parents and their circle. As was the custom of her generation, and to appease his priest, she “converted” to what she would ever after refer to as, “the one true faith?” — the lilt appended to the end of the declarative easing a foot of doubt into the door of surety, as if the apostle with a finger in the wounds of the risen Christ had queried, “My Lord, My God?” She took a kind of dark glee in explaining the conversion experience to her grandchildren, to wit: “Ah, the priest splashed a little water on me and said, ‘Geraldine, you were born a Methodist, raised a Methodist... Thanks be to God, now you’re Catholic.’” Some weeks after the eventual nuptials, she was out in the backyard, grilling sirloins for my grandfather on the first Friday in Lent when one of the brother knights from the Knights of Columbus leapt over the back fence to upbraid her for the smell of beef rising over a Catholic household during the holy season. And she listened to your man, nodded and smiled, walked over to the garden hose, splashed water on the grill and said, “you were born cows, raised cows... thanks be to God, now you are fish.” Then she sent the nosey neighbor on his way. “Surely, we are all God’s children,” she would append to her telling this, “the same but different.” Her telling of this filled me with doubts and wonders, which seem these Portland 30
years since like elements of faith. To be awestruck was better than certainty. And I was smitten at the power of language, which could, in a twinkling, turn cows into fish. It made me hunger for such “authority.” It made me less of a Catholic I suppose, variously devout and devoutly lapsed, and yet more catholic somehow — in the way Paul wrote to the Corinthians in the first century after Christ, and John XXIII wrote in the last: a sense that we are all fellow pilgrims in search of a way home. For all her efforts at temperance, my grandmother became, like many converts, as crazed as the unruly crowd she’d married into for whom everything had meaning beyond the obvious and life was the slow unfolding of metaphors and mysteries the cipher for which lay just beyond our reach. The dead were everywhere and their ghosts inhabited the air and memory and their old haunts, real as ever, if in an only slightly former tense, in constant need of care and appeasement. They were, like the saints they’d been named for, prayed over, prayed to, invoked as protection against all enemies, their names recycled through generations, reassigned to new incarnations. A moment that will shape our family destiny for generations occurs one day in the Desnoyer Funeral Home in Jackson, Michigan. My grandfather, whose brother the priest has just died, is meeting with the undertaker to This engraving, by the cheerful genius Barry Moser, first appeared as the cover of Paul Mariani’s collection of poems, Deaths and Transfigurations. For more of Barry’s work see www.moser-pennyroyal.com.
sort details for the funeral. He brings along my father, age twelve, for reasons we can never know. While the two men are discussing plots and boxes, pallbearers and honoraria, the boy wanders through the old mortuary until he comes to the doorway of a room where he espies two men in shirtsleeves dressing a corpse in liturgical vestments. He stands and watches quietly. Then they carefully lift the freshly vested body of his dead uncle from the white porcelain table into a coffin. Then turn to see the boy at
the door. Ever after my father will describe this moment — this elevation, this slow, almost ritual hefting of the body — as the one to which he will always trace his intention to become a funeral director. Might it have aligned in his imagination with that moment during the Masses he attended at St. Francis De Sales when the priest would elevate the host and chalice, the putative body and blood of Christ, when bells were rung, heads bowed, breasts beaten in awe? Might he have conflated the corruptible and the inPortland 32
corruptible? The mortal and immortality? The sacred and the profane? When I was seven, my mother sent me off to see the priest, to learn enough of the magic Latin — the language of ritual and mystery — to become an altar boy. Father Kenny, our parish priest at St. Columban’s, was a native of Galway who had been at seminary with my father’s uncle, and had hatched a plan with my sainted mother to guide me toward the holy orders. This, the two of them no
doubt reckoned, was in keeping with the Will of God — that I should fulfill the vocation and finish the work of the croupy and tubercular young priest I’d been named for. I looked passably hallowed in cassock and surplice, I had a knack for the vowel rich acoustics of Latin and had already intuited the accountancy of sin and guilt and shame and punishment so central to the religious life. This intuition I owed to Father Maguire’s Baltimore Catechism and the Sister Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary who
For all of my mother’s and the priest’s well intentioned connivances, and though I kept my ears peeled for it, I never ever heard the voice of God. I remember seeing the dead priest’s cassock hanging from a rafter in my grandparents’ basement, a box with his biretta and other priestly things on a shelf beside it. I tried them on but nothing seemed to fit. I grew uneasy religiously, if ever more interested spiritually; if I’d learned sin and guilt and shame and contrition from the nuns and priests, I was likewise schooled in approval and tolerance and inextinguishable love by my parents, earthen vessels though they were. Grace — the unmerited favor of Whoever is in Charge Here — was the gift outright of my upbringing. And my profession: among the blessings of forty years of work as a funeral director is that it has put me in earshot of the reverend clergy trying to make sense of senseless things: the man who kills his wife, their poodle, then himself; a mother who drowns her baby then does her nails; the teenager with the broken heart and loaded pistol; the tumors and emboli, flues Summer 2012 33
and tsunamis, deadly contagions and misadventures — the endless renditions of The Book of Job. When someone shows up — priest or pastor, rabbi or imam, venerable master or fellow traveler — to stand with the living and the dead and speak into the gaping maw of the unspeakable, I know I am witnessing uncommon courage and my perennially shaken faith is emboldened by theirs. “Behold, I show you a mystery,” they always say. They are balm and anointing, these men and women of God, frontline infantry and holy corpsmen in the wars long waged between faith and fear. When I first went to Ireland — a young man with a high number in the Nixon draft lotto and, therefore, a future stretched out before me — I thought I’d see the forty shades of green. And though I arrived in the off-season, with a one way ticket, no money or prospects, in a poor county of a poor country, as disappointing a Yank as ever there was, I was welcomed by cousins who could connect me to the photo that hung on their wall of their cousin, a priest, who had died years before. They took me in, put me by the fire, fed me and gave me to believe that I belonged there, I was home. If there is a heaven it might feel like that. In the fullness of time, they left the house to me: a gift, a grace. Everything in those times seemed so black and white — the cattle, the clergy, the stars and dark, right and wrong, love and hate, the edges and borders all well defined. But now it all seems like shades of grey, shadow and apparition, glimpses only, through the half-light of daybreak and gloaming, mirage and apocalypse, doubt and faith, what may or mayn’t be, what is or isn’t, happenstance or the hand of God. I am possessed of few certainties or absolutes, my faith always seasoned by wonder and doubt; but I know that if there’s a God, it is not us; I know that if there is a God, surely we are all God’s children, or none of us are. I know that our greatest gifts are one another, the greatest sins against each other. To be forgiven, we must forgive everything, because God forgives everything or nothing at all, hears all our prayers or none of them. At the end, all of my prayers begin to sound like thanks, and all the answers have become you’re welcome. n Thomas Lynch is the author of many books of prose and poetry, among them the wonderful Booking Passage, about the American Irish experience. This essay is adapted from his The Sin Eater, a new book of poems (Paraclete Press).
PHOTO: CLAUDIA MCKINNEY / GETTY IMAGES
had prepared me for the grade school sacraments of Confession and the Eucharist. I had learned to fast before communion, to confess and do penance in preparation for the feast, to keep track of my sins by sort and number, to purge them by prayer and mortification, supplication and petition. To repair the damage done by impure thoughts or cursing at a sibling, a penance of Our Fathers and Hail Marys would be assigned. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa became for me the breast thumping idioms of forgiveness and food, purification and communion, atonement and satiety, reconciliation and recompense which are so central to the “holy sacrifice of the Mass” we Catholic school kids daily attended. Thus were the connections between hunger and holiness, blight and blessedness, contrition and redemption, early on established and these powerful religious metaphors gathered themselves around the common table. That sacred theater replayed itself each night at our family meals where our father and our blessed mother would enact a home version of the sacrifice and feast, the brothers and sisters and I returning prodigals for whom the fatted calf, incarnate as stew or goulash, burgers or casseroles, had been prepared. On Fridays my father brought home bags of fish and chips. Whatever our sins were, they seemed forgiven.
Levitating the Cat On believing past any country where reason can go. By Laura Oliver
Marcy has had the tumor since I met her eight years ago. Sometimes it shrinks, usually it grows. Marcy has a theory about her tumor; her theory is that she caught it from her husband. Ten years ago he lost all their money so the bank repossessed their grey stone house on the hill. Their two children were small then. Marcy got stressed and then she got angry and then walking down the street one day she dropped like a rock and had a seizure on the sidewalk in front of Peerless Clothing. Cause and effect? Who can say? When I was little I believed that if my faith were pure I would be able to walk right off the end of the pier and not sink, step off the garage roof and fly, sail off the rope swing over the ravine and be suspended in the hand of God. I’d be able to heal Billy Wilkins who was in my fifth grade class at school. Billy was swimming in the river one summer Saturday, before the sea nettles had drifted in from the bay, and his uncle ran over him with a powerboat. Billy was in a coma and he was going to die so his parents called their priest who walked into Billy’s hospital room and said, Billy! Wake up! and Billy woke up, just like that. Billy came back to school with a jagged scar on his forehead that disappeared into his blond hair. He spoke with great effort. His left arm dangled and he dragged his left foot. One Sunday after church my father called up the stairs to where I was changing to play clothes and told me I had a visitor. We lived out in the country with few houses around so I was shocked to discover Billy shuffling on our porch. He was sweaty and purposeful and immensely pleased with his accomplishment. He had walked a mile down Eagle Hill Road by himself. I didn’t know what he wanted or why he had come. I was both afraid of and drawn to his damage. I was both flattered and ashamed to have been singled out.
We sat in the grass and watched bees bob on white clover blossoms while I thought of ways I could say I had to go. Billy carefully constructed one thought at a time. I glanced at his skinny arm and imagined it growing healthy and strong at my touch. I imagined laying my palms over his crippled leg and Billy shouting with joy as he stood straight and strong. But I was an anxious child. I worried about failing. I worried about succeeding and becoming full of myself. I worried about fallout, quicksand, and tidal waves. I worried about having to marry Billy just to be polite. Marcy has thrown chemotherapy and two surgeries at that tumor and remained arrestingly beautiful the whole time. The chemo had no side effects — zero — and the surgeries required shaving just a tiny patch of hair over which she wore a pretty velvet hair band until it grew back. She eats what I eat when we go out but she takes maybe fourteen pills before we leave the house. All of which goes to show you just can’t guess from a person’s appearance what she struggles with inside. When I was very little, long before Billy nearly drowned, long before I knew Marcy, we had a cat. Every night, after my sisters and I were dispatched upstairs to our beds, my father put the cat out for the night. He’d carry him over to the front door, pull it open by the black wrought-iron latch, lean out into the darkness, and drop the cat softly onto the porch where one day Billy Wilkins would wait. Then my dad would turn, pull the door tightly closed, and pad through the shadows to my parent’s bedroom at the back of the house. The cat would be sitting on the bed. There were no windows without screens in our house, no unlocked doors, just a cat that could transport himself through time and space. This went on for weeks. I spent a lot of time staring at that cat. That cat had promise. He was a cat with potential. Surely it was true about mind over matter. If I visualized long and hard enough, if my belief were just true enough, surely I could make that cat levitate. Portland 34
After Billy’s visit I had a dream I wanted to tell someone. I was watching a sunset, full of rose, orange, and gold. Suddenly the hand of God descended right through the clouds. It just stayed there, poised over the grassy pasture and the dark woods beyond the fence. In my dream I was witnessing this remarkable event from my bedroom window, sitting on my circus animal bedspread with the ball fringe. God’s hand was huge and it just stayed there without explanation. There was nothing to prove, no test to pass. Looking back I think that if it had been turned palm down, it would have been like a blessing, a benediction. But it was palm up, the fingers gently opened in invitation. I said yes. My father eventually figured out the cat. Every night, the minute the cat dropped to the porch, he tore around the side of the house to the chimney, slipped through the trap door in the fireplace for ash removal, and got back to the bedroom before my father. Sometimes when Marcy is very angry, which is never at the brain tumor but usually at the waiter, or the store clerk, or her husband, I want to put my hands on her heart to draw the anger out like a fever. I want to sit by her on the sofa and cradle her head in my lap and will the tumor gone with the fierceness of my desire for her happiness. Marcy’s parents are dead and sometimes I think that if I could become a whisper in her ear, a voice that promised I love you, I love you, I love you, every second of every day, she’d get well. That’s all it would take to mend any of us. There is love and there is abiding love. There is constancy. There is an invitation suspended over the world like a held breath. I have only one response now and forever. Yes. Yes. Yes. n Laura Oliver teaches writing at St. John’s College in Maryland, and is the author recently of The Story Within, an excellent book about the writing craft.
PHOTO: JOHN SANN / GETTY IMAGES
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y friend Marcy has a brain tumor. We go out for coffee, to lunch and to movies. I drive. We talk about people we know, what our kids are doing, we laugh. She has a brain tumor. I have allergies. We’re normal.
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REUNION 2012: JUNE 21-24 Join us at Reunion 2012 for the biggest party of the summer! We’ll especially celebrate the anniversary year classes ending in 2s and 7s, induct new honorees into the Pilot Athletics Hall of Fame, and welcome the legendary UP sororities and fraternities back for a weekend of reminiscence. It’s sure to be a summer to remember back on The Bluff. Reunion 2012 kicks off with a dinner honoring the newest members of the Pilot Athletics Hall of Fame: Pete Julian ’93, Tiffeny Milbrett ’95, Gayle Poff Ventura, and Terry Pollreisz ’69. On Friday, the National Alumni Board invites golfers to roam the course in quest of the lowest score at Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club, while alumni vintners Dick Ferraro ’64 and Hal Medici ’55 will host a visit to the world-famous Willamette Valley wine country. In the evening, we’ll welcome alumni and friends back to campus for the Purple Flamingo Happy Hour, a chance to relax and network while enjoying a cocktail in a casual setting, including a special gathering opportunity for members of the Alpha Kappa Psi professional business fraternity. The evening will conclude with the Late-Night Talent Pub, featuring an opportunity for dancing, foot-tapping, and boisterous sing-alongs. On Saturday morning, we’re offering both a nature walk in Forest Park and a “Zumba Fitness-Party,” led by alumnus Ernest Yago ’97/’05, for those adventurous souls who want to get moving at the beginning of a jam-packed day of fun. The 50-Year Club Mass and luncheon will celebrate the Class of 1962 on their Golden Anniversary. In the afternoon, Pilot basketball head coach Eric Reveno and his staff will welcome former men’s basketball team members back to the court for an alumni game
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in Howard Hall, while professor Thom Faller will lead a lively session about challenges at the intersection of medicine, ethics, and public policy. Engineering alumni will have an opportunity to tour the newly-renovated Donald P. Shiley Hall with engineering dean Sharon Jones and professors from the Shiley School. Bicyclists can enjoy a brisk two-wheeled tour of North Portland with Mark Hansen ’82 and Jayme Fisher ’90. Pre-barbecue receptions for the sororities Psi Chi Eta, the Spurs, and Theta Tau Delta are scheduled for 2:30 p.m., while the fraternities Iota Kappa Pi, Sigma Tau Omega, and Upsilon Omega Pi will also host gatherings in the afternoon. Blue Key Honor Society members will gather to reminisce, and the Honored Year classes of 1957, 1962, 1967, 1972, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2002, and 2007 will also have receptions in Franz Hall before the Welcome Home Barbecue. A special memorial Mass celebrating the life and legacy of the late Fr. Chester “Pru” Prusynski, C.S.C., will take place in the Chapel of Christ the Teacher at 4 p.m. on Saturday afternoon. The Welcome Home BBQ and Dance begins at 4:30 p.m. behind Bauccio Commons. A photographer will be taking official class photos beginning at 5:15. In addition to areas for alumni from each decade to gather, we will host special tents along “Greek Row” at the edge of the Bluff for the fraternities and sororities. Kiddie Funland will again feature a bouncy castle and slide for our young guests, as well as kidfriendly art projects with university professor Ray Bard. Reunion 2012 wraps up in prayer together on Sunday, June 24 with the All Alumni Mass celebrated by University president Fr. Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C., and featuring music led by the Alumni Choir. The closing brunch provides a final opportunity for alumni and friends to reconnect. Visit our webpage at http://alumni.up.edu/reunion for more information about these and other events. You can also register online at the site to join us for the weekend. We hope to see you back
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on The Bluff this summer, June 21-24. There will be a little something for everyone at Reunion 2012!
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION PRIMER This course, presented in three parts, seeks to energize our political junkies and provide new insights to political novices throughout the course of the 2012 election cycle. Br. Donald Stabrowski, C.S.C., University of Portland provost and political scientist, will analyze and break down the primaries and discuss other hot issues in the initial two sessions leading up to a third and final course on Election Day. Plan to join in this lively discussion while gaining an historical perspective on national, state, and local politics. Refreshments will be provided. Classes will be held on October 2 and November 6. Contact the Office of Alumni Relations for more information.
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more about upcoming Hive events please visit its website at uphive.wordpress.com.
SUMMER IN SALZBURG The University of Portland’s Salzburg Center will be available this summer from August 20 to September 2. A visit to Salzburg provides rich cultural opportunities, including the internationally acclaimed Salzburg Festival of music and drama. Come soak up the unique history and culture of this Austrian jewel when you work with alumni relations to choose your own activities and site visits, all while using the University’s Salzburg Center as home base. This trip is highly recommended for individuals and families wishing to explore central Europe on a budget. Contact the Office of Alumni Relations for more information.
50TH ANNIVERSARY OF SALZBURG PROGRAM HIVE ENTREPRENEURS NETWORK The UP Hive is an open forum for University of Portland alumni of all ages, current UP M.B.A. students, and University of Portland supporters interested in business and entrepreneurial activity within the community. The Hive organizes events focused on connecting and assisting UP alumni and supporters in finding new business partners, clients, and investors through networking and interactive and fun educational presentations. If you have a speaker in mind or would like to host a Hive event, please contact the Hive committee directly at hive@pilotwm.com. To learn
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Join the University in celebrating the 50th anniversary of its most popular study abroad program with a visit to Salzburg Center and a cruise down the Danube River. The 50th Anniversary trip begins on Saturday, September 7, 2013 and continues with three days in Salzburg where guests will be able to enjoy a tour of the city and two group dinners. On September 11 guests will have the option of a weeklong cruise of the Danube River beginning in Vienna and ending in Nuremberg. The ship will cruise through the vineyard-rich Wachau Valley before moving through Main-Danube Canal en route to the historic city of Nuremberg. Contact alumni relations for more information.
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The estimable University chemistry professor Carl Bonhorst, in 1961. Riveting man, Carl — as his student and lab assistant George Beitel ’62 reminded us recently, Carl laboriously translated the Roman poet Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, “On the Nature of Things,” because he was convinced that Lucretius had a good grasp of atomic physics before Christ was born. “Why,” asks Beitel, “did Dr. Bonhorst put in the effort to translate a classic piece of literature that had been translated many times before? The answer is in his own words, in response to a typical complaint in Chemistry 101, as I recall from many years ago. Several students for whom the course was difficult and seemingly meaningless whined to Dr. Bonhorst, ‘Why do we have to take this course anyway, we’re not going to become chemists?’ With a twinkle in his eye, as usual, he replied, ‘If we just eat, sleep, and chase women, bugs do that. We are trying to be better than the rest.’ Beitel is a fascinating lad himself: after earning his physics degree on The Bluff, he earned his doctorate in physics, worked as an engineer, physicist, and professor in Idaho, and is now retired to Port Orchard, Washington. Our thanks, George. And do we honor and celebrate cheerful science nuts and visionaries like Bonhorst to this day? Of course we do: among the University’s scholarships for brilliant kids are those named for beloved science professors Paul Wack, Merle Starr, Walter Stott, Tom McGlinn, Blondel Carleton, and the legendary Brother Godfrey Vassallo, C.S.C. Scholarships help students immediately. Call Diane Dickey, 503.943.8130, dickey@up.edu. Summer 2012 37
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C L A S S Leo Eugene Maguigan ’49 passed away on January 23, 2012, surrounded by his family, at the age of 88. Leo was born in 1923 to Thomas Maguigan, who emigrated from Ireland in 1898, and Mary Ready Maguigan, a child of Irish immigrants. Except during World War II, Leo lived his entire life in the Maguigan family home on N. Portsmouth, near the U.P. campus. He was a lifetime member of Holy Cross Parish and an alumnus of Holy Cross Elementary, Roosevelt High (1941) and the University of Portland. Leo was employed as a State of Oregon parole and probation officer for 27 years. He is a member of the Portland Interscholastic League Sports Hall of Fame and was a proud member of the 1941 Roosevelt High City Championship basketball team. He played baseball at the University of Portland and for many years held the record for the longest home run by a Pilot baseball player. While Leo and his wife Helen raised their eight children, he also worked evenings and weekends as a basketball referee and baseball umpire at the high school and college levels. Until his final weeks, he greatly enjoyed hosting his lifelong neighborhood friends for visits and storytelling at his home, keeping up correspondence with those who have left the area, and attending every reunion gathering. Every June for many years through 2011, Leo hosted a large picnic at Columbia Park where everyone of whatever age was welcome. Leo was a character in the very best sense of the word, a hysterically funny man who made life a lot more fun for his family and friends than anyone can reasonably expect. Survivors include his beloved wife of 60 years, Helen; children, Tom, Tim (Rives Kistler), Jim (Susan), John (Leslie), Sue, Annie (Steve Mueller), Mary (Joe Fanelli) and Mike; grandchildren Brian, Lauren, Brendan, Ryan, Connor, Logan, Christopher, Michael, Matthew and Anna; and many nieces and nephews. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made in Leo’s memory to Holy Cross Area School or Holy Cross Catholic Church. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
N O T E S FIFTY YEAR CLUB Dr. Wesley R. Weissert ’42 passed away on January 23, 2012. In 1945, he received a medical degree from OHSU, spending 20 years as a family physician in Pendleton. In 1965, he left Pendleton to pursue a residency in psychiatry. From 1969-1985, he served as a psychiatrist at the Oregon State Mental Hospital. He retired to Bend to build a log house and train two Great Pyrenees. In 2001, he moved to Holladay Park Plaza in Portland. Always a smile on his face, this gentle and kind man held a special place in the hearts of many. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Nora Gerald ’43 died on March 29, 2012, in Amarillo, Texas. She was 90. Born to Arthur Jackson Wiser and Nora Ella Wiser on February 10, 1922, in Oakridge, Ore., Nora was welcomed as a newborn, upon the death of her mother, into the home of her maternal aunt Flora and her husband, Ole F. Christensen, whom she knew and loved as her parents. Her adoptive mother, Flora, died when Nora was 14. It was her adoptive father, Ole, who made it possible for Nora to attend and graduate from the University of Portland with a BS in nursing. When she reached the age of legal adulthood, Nora changed her last name to Christensen, in honor of the man who had raised her. On December 11, 1943, Nora married Charles Edward Gerald of Canyon, Texas; together they celebrated 61 years of marriage until his death, in 2004. She was predeceased by three older siblings as well, Elva (Jimmy) Wiser, Naomi Wiser, and Elze Wiser. Nora is survived by all her children, ten grandchildren, and eighteen great-grandchildren. Nora’s family was most precious to her. She was its defender, protector, and role model. Throughout her life she served the Lord with gladness and thanksgiving, making generous use of her gifts of caregiving, hospitality, and compassion for others. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Margaret Franulovich ’44 passed away on January 5, 2012, in Bellevue, Wash. After graduating from The Bluff she served in the Army Nurse Corps during World War II. She is survived by: daughter Carol O’Connell and husband, Michael; daughter, Sharon Morris and husband, Jack; son, Tim Franulovich; grandchildren: Kelly O’ConnellWeisfield, Amy O’Connell
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Colthurst, Michael Morris, and Julie Morris; great-grandchildren: Conor Shewey, Julia Weisfield, Kate Weisfield, Maggie Colthurst and Charlie Colthurst. Our prayers and concolences to the family. Thomas D. Sullivan ’46 passed away on February 5, 2012. Tom graduated from Columbia Prep in 1938 and the University of Portland in 1946. He served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific during World War II achieving the rank of lieutenant. He enjoyed a long professional career in the grain business in the Pacific Northwest. After retirement in 1986, he and his wife traveled the world, often by freighter. They lived for many years in Lake Oswego. A man of generous spirit with a mischievous sense of humor, he was much beloved and will be greatly missed by his family and friends. He is survived by his wife of 64 years, Margaret Brosnan Sullivan and his children, T. Dennis Sullivan, Mary K. Lally, William J. Sullivan, and James P. Sullivan. Our prayers and condolences to the family. James Adrian Thielen ’49 passed away on February 1, 2012, in Portland, Ore. After serving in World War II and the Korean War, he worked as a commercial real estate appraiser. A published poet, he was blessed with a remarkable singing voice, and loved singing with his wife and children. Survivors include his wife of 60 years, Shirley; children, Heidi (Rob) Ware, David (Katy) Thielen, Patti (Craig) Page, Philip (Wendy) Thielen, Sheila (Reid) Garber, Greg (Kelsie) Thielen, and Jake (Tara) Thielen of Portland; 15 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. He will be fondly remembered by his many relatives, friends, bridge players and fellow poets for being a giant man with a kind heart full of wit and humor. Our prayers and condolences to the family. We heard recently from Peter Van Hoomissen ’50, who writes: “I enjoyed the winter issue of the Portland magazine, particularly the picture of the University’s Choir and Chorale on pages 18 and 19. My older brother, John Van Hoomissen, is located in the picture directly below the piano with a violin in his hand. In 1938 he would have been a sophomore at Columbia Preparatory School, the high school located on the U of P campus at that time, and all of 14 years old. He graduated from Columbia in
C L A S S 1941 and attended U of P until he went into the navy during WWII. He played football and sang in the glee club. After the war he returned and graduated in 1947 in engineering and then went to Notre Dame, where he received a Ph.D. degree in physics. Starting a career with General Electric working in the nuclear power group, he traveled to help install and operate many nuclear power plants. Our family has had many attend the U of P. John, my brother Kevin (1954) and I (1950) all attended Columbia Prep and U.P. The family still has students there. Kelly Brandenburg, Dr. Paul Wack and my sister Mary Ellen’s grandaughter, is there. We even have a faculty member, Jacquie Van Hoomissen, in biology. My three brothersin- law George, John, and Robert Charters all attended Columbia Prep and either U of P or Notre Dame. If you check on the last names of Van
Died in January, at age 91: Sister Francella Mary Griggs ’59 (third from left), of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. A sweet brave funny gentle woman who loved children, taught thousands of them in Oregon and Washington, and worked relentlessly and sweetly for her Siletz people. A remarkable soul. See in the inside back cover of this issue for more. Photo courtesy SNJM archives/ Marylhurst.
Hoomissen, Wack, and Charters the list will be long and cover many years. Thanks for the picture as it brought back many great memories of my years on the bluff.” You bet Peter, we’re
happy to jog such wonderful memories, and you’re not kidding about the long legacies of the Van Hoomissen, Wack, and Charters families. Christopher Paul Mestrich 50’ passed away on January 24, 2012, in Astoria, Ore. Both of his parents were Croatian, a heritage that he was very proud of. Chris graduated as Salutatorian from Star of the Sea High School at the age of 17, and graduated cum laude with a degree in business administration from the University of Portland at the age of 21. Following college, Chris was drafted into the U.S. Army, and after training was sent to Fort Lewis where he served until the end of the Korean conflict with the rank of corporal. Working at the headquarters of Fort Lewis, Chris met the love of his life, Marlene Ballew of Tacoma, and they were married in 1953. Chris was well known by his constant presence at Chris’ News, which was considered by many to be an Astoria institution until its closure in 2005. Using the motto “Chris’ News; For Everything You Use,” the store at 14th and Commercial carried books, magazines, beer, wine, snacks, sundries and more. The business was started in 1931 by his father and carried on by Chris and his brother Charles. If asked what his favorite hobby was, he would always reflect on his love of music and immediately burst into song and dance. Survivors include his wife, Marlene; son, Paul; daughter, Carol; daughter, Monica; grandsons, Sebastian and Harrison Lynch; his brother, Charles; as well as his cousin, Margie Radich; and four first cousins in Croatia. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Ivan Husovsky ’52 passed away on December 25, 2011, in Wilton, Conn. A native of Budapest, Hungary, Ivan completed most of his undergraduate work in Munich, Germany and finishe his degree after emigrating to the U.S. in 1949. His law career included stints at Vicks Chemical, Merrell International, and others. Survivors include his wife of 55 years, Joanna; sons Hal and Peter, and granddaughter Lila. Our prayers and condolences to the family. James Estes ’54 passed away on March 26, 2012. Jim is survived by his two sons, Mark Estes (Marsha) and Matthew Estes; and his two daughters, Nancy Hoyt (Jim) and Susie Jansky (Andy). Jim has nine grandchildren: Jenna and
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We heard recently from Inarose Ries Zuelke ’47, who sent us the above photo and writes: “I read your request for information on music at the University of Portland and thought I would share a few of my experiences. Thank you for reviving some very old and wonderful memories. “Father Dum and the Hooyboer brothers were family friends and my mother enjoyed inviting them for dinner. Fr. Dum would ‘sing for his supper’ and I would accompany him on the piano. After I enrolled in the University of Portland School of Nursing, he asked me to play for the Glee Club. This resulted in many fun trips around the state as the club entertained at other events arranged by Fr. Dum. “I recall that Marian Bergstrom, one of the nursing students, was a vocalist and Sal Mardesic was frequently the accompanist. Sal was a gorgeous pianist...well, he was really a great pianist but he was also gorgeous! He passed away a number of years ago. “The two Fathers Hooyboer officiated at my wedding, and Fr. Dum brought the Glee Club to sing and he arranged for the recording of the event. They did a great job; the marriage lasted over 60 years.” Inarose was married to legendary Portland obstetrician Dr. Paul Zuelke; he passed away in August 2007. Molly Jansky, Tyler and Ryan Hoyt and Julie, Steven, Kirstin, Allison and Josh Estes. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Richard C. Benevento ’58 passed away on January 14, 2012, in Portland, Ore. Survivors include his wife, Susie ’62; daughters Barbara and Julie; son, Rick; and four grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Patricia Lynne Allessio Senko ’59 (pictured at right) passed away on November 3, 2011 after a courageous struggle
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Kennie Namba ’53 died in March, age 86, but there’s a man whose zest and courage will never be forgotten on The Bluff or in Oregon. Born and raised on Mount Hood, Kennie and his family were sent to Idaho’s Camp Minidoka after Pearl Harbor—essentially an American prison camp for people of Japanese ancestry. Kennie joined the U.S. Army after a year, saw battle in Europe, and was wounded in Italy by a Nazi grenade. His granddaughter Kaeti Namba ’12 once asked him why he joined the Army of a country that had thrown his family into a prison camp. “Because I’m American, Kaeti,” he said. On his return from the war he was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. In 1946 he married Ruth Shige, who had taught him to dance when they were both interned at Minidoka. In 1947, Kennie, all of 22 years old, helped file a lawsuit that successfully challenged the constitutionality of the state’s Alien Land Law that had prevented people of Japanese ancestry from owning land in Oregon. In 1991, Namba and thousands of others each received a government check for $20,000 and a letter of apology from President George Bush. Kennie helped start the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, often visited schools and universities to discuss his experiences, was a roaring Blazers fan, and now will be remembered on The Bluff with the Kennie Namba Scholarship fund at the University. (Photo courtesy Motoya Nakamura/The Oregonian.) with liver cancer. She was born September 21, 1937 in Walla Walla, Washington to Chuck and Abie Allessio. She grew up
in Walla Walla, and attended the University of Portland, where she graduated with a degree in nursing. She is sur-
N O T E S vived by her husband, James, children Lizabeth, Margaret, Christopher and Andrew, and grandchildren Kathryn, Peter, Molly, Caitlin, Drew and Sarah. She was preceded in death by her parents, and by her dearly loved grandson, Nathan. Pat met Jim though his sister Alice, a fellow student in her nursing program. They married on December 31, 1960 at St. Mary’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Portland, Oregon. They began their life together in Harlingen, Texas, as Jim began his career in the Air Force, where their first daughter, Lizabeth, was born in 1962. They then moved to Pullman, Washington, where Margaret was born in 1963. Christopher was born in Oklahoma City in 1965, and their family was completed with the birth of Andrew in 1969 at Beale Air Force Base, California. During their travels, they also lived in Montogomery Alabama, Eugene Oregon and Centerville, Virginia before settling in Washington, living in Lakewood and Steilacoom. Once their travels ended, Pat resumed her nursing career at Allenmore Hospital, Tacoma, with a passion for oncology patients working with Dr. Lauren Colman. Jim and Pat enjoyed their 50th wedding anniversary with their family on December 31, 2010. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Marian Louise Scott Mack ’59 died peacefully on March 23, 2012. Marian was born in Portland, Oregon, on October 29, 1936, to Walter and Grace Kelley Scott. She attended high school at St. Mary’s Academy and graduated with a degree in general science from the University of Portland. After a year of post graduate training, Marian worked as a medical technologist in hospital laboratories for several years. Marian met her husband, the late James Loren Mack ’58, a fellow science student, at the University of Portland, and they were married in August 1959; Jim and Marian were married for 51 years, until Jim’s death in 2010. Jim and Marian had five children, and as her family grew, Marian became a stay at home wife and mother. As a lover of books and libraries, Marian volunteered for many years at the Holiday Park Hospital and Whitford Junior High School libraries. After her children were grown, she spent ten years as a volunteer with the Oregon Historical Society. Marian and Jim retired in 1997 to their vacation home at Black Butte Ranch, and each
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winter found them on their annual RV trip to a variety of parks and casinos. Marian is survived by her children: Kathy Cooney, Collett Schleiss, Derek Mack, and Jennie Taschioglou. She is also survived by seven grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her husband, her daughter, Carey, and her brother, George J. Scott. Remembrances may be made to the Dr. James L. and Marian Scott Mack Memorial Endowed Scholarship Fund at the University of Portland. Our prayers and condolences to the family. J. David Chase ’60 passed away on February 17, 2012. He is survived by his wife, Mary Louise; four children; and two grandchildren. He graduated from Central Catholic High School and the University of Portland. He received his master’s from the University of Oregon. Dave was the co-founder and director of Mt. Hood Ski School, an officer in the Pacific NW Ski Association and a member of Professional Ski Instructors of America. He taught business courses at Clackamas High School for 30 years. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Ann Wade Mootz ’60 writes: “I just have to tell you what a joy the Rise CD is. The perfect accompaniment to decorating Valentine cookies! Keep it up, we love the magazine. Every issue is a surprise and a must read. By the way, all members of the Mootz clan are great. Our 5 grandchildren of widely varied ages are doing well. Allan and I will be celebrating our 45th wedding anniversary in July. Retirement is good. I am serving on the Notre Dame San Jose High School alumnae board and trying to keep up with the family activities. Life is thankfully very busy.”
’62 PRAYERS FOR LELAND We heard from Mary Katherine “Kay” Chester recently, who writes: “My brother, Leland Nicholas (Nick) Chester, died in Portland on August 11, 2011. He was a Notre Dame graduate and served as Director of Development at the University of Portland for a time. Four younger siblings are graduates: myself, Barbara Lee ’71, James Alfred ’67, and Therese Alma ’71.” Thanks for writing, Kay, and we’re sorry for your loss. We checked Jim Covert’s 1976 UP history, A Point of Pride, and your brother was development director at the time of publication, starting in 1975. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
C L A S S ’66 REMEMBERING MIKE Mike William Boyle passed away on March 22, 2012 in Aransas Pass, Texas. Surivors include his wife, Clara; son, Rick; sister, Trisha Lightel; brother, Jerry; and numerous in-laws, nieces and nephews. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’68 THE SIMPLE ROAD We heard recently from Don West, who writes: “I went to the University from 1963 through 1965, my freshman and sophomore years. I am not sure if that qualifies me for alumni status. If it does please sign me up. I sent my step-son Anthony Reeves ’02 to UP and he graduated tops in his class in philosophy and then received his doctorate from Boston U. He is now a professor of philosophy at SUNY Binghamton. I am attaching a flyer on my recently published book, The Simple Road to Heaven, of which I hope you will help get the word out. Thank you so much. I still love the Pilots.” Well thank you, Don, and congratulations on the publication of your book. More information on The Simple Road to Heaven can be found at www.friesenpress.com.
’69 FUN IN THE SUN David Allstot writes: “Vickie and I are currently enjoying the sunshine in Silicon Valley. I am on a sabbatical leave at Stanford University as a visiting professor in the electrical engineering department where I’m teaching a course and generally having a great time.”
’70 PRAYERS, PLEASE Prayers, please, for Barbara Jorgenson and her family on the death of her mother, Dorothy Duyck, on December 15, 2011. Survivors include seven children and their spouses, Barbara and Tom Jorgenson, Roy; Tom and Vickie Duyck, Roy; Larry Duyck, North Plains; Brian and Lisa Duyck, Powell, Wy.; Kevin and Carrie Duyck, Roy; David and Denise Duyck, Roy; Doreen and Paul Loofburrow, Newberg; a sister and brotherin-law Bea and Norbert Peters, Roy; 23 grandchildren; and 20 great-grandchildren.Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’71 HARD AT WORK We heard recently from Bernadette Brooten, who writes: “I completed a new book, Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), edited by me with the
assistance of Jacqueline L. Hazleton. I also convened a conference with Anita Hill, Disrupting the Script: Raising to Legal Consciousness Sexual Assaults on Black Women, on Monday, March 19, here at Brandeis University.” Dr. Brooten is the Robert and Myra Kraft and Jacob Hiatt Professor of Christian Studies, Professor of Classical Studies, of Women’s and Gender Studies, and of Religious Studies, and director of the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project and Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at the Mandel Humanities Center at Brandeis University.
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N O T E S trolman, working up to Chief of Police, and retiring in 1992 as a captain. Jim is survived by his wife, Rhea; daughter, Connie Smith of Casper, Wyo.; son, Dr. Thomas C. Davis of Gillette, Wyo.; six grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; and Aunt Alene Williams (Delbert) of Kennewick, Wash.; as well as many cousins. He was preceded in death by by his parents; son, James T. Davis, Jr.; and wife, Linda. Memorial contributions may be made to University of Portland Scholarship Fund. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’76 JOHN & JANE’S UPDATE
’72 A MAN OF NOTE Bill Reed was featured in an article by Clarice Keating in the February 16, 2012 edition of the Catholic Sentinel (see it at http://tinyurl.com/83lyffr). The article, titled “UP Events Director Exemplifies Spirit of Holy Cross,” features Bill’s longtime service at UP and his 2012 Spirit of Holy Cross Award, conferred in January by the U.S. Province of Priests and Brothers. “The priests and brothers at UP carry out the vision of Holy Cross founder, Blessed Basil Moreau, to educate the hearts and minds of students,” writes Keating. “For a century, the congregation has partnered with lay people throughout the world to live out Father Moreau’s call.” We received sad news from Temple Martin ’77 recently: “Beverley Virangura Roberts of Carlsbad, California passed away on February 20, 2012, in Bangkok, Thailand at her mother’s home. She had breast cancer. She was a 1972 School of Business graduate and also received her M.B.A. at U. of P. She is survived by her husband, Jerome Roberts, son Thomas Roberts, and mother Joyce Virankura. Remembrances are welcome to Coastal German Shepard Rescue (http://www.coastalgsr.org).”
’74 PORTLAND’S FINEST James T. “Jim” Davis passed away on March 20, 2012, in Tukwila, Wash., at the age of 80. He was born in Buhl, Idaho to Garland and Mildred Davis. Jim graduated from Pasco High School and joined the Air Force in 1950, serving in Curlew, Wash. and Alaska for four years. He married Delores Velera In 1951, the mother of his three children. Upon discharge, he worked various jobs until beginning his life’s career with the City of Portland Police Department, starting as a pa-
When Barbara Miller (longtime PR queen for the University who is now a spry 93) showed up for high tea at Lady Di’s Tea House in Lake Oswego to meet self-anointed, all-time favorite Beacon editor Jane Taylor, she had no idea who the man was that walked up with Jane and gave her a kiss. It was John Bernard, another self-anointed, all-time favorite Beacon editor and one-time student regent. Jane and John had connected in recent times through LinkedIn and Jane thought Barbara would enjoy the surprise (not to mention the tea and quiche). All said, everyone had fun swapping old stories and sharing fond memories of the great Fr. Waldschmidt and remembering their wonderful times at UP. Jane has made Seattle her home since 1982 and is a writer and editor for AmazonLocal, the daily deals part of Amazon.com’s farreaching empire. After having started her fresh-out-of-UP career in public relations at Lloyd Center, she finds it highly gratifying to again be employed in a business that combines her two passions: writing and shopping. She’s currently working on a book about surviving downsizing and is an actor/singer with her local theatre group, Twelfth Night Productions. Prompted by the sudden passing of a dear friend in 2007, she and a friend started a food ministry called Lettuce Pray. During the summer vegetable harvest season, they travel weekly to ten churches in West Seattle, collecting fresh produce grown by home gardeners and delivering it to the two local food banks. Over the past four years, they’ve gathered over 3,000 pounds of produce and over 4,000 pounds of non-perishable food. Her email is janeatay@msn.com.
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Born unto the clan of Dr. Tom Manning ’76: James Patrick Manning, on March 19, 2012. James, here gaping at his grandpa Tom, is the son of Tracie and Michael Manning. John is chairman and founder of Portland-based Mass Ingenuity. His book, Business At The Speed Of Now, was released in late 2011 by John Wiley & Sons and quickly hit no. 5 on Inc. Magazine’s best-seller list. John is a toprated speaker for The Conference Board, writes a monthly column syndicated to 41 business journals, and has recently become a regular blogger for governing.com. John’s company focuses on organizational transformation focused on employee engagement in both the private and public sector. He invites UP alumni to follow his blog (massingenuity.com/blog), tweet up with him (@johnmbernard) or connect at LinkedIn (John M. Bernard). John and his wife Lannah live with their 5-year-old twins in Wilsonville. John’s grown daughters, Ryann, Erin, and Ashley are all doing well. Ashley ’07 will join her sisters with advanced degrees (Ryann is a lawyer in D.C., Erin graduated with a masters in journalism from Missouri) when she completes her M.B.A. in marketing and corporate social responsibility at Notre Dame in May 2012.
’77 SAD NEWS Prayers, please, for Paul Meermeier and his family on the loss of his father, Paul Meermeier Sr., on February 2, 2012. He died peacefully at home after a long battle with cancer. Paul is survived by his wife, Margret; children, Paul Jr. (Nancy), Judy Cook (Steve), and Tina Herbison (Dave); and grandchildren, Chris and Nick Meermeier,
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N O T E S until her death. She is survived by sisters, Karen Day ’69, Sr. Mary Michaud, Frances Makowski ’72, Patricia Burkey ’73, Therese Michaud, Johanna Weber; brothers, Ted Michaud ’67, Paul Michaud ’69, and Steven Michaud. In lieu of flowers, contributions to Susan G. Komen for the Cure or The American Heart Association. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
on the Roof, where Lydia was the fiddler. Music has been the common denominator for the kids at West Albany. They care about each other so much; it’s amazing to see! Their band program is incredible. The director, Stuart Welsh, has high expectations for his students in behavior as well as academic and musical per-
’80 AN HONOR FOR PETER
We hope to see you back on the Bluff at Reunion 2012, June 21-24! This summer, we’ll celebrate special milestones for classes that graduated in years ending in ’2 and ’7, with special focus on 1962 (50 Years) and 1987 (25 Years). We’ll also be welcoming back the social fraternities, sororities, and select clubs: Iota Kappa Pi, Sigma Tau Omega, Upsilon Omega Pi (whose 1982 pledge class is pictured above), Theta Tau Delta, Psi Chi Eta, the Spurs, members of the Blue Key Honor Society, and former men’s basketball players for an alumni game on the Howard Hall court. Reunion 2012 will also feature several Alumni College classes: philosophy professor Thom Faller will speak about ethical dilemmas in the news, and Brian Doyle, editor of Portland Magazine, will regale the audience with selections from his writings in non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Alumni College sessions are free and open to the public, so bring along your non-UP alumni friends as well. The full schedule is now available on the University’s website at alumni.up.edu. Paper registration packets were mailed in April, and online registration also available at alumni.up.edu. Aaron, Lauren, and Kathryn Cook, and Maria and Emily Herbison; and sister, Käthe Scholtens of Germany. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Elizabeth A. James passed away on February 26, 2012. Elizabeth was born in Vancouver to Louis and Frances James. She graduated from the University of Portland with a bachelor and masters degree in business administration/accounting. She worked
for Providence Health System as a finance officer. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Providence Portland Medical Foundation in the name of her mother, Frances M. James. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
’78 PRAYERS, PLEASE Monica Michaud passed away on December 3, 2011, in Portland, Ore. She worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from June 1978
Washington State University history professor Peter Boag has been awarded the 2012-13 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the Eberhard Karls University in Tuebingen, Germany. The prestigious post is awarded to “scholars in the fields of American Studies including culture/literature, history, (and) political science who have substantial research and teaching experience and an excellent publication record.” The 10-month post will allow him to teach two or three advanced courses and to use the research facilities of the host university and neighboring institutions.
’82 SUSAN’S BIG NEWS Susan Gaca has been named as the first chief nursing officer (CNO) of Cigna, a global health service company dedicated to helping people improve their health, well-being and sense of security. In this new clinical role, Gaca will serve as an advocate and spokesperson for Cigna’s nurses and allied health professionals at key external stakeholder meetings. She will lead more than 2,000 nurses, health educators, case managers and behavioral coaches who every day help customers, including those with acute or chronic conditions, to achieve their optimal health potential. Gaca will continue with her current responsibilities as leader of Cigna’s Executive Nurse and Leadership Council, and leader of Premium Solutions and Onsite Health within the Total Health & Network organization.
’87 A MUSICAL LIFE Corrie (Ripp) O’Brien writes: “I’m answering your request with a photo and some info related to music. My daughter Lydia was a freshman at West Albany High School this last school year. Almost everything Lydia does involves music. Lydia plays piano, violin, clarinet, and tenor sax. The attached photo is of Lydia this last April for West Albany’s production of Fiddler
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formance. Their Symphonic band took 2nd in state this year at the 5A level. They played beautifully, their instruments sounded like they were singing. It was amazing. Lydia lived and breathed music the whole school year. She has always loved music and to see her in such a positive environment, and thriving because of it, is wonderful. Albany has figured out that music is important and helps raise academic performance in other areas as well. Even with budget cuts, they are adding an additional band at the high school next year because they have so many incoming freshmen.”
’90 THE IMPORTANT THINGS Elizabeth Covert-Tobey was featured in an interview in the February 23, 2012 edition of The National (see article at http://tinyurl.com/77mx6qm). “A Minute With: Beth Tobey of Sweetnature Designs” was written by Selina Denman and includes much of what drives Beth to create and market products for her company, Sweetnature Designs (“Design is important because it can make a simple, useful object look nice. It is as simple as that. A towel or pillow cover is fine if it is a plain piece of fabric, but by adding a unique twist, it turns into something you will be happy to use and look at every day”). See more at http://sweetnaturedesigns.com/.
C L A S S ’92 KERRI’S UPDATE Kerri Russell writes: “I married Scott Bates in October, 2011. I also attended Portland State University for graduate school, graduating in 2005 with a MS in Special Education, K-12.”
’94 OUR MAN OF THE YEAR Sean Burke, who serves as McMinnville High School’s assistant principal in Oregon, was one of three finalists for the national title of assistant principal of the year. He was named Oregon’s assistant principal of the year in November by the Oregon Association of Secondary School Administrators, primarily for his emphasis on putting students first and highlighting their achievements rather than his own. The national winner will be announced later in the year. Burke is the third McMinnville School District administrator in six years to be named a statewide winner and the second to go on to be a national finalist. Burke, who grew up in Sherwood, has been at Mac High since 1994. He taught social studies and coached basketball prior to becoming part of the administration. He and his wife, Keri, have four children: Michael, a 2011 Mac High graduate, and younger siblings Olivia, Peyton and AJ.
’96 THE PLAY’S THE THING Doreen O’Skea shouted out the news from Ashland that she was recently hired by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as their new director of individual giving. Doreen joins the Shakespeare Festival from the office of development at Southern Oregon University, where she served as director of alumni relations for nearly five years.The position allows her to stay in the Rogue Valley and be involved with her passion for theatre. Daughter Amelia was excited about the news as she views the Shakespeare Festival as the cool place where they tell big stories. (She is seven, she also calls American Football “The Football Show” and soccer is her favorite sport. Smart girl!) Doreen sends out greetings to her fellow alums near and far and hopes that somehow they will find their way to Ashland to say hello at some point. Prayers, please, for Kristin Brooks on the loss of her father, William “Bill” Lind, on March 20, 2012. Survivors include Kristin and her brother, Greg Lind; Bill’s brother, Donald; and one grandchild, Parker Linn. Our prayers and condolences to the family.
The City of Woodland, Washington has hired Bart Stepp as public works director. Originally from the Albany, Oregon area, Stepp most recently work for the city of La Center, where he held the title of City Engineer. He holds professional licenses in Washington, Oregon and Montana and is a Certified Erosion and Sediment Control Lead in Washington. Stepp and his family will continue to reside in La Center, Washington, where he is active in the community and coaches youth sports. The Woodland City Council confirmed Bart’s appointment and approved his employment contract at their regular February 21, 2012 meeting. His official starting date was Monday, March 5, 2012. A note from teacher extraordinaire Scott Reis ’98: “Here’s a random e-mail from my friend Tim Fukawa-Connelly, who is also a UP alum from 1997. Pardon the pseudo cursing...Tim has a unique sense of humor. Uli Steidl ran for the Pilots cross country and track teams and apparently he won the Masters Division of the Boston Marathon. Here’s the message: ‘Date: Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 5:52 AM. Subject: fast mofo! To: Scott Reis. I’m reading the paper this morning checking out the winners of the Boston Marathon and come across: Masters Winner: Uli Steidl, Seattle. 2:23.08. SOB’s still frikkin fast!’” Well, we certainly can’t sum it up any more succinctly than that. Thanks Scott, Tim, and Uli, of course. We heard from James L. Guse recently, who sends us the following: “Ball Janik LLP announced today that James L. Guse has joined the firm’s Portland office as an Associate in the Construction Defect, Insurance Recovery and Litigation practice groups. Mr. Guse’s practice focuses on the representation of individual and corporate policyholders in insurance coverage disputes, including insurance coverage for construction disputes. He also is experienced in general business litigation and in a wide variety of matters involving employment law. Mr. Guse has represented his clients in administrative hearings as well as state and federal courts, including argument before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Mr. Guse received his J.D. cum laude in 1999 from the University of Notre Dame Law School, attending the school’s Concannon London Law Programme in 1997-8. He earned his B.A. in
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Honoring music professor emeritus Roger O. Doyle in January as the Mac Club Balladeers: his lovely bride Kay and four of Roger’s singing teammates: Karl Wetzel; Doug Cooley ’86; Paul Nelsen ’96, ’97; and Joe Baker ’00. The Sonorous One is awfully sick with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, you know, and we love and miss him, and celebrate him with scholarships, and if you want to make a gift to help kids sing their hearts out, call Diane Dickey at 503.943.8130. political science from the University of Portland in 1996.”
’00 A WOMAN OF TASTE AND DISCERNMENT Nicole Bestard writes: “A little of what I’ve been up to on the writing front: After several years working in community magazines in northern California, I worked in restaurant public relations, and then wine-focused PR for several years, and completed my MFA in writing at the University of Southern California along the way. Writing marketing materials for fine wine went handin-hand with indulging in incredible meals, and while my current life is nothing like that, the experience gave me a lot more confidence in the kitchen. I also became a recipe tester for a few cookbooks —from bundt cakes to the ‘love diet.’ In 2012, I moved to Washington DC (my husband is in graduate school there) and I took a job in technology writing for a small software marketing company. I went from writing about winemakers and vineyards, and authoring food and wine pairing manuals, to writing about semiconductor manufacturing software. It’s challenging, and I’m learning a lot. And I’m still eking out time to work on my fiction and poems. I moved back home to southern California recently, and I’m working remotely as a tech writer. I’m living in the back bay area of Newport Beach (a beautiful wetlands area that’s
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truly a blessing to live alongside, what with tides, and egrets and pelicans and light that changes every moment on the water). It’s also nice to be back somewhere with yearround farmers markets. Being able to get field strawberries in winter is a luxury I took for granted my entire youth, and an indulgence I can’t resist now that I’m home.” Joe Womac was recognized at the White House as a “Champion of Change” in January 2012. The Champions
of Change program honors “ordinary Americans doing extraordinary things in their communities.” Nine leaders in Catholic education from around the country, including Womac, were honored for their service to their communities and the nation, and Womac was recognized in part for his dedication and work as the executive director of the Fulcrum Foundation, based in
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remains in my life all these years since graduation. She helped me get financial aid for grad school through the philanthropic educational organization, P.E.O., introduced me to the sisterhood of that same organization years later, and continues to check on me now and then. Happy retirement, dear lady!” Holly is, of course, referring to our winter 2011 mystery faculty member, Jill Hoddick, who is retiring at the conclusion of the 2011-2012 academic year. Candace McLean writes: “I defended my dissertation at Notre Dame on April 4, 2012, and I am now officially a Ph.D. in theology. Thanks to everyone for their support over the years.” Candace, according to Fr. Art Wheeler, who knows these things, “was valedictorian here, semester in Spain, RA in Kenna. Married to Chris McLean ’99, also a UP alumnus. She has been teaching here as an adjunct in theology. Excellent representative for UP. Her majors were theology, political science and Spanish. She was in the honors program. And she started here as a business major!” Thanks Fr. Art, and congratulations to Candace on her stellar achievement.
Rebecca MacIsaac ’01 writes: “David and I (and our two kiddos) are stationed at Geilenkirchen NATO Air Base in Germany, along with some other UP alumni. We recently hosted a dinner with UP alums and other friends. In this photo, left to right, are: Cara Cavanaugh, Colin Cavanaugh ’05, David Gregory ’00, Rebecca MacIsaac ’01, Kathleen (Stein) Lansing ’08, and Bobby Lansing ’08. It’s been a great assignment for us. We are headed back to the states (Beale AFB in California) this summer after five years overseas.” Seattle, Wash. During his eight years at the Fulcrum Foundation, Womac has worked extensively with at-risk students as well as Catholic schools in jeopardy of closing. Under his leadership, the Fulcrum Foundation has raised $60 million, which has helped more than 10,000 low-income students attend Catholic schools in western Washington state. Womac, who is responsible for directing the foundation’s overall operations, has played a vital role in Seattle being among the largest regions in the country that has not closed any Catholic schools and instead has opened schools during the past decade. Last year, every high school senior supported by the Fulcrum Foundation graduated and of those, 99 percent are now attending college. Womac’s dedication to Catholic education is apparent in the 17 years he has spent as a student and teacher in Catholic schools. After his time on The Bluff, Womac went on to receive a master’s in education from University of Notre Dame and a law degree from Seattle University. Wonderful news from Deb Vaughn (Debbie Martin): “Hello from Salem! My husband Rob and I are proud as heck to announce the birth of our daughter, Emery Anne Vaughn, on
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January 9, 2012. She was 9 pounds, 14 oz. and 21 inches long, born at home in Salem,
Oregon. Our new little family is doing well and we fall a little more in love with her every day. In other news, I started a talk radio show on Salem’s new community radio station, KMUZ 88.5 FM, in December and Emmy’s arrival was timed perfectly so that I didn’t even have to miss a show. The Kat and Deb Show is available to stream online at www.kmuz.org every Friday at 6 pm. After my maternity leave, I returned to work as the arts education coordinator at the Oregon Arts Commission, where I have been for the past four years. Rob continues as the technical director at Linfield College in McMinnville. Best to all in the UP community!”
’01 HEY, IT’S JILL! Holly Ellis writes: “It’s Jill! It’s Jill! It’s our dear Jill Hoddick. She is a constant teacher and
’02 WEDDING BELLS Erika Nest got her fairy tale ending and married her best friend, Ryan Cadres, on February 18, 2012. The couple met in 2010 and fell in love almost instantly. The Boston Red Sox take a big part in the couple’s lives. Their first date was at Fenway and Ryan proposed to Erika on the Green Monster during a tour of Fenway last year. The wedding was in Ryan’s hometown of Hanson, Mass. Erika is a registered nurse in the Medical Intensive Care Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and Ryan is a physical education teacher at Cardinal Spellman High School in Brockton. They live just 30 minutes from Boston and their doors are always open to fellow alumni who want to visit!
’04 JESSICA’S UPDATE Jessica Fritts writes: “I have joined the fabulous group of Pacific Residential Mortgage. I am very excited to be here and would love to share what my role is with fellow UP alumni. I can be reached at jessica.fr itts@pacresmortgage.com.”
’06 PRAYERS FOR LIZ, PLEASE Liz Lord lost her battle with brain cancer on Wednesday,
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February 1, 2012. Liz had learned the devastating news of her diagnosis on April 1, 2011, and to the last she remained positive, upbeat, and
characteristically determined to fight—traits that served her well in her days as a star volleyball player for the Pilots. Friends and family rallied around Liz and all were moved by her spirit. Our prayers and condolences to the family. We heard recently from Tom Gannon ’03, who writes: “On the 9th of May Nicolette Gaylan and Ben McCarty (Beacon sports writer) are getting married on Rottenest Island off the coast of Fremantle Western Australia. They were part of my first group of students here in 2004. They had just started dating when they came out and they decided on an elopement strategy, so they are flying out and getting hitched. I will get some photos and a story in early May. They will encamp at my house while I am in America for Jim Gannon’s wedding on the 27th of April. It has been quite the season, getting ready for everything. He just got back from Afghanistan on 29 March and has been busy planning weddings and things. I haven’t had the courage to ask him what was more stressful, the war effort or wedding planning. I am writing my best man speech, and it needs to be good or my other brothers, that I like to think of as the good man and the better man, will never let me forget it. Lots of pressure.” Tom serves as campus minister at the University of Notre Dame Australia.
’07 GOING TO HAITI We heard recently from Jenna Dullanty, who writes: “As some of you already know I’m going to Haiti at the end of March 2012. I’ve done nursing and mission work but this will be the first time I will experience international nursing. I will be working at Hospital Bernard Mevs in Port-AuPrince. Though the massive
C L A S S 2010 earthquake in Haiti has become old news, conditions in the country are still quite rough. Dehydration from cholera and other preventable problems are still taking many lives. The hospital provides much needed medical care for anyone in need, regardless of ability to pay. In a country of 10 million people this is the only hospital equipped for critical care, neonatal intensive care, and pediatric intensive care. They also have the only CT scanner in the country. My work with the hospital will be wherever they have the greatest need. I could be in ICU, pediatrics, operating room or emergency room. I don’t find out until the day I show up what I’ll be doing. I have my fingers crossed for pediatrics, though!” Thanks for writing, Jenna, and be sure to give us an update on how your service trip went. We learned the following from UP physics professor Shannon Mayer, who writes: “Abe Olson has been selected to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting in Lindau, Germany this summer. At the meeting 25 physics Nobel Laureates will meet with approximately 550 young physics researchers from around the world to discuss physics and establish an international network of young physics scholars. Abe was nominated to attend the meeting by his research advisor at Purdue University. Abe is in his 4th year of a Ph.D. program in physics at Purdue where holds a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. Abe began his research career as an undergraduate research student in the Department of Physics here at UP. A link to the Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting: http://tinyurl.com/6mxskdy.”
’08 A VOTE OF CONFIDENCE We heard recently from Marya Maddox (Hughes), who writes: “My daughter, Bri Hughes, graduated from the University of Portland in 2008. And I bless the day that she chose Portland. The small class sizes, the wonderfully quirky professors, and the engaged and engaging priests made for a special experience for Bri. (Also, her grandfather grew up in a house on North Strong Street overlooking the river. Their cows were grazed where now stands the current baseball diamond.) Brianne at this moment is fulfilling her wildest dream by studying lin-
guistics at York University, U.K. It took her a little longer to head out to graduate heaven because her father, Frank Hughes, was brought down by lung cancer in February of 2009. A non-smoker, the loss of this witty, charismatic, Irish-American (both sides of his family) took us all down an unimagined road.” Thanks for the kind words, Marya, best of luck to you and Bri and our prayers and condolences on the loss of Frank. Isaac Achuil Chol writes: “Since UP; I have worked in the Office of the President of South Sudan, for the U.S. Embassy Juba, and I am starting with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of South Sudan in May!” Good to hear from you Isaac, we expect great things from you. Sandi Dennis writes: “Having finished my stint as a HIV/ AIDS Program Development Officer, I am headed to Burundi to finish up my volunteer commitment with Microcredit Empowerment Fund. The last time I left Burundi it was July 2008. My primary project will be working with the microloan organization that I interned with in 2008. ISHAKA is transitioning to the next level of a registered loan and deposit taking institution. They will be implementing organizational and program changes needed to meet the service demands of a growing clientele. To do that they will need greater reserves held at the central bank, along with strong corporate governance and financial management systems. I will have 2 months to participate in that before I come home from my extended 6-month East Africa venture.” Alice Rossignol writes: “I completed my Master’s in Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University in May 2011, and recently started working full-time at The Nature Conservancy in Michigan as a philanthropy writer and editor.” Thanks Alice, and good luck in your new career. Matt Eskue writes: “I finished Law School at the University of Oregon School of Law and am currently a member of the Oregon State Bar.” Thanks for letting us know, Matt, and congratulations.
’09 AN ALUMNI COUPLE Megan Lien writes: “I’m Megan Lien but when I graduated in 2009 I went by Megan Fitzgerald. I just married another class of 2009 alumnus, Ryan Lien. Ryan received his
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The Audigy Group, a financial company in Vancouver, Washington, enjoys a startling ten University alumni among their 120 employees: left to right are Isaiah Fentress ’11, Doug Kienzle ’99, Natalie Workman ’15, Stefanie Graiff ’03, Mason Walker ’03 (Audigy’s president), Ashley Walker ’06, Cathy Hernandez ’01, Christian Piuma ’05, Nick Roberts ’07, Heather Roberts ’03, and Chris Roberts ’04. Mason Walker, in particular, lauded his time on The Bluff as career preparation writ large: “The environment UP creates is so much more than students on a campus attending a university—it’s culture and a family. My professors truly invested in me. They taught me that college was more than graduating with a degree—it means developing as a person who continues to give back to the community that nurtured you.” Our thanks to Audigy’s Nathan Miller for the entertaining photograph. B.S. in nursing and now works at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Portland. I received my B.S. in mathematics and continued my schooling at Portland State University where I just received my master’s in mathematics. We actually just got married on St. Patrick’s Day at the University of Portland chapel and our priest was Fr. Mark Ghyselinck, who Ryan knew from doing the Europe summer study abroad program. We first met during our freshman year when we were both living in Corrado hall so we’re very thankful for our time at UP since it brought us together!” Thanks for writing Megan, we love to hear about couples who find each other here on The Bluff. Jordan Allensworth writes: “I started medical school last fall and will graduate from OHSU in 2015 with an MD.”
’10 WELCOME, JETT! Our very own Krista KennedyHo, who works in the interna-
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tional student services office, along with her husband, Phong Ho, welcomed Jett Si Ho, born on October 5, 2011. He was 6 lbs. 6 oz. and 19
inches long. “We are so excited to have him in our lives,” she says. “He is a very happy baby and enjoys walks on the University of Portland campus.” Michelle Oliver writes: “After completing a year of post grad
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Jimmy Robertson ’12 on 8,440-foot Mount Bigelow in Washington. Jim’s a former Marine sergeant who finished his career in academic glory on The Bluff in May. Our prayers and thanks to him for his service. volunteering in Cleveland, Ohio, I was hired on to become a full time staff member at the agency. I now am the grant coordinator, writing, managing and reporting on all grants that the agency has recieved, and the assistant manager to the Senior Citizen’s Program at the Harvard Community Services Center.”
’11 PRAYERS, PLEASE Returning to the Light in March: the gentle, funny, honest, generous, witty jazz buff Dick Hayward of Eugene, grandfather of Kelsey Jensen, now a pediatric nurse at Saint Charles Hospital in Bend. Dick was a city treasure in Eugene for nearly 60 years, running Clary Business Machines, working with Lee Travel, being a terrific dad and
grampa, and never a mean word or anything but a gentle smile for the world. He was a humble glory, that man.
Jamie Roland Grimm writes: “I started a Job at Vital Technical Marketing in Beaverton Oregon recently.”
’14 STEMLER AWARD Amanda Danforth is a winner of the Stemler Study Abroad Scholarship, as announced by executive director Glenda Earwood of Alpha Lambda Delta, an honor society for students who have achieved a 3.5 GPA or higher and are in the top 20 percent of their class during their first year or term of higher education. Amanda was initiated into ALD in 2011 and is studying in England on the AHA International program.
N O T E S Federation. Christie Hall came in first with a 24.3 percent average reduction. Mehling Hall was next at 21.7 percent; Villa Maria with 15.7 percent; Kenna with 10.9 percent; Corrado with 4.9 pecent; Shipstad with 3.3 percent; Haggerty with 1.9 percent; Tyson with 0.8 percent, and Fields and Schoenfeldt Hall with -1.7 pecent. Participating in the Campus Conservation Nationals is just the latest in the University’s ongoing sustainability efforts. The University was the first college on the West Coast to discontinue the sale of disposable plastic water bottles on campus; has several LEEDcertified buildings on campus, including the award-winning LEED Platinum Shiley Hall and LEED Gold Fields and Schoenfeldt Halls; has witnessed record use of alternative transportation options; has enacted a Climate Action Plan with the goal of being completely carbon neutral by 2040; and has reduced food waste by 70 percent in its dining facilities.
FACULTY, STAFF, FRIENDS Congratulations to University music professor and bandleader Patrick Murphy, who has been awarded the highly competitive national Graves
Award for “outstanding accomplishment in teaching in the humanities by a younger faculty member.” Previous recipients on The Bluff are professors Herman Asarnow (English), Richard Askay (philosophy), Laurie McLary (international languages and cultures), and most recently Alejandro Santana (philosophy). Patrick plans to use the Graves stipend for his archival research into Soviet military band music (an area in which he is internationally renowned), particularly the manuscripts of composer Boris Kozhevnikov, which are housed at the Moscow Military Conservatory. Patrick, who earned his doctorate in musical arts in wind conducting at the University of Arizona in 2008, has already become a leading authority on this Russian composer. Soviet wind band music is particularly interesting, he says, because so little of it has been heard outside Russia. Murphy’s project will permit him to spend eight days at the Moscow Military Conservatory, with unfettered access to the composer’s manuscripts and personal writings; luckily he taught himself to read and speak Russian. After his archival work, he will observe classes at the Moscow Military Conservatory, a mili-
CAMPUS CONSERVATION NATIONALS College students from more than 150 schools across the country competed to reduce energy and water consumption in the Campus Conservation Nationals, and University of Portland students joined them. For a three-week period from February 15 to March 7, all nine dorms at the University took part in the nationwide electricity and water use reduction competition among colleges and universities—the only college in Portland and one of only two in Oregon that took part in this national program. UP’s progress was tracked at www.buildingdashboard.net/up. CCN is organized by the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council through its USGBC Students Program and in partnership with Lucid, Alliance to Save Energy and the National Wildlife
And now for something completely different...a photo from the recently run Corvallis Half Marathon, featuring Eric Catron, Libby Nousen ’12, and Trevor Webber ’13. Libby is the de facto boss of the University’s marketing and communications office in her capacity as work study student extraordinaire, and graduated in May. (Jesse Skoubo, Corvallis Gazette-Times).
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C L A S S tary college devoted specifically to the training of band leaders. Sr. Theodora Abreu, C.S.C., passed away on February 29, 2012, at St. Mary’s College in in Notre Dame, Ind. She taught on The Bluff from 1979 to 1981, where she became director of the gerontology program. “Delving into the needs of the elderly that this position entailed was a revelation and a spark that lit the fire of her own desire to serve this segment of God’s people,” according to her obituary. “Her work in gerontology was an excellent preparation for the new ministry she embraced. Working in home healthcare for two years confirmed her eagerness to pursue her newfound love. In 1983, as a member of Holy Redeemer Parish ministry team in Portland, Oregon, Sister Theodora immersed herself in every aspect of life that affected the elderly of the parish. Here she thrived. She became all things to all of them, and was “on call day or night” to meet the needs of her special clientele. As the Eucharistic ministry to the homebound apostolate grew, she recruited other parish members to prepare for this important service... In addition to all of this, she became a sophisticated fundraiser because she saw a need for improved accommodations for the elderly and disabled of the parish. The funds raised covered most of the cost of a ramp for accessibility, a heating unit for the parish hall, and restroom facilities for the hall and the church. Sister Theodora received a number of awards for her dedication and service to the elderly but as she wrote, ‘I have found this ministry very rewarding and while I don’t help others for the glory it may bring me, I know that I have made a difference in the lives of many.’ What greater reward could a person want?” What greater reward, indeed. Our prayers and condolences to Sr. Theolora’s family, religious order, and many friends. We heard recently from Carol Welch ’08, assistant director of human resources here at the University: “My guess for the mystery photo in the spring 2012 Portland Magazine is Margaret Wachsmuth!” Yes Carol, that’s Martha, who has graced the campus for more than 40 years now, serving diligently in the University Archives, orignally for Fr. Barry Hagan, C.S.C., and now for Fr. Bob Antonelli, C.S.C. Thanks for your note.
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And speaking of Martha: we also heard from Jim Covert, who writes: “I just saw your latest mystery photo in the magazine. It’s got to be Martha Wachsmuth, Father Hagan’s ‘Girl Friday.’ She was always at his side helping this dedicated priest as a professor and as an archivist. She was one of the most cheerful and most dependable people I ever encountered.” Dr. Covert is correct, of course, on all counts.
DEATHS Dr. Wesley R. Weissert ’42, January 23, 2012. Nora Gerald ’43, March 29, 2012, Amarillo, Texas. Margaret Franulovich ’44, January 5, 2012, Bellevue, Wash. Thomas D. Sullivan ’46, February 5, 2012. James Adrian Thielen ’49, February 1, 2012, Portland, Ore. Christopher Paul Mestrich ’50, January 24, 2012, Astoria, Ore. Ivan Husovsky ’52, December 25, 20122, Wilton, Conn. Kennie Namba ’53, March 2012. James Estes ’54, March 26, 2012. Richard C. Benevento ’58, January 14, 2012, Portland, Ore. Patricia Lynne Allessio Senko ’59, November 3, 2011. Sr. Francella Mary Griggs ’59, January 2012. James Loren Mack ’58, 2010. Marian Louise Scott Mack ’59, March 23, 2012. J. David Chase ’60, February 17, 2012. Leland Nicholas “Nick” Chester, brother of Katherine “Kay” Chester ’62, former development director at UP, August 11, 2011. Mike William Boyle ’66, March 22, 2012, Aransas Pass, Texas. Dorothy Duyck, mother of Barbara Jorgenson ’70, December 15, 2011. Beverly Virangura Roberts ’72, February 20, 2012, Bangkok, Thailand. James T. “Jim” Davis ’74, March 20, 2012, Tukwila, Wash. Paul Meermeier Sr., father of Paul Meermeier ’77, February 2, 2012. Elizabeth A. James ’77, Februaryt 26, 2012. Monica Michaud ’78, December 3, 2011, Portland, Ore. Liz Lord ’06, February 1, 2012. Dick Hayward, grandfather of Kelsey Jensen ’11. Sr. Theodora Abreu, C.S.C., February 29, 2012, Notre Dame, Ind. Sr. Jean Lenz ’98 Hon., January 2012. Rev. Chester Prusynski, C.S.C., April 22, 2012, Notre Dame, Ind.
Returning to the Maker on April 22, at age 91: the affable and beloved Father Pru, officially titled Rev. Chester Prusynski, C.S.C., but Pru to all and sundry. Pru was a Wisconsin boy who went into the Army in 1938, serving through the war; he then earned his business degree at Marquette. He arrived on The Bluff in 1964 and taught accounting, served in the halls, served as a regent, served as a loaner priest to endless local parishes, but his great love was chatting with and listening to students, especially the Pilot student-athletes, and really he was the Pilots’ chaplain at large for fifty years — one reason why the soccer practice field is named Pru Pitch. A genuine, warm, funny, smart, gentle soul, eager to help, eager to listen. A good man and a great priest and a terrible loss to the campus. Rest in peace, Pru.
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She had a smile like a country, huge and welcoming. She was quick-witted and funny and humble and honest and real and kind and the absolute exemplar of what we think we mean when we say we want to live a holy life. She was a Franciscan sister who loved the Congregation of Holy Cross and spent her whole career elevating its educational vision. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Portland in 1998 because she was “remarkable, pragmatic, patient, humorous, prayerful, gentle, witty, selfless, sincere, patient, gracious, and an extraordinary educator,” as Father David Tyson, C.S.C., said. She was a rector and chaplain and author par excellence (Loyal Sons and Daughters, a memoir of her life at Notre Dame). “She was the gold standard for the art of listening, and the most striking example of truth practiced in charity I’ve ever known,” said University vice president Father Mark Poorman, C.S.C. She was Sister Jean Lenz. She is Sister Jean Lenz, who returned to the Love in January, after 81 years in this form. The University of Portland lost a dear friend, but gained a bemused voice in the immediate company of the Maker. Portland 48
Or here’s a Campaign story. Mary Griggs, of the Siletz people of Oregon who lived here for thousands of years, was born in 1920. She spent her childhood in the Christie School just south of Portland, a Catholic orphanage for girls; this photo was taken there, in about 1935. She was totally knocked out by the grace and courage and humor of the Holy Names Sisters there, and joined the order in 1943, on her birthday, becoming Sister Francella Mary. She earned her degree at the University of Portland in 1959, and went on to be a beloved teacher in schools all over Oregon and Washington, and also turned her wit and charm to the legal and official restoration of her beloved tribe, which happened, by order of President Jimmy Carter, in 1977. ‘She had a fierce hunger for justice,” said a friend, memorably. When she died, in January, at age 91, she was buried on a hill near the coast, on land where her people had lived for thousands of years. Do we have Campaign targets that sing a soul like Sister Francella Mary Griggs? Heck, yes: scholarships. Aim your gift at helping students from the First Peoples, or for students who are nuns, or both, or join the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, who give us handsome gifts annually for creative environmental stewardship projects. Or invent your own scholarship. Dream big. See rise.up.edu, or call Diane Dickey at 503.943.8130, dickey@up.edu. And thank you. Photo courtesy of Sarah Cantor and the Archives of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, US-Ontario Province
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OBLONG TO AWESOME
THE UNIVERSITY’S FOOTBALL TEAMS, 1901-2012 American football (here personified by Edwin Fredell ’04) was played on The Bluff from the first fall the University opened until 1950, when the University could not afford to field the collegiately expensive version. But soccer, also played since the early years, eventually rose to national and now international prominence; alumnae Christine Sinclair, Sophie Schmidt, Megan Rapinoe, and Stephanie Lopez Cox will play for soccer’s World Cup this July, and the Pilot women’s and men’s teams, annually among the finest in America, open play in August. For schedules and tickets, see portlandpilots.com; to make a Rise Campaign gift to help out the University’s cheerful student athletes, call Colin McGinty at 503.943.8005, mcginty@up.edu.