Portland Magazine Autumn 2015

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CHESSAY My son asked me to play chess yesterday. When a child asks you to play chess you say yes. He is twenty years old and an excellent chess player. I taught him to play when he was five years old. He first beat me when he was thirteen years old. What I remember best from that day is his slow smile when he and I realized, a few moves before the end, that he had toppled the king.

I remember too that he did not crow or caper or shout or cackle but instead reached across the board and shook my hand, as I had taught him to do, out of respect for the game, and for your opponent, in whose mind you have been swimming for an hour. Chess at its best is a deeply intimate game in which you can delve into another person’s mind and if you are lucky you get a glance a hint an intimation of your opponent’s character and creativity, the cast of his mind, the flare of her personality, how he confronts difficulties, how rash or calm she is, how willing to be surprised, how well he loses, how poorly she wins.

He came out along his left wing, immediately establishing his knights, immediately forcing me to scuffle and skitter around on defense. My queen roared off her throne snarling and forced her way all the way to his back line but he deftly boxed her in with yapping pawns. Sometimes I think the pawn is the most powerful piece of all.

Revolutions and religions begin with ragged beggars from the wilderness.

I sent my bishops slicing here and there. My pawns grappled and died.

He missed one golden fatal chance with a knight. The knight’s curious sidelong move is the deepest genius of chess; it is the one piece that does not move in linear fashion, the one piece with a geometry of its own, the piece that goes its own way, the mystical piece.

In a moment he will be thirty. I want to stare at him across the board for a week. He catches me in a mistake that takes me forever to redress. I don’t know how to say any words that would catch the way I love him. I want him to outwit me. I want to win and I want to lose and I want to savor how deftly I am defeated. I often wonder if I have been a good enough father. A good father teaches his son how to kill the king. He makes an infinitesimal mistake and my rooks close in grimly.

I have prayed desperately to die before he does. I would like to teach his children to play chess. I would like to show them how, if you are lucky, you can see inside your opponent, only occasionally, only dimly, only for a few minutes, but for those few minutes you get a hint an intimation a glance at who lives inside the castle of his body. What we see of each other is only a bit of who we are. I want to invent new words for what we mean when we say the word love. Chess can be a wonderful word for that. Chess is a lovely word that can’t be spoken.

After the game we shake hands and I think never in the history of the world was there ever a man happier to be a father than me. Never in the whole long bristling history of the world.

Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine, and the author most recently of a collection of “proems” called How the Light Gets In (Orbis Books).

F E A T U R E S 14 / Gus and Travis, by Brian Doyle What is the University of Portland about way down deepest in its bones? This.

16 / What You Did, and Why It Mattered, by James Mattis This past April, retired Marine General Jim Mattis rose to speak to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans at the Marines’ Memorial Club in San Francisco.

What he said was extraordinary.

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20 / The Song of Songs, by Pico Iyer Notes on the wildest passage in the Bible: “a thunderbolt, streaming light, a taste of wine, a lover’s touch, a sudden cry in the middle of a crowded temple...”

24 / A Song of Summer, by Dave Devine ’97 Bathing a son, “haltingly, reverently, singing, untamed, impolite, praying…” page 16

26 / Their Rough Grace, by Martin Flanagan The University’s Schoenfeldt Series visiting writer on “two men who knew how their lives would end, but continued on bold and brave, with a release of self so astounding that the story of it travelled like a live thing…”

32 / Rise of the Rec, photographs by Adam Guggenheim Speaking of rough grace, it’s been riveting to watch a gleaming new gymnasium appear where there once was grass and dragonflies. Ladies and gentlemen, the new Father Bill Beauchamp Center.

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3 / The gentle wry amiable affable admissions glory Dan Reilly

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4 / The metallurgical engineer Archbishop Alexander Sample ’14 hon.: a note 5 / ‘Ferocity and Grace’ – the sweet theater of Merlo Field 6 / To carry each other’s burdens: University president Father Mark Poorman, C.S.C. 8 / Mr Hannes Zetzsche ’16, from Reedsport: a note 9 / A Note on the Actor, by Emily Biggs ’15 10 / One in Nine: the prison of alcoholism 11 / Writing the Rec: (engraved) notes 12 / Sports, starring World Cup titlist Megan Rapinoe ’09 13 / University news and feats and fetes 37 / The Pilot House, then 48 / The patient humble late Leo Garrow ’50

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THE UNIVERSITY OF PORTLAND MAGAZINE

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Cover by Dave Mensing; our thanks to Dave and to Chris Nelson at the Clearwater Gallery in Sisters, Oregon.

For more of Dave’s work see davidmensingfineart.com.

Autum 2015: Vol. 34, No. 3 President: Rev. Mark Poorman, C.S.C. Founding Editor: John Soisson Editor: Brian Doyle Wry Witty Tart Designers: Joseph Erceg ’55 & Chris Johnson Mooing Assistant Editors: Marc Covert ’93 & Amy Shelly ’95 Fitfully Contributing Editors: Louis Masson, Terry Favero, Anna Lageson-Kerns Portland is published quarterly by the University of Portland. Copyright ©2015 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) 943-8225, 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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The great Scottish poet Robbie Burns: “The lazy mist hangs from the brow of the hill / Concealing the course of the dark-winding rill; / How languid the scenes, late so sprightly, appear! / As Autumn to Winter resigns the pale year...” ¶ Fall is soccer season on The Bluff; for schedules and tickets see portlandpilots.com. The always-excellent women’s team returns five WCC allstars, will face Holy Cross rival Notre Dame in Indiana, and will host league rivals BYU and Santa Clara on The Bluff. ¶ October 17, 2010: the Congregation of Holy Cross gets its first recognized saint when Brother Andre Bessette, C.S.C., is canonized in Rome.

Fascinating man, Andre: when the Archbishop of Montreal told him he could build a chapel on Mount Royal only if he didn’t go into debt, he build a wooden shack fifteen feet by eighteen feet, which grew over the years into the lovely Oratory that stands there today, dedicated to Andre’s beloved Saint Joseph.

The University

September 30: The annual Red Mass, celebrating men and women working in the law.

Mass is followed by a great dinner and a greater speaker, Father David Link. Riveting man, Father Link: he is the rare priest who is a father and grandfather. After his wife Barbara died, the former dean of Notre Dame Law, a man who

(December 3-5), in the lovely little intimate Blair Studio, the University’s new black box theater in Mehling Hall. ¶ In concert this fall, usually in BC Aud: the University’s Wind Symphony, Orchestra, University Singers, Women’s Chorale, Chamber Ensembles, Chapel Choir (awesome), and Jazz Band. The annual Advent Concert at Saint Mary’s Cathedral downtown is December 5 at 8 pm; the annual glorious hilarious Mocks Crest Gilbert & Sullivan run will be June 3-26.

Info on all arts events: Kelly Brown, 503.943.7228, pfa@up.edu.

The Faculty

Arts & Letters

Speaking in the Chiles Center on Sunday, September 27 at 7 pm, free and open to all: Meg Jay, author of The Defining Decade, about the crucial and much misunderstood twenties. Jay’s TED talk, “30 is not the new 20,” is wildly popular, and her book is being widely read on campus this year through the University’s Dundon-Berchtold Institute. ¶ The Schoenfeldt Series visiting writer on November 5, free as air: the great Australian journalist and raconteur Martin Flanagan; see page 26. ¶ Guests of the English Department’s readings series this year: fictionist Sara Jaffe on October 7 and poet Elyse Fenton on November 17, both in the campus bookstore at 7.30 p.m. The Schoenfeldt Series hosts novelist Laila Lalami (The Moor’s Account) on February 15. Her great novel is the Campus Reads selection this year, following Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy. ¶ On the boards this fall in Mago Hunt Theater: the comedies The Clean House (October 7-11) and Mirror Mirror (November 18-22), and the haunting Stop Kiss

The new dean of nursing, succeeding the vibrant Joanne Warner: Joane Moceri. ¶ Leaving The Bluff after 19 years as health center director: Paul Myers, to open a private therapy practice. ¶ A whopping 37 new professors start in August, bringing the total faculty to 340; among the new faces are Wall Street veteran Chris Dunnaville, emergency nurse Vicki Ericson, turbine expert Jordan Farina (who started as an engineer by fixing muscle cars in Alabama), math and groundwater flow scholar Aristides Petrides, and Army Sergeant Charles Pittman, who served three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. ¶ Off to Changchu, Manchuria, China, this fall, on a Fulbright grant: literature professor John Orr. We note happily that the average January temperature there is -4.

The Students

Most popular majors, in order: nursing, biology, Spanish, mechanical engineering, psychology, finance, orga-

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nizational communication, accounting, elementary education, and marketing. ¶ Among the freshmen flooding onto campus this fall: Katherine Gamble, who went to high school in Bavaria as her dad served in the military abroad; Qi Liang, a member of the Society of Young Magicians; Madras High’s valedictorian, Melissa Olivera, the first in her family to attend college; six-time Maui cheerleading champion Elysse Phillips; and Ashland’s Clara Honsinger, the best young mountain biker in Oregon. Whew. There are 9 million stories among the more than 900 new students.

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October 5, 1986: The Chapel of Christ the Teacher is dedicated. The Chapel, by the way, boasts gleaming new pews as of this summer. ¶ October 6, 1999: Father Jeff Sobosan, C.S.C., dies at age 53. Riveting writer and teacher, was Jeffrey, alert to Christianity infused with wonder and awe at the natural world. ¶ October 10, 1982: Father Tom Oddo, C.S.C., was inaugurated as the University’s president, only 36 years old: he was thrillingly growing into the job when he was killed in a car crash in 1989. ¶ October 17, 1992: West Hall is renamed Waldschmidt Hall, after the avuncular former president, Father Paul Waldschmidt, C.S.C., who had been elevated to bishop; Waldy, a wry wit and no pixie, said the renaming was appropriate because it was “the oldest and roundest building on campus.” ¶ For more of this pleasurably personable campus history, see Father David Sherrer’s great up.edu/almanac.

ARTWORK BY MILAN ERCEG

The Season

had supervised the education of thousands of attorneys who helped jail thousands of prisoners, became a priest to minister to those very prisoners — “the least, the last, the lost, and the lonely,” as he says. “They are children of God.” He’s still startled by his ordination, he says; every morning he thinks “Who’s this priest in my bathroom?” ¶ Speaking in the Chiles Center on March 16: New York Times columnist David Brooks, author most recently of The Road to Character. Tickets go on sale in the fall.

PHOTO BY ADAM GUGGENHEIM

Retired this summer, after 42 years of genial amiable intelligent wry gentle honest labor: the legendary admissions counselor Dan Reilly, who during his tenure spoke with some 400,000 students and families about the University of Portland, in seven Western states and three countries (Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico); traveled more than 200,000 miles on our behalf; remembers every tiny town he was ever in (“Union, Elmira, Myrtle Point, Moro, Emmett, Jerome, Blackfoot, Rexburg, Dunsmuir, Denair…”), savors the fact that his wife and three of their children are alumni, and of late has been, he says, much enjoying admitting the children of alumni he admitted many years ago. What would he say, unpremeditated, of the students he admitted? “Bright and engaged,” he says instantly. “Those are the words I would choose.” Prayers on your roads and joys to come, Daniel. Thank you.

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Rarely do you hear an archbishop plead for a University to add a metallurgy program to its School of Engineering, but that is what Most Reverend Alexander Sample of Portland did, grinning, at the University’s 114th Commencement in May. The Archbishop, who earned two engineering degrees at Michigan Tech, also noted that his honorary doctorate last year on The Bluff allows him to say Pilots! when he’s asked, now that he’s an Oregon resident, if he prefers the Ducks or the Beavers.

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FEROCITY AND GRACE

By Blair Thomas ’07, who is earning his doctorate and teaching business at Florida State University. Blair was a season ticket holder for Pilot women’s soccer and is still, as you see, entranced.

The dimming glow of autumn skies where the scent of hot dogs and popcorn collide over a bluegrass pitch ... a field as open as child’s dream... chalked lines constrain the players, but your wonderment has no such barriers, not here. Here it is women who reign over an athletic monarchy with ferocity and grace. Here you are not quite sure if you are in heaven or at Merlo Field.

There are tales about people falling in love at Merlo Field. With their boyfriends and girlfriends. With soccer.

With their daughters, all over again.

Here every seat sells out for Florida State, Notre Dame, Santa Clara, Stanford, UCLA. Here is where prayers made over clasped hands have been answered, where fleet-footed, faithbased miracles have been performed.

Here people have danced on streets outside the walls of the pitch. Here faith is tested and destinies are questioned and unpredictability and the beautiful unknown draw you in. Here you feel alive.

Here there is a spirit cradling the field and its players and fans. Pilot faithful will tell you it is the spirit of Clive Charles, the impoverished London footballer who became the best defender in the world in his day, and then coach of the Pilot men and women from 1986 to 2002. Before his death in 2003, he created one of Portland’s and Oregon’s and America’s crown jewels: Portland Pilots soccer.

Clive resurrected a dead program.

Clive was a great coach without a great ego. Clive had no experience and became as great a coach as he had been a player. Things like that happen at Merlo Field.

Here there is a heartbeat. The Villa Drum Squad pounds steadily the whole game and the proud purple crowd pulsates, all five thousand of them, roaring as loudly for a walkon player who forces a throw-in at the 35th minute as they do for an AllAmerican scoring her third goal of the game. Here there are ovations not merely for the leads but for the whole cast. Here the crowd under-

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stands that those who do not start or play are every bit the contributors the stars are. Here the team and the crowd both understand that a woman’s best contributions are often unseen but not unnoticed. Here the understated is understood and appreciated by generations.

Here there are fables, all them true.

Shannon MacMillian’s five-assist game against Gonzaga? True. Justi Baumgardt’s goal 34 seconds into a game?

True. Tiny Tiffeny Milbrett becoming the best player in the country? True.

Shy Christine Sinclair becoming the best player in the country? True.

World Cup star Megan Rapinoe fighting back year after year from knee injuries, refusing to quit? True. But the best fables here might be the ones that cannot be described by numbers.

All too often record books fail to assess legacies adequately. How could you ever measure a woman’s spirit, her ability to move and inspire a whole generation of girls? How could you measure the dash and grace and will of a woman who becomes a beacon to other young girls, so bright that the rest of the world takes notice?

Here was where I saw the greatest college sports team I ever saw. The numbers hint at their greatness.

The 2005 Pilot women’s soccer team went undefeated. Christine Sinclair won her second national player of the year award. Thousands of fans filled Pioneer Square to honor the champions. Countless thousands rejoiced in the games and the title

and the wit and humor of the players.

But there was so much greatness and wonder that cannot be measured.

Many of the players have credited Coach Garrett Smith for his calm and subtle and quiet and trusting direction. Many have credited that year’s seniors for a ferocious energy to finish their careers with a bookend title.

Many have spoken of Clive Charles’ spirit suffusing all. His name was written on their cleats, tattooed onto their feet, engraved on their hearts.

Back then, when I sat in the stands transfixed by that championship team, there were fifty-foot-tall cypress trees behind the west goal, near the visitors’ bench; surely they added some subtle intimidation to the guests, brooding so close to the field. And when they were cut down, when the University reconfigured the grounds as part of the complex’s expansion, there were many of us fans who wondered if the intimacy and thrill of the Merlo experience would be the same, without those sky-scraping sentinels. But it was; it turned out that Merlo’s magic is bigger than any change can dilute; bigger than wins and losses. The magic has to do with hope, with the thrilling thought of what might happen, what almost surely will happen, what has happened many times, when you walk through the gate, and see the that unforgettable field waiting for you, and the crowd stands and begins to roar, for here, from the northeast entrance tunnel, come the Pilots...

This summer’s World Cup star when she was a lanky child delighting Pilot fans: the estimable Megan Rapinoe ’09.

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TO BEAR EACH OTHER’S BURDENS From University president Father Mark Poorman’s homily on Holy Thursday, the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, in the Chapel of Christ the Teacher. One great thing about a thoughtful articulate president is a steady supply of homilies with humility in them.

Right after I was ordained a priest, I was assigned to be hall director in Dillon Hall, a residence hall at the University of Notre Dame. So it was that as I was finishing up my deacon year in a parish, I was “invited,” as we say wryly in religious life, to serve 394 students, a residence staff of 11, four Holy Cross religious who were pastoral residents, six unflappable housekeepers, and probably several people whom I had no idea were living in the building. As daunting as it was at the time, I had still had that mild, understated swagger of a newly ordained priest: I was fresh from seminary training, and I was 27 years old, which of course is the best substitute anybody could ever want for actual life experience.

A few days after I moved in, I got a call at 3:30 in the morning from the security guard at the campus front gate that someone was there asking to see a priest. I quickly got dressed in my clerics and walked out into the night, fresh from sleep but still full of confidence even at that hour that I was going to bring competent pastoral care, theological truth, treasured solace, and abiding wisdom to the person waiting for my arrival. That, after all, what this was all about, I thought.

The woman didn’t wait for me.

Instead she ran toward me and then wrapped her arms around me and cried uncontrollably. She had taken a cab to the campus where she left her evening job downtown dancing at a bar. She told me her name was Linda, even though, sadly, she was

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presented every night at the bar as Demon Delilah. She apologized over and over for having taken me from my sleep. We went to a nearby common room in a residence hall and talked, and talked, and talked, and talked — about life, and love, and men who had treated her poorly, and a child she could only support with this dreadful job, and how awful she felt darkening the door of a church any more, and about her brother-in-law who had passed away that afternoon.

I was not especially competent; I was not full of wisdom; I was not theologically profound. I was stunned by the overwhelming feeling that I just wanted to give her some relief from her tough life, and a glimpse of God who understood and cared.

I looked up and it was dawn. As she

made her way out of the building, I thought to myself that for all of my early aspirations to be a super-priest ready to hit the ground running, “a little bit of relief from the tough parts of life and a glimpse of a God who understands and cares” is indeed what it is all about — the call of Jesus to bear each other’s burdens, to pick up each other other’s loads, to lift up each other’s hopes. In short — and in keeping with this Holy Thursday — to wash each other’s feet.

It is not sheer coincidence that of all the gospel stories we could have chosen for celebrating the gift of the Eucharist on Holy Thursday, it is John’s account of the Last Supper that we read. Notice that John’s account doesn’t include what we call the words of institution — “This is my body. This is my blood. Do this in memory of me.” Instead, it Portland 6

is the story of the simple, dramatic non-verbal gesture of Jesus washing the feet of the disciples — all of the disciples, including Judas, the one who betrays; Peter, the one who denies; and John, the one whom he loved. Jesus shares his own self with them, no matter what their past, present, or future, and then sends them forth in love to serve others. That scene is the blueprint for discipleship, and it is absolutely essential to the sacrament we hold at the core of our faith.

Theologian Ronald Rohlheiser captures it beautifully: “To take the Eucharist seriously is to begin to wash the feet of others, especially the feet of the poor and those with whom we struggle most relationally.

The Eucharist is both an invitation that invites us and a grace that empowers us to serve.

And what it invites us to do is to replace distrust with hospitality, pride with humility, and self-interest with self-effacement, so as to reverse the world’s order of things — where the rich get served by the poor and where the first priority is to keep one’s pride intact and one’s interest protected.”

The “mandatum,” the Latin rendering of Jesus’ command to love one another, is right at the center of our prayer today.

The evangelist John makes it very explicit: “Do you realize what I have done for you? You call me ‘teacher’ and ‘master,’ and rightly so, for indeed I am. If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.”

This evening, as we gather on this sacred occasion during these holiest of our Christian tradition, and in this place so familiar to us as the setting for our liturgies, let us celebrate the gift of the Eucharist as the divine strengthening of each of us — regardless of our particular gifts, weaknesses and illusions — to bear each other’s burdens, to pick up each other’s loads, to lift up each other’s hopes, to wash each other’s feet.

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A madrone tree on the bluff over the river, by the sharp-eyed University art professor Mark Ghyselinck, C.S.C.

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PHOTO BY ADAM GUGGENHEIM

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We think our many thousands of readers ought to meet the University’s students directly sometimes; so, ladies and gents, meet senior Hannes Zetzsche. Double major (communication studies and German studies) and double minor (political science and Spanish). Character Project alumnus — the roaringly popular class taught by University president Father Mark Poorman. Speech and debate team member. Reedsport, Oregon, native. Works summers on a farm to pay for college; has already done two internships as a student, one with U.S. Senator Ron Wyden’s office, helping veterans and seniors, and the other with the Oregon Department of Agriculture, where he worked on overseas trade opportunities for Oregon farmers. Ambition? Law school, for agricultural and natural resource and water law. Bright cheerful dude who is absolutely going to change a lot of lives for the better. Do we have a lot of Hanneses here? No, there’s only one of this guy. But there are a lot of bright creative students like him who could sure use your scholarship help. Call Amy Eaton, 503.943.8551, eaton@up.edu.

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PHOTO BY ADAM GUGGENHEIM

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The senior student actors David Rinella and Emily Biggs starred in a play this past spring in the University’s tiny Blair Theater, in Mehling Hall. Emily’s notes: “I just spent one hundred hours of my senior year secluded in theatrical artistic pursuit with one David Rinella. Read-throughs, head-shots, costume fittings, tech rehearsals, sweat, stage combat, blocking rehearsals, witty banter, sustained eye contact, dress rehearsals, frustration, designer runs, kiss choreography, makeup sponges, bickering, bruises, diction, running lines, laughter, photo call, tea masking as whiskey, insufficient sleep, what’s my line again?, notes, focus, set changes, call times, applause, striking the set, and sentimental goodbyes — it was oddly intimate experience. The small theater space with the audience so close that they can smell your nerves. The blocking which asked of us to punch, smack, chase, seduce, lure, fall, kill, and passionately kiss, while avoiding smearing lipstick on each other’s powdered faces. The text, too, required us to show an uncomfortable amount of vulnerability. Intimacy does not come easy to most people and actors are no exception. This wasn’t going to work unless we trusted each other. This had to be a raw and honest symbiotic relationship. We were stuck inside a long moment until we figured each other out from the outside in. Thank God we did. He’s meticulous, eccentric, generous, inquisitive, unyielding in his pursuit of constructive feedback and not letting a cookie go untouched, remarkably daring, hysterically quirky, and is armed with a dark wit and humor. I miss him.”

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ONE IN NINE

Business dean Edmund Smith must have liked me, for we spent a lot of time together; again and again he’d call me to his office, and we’d have The University of Portland has the same talk again and changed drastically since that late again. He would tell me August day in on which I began my that I needed to show imcareer on The Bluff. Back then the provement, and I would main meeting facility was not the Chiles Center, but an old Second World say I’d try. My drinking was never discussed, War Army surplus building called although surely he knew.

Education Hall; and it was there in I almost graduated, even Education Hall that I was taught a after being on academic lesson I didn’t learn until years later. probation nine times, It was freshman orientation. We which must be a record. freshmen were sitting on the floor, Dean Smith told me I listening to things that were supcould try to make up my posed to make our transition from last classes during the high school to college easier. After summer. The summer the basics (how to find our classes, where to eat, how to study), the dean of 1965 started perfectly: I got married, and the of students, Father James Norton, weather was good for parC.S.C., took over.

Father Norton was a pretty direct tying. Then Dean Smith guy, and he got right to it: “Students, died. The new dean was Art Schulte, before your class leaves this campus who’d had me in class and had me figured out. I went to meet him, and four years from now, one in nine of suggested something like amnesty. you will be alcoholics.”

His response was two words long, I remember thinking to myself that this guy with his fancy doctorate words I had never heard, words that degree was stupid, a loser, a fool. Al- pounded me as they bounced off the walls and through my brain to the ready an expert on drinking myself, me that hid so deep within.

I figured Father Norton must have Good bye, he said. read an article somewhere and was trying to scare the less-sophisticated To hell with him! To hell with all of them! So I lied about being a graduate drinkers among us into staying away on my resume, and my name had from a good time. It didn’t matter to me, anyway. I wasn’t going to become accidentally been published with my graduating class in the newspaper, an alcoholic. so for all anyone knew I was a Class But I already was one, and just of 1965 man. A few years later I was didn’t know it yet. asked to join the Alumni Board, and Even at 18 I was an every-day drinker, and before long I was cutting relished the wonderful irony for years.

It was on a bus to Corvallis one day, classes, not doing homework, getting for a Pilot-Beavers basketball game, failing grades, and living a life that two years after I had finally stopped revolved around “fun,” as I then saw drinking, that Father John Van Wolvit. It got so bad that I would find lear, C.S.C., fired a bolt from the sky. myself waking up in the dorm to the “How come you never finished colnoise of others showering across the lege?” Busted! He quietly went on to hall, as they prepared for their day tell me he’d looked in my school file. as students. In order to avoid feeling the guilt-filled truth, I’d keep my eyes So I shared with him the story I’ve just told you. He already knew about my tightly closed, cover my head with alcoholism and how I was now changthe pillow to keep out the morning ing my life. It felt good to talk about light, and pretend to myself that it was still the middle of the night and this, because for so long I had felt like that some jerk was just taking a late such a loser, such a sham, and now that I was no longer acting that way, night shower. Around lunchtime, after missing all my morning classes, the truth helped me, not hurt me.

I’d dress and head for the Commons, Weeks later Fr. Van told me that he had spoken with Dean Schulte, who looking for that day’s drinking comin turn had shared with him that both panion. The worst days were those my spot on the Alumni Board and my where everyone else would do what new sober life had not gone unnoticed they were supposed to do. How I by him. The University was inviting hated to be alone!

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me to finish. If I earned a B, I’d be granted my degree. I made it (and now boast a cumulative GPA of 2.01), and this time laughed aloud when a second mistake appeared in the newspaper: I was erroneously listed as having earned a master’s.

My point: I had the wonderful opportunity to better myself with a fine education from a very good school, and I blew it. Unlike me, my classmates respected their parents, teachers, and fellow students. Today I see my degree as a symbol of making right a wrong; and the way I try to live today is a gesture of respect to the three men who had faith and hope for me. Those men saw in me what I could not.

For the past 45 years I have not had a single drink. I go to at least one Alcoholics Anonymous meeting every week. My wife and I have been married for fifty years now, building a life together that includes six kids and 21 grandchildren. But I never forget those numbers: one in nine. You might be that one, or your child, or your grandchild. I know what it is like to be that one. I was wrecked, lost, and hopeless, and I was wrecking my wife’s life, and our children’s lives. But I went to one meeting, and then another, and then another, and my life changed.

It is possible to change your life.

That’s what I want to say to the one in nine reading this article. You can change your life. You can. Reach out for help, and you will find it.

— Anonymous ‘65

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Hundreds of alumni and friends bought paving stones in and around the new Beauchamp Center, and had them engraved with terse thoughts; these were some of the funniest and most moving, we thought.

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Women’s Soccer Five WCC all-stars are back for the Pilots, who will face Notre Dame in Indiana and league World Cup! The U.S. women’s na- rivals Santa Clara and BYU on Merlo tional team, led by the creative brio Field. The Pilots also host First Reof Megan Rapinoe ’09 (below), swept sponders Night, at which all emergenthrough Australia, Columbia, China, cy response folks are admitted free Germany, and Japan to win their (September 11); Youth Day, on which third World Cup. Rapinoe plays pro- any kid in a soccer jersey is admitted fessionally in Seattle, and will stop free (September 20, and that will be by a Pilot game this fall and cause a wild day); savory Oktoberfest, bea happy ruckus. fore the BYU game (October 3); and a Actual Real Genuine Scholars The sweet ten-year celebration of the 2005 Pilot women’s track team recorded national championship team, to be the fourth-highest team grade-point honored at halftime as we beat Santa average in America (3.62) and the Clara on October 18. Yes, international men were not far behind (3.3); the stars Christine Sinclair and Megan women’s rowing team had a WCCRapinoe will be there. record 11 students named National Women’s Cross Country The Pilots, Scholar Athletes (3.5 or better); and a second in the WCC last year, lost whopping 153 student-athletes earned All-American Tansey Lystad to grad3.0 or better, led by a WCC-record 31 uation, but return All-WCC runners students with a 3.75 or better. Wow. Anne Luijten (Netherlands) and Baseball The Pilots finished 12-42, Sanna Mustonen (Sweden). Among led by Turner Gill, who finished his ca- the new faces: Dylan Hite, from Portreer with 56 doubles, second all-time land’s Jesuit High. on The Bluff; but the bigger news was Men’s Soccer Highlights for the men: the end of the Chris Sperry era. Chris, a road match against national champ a player for the Pilots from 1985 to Virginia, a home game against Den1989, coached the men to 347 wins in ver, and the usual rigorous WCC slate.

18 seasons, made sure every one of The men, looking for their 15th NCAA his players behaved and graduated, playoff berth, return All-WCC stars and was a man of remarkable grace, Eddie Sanchez and Hugo Rhoads. character, integrity, and dry wry wit. Among the new faces for the Pilots We will miss him very much at the are local stars Reid Baez from Sprague University he did so much to advance. High in Salem and Oregon Player of Men’s Cross Country Veteran Danny the Year Brennan Weber from Central Martinez returns for the Pilots, third Catholic High in Portland; Brennan’s in America last year, and WCC Coach dad Jim Weber ’89 was also a soccer of the Year Rob Conner will again star for the Pilots. have his men aiming for the NCAA Women’s Basketball Among the championship meet (and their 35th new faces for the Pilots: shooter WCC title). Among the many new Corissa Turley, transferring from the faces: Oregon state 4A champ Jakob College of the Sequoias, where she Hiett and Washington state 1A champ averaged 15 points a game, and guards Ryan Clarke, and two-time California Holly Blades and Rachelle Owens, champ Caleb Webb of Big Bear. both transferring from the College of

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Southern Idaho. The Pilots will be young, quick, far-flung (there are players from Italy, Spain, Greece, and Fairbanks), and fun to watch when they open their season in November.

Men’s Basketball All-WCC point guard Alec Wintering and high-flying Bryce Pressley are back for the Pilots; among the new faces are all-Texas center Ray Barreno, guard Jazz Johnson (from Lake Oswego High), and forward Chiir Maker (from Sydney, Australia). One highlight: the return of the Far West Classic, which will bring Portland, Oregon State, and Weber State, among others, to the Moda Center on December 18-19.

Volleyball Among new faces for the women: Hannah Troutman from Crook County High, where she helped win four Oregon state titles, was the 4A Player of the Year, and was also a javelin star; and Jocelyn Peterson from Central Catholic High in Portland. Six starters are back for the young Pilots, notably senior Emily Liger and junior Makayla Lindburg. ¶ The Pilots are also inching ever closer to a sand volleyball team – the University’s 16th varsity team.

Track The story of the year on the track was Korey Thieleke, who went from four years as a Pilot basketball player to the best 400-meter man in University history, as he earned his master’s degree. Both Thieleke and freshwoman Taryn Rawlings (800 meters) made the USATF National Championships in June; Thieleke and three other Pilots ran in Outdoor Track and Field National Championship at Oregon’s legendary Hayward Field: Woody Kincaid (who ran a four-minute mile this spring to set the University record) and All-American Tansey Lystad in the 5,000, and Scott Fauble in the 10,000.

Tennis New faces for the men: Felix Fan (Canada) and Carlos Donat (Spain). Back for the men, nationally ranked last year, is all-WCC Michail Pervolarakis (Cyprus). ¶ Back for the women, after a terrific year in which were also nationally ranked and played or their first WCC title, are junior Lucia Butkovska (Slovakia), senior Maja Mladenovic (Serbia), and junior Jelena Lazarevic (Serbia).

Rowing Seniors Kelly Herman and Claire Seibold were both named AllWCC as the Pilots finished fifth in the league in May; Portland’s varsity four also earned a bronze medal at the 2015 Western Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championships on Lake Natoma in California.

PHOTO: STEVE WOLTMANN

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itable Father Art Wheeler, C.S.C., is Harvard professor Eduardo Contreras, who is fluent, absorbingly, in Spanish, Hindi, Urdu, and Sanskrit. Wow. Student Feats The University will again enroll more than 4,000 students ¶ Joanne Warner, who retired as nursing dean on July 1 (and was this year — 3,600 undergrads (920 succeeded by nursing professor Joane freshmen), 500 grad students. StuMoceri), was named a Fellow of the dents hail from 40 states and 22 American Academy of Nursing — countries. More than a third of the essentially the nursing hall of fame. undergrads will study abroad. ¶ Four May graduates were off to France this ¶ Education professor and deft essayist Karen Eifler won two national fall to teach English in l’Hexagone, Catholic book awards for Becoming courtesy of the French government.

Beholders: Cultivating Sacramental ¶ Off to MIT on a free three-year ride to study graduate biomechanics: Imagination and Actions in College Classrooms (Liturgical Press), and engineering major Chika Eke ’15, who dreams of helped disabled folks. theology professor Tina Astorga won ¶ Among the new students: Jean Paul the College Theology Society’s best book award for Catholic Moral TheolMugisha, whose family fled violence in the Congo and lived in a Rwandan ogy and Social Ethics. ¶ Sentenced to being provincial of Oregon’s Congrerefugee camp with no electricity; gation of Holy Cross men: the urbane Jean Paul, a brilliant guy who will study electrical engineering, wants to Father John Donato of the student affairs office. Poor, poor John. eventually electrify his home village and the refugee camp. He’ll do it, too. Gifts & Grants Among recent generA New Residence Hall is being plan- osities: $106,000 from 120 donors for ned for the corner of Portsmouth and the new Catherine Bigelow Gullickson nursing scholarships, honoring Willamette, between Tyson Hall and the new Beauchamp Center; the huge a gentle gracious nursing alumna three-part castle will house some 270 (and tennis star); life regent and terrific photographer Larry Rockwood’s students, and could be finished by next summer; see below. ¶ The Pilot house on the Columbia River, left to House is doubling in size, and should the University in his estate when he died last year at age 93; $100,000 from open for business (with a campus NBC television sports legend Dick pub!) before Christmas. ¶ The gleaming new Rec opened for all students Ebersol, honoring his good friend Father Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C., for in August; see pages 32-35. ¶ The next big dream: a new academic cen- whom the gleaming new rec center is named; and $50,000 from Tony Isaia ter, to augment Buckley Center and ’53, honoring the two best Holy Cross Franz Hall. teachers he ever had, Brother Godfrey Faculty Notes The new studies abroad director, succeeding the inim- Vassallo and Father John Delaunay.

B R I E F LY

The New UP App was born in July; it works on iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile devices and tablets.

It’s free and instant and opens doors to all sorts of campus resources, among them courses, assignments, events, complete directly of faculty and staff and students, news, maps, emergency data, social media, sports scores and schedules, and everything at Clark Library. A Windows version is coming soon. Info: Ann Harris at harrisa@up.edu.

Awards & Honors The University was ranked as Oregon’s top private school for best value for the fifth consecutive year, by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. ¶ And we were ranked 14th in the nation for study abroad opportunities and commitment. ¶ And we were ranked 20th in America for producing Peace Corps volunteers. ¶ And among the best ten universities in the West, by U.S. News & World Report, and among America’s ‘greenest’ schools, by Princeton Review.

New Faculty Among the fresh professoriate: psychology’s Louisa Brad, who studies irrational behavior in primates and children; engineering Olivia Coiado, who earned all her degrees in her native Brazil; pediatric intensive care nurse Theresa Duda; terrific ultimate frisbee player and mathematicist Carolyn James; Air Force Captain Daniel Parker, who served in Iraq and was an NSA cyber-security manager; and Father Dan Parrish, C.S.C., ’96, delighted to be back on The Bluff teaching business.

Work on the University’s newest residence hall is slated to begin this fall: the new dorm, a whopper that covers both arms of the Portsmouth/Willamette corner across from the Chiles Center, will house 268 students and might include a dining hall, ground-floor retail, and classrooms. You could name it for someone you revere, you know, with a gargantuan gift: call Amy Eaton at 503.943.8551, eaton@up.edu.

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Gus & Travis What is the University of Portland about way down deepest in its bones?

This.

by Brian Doyle

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have been trying to get at the deepest University of Portland stories for 25 years now. I have been trying to learn to see and hear them beneath the swirl of the ordinary. They are the extraordinary ordinary. They are always about people. They are never about power and money and status and fame. They are about something else altogether. The something else is what the University is about at its best. All the things you can see about the University are not the best and coolest and deepest things about the University. All the measurements of success are not best and coolest and deepest measurements of success. There is a deeper play. The best things about the University are people like the biology professor Becky Houck, who never left her office before midnight in October, because she knew that lonely freshmen would see her light and shuffle in and unburden their frightened hearts. Like the priests who live in the residence halls and leave their doors ajar at night for broken-hearted kids to tap on the door and ask if they can come in and unburden their shattered hearts. Like Father John Delaunay, who wrote every month to every single student and alumnus in the Second World War — hundreds of letters a month, handtyped, hand-signed, cheerful and chatty, not one of them the same as another. Like Virginia Asuncion, who cleaned the toilets and showers and rooms and kitchens on the third and fourth floors of Mehling Hall for forty years, and knew every girl who lived there by name, and never once had a cold word for them, but treated each one like a sweet shy niece.

Like Gus Little and Travis Vetters.

Both played baseball for the Pilots, Gus at second base and Travis in the outfield. Travis went on to play five years in the minors for the Dodgers.

Gus married the Pilot soccer player he had fallen head over heels for, Colleen Salisbury. He went to work.

But then his kidneys began to fail. To the point where he needed a transplant or he died. He sat one night with his wife and he said I don’t know how Portland 14

to tell people, how do I tell people?

And Colleen Little said you have to tell them the truth, Gus. Tell them what’s happening. Give people a chance to love you.

So Gus tells everyone. He calls a breakfast meeting and tells his friends, and they tell their friends, and Gus starts to weep as he says that eight of his teammates said hey, Gus, I’ll give you a kidney, brother, and twenty other people said hey, I’ll give you a kidney, man, and among them were Pilot soccer players male and female, and people I had never met, he says, people I’ll never know. Thirty people basically said to me hey, Gus, I’ll save your life, no problem. Thirty people said that to me. Thirty people.

And one of those people was his baseball brother Travis Vetters.

Travis says to me, says Gus Little, I am going to be the one to give you a kidney, Gus. I know it will be me.

And it was Travis. He was the match.

Gus and Travis are wheeled in for the operation. Standing there beaming is their teammate Adam Kerr. He was an outfielder. Now he’s the attending nurse. Here are the three men in this photograph. In this photograph one man is about to save another man’s life, and their teammate is making sure it all goes well, and this is a story of love and affection and respect and reverence.

This is a story of courage and humor and how being a teammate never ends.This is a story about the deepest University of Portland things. The words we have for those deepest things are hard to find. But a story says things that words cannot explain. Here is a story of love and courage, of a wise woman saying let people love you, of thirty people saying hey, I’ll save your life, no problem, of a gentle graceful young man named Gustaf Little saying to me, with a smile but with his voice cracking, Thirty people. Thirty. And one of them was Travis.

Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine, and the author most recently of a collection of ‘proems’ called How the Light Gets In (Orbis Books).

What You Did, And Why It Mattered This past April, retired Marine General Jim Mattis rose to speak to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans at the Marines’ Memorial Club in San Francisco.

What he said was extraordinary.

by James Mattis

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ur country gives hope to millions around the world, and you —who knew that at one time your job was to fight well — kept that hope alive.

By your service you made clear your choice about what kind of world we want for our children: The world of violent jihadist terrorists, or one defined by Abraham Lincoln when he advised us to listen to our better angels?

I searched for words to pay my respects to all of you here tonight and had to turn to others more articulate than I to convey what our service meant. Someone once said that America is like a bank: If you want to take something out, then you must be willing to put something in.

For the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — poorly explained and inconclusive wars, the first major wars since our Revolution fought without a draft forcing some men into the ranks — the question of what our service meant may loom large in your minds. You without doubt have put something into the nation’s moral bank.

Rest assured that by your service, you sent a necessary message to the world and especially to those maniacs who thought by hurting us that they could scare us.

No granite monuments, regardless of how grandly built, can take the place of your raw example of courage, when in your youth you answered your country’s call. When you looked past the hot political rhetoric. When you voluntarily left behind life’s welllit avenues. When you signed that blank check to the American people

payable with your lives. And, most important, when you made a full personal commitment even while, for over a dozen years, the country’s political leadership had difficulty defining our national level of commitment.

You built your own monument with a soldier’s faith, embracing an unlimited liability clause and showing America’s younger generation at its best when times were at their worst.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., arguably the most articulate justice in the Supreme Court’s history and himself a combat-experienced infantry officer in our awful Civil War, said: “As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.”

You, my fine veterans, are privileged that you will never face a judgment of having failed to live fully. For you young patriots were more concerned in living life fully than in your own longevity, freely facing daunting odds and the random nature of death and wounds on the battlefield.

So long as you maintain that same commitment to others and that same enthusiasm for life’s challenges that you felt in yourself, your shipmates, your comrades and buddies, you will never question at age 45 on a shrink’s couch whether you have lived.

Veterans know the difference between being in a dangerous combat zone and being in close combat, seeking out and killing the enemy. Close combat is tough. Much of the rest of war is boring if hard work. Yet nothing is mentally crippling about hard work Autumn 2015 17

in dangerous circumstances, as shown by generations of American veterans who came thankfully home as better men and women.

Close combat, however, is an “incommunicable experience” — again quoting Holmes. Then there was Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Union general, who spoke of war’s effects, distinguishing the impact of close combat from military service in general. He said that such combat is “a test of character, it makes bad men worse and good men better.”

We are masters of our character, choosing what we will stand for in this life. Veterans today have had a unique privilege, that of having seen the tenacious spirit of our lads, like those young grunts preparing for a patrol by loosely wrapping tourniquets on their limbs so they could swiftly stop their own bleeding if their legs were blown off. Yet day after day they stoically patrolled. Adversity, we are told, reveals a man to himself, and young patriots coming home from such patrols are worth more than gold, for nothing they face can ever again be that tough.

Now, most of us lost friends, the best of friends, and we learned that war’s glory lay only in them — there is no other glory in warfare. They were friends who proved their manhood at age 18, before they could legally drink a beer. They were young men and women taking responsibility for their own actions, never playing the victim card. Rather, they took responsibility for their own reaction to adversity.This was some-

Someone once said that America is like a bank: If you want to take something out, then you must be willing to put something in. thing that we once took for granted in ourselves and in our buddies, units where teenagers naturally stood tall, and we counted on each other.

Yet it is a characteristic that can seem oddly vacant in our post-military society, where victimhood often seems to be celebrated. We found in the ranks that we were all coequal, general or private, admiral or seaman.

We were equally committed to the mission and to one another, a thought captured by Gen. Robert E. Lee, saying his spirit bled each time one of his men fell.

Looking back over my own service, I realize now how fortunate I was to experience all this and the many riotous excursions I had when I was privileged to march or fight beside you. And a question comes to mind: What can I do to repay our country for the privilege of learning things that only you in this room could have taught me? For today I feel sorry for those who were not there with us when trouble loomed. I sometimes wonder how to embrace those who were not with us, those who were not so fortunate to discover what we were privileged to learn when we were receiving our Masters and Ph.D.s in how to live life, and gaining the understanding and appreciation of small things that we would otherwise have never known.

How do we embrace our fellow citizens who weren’t there? America is too large at heart for divisions between us. If we became keenly aware of anything at war, it was what is printed on our coins: E Pluribus Unum — out of many, one.

We veterans did our patriotic duty, nothing more, certainly nothing less, and we need to “come home” like veterans of all America’s wars. Come home stronger and more compassionate, not characterized as damaged, or with disorders, or with syndromes or other disease labels. Not labeled dependent on the government even

as we take the lead in care of our grievously wounded comrades and hold our Gold Star families close. We deserve nothing more than a level playing field in America, for we endured nothing more, and often less, than vets of past wars.

For whatever trauma came with service in tough circumstances, we should take what we learned — take our post-traumatic growth — and, like past generations coming home, bring our sharpened strengths to bear, bring our attitude of gratitude to bear. And, most important, we should deny cynicism a role in our view of the world.

We know that in tough times cynicism is just another way to give up, and in the military we consider cynicism or giving up simply as forms of cowardice. No matter how bad any situation, cynicism has no positive impact. Watching the news, you might notice that cynicism and victimhood often seem to go hand-in-hand, but not for veterans. People who have faced no harsh trials seem to fall into that mode, unaware of what it indicates when taking refuge from responsibility for their actions. This is an area where your example can help our society rediscover its courage and its optimism.

We also learned the pleasure of exceeding expectations. We saw the power we brought when working together as a team. We learned alongside one another, in teams where admired leadership built teamwork, where free men and women could change the world.

Now having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world and having worked with others of many cultures, having worked in one of the most diverse teams on earth — that of the U.S. military — and having faced down grim circumstances without losing our sense of humor or moral balance under conditions where war’s realities scrape away civilization’s Autumn 2015 19

veneer, we have learned that nothing can stop our spirit unless we ignore Lincoln’s call to our better angels.

American colleges and businesses know your pedigree for commitment, reliability and loyalty. This is why so many corporations and startups aggressively recruit veterans. As San Francisco-based Uber sums it up: Veterans deliver higher value. Bellwether companies like Microsoft, Uber, Starbucks and more act on that premise.

I will close with words again borrowed from others.

From Alexander Dumas: You should be satisfied with the way you have conducted yourselves, “with no remorse for the past, confident regarding the present and full of hope for the future.” When you retire to bed you should sleep “the sleep of the brave.”

If Jackie Robinson, a sparkling ballplayer and veteran of World War II, could write his own epitaph on leadership by saying “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives,” then you who are fortunate to have learned so much living in the greatest country on earth while making an impact so young — you should recognize that our country needs your vigor and wisdom. It was gained at great cost to our comrades and to our Gold Star families, who need to see their sons’ spirits live on in your enthusiasm for life.

I am reminded of Gen. William Sherman’s words when bidding farewell to his army in 1865: “As in war you have been good soldiers, so in peace you will make good citizens.”

James Mattis, a retired four-star U.S. Marine Corps general and former commander of U.S. Central Command, is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.

We are grateful to him for his courteous permission to share his remarks, and for his cheerfully high opinion of the University and its magazine.

THE

SONG OF SONGS

“I

f I had to listen to just one piece of music in the world,” said my friend Father Cyprian, “it would be this. Look! I have my Bible open to the lyrics.”

We were sitting in his cell, in his monastery, high over the coast of California, and the music was Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and the words were the Song of Songs, voices going up and up as the Song cries, “Rise up.” It used to be said, my friend explained, that the 16th-century Italian had written it at a time when the Church had wanted to ban harmonies, because they blurred the meaning of holy words. Palestrina had found a way to deploy overlapping lines so the voices could come in on top of one another, chiming, even as the meaning of every word was crystalline.

It seemed a perfect accompaniment to a Song that is itself a kind of chorus, a harmony of intertwining voices, all coming together to sing of love and sometime loss.

“The Song of Songs was the most written-about book in the Bible, by the ancient Christian Fathers,” Father Cyprian went on. “For the Rabbis, it was not just the Song of Songs, but the Holy of Holies. Because it told the story of Israel, and the marriage of God and Jerusalem. And then, for many Christians, of course, it sang about the courtship of Christ and the Church. But later, for the mystics, it sang about God and the individual soul. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote 86 sermons about the Song of Songs.”

Cyprian looked across at me and I caught a little of his fire by contagion.

“Sorry for the deluge,” he said. “You really put a nickel in my jukebox.”

It comes like a thunderbolt, streaming light. No one knows who wrote it, or when; it exists without a con-

Notes on the wildest passage in the Bible: “a thunderbolt, streaming light, a taste of wine, a lover’s touch, a sudden cry in the middle of a crowded temple...”

By Pico Iyer text, its date placed, not very helpfully, sometime between the tenth and second centuries before Christ.

The other books of the Bible are all called Books; this is the only Song, whether it’s referred to as the Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon (who’s mentioned briefly in its third canticle). The New Testament, of course, is alight with Gospels and Letters; but this is a sudden cry in the middle of a crowded temple, at the time of harvesting, summoning us outdoors.

Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.

It falls, in my Bible, between the wise verses of Ecclesiastes and the prophecies of Isaiah, like an interlude. It’s one of the shortest books in the Bible — only four pages long in my edition, with just eight canticles.

There is no story to it, or history, no reference to God; it is unique in the Old Testament for not even mentioning the Law, or offering genealogy or explicit parable.

Nobody knows whether it came from one hand or from many, Portland 20

whether it’s a single narrative or an anthology. Sometimes it feels like those walls on which someone has inscribed his love, his prayer (there may not be a difference); and someone else, inspired by that, has added his own. Soon there is a mounting firestorm of songs of praise and hallelujahs, though, to the late-arriving newcomer, all of them exist in a kind of vacuum.

Behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.

All we do know, the minute it begins, is that it comes to us as urgently, as without frame or introduction, as a taste of wine, a lover’s touch, as April sun. Through enumerating the features of Creation, it might almost be teaching us to love it, and to love it, as we love everything, in part for what we cannot understand. It might even, in truth, be teaching us — with its locked gates and inner gardens — how to read the world symbolically; in the midst of a holy book telling the history of humanity and the commandments of God, suddenly there comes an incitation to see all the world as gateway and charged code.

The first real line of the poem announces, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth”; it’s as impatient as your beloved when she throws open the door. And very quickly we’re in a landscape of silver and gold, rich with doves and roes, with myrrh and frankincense, with lilies. The scenes and visions that proceed have something of the illumination we might associate with Revelation — “pillars of smoke” and a “tower of ivory” — but always one feels that the spirit that is being reached for is affirmation.

One thing that so stirs me about the Song is that it seems to travel in and out of the day-to-day, as if its

singer were going back and forth between her stern admonitions to the “daughters of Zion” and another world, as close as sunlight, that is eternal. You take it in as you might a piece of music, as much for its atmosphere, its cadences — now allegro, now andante — as for its words. It sings the constant dance of rest and invigoration, inner chamber and outer. The mystery of its composition has the effect of making it feel like a world seen in the round — a wide-angle Whitman’s eye brought to all creation, yet delivered with such intimacy that it really does feel like being in love with the universe (the earthly lover’s blessing).

The fact that it keeps switching voices makes it seem a roundelay, a choir of presences that ensures we’re never locked within a single heart; and yet the language is as particular as any lover anatomizing the features of his beloved, one by one, as if running his memory down her body. As every reader notices, the Song is as cluttered with proper names (Lebanon, Mount Gilead, the tower of David) as with fig-trees and apple-trees and cedars and firs.

This all gives it the feeling of reality, not romance or fantasy. And part of its power, for me, is that it never sidesteps the pain or desolation that hide within earthly kinds of love. Returning to the poem one buoyant spring morning recently — the first plum-blossoms showing on the bare black branches around me in Japan, against skies of palest blue — I noticed how the singer is “sick of love” (in the King James Version) at the beginning of the poem, replete, with her lover beside her; and “sick of love” towards the end, because without her love. Again and again she warns the “daughters of Jerusalem” not to stir up her love before the time is right; to handle such a charge with care.

Belief is a relationship, it might be saying, as intense and palpable as the one we know with someone we can see and touch. In the Beatitudes, those who “do hunger and thirst after righteousness” are among the blessed (and the word “righteous,” I’ve read one scholar claim, comes from a Greek term referring to a yearning for oneness with God). Revisiting the poem, I think of how lovers, in many a wedding ceremony (one of which sits at the heart of the Song), say, “With my body, I thee worship” — and how Jesus’s first miracle would come at a wedding. The Song might be a B-side to the Book of Job, telling us to love creation not because

we must, but because we can.

Critics inform us that the narrative moves between the world of dream and wakefulness; that sometimes the sense of absence is imagined, as every monk in his cell feels God at moments lost from him. But this speaks to that deeper logic Proust knew, which is that a beloved is never so present to us, never felt and remembered with such vividness and intensity, as when he or she is gone from us. It’s only when we lose something, too often, that we realize how we treasure it.

It’s not hard to see how the poem sings the tale that many who have given themselves up to God have felt. “Ah! How sweet was that first kiss of Jesus!” wrote Therese of Lisieux, upon receiving her first Communion. “It was a kiss of love; I felt

The Song might be a B-side to the Book of Job, telling us to love creation not because we must, but because we can. that I was loved, and I said: `I love You, and I give myself to You forever.’ “After she surrendered herself to a lifetime of worship, she wrote, “I know, O my God! that the more You want to give, the more You make us desire. I feel in my heart immense desires and it is with confidence I ask You to come and take possession of my soul.”

An angel thrust and thrust a golden spear into Teresa of Avila’s heart; and when he drew it out, he left her “all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it.” She might have been singing, with the Song, “I rose up to open to my beloved.”

But every parent knows that the object of one’s devotion — what can seem one’s life itself — must at some point leave; every lover of God is aware that light cannot be constant, Portland 22

and the sign of true love is to continue through the dark. I’m often struck by how repeatedly this strain sounds through the New Testament, in the Parable of the Lost Sheep or of the Prodigal Son, in the Parable of the Lost Coin. Seeking is how we keep honest and fresh an adoration it would be heresy to take for granted.

John of the Cross, in his dark night of the soul, thought of the second verse of the third canticle of the Song.

I love all this because there is almost no human being, alive or dead, who does not know the taste of “honey and milk,” the transport of losing yourself in something beyond your control, and then, perhaps, of being at a loss through sorrow, the feeling you have lost that sustains you most.

The Song of Songs is the most universal book in the Bible. It lends itself, with its cryptic, suggestive nature, to any number of interpretations, but on its surface it could not be more explicit. One breathes it as much as reads it. And at its end, unusually for the Bible, it leaves a kind of space open for the reader to make complete and real.

When I read it, therefore, I’m back in the domain that Leonard Cohen has made his own, down on his knees, exhaling love-songs to a “you” that could be a goddess or his G-d (or, most likely, one grasped through the other). I’m with the Sixth Dalai Lama on the wrong side of the Potala Palace, haunting the taverns of Lhasa and hymning its pretty girls; to this day, Tibetans cherish his poems because they see the sensual, worldly songs as a call to higher devotion.

The only way we can begin to approach the love that exists out of time is through the love that doesn’t.

Of course — and this, too, is part of the point of the Song — to elide or confuse the two is to play with fire.

I recall how Thomas Merton, when first released from the main monastery in Gethsemani to a private hermitage, so he could be alone with God, could not stop scribbling down, from the Book of Wisdom, “When I enter my house, I shall find rest with her, for nothing is bitter in her company; when life is shared with her there is no pain, nothing but pleasure and joy.” A little later, he was writing, “I had decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife.” Yet only a year after that, he was writing with even more fervent (though anguished) passion to a 20-year-old student nurse he’d met while in St. Joseph’s

Hospital in Louisville for back surgery, and trying to persuade himself (and her) that their love on earth was a reflection of, a gift from, some higher love.

“Love is strong as death,” warns the Song of Songs, near its end. “Jealousy is cruel as the grave; the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.” Those who most profoundly revere the Song believe that to misread it, to turn it into a literal rhapsody, is to commit a kind of blasphemy and lose your place in Paradise.

Or look at how the great 12th century Persian poet Attar (who shares his name with a perfume) writes of a soldier on watch all night, assisted by his sleepless love. “True lovers who wish to surrender themselves to the intoxication of love go apart together. He who has spiritual love holds in his hand the keys of the two worlds. If one is a woman one becomes a man; and if one is a man one becomes a deep ocean.” D.H. Lawrence, Emily Dickinson, Rumi would have known what he was talking about.

The Song of Songs will always be talked about, puzzled over, cherished precisely because it does not give away its secrets; its power lies in its rare mix of sensual immediacy and mystical symbolism. It presents us with the taste of love, unfootnoted — and asks us to unlock the door according to our purity.

In his radiant, charged book on the Sabbath, the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel describes how the seventh day comes as a beautiful bride who graces us with her presence for a few hours.

Candles are lit, a meal is prepared, we take care of all our earthly duties, so as to have them behind us. Then the hour “arrives like a guide, and raises our minds above accustomed thoughts.” We step outside the calendar, you could say, and into a back street of Eternity. It is, as he points out, “a moment of resurrection of the dormant spirit in our souls.”

And at this moment of expectancy and celebration, when we are brought to a peak, of closeness and elevation, some people “chant the greatest of all songs: The Song of Songs.” It is, for Heschel, “a chant of love for God, a song of passion, nostalgia and tender apology.” The day becomes a time of flame and water. For the early second century Rabbi Akiba, it was something even more. “All of time is not as worthy,” he wrote, “as the day on which the Song of Songs

was given to Israel, for all the songs are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holiest of holies.” Just as Father Cyprian told me: it’s how the light gets in.

One spring afternoon not long ago, I went into a small cinema in Los Angeles, and saw Terrence Malick’s film, To the Wonder, named after the haunting image, out of time, that features at the very beginning of the movie, Mont Saint-Michel, rising from an island in the middle of worldly France like a reminder of something higher. It’s an exasperating film, elliptical and private and not very grounded, sparing with plot and character and dialogue. But at some point, as I watched light through the trees and the sun burning on the water, as I saw faces golden in the magic hour so they looked like Botticelli angels and somehow felt — this the director’s art — something of the transport one feels when one’s in love, and everything seems hallowed, I realized that the film was more or less a faithful director’s Song of Songs.

There was plenty of room for doubt in his work, too, for a priest who’s lost his God, for disfigurement and betrayal and loneliness. The movie Malick made immediately before, The Tree of Life, was an all but explicit modern re-enactment of the Book of Job. This might have been his latest visit to an Old Testament landscape (his great work, Days of Heaven, replays the story of Sarah and Abraham and the Pharaoh, and even includes a reading from an ancient book for a wedding ceremony). But it is also a richly sensual, rapt, wide-awake celebration of Creation.

The Song of Songs is the one book in the Bible that all of us enact, if we’re lucky. We may put it in the terms of the Bible or not, but we have tasted what it is to be in the Garden, for a moment, or exiled from it, so raised up by our love that we feel ourselves transfigured and moved to cry, “Rise up.”

There are no coincidences when one is love; everything, it seems, was meant to be. The beloved has just picked up the book that you have just finished reading; the letters in her name turn out to be an anagram of yours. Everything makes sense. It’s as if, in that temporarily enhanced, even enchanted state, suddenly one sees the world from on high, and can make out its secret harmonies, the way everything fits together. We see and become Autumn 2015 23

the people we always hoped to be.

The sensation seldom lasts, but the moments are important; they show us where we could be the rest of the time. They give us an intimation of some higher home, the way someone may show us a postcard of a cathedral and that card alone becomes the first step towards our going there. The loves that die gives us a taste of what it would be to have a love that never dies, encircled forever by something harmonious and singing.

The beauty of the Song of Songs is that it’s set in everybody’s home, otherwise known as the heart. It’s uniquely intimate. The first time I came to the monastery over which Father Cyprian presides, I realized that all the monks there were at some level lovers. Of course they are all celibate; their lives are as full of drudgery and routine and boredom (of doubt, and self-doubt, I’m sure) as any workers’ might be. They’re not in the throes of romance but caught up in the hard labor of marriage, a lifelong commitment sealed by solemn vows.

But when they talk to me, they tell me how God won’t let them go; he was haunting them from the time they were young boys. Or how they felt this gravitational pull, which they couldn’t explain or resist, even if they were going in an opposite direction. One man in his mid-eighties told me he’d simply seen a picture in Time magazine, in 1958, and he had come to stay in the hermitage in its first year there — he didn’t know how or why the place summoned him so instantly — fifty-five years ago.

We read the other books of the Bible to learn the laws of conduct for believers, to be shown parables of good and evil, to be caught up in whirlwinds that remind us, as in Job, how little stands to human reason.

The power of many of them is forbidding, dark, and it gains its force from alienness, the fact we can’t understand very much.

The power of the Song of Songs is that everyone can understand it, at some instinctual level, even if every interpretation differs. It is the book that makes life itself—or joy, or even God — embraceable.

Pico Iyer is the author of many books, including The Global Soul, The Open Road, and The Man Within My Head. This essay is drawn from the forthcoming The Good Book: Writers Reflect on Favorite Bible Passages (Simon & Schuster), edited

by Andrew Blauner.

THE SONG of

SUMMER Bathing a son, “haltingly, reverently, singing, untamed, impolite, praying...”

by Dave Devine

I

s written on the slim submerged legs in the bathtub beneath me, blunt verses carved into a pair of knobby limbs attached to my six year-old son, limbs I gather now — haltingly, reverently — from the dust-tinged water, angling forward from my bath towel kneeler like a supplicant, cupping each bony heel, each tender calf, surfacing calloused feet past a flotilla of plastic dinosaurs, a whorl of Legos, a capsized sailboat, retrieving in the available autumn light a freshly unwrapped bar of soap, the neat almond shape of it suspended in the space between me and my slippery son, because a waning season is engraved on these legs, and it must be sung: the welt at his hip, authored by a final plunge down a poorly anchored Slip-n-Slide; the bruise on his thigh, contributed by a fence rail collapsing midclimb; the scabbed-over abrasion behind his knee, of uncertain and untraceable origin; the complex constellation of mosquito bites and ant bites and spider bites, all of them scratched and badgered and bothered for days, and then wincingly, fleetingly ignored for a single night, and then pawed again to semi-permanence, a collection now of gentle calderas the length of each lanky bough; the symmetric cerise scuffs adorning both knees, inscriptions from a week of skidding soccer camp; the perennially damaged shins, dented that same week despite the sock-buried safeguards, but victims as well of a misjudged porch step in June, a wagon crash in July, a dive through a minivan door in August; the thorn-scribbled calves, remnants of an outdoor

camp which deposited him daily to the pick-up line looking foxed and bramble hatched, as if he’d spent the afternoon with Ralph and Piggy on the far side of the island searching for additional plane crash survivors; and the ruined toenail, blackened like a spent fuse after a trip through a chain ring on a barefoot bike ride; these rangy, ill-mannered limbs, these roaring Huckleberry Finn legs, untamed and impolite, connected to this boy I bathed with a wash cloth, a whale sponge, on a countertop, in a kitchen sink, supported in the shallows between my wrist and elbow, stretched out now the length of the tub, water lapping at his chin, eyes closed, lids fluttering, the way he looks sometimes when he prays, which is what I’m doing now, this ancient parental prayer of kneeling and soaping and sluicing, singing scratches and scabs, which is the act of singing a child, which is something as fleeting and ephemeral as the square of September light sliding now, elegiacally, up the water-spattered wall.

Dave Devine ’97 runs the University’s Pacific Alliance for Catholic Education (PACE), which sends young people to Catholic schools in Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Utah, and California, to teach as they earn their master’s degrees.

More than 100 graduates of the program are teachers today. Great program.

Want to slather generous gobs of money on it, and help make more cool new bright graceful eager witty teachers? Call Dave: 503.943.7344, devine @up.edu.

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THEIR ROUGH GRACE Two men who knew how their lives would end, but continued on bold and brave, with “a release of self so ­ astounding the story of it travelled like a live thing...”

by Martin Flanagan

I

n Nazareth in 2011, I went to a small stone church thought to have been the synagogue where Jesus made his first public appearance after returning from the desert. What he had to say so riled the locals they took him to a nearby cliff-top to throw him off. Our guide, an extremely decent and well-meaning Israeli, said that in the Gospel of Luke it is written that Jesus evaded his pursuers by flying to a nearby mountain. Although it was more than 40 years since I read the gospels, I didn’t remember that being the case. But I was intrigued.

I was in Israel on, of all things, a football trip. Even more oddly, it was an Australian football trip. Australian football is a game unique to Australia that blends three cultures — English, Irish and Aboriginal — to a degree not otherwise found in Australian society. The game is infectious, the players employing skill and daring with spectacular results, and it has a history of jumping cultural barriers.

Precisely because the game has no history in the Middle East, a Jewish Australian woman had the idea of getting up an Australian football team that was half-Israeli and halfPalestinian as a peace initiative. It was with people connected to the Peace Team, as it is known, that I visited the old church in Nazareth.

Nothing makes a story come alive like going to the place it’s from. In a market in Tel Aviv, I bought a Bible, initially just to read the relevant verse in Luke and establish whether Jesus was said to have flown. It actually says, not much less mysteriously, that he merely “turned and passed among them,” but by now I was starting to get seriously interested, not in the religion, but in what sort of a man Jesus was. I ended up reading all four gospels and what struck me was what a rebel Jesus was!

Here was a young man who recognised no-one’s authority but his own

and that of an invisible deity he called “Father.” He could be a hard man (instructing a would-be follower not to attend his father’s funeral and follow him forthwith) and, while remembered as a man of peace, he was prepared to create conflict (Matthew 10:38: For I have come to turn a man against his father, etc.). Putting theological issues to one side, I was surprised to find that the person the fearless Jewish rebel reminded me of was Ned Kelly.

I don’t pretend to be objective about Ned Kelly, but then I don’t believe anyone is. The Flanagans — by which I mean my father’s family — were not what you would call religious.

Grand­father Flanagan was the grandson of an Irish convict. The two things I ­inherited from him were the Kelly story and a love of Australian football. The story of the Kelly gang, culminating in Ned’s hanging in November 1880, was the great adventure of my grandfather’s youth. My father is 98 now. Two of the three songs I heard him sing as a child were old folk songs about Ned Kelly; he learnt them from listening to his father.

Portland 26

If I describe Ned Kelly as an outlaw, I imagine, for an American audience, that word summons images of people like Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Ned was that and more. Ned had a strong whiff of the Confederacy about him — he represents a determined rebel impulse that challenged powerful interests and had a lot of popular support.

Possibly the greatest single difference between the USA and Australia is that whereas America is the “land of the free,” Australia was founded as a penal colony. America was founded by religious dissidents who saw the hand of God in their destiny as a ­nation. Australia’s most prominent early churchman, the Reverend Samuel Marsden, is remembered as “the flogging parson.”

Fearing a rebellion among the Irish convicts, Marsden had a 21-year-old Irish convict flogged to the point of death to force him to say where a store of pikes were hidden even though there was no proof the 21year-old convict had any knowledge whatsoever about the pikes or indeed whether the pikes, which were never located, even existed.

When Ned Kelly was born in 1854, convicts were still being transported to my home state of Tasmania, the island to the south of Australia where some of the worst excesses of the convict system occurred. Ned’s father Red Kelly, an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, was sent as a convict to Tasmania, then called Van Diemen’s Land. Some former convicts prospered after servitude, but a lot more were beaten by a system which ground humans like a mill grinds wheat. Red was in the latter category but not so his young wife, 18-yearold Ellen Quinn, and, with her, the red flame of Ulster enters the story.

Above, Ned Kelly at age 15 in 1873; right, his death mask.

The Quinns were not a product of convict culture; they were a product of Northern Ireland’s culture with its bitter Catholic-Protestant divide.

Red Kelly, tall and good-looking, died when Ned was 12. Thereafter, Ned, tall and good-looking like his father but fierce like his mother, was the man of the house. Soon after his father’s death, Ned saved the life of a drowning youth in a creek and was rewarded with a green sash, the symbolism of which continues to reverberate.

The Quinns, Ned’s mother’s family, pushed up to the colony of Victoria’s most northern border, then in a frontier state.

The Quinns were lawless and Ned was one of the clan. At 16, he was in jail for horse stealing. Between the Kellys and the police there was constant friction. What is called the Kelly outbreak started in 1878 when a drunken trooper visited the Kelly shanty and made a pass at Ned’s 15-year-old sister. It is likely that everyone lied about what happened next but the trooper claimed Ned shot at him and Ned claimed he wasn’t there.

The government put a warrant out for Ned and, for hitting the policeman with a shovel, an Irish Protestant judge gave his mother Ellen Kelly three years hard labor, separating her from her newborn baby.

The Ned Kelly story is a mother-and-son story.

Ned initially offered to surrender if his mother was set free. Later, he planned kidnapping the governor of the colony and offering him in exchange for his mother. Ned, as he was to show, thought big, but he also had the audacity and physical wherewithal to pull off his plans. He was an expert bushman, great on a horse, a crack shot and a bare-knuckle fighting champion.

Four armed troopers discarded their uniforms and went into the bush after him. The Kelly side claim they had canvas body bags on their horses. Ned, who had his 16-year-old brother and two others with him, ambushed the ­police and called on them to surrender. In two separate incidents, three of the police went

for their guns; Ned shot them dead.

For the next 110 years it was the only police shooting in Victoria, which partly explains the extreme sensitivity of the Victorian police to the Kelly story even now.

For the next two years, Ned and his three companions — the Kelly gang — stuck up towns and robbed banks, but what really made them figures of revelry and popular interest was that they flouted the authorities. The old convict regimes had

struck terror into people’s hearts when they talked about the certainty of the law. Ned made the law look foolish. The gang wrote a colourful manifesto which author Peter Carey, in a tribute to its linguistic originality and bravura, openly plagiarised for his prize-winning fiction, The True History of the Kelly Gang. Ned had support from two main groups — poor Irish Catholics, of whom there were plenty, and a generation of colonial youth who were not cowed by authority in the way their convict parents had been. Ned carried the defiance of his generation like a banPortland 28

ner, and, in time, Ned and this spirit of defiance would be seized upon by some as national characteristics.

Faced with their impotence in catching the gang, the authorities responded by locking up large numbers of Kelly “sympathisers.”

It was Aboriginal trackers who flushed Ned out of the bush and forced him to make a stand. Employing a tactic the Boers would use in South Africa against the British 15 years later, Ned derailed a train-line just north of a tiny town in northern Victoria called Glenrowan. He then provoked the police into coming after him by shooting a man under police protection called Aaron Sherritt — the gang deemed him an informer. And it is here, I feel compelled to say, that there is a sense in which Ned loses me. Ned’s critics would say that by writing an article which takes him with this degree of seriousness I am making a hero of him. But he’s not a hero to me. Shooting an unarmed man is not, in my view, shooting in self-defense, and at this point of the story we cross a boundary and move into the province of political violence or the sort of acts condoned in war. But perhaps Ned would say he was at war — there’s plenty of evidence that an uprising was planned to erupt around the derailing at Glenrowan with the aim of creating a Republic of Northeastern Victoria.

The plot failed because Ned performed an act of kindness. Having herded the township of Glenrowan into the local hotel — a slab hut owned by a widow called Jones — Ned let a hostage go because he said he had a sick wife at home. The man ran down the track and waved down the train carrying troopers aplenty and a carriage of journalists.

Stopping before the section of derailed track, the train disgorged its troopers and what is called “the first volley” occurred. Ned was wounded Above, Ned Kelly, in shackles, photographed on November 11, 1880, the day before he was hanged in a Melbourne gaol, Australia; right, Ned Kelly’s suit of armor was half his own body weight.

in three places — foot, hand and arm — but escaped. His best mate, Joe Byrne, re-entered the pub, moved a toast to the Kelly gang, was shot in the thigh and bled to death.

Dan Kelly and Steve Hart, the gang’s two teenagers, were trapped in the hotel which was now surrounded by troopers.

It’s what happened the next morning that probably matters most in terms of understanding how Ned Kelly became an Australian legend.

The authorities had run the line (continued by his critics today) that Ned was a coward. Around dawn, a figure clanked out of the morning mist. No-one knew who or even what it was. It was Ned — he was wearing 90 pounds of armour fashioned from plowblades, a cylindrical helmet around his head, a body plate that reached his knees. One reporter wrote that he could not have been more surprised if he had been Banquo and just seen his father’s ghost.

Firing a revolver with his one good hand, he advanced on the small army of troopers surrounding the Glenrowan Hotel, attempting a diversion that would allow his young brother and Steve Hart to escape.

Eventually, an English policeman shot Ned beneath the knees and he crashed to the earth.

With multiple wounds, Ned was expected to die but didn’t. The Irish Protestant judge who had sentenced his mother to three years hard labour sentenced Ned to hang. Ned said he would see the judge in the place to which he was going and, sure enough, almost on cue, the judge died 12 days after Ned did. The night before Ned died his mother visited him and famously said, “Mind you die like a Kelly.” No less celebrated in Australian folklore is the line Ned uttered on the gallows, “Such is life.”

His mother was in the prison when he was hanged and would have heard the steel trapdoor on the gallows clang open as his bound body hurtled through the air before being jerked back up.

He was 25 years old.

They cut off his head for criminal science. People have been looking for the skull ever since — bits of it are forever being sighted in different parts of the continent. His headless corpse was dumped in a hole in a corner of the prison yard and covered in lime to corrode the flesh. The authorities thought that was the end of Ned but they were mistaken. He entered the language. To say someone was “as game as Ned Kelly” was to say that person was seriously brave.

Autumn 2015 29

Left, “Kelly With Horse”, 1955, by Sir Sidney Nolan, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

Songs were written about him. Songs are still being written about him.

He is the subject of countless books.

You often see his name and helmeted head in tattoos and graffiti. Ben Cousins, the first Australian football star to be defiant about his use of recreational drugs, had Such Is Life tattooed in Gothic print on his rippled brown torso.

There have been a series of films about Ned. One starred Mick Jagger.

The last, starring Australian actor Heath Ledger, was the great missed opportunity — Ledger was the actor for the role but the script was dismal.

A series of paintings about Ned completed during the Second World War by an army deserter named Sidney Nolan has the sort of prominence in Australian modernist art that Jackson Pollock’s work has in the America canon. Ned’s story slips effortlessly from one culture to the next. Almost alone among white Australians, he appears in Aboriginal creation or “dreamtime” stories so that the Yaralin people of the Northern Territory have a story which says Ned was captured by the English, taken back to England and murdered there. When you hear thunder, the story goes, that’s Ned’s anger. One contemporary song talks of Ned’s “holy rage.” A Muslim Australian once told me the Islamic word for Ned is jihad. Not everyone likes Ned — some people hate him. He is regularly attacked as a thief and murderer. Much less regularly is it recalled that a government inquiry the year after the Kelly outbreak demoted or suspended most of the police involved. Ned’s story falls on that universal fault line which makes someone a rebel or a freedom fighter to one group and an outlaw or a terrorist to another, but what makes Ned a legend is not that everyone sees him the same — it’s that everyone sees him.

Like a bushfire on the horizon casting its red glow into the night.

The old Ned Kelly songs I grew up with were written by “sympathisers” — one has a chorus which goes: Farewell Dan and Edward Kelly, Farewell Stevie Hart and Joe Byrne too, With the poor your memory lingers, Those that blame you are but few.

This is the second of its two verses: Thirty policemen did outdo you In a hotel owned by Jones

Then they captured you and hanged you Nothing left you but the bones.

And so there I was, 132 years after Ned Kelly was hanged, in a Catholic church in the northern Victorian town of Wangaratta and there he was, Ned, his bones, his mortal remains, lying in a polished coffin before the altar. Ned wore the green sash he won as a boy beneath his armor at Glenrowan. Now it was on his coffin along with a sheath of native flowers while, on the wall directly behind him from where I sat, was a statue of a large wooden cross with the body of a Jewish rebel nailed to it, and I was powerfully reminded of being in the old synagogue in

Ned’s story falls on that universal fault line which makes someone a rebel or a freedom fighter to one group and an outlaw or a terrorist to another.

Nazareth again, the one where I first sensed the presence of Jesus the man in his native land, only the presence I was feeling now wasn’t that of a rebel who died on a cross, it was a rebel who died on the gallows. Jesus and Ned have plenty of differences, but I reckon they had this much in common: they both knew how it was going to end for them, or how it was almost certainly going to end for them, but they continued on regardless — and, not timidly, but in a large way. The world was out of their control, but they had control of their own world in a way only people truly prepared to put the lot on the line can ever know and, with that, came a release of self so astounding the story of it travelled like a live thing.

The priest who performed the service, Monsignor John White, said he had received a number of “offensive” communications from people objecting to a convicted murderer receiving a “public liturgy.” In his homily, Monsignor White said, “We don’t make the judgments. We don’t know what goes on in people’s hearts Autumn 2015 31

and souls and minds. God does that.

Ours is a church of saints and sinners and we are not here to decide which side Ned falls on. We can, and we must, pray for our dead.” Relatives of Ned’s, wearing the green sash, read from the scriptures. I sat with a friend of mine, Ursula Gilbert, a Sister of Mercy with an endlessly cheerful manner whose forebears were Kelly “sympathisers.” For more than a century, the Kelly clan held their story as tightly as a piece of paper in a clenched fist. To see things, or be told things, you had to know someone on the inside. Twenty years ago, Ursula took me to meet an old dying woman in a Melbourne hospital who was the granddaughter of Ned’s sweetheart, Kate Lloyd.

Ursula’s brother took me to the bush camp the Kellys used the night before the police shooting. Ned, through his five sisters, has around 450 descendants. They filled the old church.

Ned’s coffin was carried from the church to a woman singing “In the Sweet By and By” — according to the funeral brochure, Ned’s favorite song and the one he sang in the condemned cell the night before he was hanged. Outside the church, people crowded around, trying to touch the coffin. Some motocyclists arrived.

Standing with Ursula, I met a descendant of Aaron Sherritt, the former friend the Kellys judged, probably wrongly, to be a traitor. I met a descendant of one of the three policemen the Kellys shot. He also had forebears who were on the other side of the dispute, who were “sympathisers.” The truth had got ever more tangled with time. Ursula declared it was time for a new start. When the hearse began to move, there was a shout of “Three cheers for Ned!”, which were lustily given. People applauded.

Then his remains were taken and buried in an unmarked grave beside the grave of his mother, also unmarked, in a dusty cemetery not far from the slab hut where Ellen Kelly and her large brood once lived.

Concrete was poured on Ned’s coffin to keep it from re-surfacing.

Martin Flanagan has long been a piercing writer for The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Victoria. He is the author of many books, among them the Australian classic The Game in Time of War and The Line, about his dad’s experience as a prisoner of the Japanese on the horrific Burma Railway. Martin will speak and read from his work in the Buckley Center on Nov. 5, free as air, all welcome. Call 503.943.8225 for details.

Rise of the Rec

A

s the University’s web site dryly notes, our Howard Hall was state-of-the-art when it was built... 90 years ago. The University has yearned for a gleaming new student recreation center for many years, and finally it arrived in August, when the stunning huge imposing remarkable Father Bill Beauchamp Center opened for student use. The Rec (we have already heard students call it ‘The Beau,’ which we think is funny) will be blessed, dedicated, and speechified over in September.

It has been amazing to watch such an aircraft carrier of a building rise from what was grass and insects and the occasional frisbee – alumni will remember the field north of the old public safety building as a great place for necking and dozing in the sun while totally intending to study. University photographer Adam Guggenheim took thousands of photos of the Rec over the last year, but we are especially absorbed by how a glorious new student rec and “wellness” center slowly took shape.

There’s much more to it than the three gyms (one primarily for use by the Pilot varsity basketball and volleyball teams), of course: there are enormous areas set aside for weight and strength training, resistance training, endurance training, and suchlike; there’s a vast rock-climbing wall; there are shining locker rooms, administrative offices for Rec Services staff, a bicycle repair shop, studio space for yoga and ballet and spin classes, and a beautiful track (eight laps to the mile) suspended high over the gyms.

Another little detail we love very much: the Beau was funded entirely by gifts from alumni, staff, faculty, and friends. We borrowed not a penny for it. Somehow that just seems very cool, that very many people and entities understood that it was far more than a place to sweat. In a real sense it is a laboratory for the grace of the body, a theater for competition, a classroom where young men and women try to hone and shape the holy vehicles into which they were born. It’s a space for laughter and camaraderie and meditation and elevation and growing confidence.

It’s also a celebration of a good priest, a good man, who devoted twelve years of his life, with calm wit and patience, to the University community, as vice president for two years, and then president for ten. He is a quiet wry man, Father Bill Beauchamp, and it cannot be said that the students knew him well, for he often seemed stern and remote; but there are hundreds, no, thousands of people who saw and savored the honest, forthright, admirable man behind the presidential façade. The fact that his name, in gleaming letters a foot high, will be read by thousands of people every day for the next 90 years is pretty cool.

Are we still and always welcoming gifts for students and the Beau and student health and scholarships and athletics and anything else you can think of? Sure we are. Call Colin McGinty, 503.943.8005, mcginty@up.edu.

— Editors

Summer 2014: the drowsy field behind the public safety building vanishes, along with the old wooden public safety building; driving the backhoe that delivers the first blow against the castle of campus law is University president Father Mark Poorman, who cackled, yes, he did.

Spring 2015: Shockingly, the Rec is a Huge Building, stretching from Fields and Schoenfeldt halls to the Chiles Center, where there used to be mostly grass and air. It’s ... huge. People, no kidding, gape when they see it for the first time. Even Father Bill Beauchamp looks startled when he tours it in late spring, as he’s back on campus for a Congregation of Holy Cross meeting.

Winter 2014: Imagine working ten hours a day, or more, during an Oregon winter, which is to say moist and cold, and moist. Hundreds of men and women from Skanska did that for the University. Hardly ever do we thank the people who actually dug and welded and molded and nailed and framed and every other verb you can imagine. We thank them now.

Autumn 2015: The Rec opens for all students on August 24, will be blessed soon after, and will be formally dedicated, with speeches and hoopla, on September 24. And then, amazingly, it will instantly be a normal part of campus. Just like that. Wow.

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Great To See You At Reunion 2015!

This summer’s Reunion celebrated our nationally-ranked Cross Country program, the prestigious Entrepreneur Scholars program, the induction of the Class of 1965 into the 50-Year Club, and campus birthdays: the School of Nursing’s 80th, and Mehling Hall’s 50th. With just under 1,000 attendees, campus was bustling with purple pride. Our weekend featured tours of the newly completed Beauchamp Recreation & Wellness Center as well as the river campus.

Other highlights included the view from the Mehling rooftop, misting arches to combat the high temperatures, caricature artists, alumni college sessions, and a fond nostalgia shared among Pilots.

Save The Date For Reunion 2016: June 23-26 Mark your calendars to join us back on the Bluff next summer from June 23-26, 2016. The Class of 2006, Class of 1991, and Class of 1966 will be celebrating milestone anniversaries as will all classes ending in 1 and 6. If you’re a member of one of these classes and would like to assist with Reunion planning, please contact Anna Mottice Horlacher at horlache@up.edu or 503-943-8505.

Battle On The Bluff, Oct. 24

Get your old team back together or meet new teammates as you relive intramural fun at

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the second annual Battle on the Bluff. Set for Saturday, October 24, this year’s event will feature a 3v3 basketball tournament held in the new Beauchamp Recreation & Wellness Center, a kickball tournament, lawn games, and a wrap-up BBQ. Tournament winners will be awarded prizes and all participants will receive a commemorative t-shirt and dinner at the BBQ. $10 per person or $15 at the door. To reserve your spot, go to up.edu/alumni.

Alumni Chapters Launched in Portland, Seattle, Bay Area, Chicago

Looking to connect with alumni in your region? The Office of Alumni Relations is proud to announce the formation of alumni chapters and clubs. The first phase of chapters is launching this fall in Portland, Seattle, the Bay Area, and Chicago. If you are interested in joining one of our chapters or if you’d like information about upcoming chapters or clubs in your area, please contact Ken Hallenius at halleniu@up.edu or 503-943-8326.

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Have You Joined UP Switchboard?

Be sure to sign up for the University’s new social media networking site: UP Switchboard!

It’s an online community for UP alumni, students, staff, faculty, and parents where you can ask for what you need and offer what you have. Go to up.edu/switchboard to create an account and start connecting.

10-Year Anniversary of 2005 Women’s Soccer National Championship

This fall marks the 10-year anniversary of the 2005 Women’s Soccer NCAA National Championship. The 2005 team will be honored throughout the soccer season and recognized as part of Alumni Family Day at the Pilots vs.

Santa Clara game on Sunday, October 18. To purchase game tickets, contact the Pilot Box Office at 503-943-7525.

Engineering alumni, please join us on Sunday, September 20 as the UP women take on the Washington State Cougars at Merlo Field. The pre-game gathering starts at noon at the new Alumni House (5618 N. Strong St.) followed by the 1 p.m. game.

Lunch and general admission tickets are complimentary for engineering alumni.To RSVP, e-mail alumni@up.edu.

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will serve as program manager of alumni events. She comes to The Bluff from the wedding and special events industry and her role at UP includes managing Reunion Reunion as well as all other alumni event programming in Portland.

Happy to have you, Anna!

GOLD Tasting Series

GOLDs (Graduates of the Last Decade) are invited to raise a toast with fellow young alumni at three different tasting events this fall. The tastings will be hosted by The Commons Brewery on Saturday, September 12; Occidental Brewing Company on Saturday, October 17; and Humble Brewing on Saturday, November 21. Tickets are limited. To reserve your spot, go to up.edu/alumni.

Alumni Advent Mass & Brunch With Santa, Dec. 6 Alumni Awards Nominations Now Open

Engineering Alumni Pre-game and Women’s Soccer, Sept. 20

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Each year, the University presents awards to three exceptional alumni for their noteworthy contributions to their professional fields, for their dedication to volunteer endeavors, and for their ongoing support of the University and its mission. To recommend an alumnus for our 2016 alumni awards, go to up.edu/alumni and submit your nomination

by December 1, 2015.

Please Welcome Anna Mottice Horlacher ’12 to Alumni Office This summer, the Office of Alumni Relations welcomed a new staff member: Anna Mottice Horlacher ’12. Anna

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Alumni and their families are invited to join us on Sunday, December 6 for our annual Alumni Advent Mass in the Chapel of Christ the Teacher followed by a festive brunch and photos with Santa. Details to follow on up.edu/alumni.

We’ve Moved!

In order to make way for the University’s new residence hall, the Office of Alumni Relations has relocated to a new office space. You can now find us in the big brown house located at 5618 N. Strong St., behind Fields Hall. Next time you’re in the area, be sure to stop in and say hello!

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The University’s first Pilot House, built in 1938 for $13,000, had two rec rooms and a lunch room, and was designed primarily for ‘day dogs,’ students who lived in Portland but not on campus. It was famous for its pall of cigarette smoke and for its pool sharks – among them Al Corrado ’55, who reportedly made enough money at the table to pay his tuition bills. The Pilot House was renovated twice more over the years, and is being rebuilt yet again this fall, this time doubling the size and adding a campus pub. (Really.) Are we welcoming gifts for the renovation? Heavens, yes; this edit will cost more than $2 million. Call Laura Hanna at 503.943.8607, hanna @up.edu.

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Leo Garrow ’50 passed away on June 8, 2015, at the age of 88.

Leo was a member of one of the first classes at Portland’s Central Catholic High School, where he excelled at football and basketball and was a student body officer. He served in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific in the last days of World War II. In 1949 he married Mary Elaine Feller, and they settled in Northeast Portland. Leo spent 44 years as an engineer at Bingham Pump. He was always willing to help get things done and was a longtime supporter of the Blanchet House of Hospitality. Survivors include his wife, Elaine; sister, Marie McCarty; children, Dan, Phil, Nick, Pete, John, Mary Randazzo, and Ed; 19 grandchildren; 10 great-grandchildren; and many nieces and nephews.

“He was as humble and kind as anyone you would ever meet,” according to his obituary, “the product of a great family and the Catholic educational system; a true example of a great Christian gentleman for whom actions not words were the true measure of a man.” For those attributes and more we salute Leo here. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

50 Year Club

Dan Leary ’31 passed away on May 13, 2015. Dan served as a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II, then married his dream girl, Lucille Smith. They spent the 1950s and 60s in Hayward, Calif., raising two children, Doug and Nancy, settling back in Portland in 1970. Dan loved reading, politics, jokes, airplanes, cars, cribbage, lists, projects, being with his family and above all, his beloved Luci. Afflicted with Alzheimer’s in her final seven years, he cared for Luci at home to the end, without complaint.

She remained the love of his life until his final breath. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Helen Gaylord ’42 passed away on July 12, 2015. She was predeceased by her husband, A. Henry Gaylord; and daughter, Barbara Gaylord Stillwell. Helen is survived by her daughters, Sharon (Gary) Roberts and Gwendolyn (Richard) Remillard; son, James (Debbie) Gaylord; sister,

a beautiful nurse named Rosemary Bader, whom he married in November of 1952.

Rosemary and Bob had five children in Bremerton, Wash., before moving the family to Vienna, Va., in 1966 where Bob began a fast rise through the ranks of the U.S. civil service supporting the U.S. Navy. Bob retired in 1987 and Rosemary died in 1990.

Two years later, he married Beulah “Boots” Friedhoff, the widow of Bob’s brother Joe, who had died two years prior. Bob “Papa” was a great husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, uncle, and friend. Survivors include his wife, Boots; sister, Ann Marie; daughters, Dianne and Kathy; sons, Robert, John and Jerry; stepchildren, Janet, Dan, Jim, and Jeff; 14 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Alfred J. O’Brien Jr. ’45 passed away on Tuesday, June 16, 2015, at Riverwood Senior Living in Tualatin. He was 92 years old. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II as an operations and communication officer in the Asiatic Pacific, then worked in the lumber industry for 40 years. He Delores Chapman; brother, loved and supported UP Harold Schild; 11 grandchilsoccer and basketball and dren; and eight great-grandvolunteered as a Meals on children. Our prayers and Wheels driver until age 89. condolences to the family.

His beloved wife, Ailene, Paul Joseph Madden ’42 preceded him in death in passed away on August 1, 2007. Survivors include his 2014, at home, surrounded by son, Bill O’Brien; daughter, his wife and children. He Cathy O’Brien; four grandchilserved in the U.S. Navy in dren; and two great-grandchilWorld War II, where he served dren. Al was preceded in as a photogradeath by his son, Michael; and pher for four daughter, Jane. Our prayers years in and condolences to the family.

Europe. In James Sahli ’46 passed away June of 1951 he unexpectedly on May 10, 2015, married Mary in his home after a long and Esther Schatz fruitful life of 90 years. He and together fulfilled his passions for both they raised five history and traveling by children: Catherine, Mary Jo, enlisting with Lawrence, Julie, and David. the Merchant He retired in 1987 and Marines, sailing devoted himself to volunteer from Tasmania work. His deep and abiding to Murmansk love for his wife of 63 years, and all points Mary Esther, was the cornerin between. He stone of his life. Our prayers married Louise and condolences to the family.

Abraham and Robert Friedhoff ’45 passed with her raised five children. away on JanHe owned several home uary 21, 2014. furnishing businesses, retiring After graduafor good at age 89. Jim was tion from the preceded in death by his Coast Guard loving wife of 6 2 years, Academy in Louise; brother, Jerry; and 1950, he met grandson, Joel. Survivors

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include his children, Patrick, Dena, and Kevin; grandchildren, Jennifer D’Alotto, Melanie Graves, Kayla Sahli, and Hayden Sahli; and great-grandchildren, John Anthony, Christian, and Natalie D’Alotto. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Robert Labbe ’47 passed away on March 23, 2015, from complications of Parkinson’s disease, in Bellevue, Wash.

He spent two years in the Navy during World War II, completing his college degree after his discharge.

Bob joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 1958 where he spent his career in the departments of pediatrics and laboratory medicine.

He married Norma Lee Wiley on August 21, 1955 in Nampa, Idaho. Survivors include daughters, Sharlene Forbes and Yvonne Guptill; grandchildren, Brad and Lisa Forbes and David and Rachel Guptill; and many nieces and nephews. Norma Lee and his daughter, Valerie, preceded him in death. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Dolores C. Keys ’47 passed away peacefully on August 13, 2014, at age 88. During an extended honeymoon trip across Europe in 1951, she and her late husband, James Keys, settled for a time in Cairo, Egypt when James was hired by the U.S. Foreign Service.

Subsequent assignments included Paraguay and Costa Rica.

After journeying around the world, the Keys family moved to Annandale, Virginia, where she and Jim raised their family and Dolores still lived at the time of her passing. In addition to being a Foreign Service wife and energetic mother of seven, Dolores also had a fulfilling career as a motivational psychologist and speaker, including her own business teaching the Silva method of mind development for over thirty years. Her family asks those who knew her to join in celebrating the happy and fulfilled life of this remarkable woman by undertaking a random act of kindness in the spirit of her legacy. Survivors include children, Terri Lee, Tom Keys, Mary Jean Hurst, Kathy Keys, Joanne Keys, Betty Bancroft, and James J. Keys; and

C L A S S thirteen grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Anna L. Blickle ’48 passed away on May 12, 2015. Her Catholic faith was a guiding force throughout her life. After graduating from the University with her nursing degree on May 30, 1948 (the day of the Vanport flood), she went to work at the old St. Vincent Hospital on NW Westover.

When her husband Jim died on 1977, she returned to nursing and soon found her second calling as a grandmother, a role she cherished so much that she became known as “Grandma” to her family and friends. Survivors include her children, Susan, Chuck, Sally, and Tom; grandchildren, Stephanie Cassidy, Brian Cassidy, Jim Fenton, Emily Cassidy, and Joe Fenton. She also will be missed by the love of her children, Paul Cassidy, Ron Larsen and Brian Garcia.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Robert Beaudry ’49 passed away on June 20, 2014, while convalescing in Vancouver, Wash. He married Joan May Burdick in 1953, and moved to Tigard where they raised three boys. Bob enjoyed a long career in the insurance field as an agent and agency owner.

He also had a lifelong love of the Oregon coast. Bob enjoyed a close group of friends that he vacationed and spent time with at Neskowin Beach. He is survived by his children, Kim, Brian, and Scott Beaudry; and six grandchildren. His wife, Joan, predeceased him. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Kenneth Mehlig ’50 passed away on June 4, 2015, at the age of 92. He was an honorable World War II veteran and cherished father. In lieu of flowers, donate to Habitat for Humanity or Medical Teams International. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Anna Craviotto, wife of Robert Craviotto ’50, died on November 19, 2014, of lung cancer. She was 81. She graduated from Hillsboro High School and attended St. Vincent’s School of Nursing.

Survivors include her husband of 64 years; sons, Paul, John, Kevin and Bruce; siblings, Florence Colbert, Bobby Dean, Shirley Meter, and Betty Word; and five grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Ronald Leon Williams ’50 passed away on March 18, 2015. He spent 44 years as a violinist in the Oregon Symphony and was a popular strolling violinist at numerous venues. He taught music at Portland and Parkrose schools for 27 years and conducted the orchestra for 20 Parkrose High School musicals. Survivors include his wife, Phyllis; six children; 21 grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Jack Schutz ’50 passed away peacefully at home, after a heroic battle with cancer, on March 3, 2013. Soon after his graduation from The Bluff, he traveled to California, stopping in a little town called Woodside—the town he never left.

Jack became the well-loved restaurateur of The Village Pub. He was a devoted, loving husband for 40 years to the late Norma Oswald.

He was an amazing father to Carolyn Schutz, Janet Schutz, Julie Luttringer, and son-in-law Collin, and grandfather to Katie and Jack. He was a loving partner to Linda “Sam” O’Sullivan, and the family is grateful for the happiness and care she brought Jack in his final years.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Geraldine “Geri” Morin, wife of Lawrence Morin ’51 and mother of Terence Morin ’94, passed away on June 21, 2015.

She inspired others by her positive attitude and fighting Irish spirit. Geri loved tea parties and all holidays, especially Christmas. For the past 35 years, she hosted the Carriage House Holiday Boutique in her home.

Survivors include her loving husband, Larry; children, Nik, Michele Hastings, Tom, Mindi Marsh, Terry, and Monique Matson; 11 grandchildren; one great-grandson; and siblings, Sr. Barbara Jean Laughlin, Joyce Karaman, Michael Laughlin, and Ahriah Vocare.

Geri requested a donation in her name to either the Providence Child Center for Medically Fragile Children or

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N O T E S Longtime Portland broadcaster Jim Howe ’60 passed away on February 6, 2015, after a short battle with cancer. After moving to Oregon as a teenager, Jim graduated from Tigard High School and from there, attended the University of Portland, where he met his beloved wife, Marilyn (Fay) Howe ’60. In 1962, he joined KEX in Portland as a street reporter and quickly worked his way up to news director. Jim remained at KEX for 39 years, covering everything from the birth of Packy the elephant to the Columbus Day Storm, the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and the Mount St. Helens eruption. In April 2001, the Oregon Associated Press Broadcasters awarded Jim a lifetime achievement award. Survivors include his wife of 55 years, Marilyn; daughters, Cathy Martin, Patty Carrasco, Caroline Howe, Susie Trahan, and Sharon Krauel; six grandchildren; and brother, Bill Howe. Our prayers and condolence to the family.

Boys Town. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Carl Markgraf ’51 passed away on May 31, 2015. In 1949, after serving in the U.S. Navy, he entered the University of Portland, receiving his B.A. cum laude in English literature. Carl and his wife-to-be, Mary Barbara Irene Fleming, were active in the University of Portland theater. They married in 1951 and spent their 40 years of married life together, devoted to each other and to their children until her death in 1991. From 1954 to 1957, he taught and directed English and drama at Wy’east High School in Hood River, and then taught from 1957 to 1963 at Marylhurst College. He then served as a professor and assistant dean of arts and letters at Portland State University until retiring in 1996. Survivors include seven children, Cecily Schoning, Elinor, Karl, Lise, Thomas, Paul, and Anna Gregory; 22 grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

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John K. Vitas ’51 died on April 11, 2015, an hour before his 89th birthday, at OHSU in Portland. His bed was surrounded by family as they sadly said their goodbyes. He left his memories with his wife, Pat Towle; children, Susan Vitas, Terry Towle, Nancy Towle, and Robert Towle; grandchildren, Valerie Vitas, Dustin Vermeulen, Katie Neuman, and Joseph, Benjamin, Daniel and Michael Towle; great-grandchildren, Lola Vitas and Julia, Reese, Hudson, Jackson and Cameron Towle, all of Portland; and extended family and friends. John founded Plasti-Fab in Tualatin in 1965, and grew the company to a global leader in engineered noncorrosive fiberglass equipment used in the water treatment and containment industries. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

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JoAnn Leipzig, mother of Richard ’77, Frank ’83, and Robert ’88 Leipzig, passed away on May 11, 2015. In high school, Jo met the love of her life, Robert A. Leipzig ’41 CP ’47; they were married on June 22, 1946, and by 1966 they were the proud parents of eight children. The Leipzigs were one of many large Catholic families that founded St. John Fisher Parish in 1959. All eight of Bob and Jo’s children graduated from St. John Fisher, and from there populated Portland area high schools such as Jesuit, Central Catholic, St. Mary’s Academy, and St. Mary’s of the Valley. Bob passed away on December 8, 2012. Survivors include children, Kurt, Mark, Karey Manley, Rick, Tim, Jody Gordon, Frank, and Rob; 18 grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren, with another on the way. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

William Tsuyoshi Hirata ’51 passed away on February 20, 2015, at the age of 86. He was born in Baker, Oregon and graduated with a degree in Economics from the University of Portland. He was married to Kimiye Akiyama on October 7, 1950.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Rev. James T. Burtchaell, C.S.C., ’51 passed away on April 10, 2015, at Holy Cross House in Notre Dame, Ind. Survivors include his brother, Robert K. Burtchaell, and sister, Martha Burtchaell Bernadelli. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Donald M. Ham ’52 died on July 18, 2015, at the age of 87, at his home in Milwaukie, Ore., with his family by his side. He served in the U.S. Army Air Force in 1946 and 1947, and married his high school sweetheart, Lila June Mansfield, on August 21, 1948. Don started his firefighting career as a volunteer with the Portland Fire Department when he was 16 years old, and retired in January of 1980 after 30 years driving Truck 3 on A Shift in northwest Portland. He loved kids and helped repair toys every year with the Toy and Joy Makers.

Survivors include his wife of

N O T E S nearly 67 years, Lila Ham; daughter, Debbie Philips; and eight grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Kevin Wager ’53 passed away on May 17, 2015, with his family at his side, at the age of 87. He worked for 33 years in sales and marketing for the Burlington Northern Railroad.

Kevin was kind, funny and caring, with a true Irish soul and spirit. Survivors include his wife of 50 years, Gerrie; six children; and nine grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

John Paul Kent, Sr. ’53 died on May 29, 2013, at his home in Walla Walla, Wash., at the age of 78. In 1957 he joined his father on the family wheat farm; in 1961, he married Virginia Nelson and together they had three sons. They raised their boys on the farm and created a business partnership that exists to this day.

Survivors include Virginia and his three sons and their wives, John P. Kent, Jr. (Elaine), James P. Kent (Lisa) and Joseph P. Kent (Eleanor); and five grandchildren, Benjamin and Corey Harter, Jackson P. Kent, Olivia Kent and Nyla Rose Kent. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

We heard recently from Don Haynes ’55, who writes: “Thanks for including my lengthy update in the summer issue of Class Notes. I have, however, a problem. Who is the man whose picture is included in the column?

Handsome though he may be, he is not me.” Oh, well, um, gosh Don, we just...screwed up, to tell you the truth. Turns out you’re not the only Don Haynes who pops up in Google searches. Our apologies for the misdeed and we are happy to include a photo of the real Don Haynes, rather than the gentleman you mention (who is in fact Rev. Donald W. Haynes of Hood Theological Seminary in Salisbury, North Carolina).

Edith E. Brown ’55 passed away on May 7, 2015, at the age of 82. She was devoted to her church, and enjoyed traveling and spending time with her large and vibrant circle of friends and family.

Survivors include her husband, David; children, Mike, Kit, Ken, Cheryl, Jeff, Christina, and Eric; brother, Leonard; 13 grandchildren; and many

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nieces, nephews and cousins.

In lieu of flowers, a memorial fund at the Northwest Down Syndrome Association, nwdsa.org, has been established in her name. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Robert “Rip” Corrigan ’55 passed away on July 15, 2015, at Harmony Guest Home in Hillsboro, Oregon. He was 82.

An orthopedic surgeon by trade and vocation, Dr. Corrigan was known for taking long bus rides with the football team, making house calls, and accepting firewood as payment for his services.

He served in the U.S. Navy as a physician and was stationed in Hawthorne, Nevada, later returning to Portland. In 1964 he and his family moved to Bend, Oregon, where he set up practice until returning to the Portland area once again in 1984. He retired from Kaiser-Sunnyside Medical Center in 2000.

“Grandad” is survived by ten children, Julie Roberts, Colleen Corrigan-Buckendorf, Kathleen Rankin, Sean Corrigan, Molly Neal, Tim Corrigan, Patrick Corrigan, Maureen Vasquez, Bill Corrigan, and Chris Corrigan; stepchildren, Debbie Thompson, Denise Dickson, Bryan White, Joseph White, and Barb Fisher; 34 grandchildren; and ten great-grandchildren. Memorial contributions in his name may be made to the Pregnancy Resource Center, the American Heart Association, and Clackamas Women’s Services. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Darrell Louis Cornelius ’56 died in the comfort of his own home on May 9, 2015, with his family at his side. He attended Blessed Sacrament grade school, Madeleine grade school, Columbia Prep High School, and Central Catholic High School in Portland. He Darrell practiced law in Portland and was a member of the Oregon State Bar for 50 years. A lifetime resident of Multnomah County, Darrell was a member of the Elks, Moose, and Eagles lodges. Survivors include his daughters, Catherine and Alexandra; son-in-law, Michael; and sister, Delores Buck. Our

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Patrick Weller ’56 wrote the following note, hoping to have it read to Fr. Ambrose Wheeler, C.S.C., barely a month before Amby’s passing in July 2011 at the age of 92. Patrick asked that we publish it here as a remembrance to his Good Shepherd: “It was a fateful day that September in 1955 when I reached the top step of the Science Building and turned into your biology lab. I had heard about Father Wheeler and his Freshman Biology course. To tell the truth I was a little leery of this place with all the microscopes lined up on the tables and the faint smell of formaldehyde hanging in the air. It was a little too much for a green 17-year-old kid that barely made the cut, but it was the beginning of a friendship that has grown over the last 55 years. I well remember the wintertime Sunday morning dashes up to Timberline where you would say Mass, and the return evening trips where you would teach Biology 101 to your captive student, the driver. I got through biology and we were still friends. The dinners at the MAC club with Hazel, that Easter down in Phoenix when we ended up eating Easter lunch at Denny’s, and the few times we would get together when you made it into Portland. Yes it has been a long journey, you from the rocky shores of Ireland and me from that top step in the Science building at Portland U. You have been an inspiration to all that have crossed your path, and like a Good Shepherd you coached and prodded, pointed and guided your charges to reach their potential as they stepped out into the world.

Your tools were faith, loyalty, kindness, humor, and the knowledge that every day is a gift from God. On occasion God calls in one of his shepherds to receive his rewards and rest after a job well done. I am very honored that you were my shepherd.

Hazel and I want to thank you for being a part of our lives.

You will always be in our prayers.”

Charles E. Leis ’57 passed away on August 4, 2014, in Portland, Ore. He grew up on his family’s farm on the west slopes off Canyon Road. While playing pinochle with friends, Charlie was introduced to

Sandy Thomas. The two quickly became enamored of each other and were married at the Washington County Courthouse in December 1970. In his early work career, he took a position as manager at Edwards Lumber and retired from there when his eyesight began to fail in the late 1980s. He will be missed and remembered by his wife and partner of over 43 years, Sandra Leis; brother, Leonard Leis; and numerous nieces and nephews. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Larry James Caldwell ’58 passed away on June 15, 2015, from complications of Alzheimer’s. He was 78 years old. He married Joan Louise Clark on September 12, 1959, and then began his lifetime career in the food industry. Larry worked as manager for Albertsons, Portland Wholesale Grocery, and Fernando’s Foods, among others. He was an entrepreneur at heart, whether it was mowing lawns, chopping wood, bagging groceries, or working food shows. He is survived by his wife, Joan; daughters, Kathie Vosper and Tami Feller; daughter-in-law, Kim Caldwell; six grandchildren; one great-granddaughter; sisters, Carol McCollum and Donna Harden; several nieces and nephews; and a plethora of friends.

Terry “Big Daddy” Cline ’59 died on May 19, 2015, at St. Vincent Hospital in Billings, Montana—the same hospital where he was born 78 years earlier on Dec. 27, 1937. He met his future wife, Karen Doherty ’60 at UP and they were married at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Portland in 1960.

Terry was a lifelong and devoted Catholic, and his faith helped to guide him toward service to others, especially those most in need in the community. He was known as “Big Daddy” to his children and grandchildren and to the entire Cline Clan. He was a loving husband to Karen, and a wonderful, life-giving,

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Kristy Dillon ’77 wrote to tell us of the death of her brave lively vivacious witty generous sister Peggy.

“Margaret Teske O’Reilly ’80 died peacefully on February 3, 2015, in Portland at age 56. With her family present, she accepted death with courage and grace, her spirit strong after enduring years of trials from kidney disease. Her inspiring beauty will be forever cherished.

She is survived by her children, Kathleen, 24, and James, 17, husband Vince ’78, father John A. Teske and his wife Joy, sisters Meri ’73 (Michael ’73) Backus, Kristy ’77 (Sean ’87) Dillon, Liesl (Doug) Sullivan, and brothers John ’70 (Diane) and Michael (Gretchen), many treasured nieces, nephews, grand nieces and nephews, and other beloved relations in the Teske and O’Reilly families, many who are graduates of UP and Notre Dame.” She is also mourned by her beloved dog Scout; imagine his epic sadness every morning, when she still does not appear to light his day. Peggy’s uncle was the legendary Rev. Lloyd Teske, C.S.C.; his portrait hangs in the room named for him in Bauccio Commons, so Fr. Teske is still beaming all day and night on the campus he loved. Our prayers for Peggy’s soul and for the holes in so many hearts she leaves behind. Want to pray for her in a tactile way? Kristy suggests planting a tree, as a tribute to Peggy’s love of gardens; and there is, of course, a UP scholarship named for her uncle. wise-cracking father, father-inlaw, uncle and grandfather, steady in his love for his sprawling Irish clan. Big-hearted, compassionate and generous, Terry’s unique sense of humor brought laughter to many, and occasional embarrassment to some. Survivors include Karen; children, Kerry,

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Jennifer Hogan, Mary Beth James, Patrick, and Tony; 13 grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; siblings, Sr. Mary Arthel, Danny, Carole, Kevin, Colleen, and extended family.

Terry was preceded in death by his grandson Dylan. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

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Madeleine (O’Brien) Faller ’65, ’68 died peacefully on July 2, 2015, at home, holding hands with her husband and son. Madeleine moved from St. Paul, Minnesota to Portland in 1961 when she enrolled at the University of Portland and subsequently fell in love with her future husband, philosophy professor Thompson Faller. They married on August 22, 1969, and gave birth to twin sons a year later. She served as librarian and taught art and calligraphy at The Cathedral School starting in 1983, then returned to UP as administrative assistant to the superior of the Holy Cross priests and brothers. Madeline especially cherished a three-month journey to Japan with her husband and son, and was known affectionately (and gratefully) as “Mom” to 38 often-homesick students of the Salzburg class of 1980-81. A woman of great poise, intelligence, radiance, and compassion, Madeline was held dear by one and all, and those who love her can scarcely believe she has left us. She is loved and remembered by her husband, Thom; son, Tom and his wife Heidi; brothers, Mike, Paul, and Emmett; sister, Kathleen; and several nieces and nephews. In lieu of flowers, remembrances may be made in honor of Madeleine to the Faller Scholarship at the University of Portland (www.up.edu) or to the Loreto Day School of Calcutta, India (contactloretobowbazar@gmail.com).

Janice Choruby, wife of Larry Choruby ’62, died on June 26, 2015. Jan and Larry recently celebrated their 53rd wedding anniversary. Jan loved music and dancing but of all things, she loved her family and grandchildren the most.

She is survived and will be missed by her husband, Larry; son, Shawn Choruby and wife, Bonnie; grandchildren, Nicholas, Anna and Madeline; son, Patrick Choruby and wife, Lori; grandchildren, Kristin, Meghan, Derek and Brynn;

N O T E S and sister, Dorothy Arnoti.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Lawrence J. Salimena ’64 died on May 26, 2015. He worked for First Interstate Bank/Wells Fargo for 30 years in Portland, retiring as a trust officer in 1996. Survivors include his wife, Patricia; sons, Geoff Latham, Geno, and Giovanni; daughter, Gina Smith; and seven grandchildren. Remembrances may be made to the Boy Scouts or East Portland Rotary. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Bob Maloney ’64 has been appointed to the board of trustees for the Oregon Zoo Foundation. He joins a group made up of individuals in the community who share a passionate commitment to fostering community pride and involvement in the Oregon Zoo. For more information about the Oregon Zoo Foundation and its board of trustees, visit its website at www.oregonzoo.org.

Thomas Gregory Reilly ’65 passed away on January 25, 2012, in Riverside, Alabama.

After earning his economic degree at the University of Portland he became an officer in the United States Air Force, then had a long career in the automotive industry. He loved being with his family and friends and was truly a kind soul. He is survived by his wife of 44 years, Lyn; children, Sean Reilly and Meghan Trotter; grandchildren, Ethan, Kyle, Sam, and Greer; and brothers, Lawrence, Kevin, Marcus, and Denis Reilly. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Leonard Hartley Taylor, husband of Sally Ann (Larson) Taylor ’65, passed away on May 10, 2015, at home with Sally by his side. They married in 1979, and after living in Canada for six years, they moved to Portland, where Lenny became the beloved “handyman” to many Laurelhurst friends and neighbors for almost 30 years. Survivors include Sally; sisterin-law, Nellie McCarty of Portland; numerous nieces, nephews, and cousins; and the dearest of friends, Larry, Neville, and Carl. Our

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prayers and condolences to the family.

Kathleen (McMahon) Lerman ’65 died on November 22, 2014. Survivors include children, Lee David Lerman, Andy Lerman, and Becky Zajac; six grandchildren; siblings, Bob, Pat, Sheila, Mary, Dan, Jean, Maureen, Nancy and Sharon; and many nieces and nephews. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’68 Prayers, Please

William Charles Medak passed away on June 17, 2015 in his home surrounded by his wife and four children. After serving in the U.S. Air Force, Bill began his 35-year career with Kaiser Permanente, his first 12 years in health care administration followed by 23 years of facilities work, including his final role as senior real estate manager. Bill loved his grandchildren, who gave him special named like Grandpa Chef, Papa, Grandpa, and Grampie. Survivors include his wife, Susan; children; brothers, Jack, Bob, and Ed; sisters, Diane Gritzmacher, Jean Farrell, and Sally Medak Davis; and numerous nieces and nephews. The family suggests remembrances to the Rev. Msgr. T. Murphy endowed scholarship fund at Central Catholic High School or the All Saints Altar Society. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’69 A Salzburger To The End

Mary Ann Merrill died of cancer on January 12, 2015.

One of her favorite years was spent in Salzburg, Austria, while she was a student at UP. After graduation, Mary was a French and German teacher, then decided to go back to school to become a dental hygienist. After her cancer diagnosis, Mary moved to Sequim, Wash., to be close to family who could help her.

She made lots of dear friends through her cancer support group, and had a wonderful last year. Survivors include her mother, two brothers and their wives, a nephew and niece, and their families. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Phil Carlin was featured in an article titled “Musical prodigy, now in his 80s, finishes grandest work yet” in the July 25, 2015 edition of the Arizona Daily Star. Phil began his musical career in Portland at the tender age of 5, performing piano and organ pieces far beyond his years in front

C L A S S of paying audiences as “Phil Carlin, Musical Marvel.” He has written what he considers his opus, “‘A Dance Not Easily Done,’ A Ballet In Three Acts by Phil Carlin.” Read the article in its entirety at http:// tinyurl.com/ptoz6z9.

enter UP and a freshman. We remember when, as a 5-yearold, she would fill out her Reunion name tag as ‘Mary Martin, Class of 2019.’” Thanks so much Tami, we’ll take good care of Mary when she gets here in the fall.

Dan Malone ’81, ’87 has ’71 Mea Culpa returned to his old stomping Apparently we made a mistake grounds, North Portland’s in reporting the death of Rich- Roosevelt High School, where ard “Rick” Swee in the winter he spent his first 22 years as 2014 edition of this magazine. a teacher. This time around Rick is very much alive, and he’s serving as vice-principal it was his father, Richard John of the sprawling, currently-beSwee, every bit a war hero for ing-remodeled-and-upgraded his service in World War II and school. He was at Newberg Korea, who passed away in High School since 2004, and September 2014. We regret the many there are lamenting the error and extend our heartfelt big shoes that need filling with condolences to Rick and his his departure. Welcome home family on their loss. to NoPo, Dan, and don’t be a Word of our mistake, stranger on campus. accompanied by a number Sandra (Cato) Wood died on of tart and, in our opinion, May 20, 2015, surrounded by silly observations about the her family. Sandy worked for magazine being only about KINK radio and G.M.A.C. in donors, came to us in the form Portland, and most recently as of an anonymous letter, whose a credit analyst author we invite to grace his for Beaverton or her correspondence with a Toyota in name and address to which we Beaverton. may respond. We’d be happy Sandy married to chat about what’s good and Stephen Wood bad about the magazine. Have on October 6, the courage to give us the 1984. He chance. predeceased her in 2005. Survivors include ’79 A Hui Hou, Sterling her father, Robert G. Cato; Sterling Eltagonde passed away sisters, Cheryl McDonald and on July 23, 2015. Survivors Sharon Johnson; and numerinclude his wife, AnneMarie; ous nieces, nephews, and children, Iokewe and Keala great-nieces. The family Eltagonde; father, Juanito suggests remembrances to the Eltagonde; siblings, Joanne Shriners Hospital for Children Leiato, Sheldon in Portland or the Oregon Eltagonde, Jodi Humane Society. Our prayers Howser, and and condolences to the family.

Joyce Arata; We received this note from and grandchilPhilomena Bishop, mother of dren, Alaka’i the late Francesca (Bishop) and ’Ilikea Clifford, along with a gift to Eltagonde. Our support tuition assistance and prayers and programs here on The Bluff: condolences to the family.

“If I should ever come into a Diane Alexander, wife of fortune, I promise that you James Alexander, passed away will be generon May 21, 2015. She is surously rewarded. vived by James, her husband I will never, of 53 years; three daughters; ever, be able to and four granddaughters. In repay U. of P. lieu of flowers, please make a for Francesca’s donation in her name to the happiness when Albertina Kerr Centers. Our she was there. prayers and condolences to Thank you.” the family.

Thanks so much, Philomena, it is we, of course, who should ’81 Welcome, Mary! thank you for the gift of your We got a nice note from Tami daughter, who graced our Moore Martin along with a gen- community not only as a erous gift to support students student but also as a member at UP. She writes: “Tom Martin of our public relations team. ’79 and I met at UP and have been happily married for 33 ’82 Sad News years. We love Reunion weekPrayers, please, for Susan Voss ends and have been bringing on the loss of her husband, our family to campus nearly Richard Henry Voss, who every summer. This fall, our passed away on Sunday, May youngest daughter, Mary, will 3, 2015. Richard was a gen-

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N O T E S Our prayers for the traveling soul of Dana Mount- Berrett, sister of alumnae Susan Surayani ’75 and Peggy Doherty ’73.

Dana was a wonderful artist, especially of ceramics and pottery, and spent endless hours in her studio in Eugene, not far from her home in Cottage Grove. Her favorite saint was the Little Flower, her sister Susan tells us — and it is to Saint Therese that we will turn quietly and ask for peace on a woman who loved beauty in all forms, and saw it as the evidence of an immeasurable Mercy. Rest in peace, Dana. tle man whose life revolved around his family, friends, teaching, coaching, baseball, golf, and travel. He was drafted out of Wilson High School in 1962 by the New York Yankees and played as a pitcher for several years before joining the U.S. Army Reserve. Richard taught eighth grade social studies at Dexter McCarty Middle School and Gordon Russell Middle School for 32 years until his retirement in 2002.

Survivors also include his son, Jimmy; daughter, Rachel; and four grandchildren who miss their “Poppy” terribly. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’83 It Was 50 Years Ago Today...

Janet Sandy and her husband Ed celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary on June 18, 2015. They were married on June 18, 1965 in Shoshone, Idaho, and have spent all but two years of their married life there. Janet taught in the nursing program at the College of Southern Idaho for 35 years and during this time attended graduate school in Portland for her Nurse Practitioners license. She has worked at the clinic in Shoshone for 30 years and still sees patients a couple of days a week. Ed and Janet have 6 children, Charles (Michelle), Curtis (Candace), Clinton, Christina Allbright (Troy), Clayton (Amanda), and Catheryne Trenkle (Eddie) and 22 grandchildren. They have

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recently enjoyed a cruise through the Panama Canal and will soon cruise to Alaska.

’86 The Man For The Job

Robert Fasulo has a new leadership position as chief strategy officer and special adviser to the president at TrackTown USA. A man who clearly knows his business, Robert is billed by TrackTown as “a multilingual internationalist with extensive experience in delivering communications, public relations, marketing, and bid campaigns [who] brings a blend of creative and entrepreneurial skills to TTUSA’s executive team as the company expands its international sport business enterprises.” He launched his own consulting agency, Robert Fasulo international (RFI), in 2010 and since then he has provided high-level, strategic consulting and business development services to major corporations, sports marketing and media agencies, national and international sports organizations, events, major event bids and international sport leaders. His past positions include chief of staff at the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and secretary general of the International Athletic Foundation, the Monaco-based charitable arm of the IAAF. Robert was a scholarship member of the UP track team and

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Pilots baseball hall of famer Geoff Loomis ’94, one of the most decorated players in the history of the program, has been named as head coach of the UP baseball program. Loomis comes back to The Bluff after compiling an impressive 327-197-2 (.624) record over the last 13 seasons as the head coach at Pacific Lutheran University. Loomis led PLU to new heights during his tenure, including the first two NCAA Baseball Championship appearances in school history and first Conference championships in 53 years. Loomis had a great run as a player for the Pilots from 1990-92, and he still holds the school’s career record for batting average (.372). He earned Pacific-10 North Division Player of the Year honors in 1992 and All-Pac-10 North recognition in 1991 and 1992. His 80 base hits and 22 doubles in 1992 still stand as school single-season records and he helped lead the 1991 squad to an NCAA Regional appearance.

Welcome back, Geoff, now batter up! graduated cum laude with a degree in communications.

Congratulations Robert, your bosses sure know talent when they see it.

We heard recently from Mona Beaton, who writes: “I regret to inform you that Donald Ross Beaton passed away on April 4, 2015. For many years he was a cardiac patient and he sustained a massive coronary. He is survived by myself, Mona Beaton, his two children, Daniel Beaton and Jennifer (Beaton) Vegas and her son, Ross Vegas; stepdaughters, Hanna McDonald, and Kendra McDonald and their sons, Gage Payne and Azon Larson; his father, Gordon Beaton; brothers, Douglas Beaton, (wife) Jill Beaton and their sons Alex and Keoni, Jim Beaton (wife) Vanessa Beaton and their sons, Nion and Briscoe. If you could please include his passing in your next publication, I would greatly appreciate it.” Certainly Mona, Don will certainly be missed, and our prayers and condolences to you and your family.

’88 Russell’s Return

N O T E S pleased to see the note regarding the passing of my husband, Steve Ward. I assume that Karl Wetzel had a hand in it. For the record, Steven Jr. is not the only UP alumnus in the family. I received a B.A. in education in May 1988 and another B.A. in arts and sciences in summer 1988. James received his MAT in May 1999, after his dad left UP.” Thanks Mary, Karl did indeed notify us of Steve’s passing. We’re sorry to have overlooked your and James’, class years, and our continued prayers and condolences to you and yours.

’91 Remembering Greg

Greg T. Ritter passed away on June 28, 2013, in Norman, Oklahoma. Survivors include his parents, Thomas E. and Shirley A. Ritter; daughter, Kaitlin Anne; and his new grandson, Kane Reagan Roach; also a brother, Lenny Ritter; sister, Debbie Pollock; and a niece and two nephews. Noted for his stature of 7½ feet, he played basketball in college and played briefly for the Milwaukee Bucks and the LA Lakers. He also played in Brazil and Germany. He worked for the Harp Correctional Center in Norman as a sergeant for nearly 14 years. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’99 Remembering Robert

Russell Plewinski has returned to the Somersworth and Newington offices of PainCare, a New England medical practice dedicated exclusively to treating all types of pain.

Plewinski completed his undergraduate degree in nursing from the University of Portland and received his anesthesia training while on active duty and completed his residency at the National Naval Medical Center in the greater Washington D.C. region. Russell has provided anesthesia in settings including stateside military and civilian hospitals, on board the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier, trauma centers in California and Colorado, and served for the past three years helping veterans who suffer from chronic pain.

We received a note from Mary Ward, who writes: “I was

We heard from Ryan Lafrenz, son of the late Robert Lafrenz ’74, and he gently pointed out that in our summer 2015 notice on his father’s death, we misspelled the family name as “LaFrenz.” Also, one of Robert’s daughters, Katie ’12, was not listed with those who survive him. We’re sorry about the errors and appreciate the corrections. Our continued prayers and condolences.

’00 Roger’s Lasting Legacy

We heard recently from Joe Baker, who writes: “I’d like to announce my marriage to Sarah Wells ’99 in August of 2013, as well as the birth of our daughter, Vivienne Pearl Baker, on May 21. Sarah and I met in 1996 when we were in the University Singers under Roger Doyle, and were reunited by Dr. Doyle after more than 10 years when we came together in 2012 to sing at his memorial concert. I’ve wanted to thank UP’s Brian Doyle for the powerful words he spoke about our mentor and friend that day, and also for the

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many kind things he’s written about Dr. Doyle over the years. We thank the Lord for Roger’s friendship and leadership, and that he brought us together again, just as he did the first time almost 20 years ago.” Thanks so much for writing, Joe, and congratulations on the new addition to your budding family.

’03 Time To Name Names!

The University’s very own Kunal Nayyar, whose life after The Bluff includes landing a part in a moderately successful television series called The Big Bang Theory, has written a memoir titled Yes, My Accent Is Real: And Some Other Things I Haven’t Told You, due to hit store shelves on September 15. Hopefully his many friends and instructors here at UP don’t have anything to worry about.

“Kunal also walks us through his college years in Portland, where he takes his first sips of alcohol and learns to let loose with his French, 6’8” gentle-giant roommate, works his first-ever job for the university’s housekeeping department cleaning toilets for minimum wage, and begins a series of romantic exploits that go just about as well as they would for Raj.” Maybe it’s time to start worrying after all…

’04 A Time To Heal

Prayers, please, for flight nurse Matt Bowe as he recovers from serious injuries sustained in a Flight For Life Colorado helicopter crash at Denver’s St. Anthony Summit Medical Center on July 3.

After a stay at St. Anthony and Craig hospitals, Matt has returned home, where he will continue his rehabilitation. Matt is one of two crew members who survived the crash; the helicopter’s pilot was killed. Flight for Life has set up a GoFundMe account to assist the families involved at www.gofundme.com/flightforlifeco. Nursing and Army ROTC classmate Lynda Lukenbaugh has also helped set up a support page on Youcaring at http://tinyurl.com/pby8l9m.

’07 Keeping Up With The Fabers (Trying, At least) Richard and Mary Faber dropped by the UP campus in May 2015, and we were able to find out what the intrepid couple has been up

C L A S S to. They now live in Nepal, where they settled after beginning what was to be a one-year trip around the

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inches. Devon is in his last year of ENT (ear, nose, and throat) residency and I am working as a primary care doctor in Seattle.” Congratulations Emma, and thanks so much for sharing. She is a living doll.

’08 Michelle Won’t Brag About It, So Thomas Will

Thomas Neveu writes: “Greetings from Wichita, Kansas. I had to send you an alumni update for my wife, Michelle world to map human traffick- (Smith) Neveu ’07, as she was ing in 2011. They planned to just selected from a field of go from Nepal to South Sudan, over 2,000 applicants to but decided to stay in Nepal, become a 2015 Tillman volunteered with a shelter Scholar by the Pat Tillman for women (most had been Foundation (http://pattillmantrafficked), and started thinking foundation.org/2015-tillmanmore and more about proscholars/). Her tireless work to viding economic opportunibetter the care provided to ties to local communities. veterans and their families has While they were here Richard led her to pursue her master of and May came to the Moreau science in nursing/acute care Center to talk about possible nurse practitioner degree connections, including shortthrough term interns and long-term Saint volunteers, and finding more Louis connections for their work in UniverNepal. Currently their focus is sity. She working with Purnaa: Ethical is also Garment Manufacturers in Nebalancpal (http://www.purnaa.com), ing life and anyone, especially those as a who work in the fashion or mother clothing fields, is welcome to and Key Spouse during my contact them to find out about many deployments over the providing sufficient employpast few years. Through it all ment to reduce poverty and we fall back on the foundation eradicate modern day slavof teaching, faith, and service ery: richard@purnaa.com. we learned at UP. We look forward to the day that a Tillman ’07 Wonderful News Scholar attends UP and would Emma Benzar Greer has love to help in making that a wonderful news to share: “I reality. Thank you to UP for just wanted to continuing to go above and let you know beyond in support of ROTC on that Devon and campus as well.” Thanks for I welcomed our sharing the news, Thomas, we first child, send our heartfelt congratulaEleanor Ruth tions to Michelle and our gratGreer, on July itude to you for your service 9! She was 7 lbs. and sacrifice as a member of and 4 oz., 19.5 the U.S. military.

The University’s dean of education, John Watzke, aloft in an F-18 with the Blue Angels. It’s a long story. Ask John: watske@up.edu. Give him a little money for teaching scholarships after you razz him.

The University community mourns the loss of Mary Candida Garaventa (above, center), who passed away peacefully at age 91 in Concord, Calif., on June 29. The Garaventas were the main benefactors for renovations to Waldschmidt Hall, provided key support for construction of the Chiles Center and Merlo Field, and established the Garaventa Center for Catholic Intellectual Life and American Culture, dedicated on June 2, 2005. Mary is survived by her five children: Silvio Garaventa, Jr. ’71, Cookie Garaventa Adler ’73, Louisa Garaventa Binswanger, Joseph Garaventa ’81, and Linda Garaventa Colvis; and many extended family members. Our prayers and condolences. ’09 The Perfect Choice

Jennifer Brookes was named as one of two 2015-2016 Congressional Science and Engineering Fellows in May. She will serve as the 2015-2016 Arthur H. Guenther Congressional Fellow, spending a one-year term working as a special legislative assistant on the staffs of U.S. congressional offices or committees in Washington, DC. Jennifer is a Ph.D. candidate in physical chemistry at the University of Washington. She volunteers with the University of Washington Science Explorers, an outreach group facilitating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) activities at an after-school program for elementary students, and is an officer in the University of Washington Chapter of OSA Student Affiliates. She is looking forward to combining her scientific and technical background with her interest in policy to help elected

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officials make complex policy decisions.

Jordan Thorpe writes: “I am excited to share the news that Brennan Thorpe and I were married on July 3, 2015. We first met at UP in 2008, during the first semester of our senior year. At the time Brennan was a pitcher on the baseball team, and we were both studying organizational communication. Our beautiful outdoor ceremony took place at Gorge Crest Vineyards near Hood River, OR, and was officiated by fellow UP alumnus Kelly Nemecek.

“Three days later, we held our convalidation ceremony on the UP campus with Fr. Mark Ghyselinck C.S.C., in the Chapel of Christ the Teacher. Alumni who helped us celebrate our special day included Kelly Riley ’08,Taylor Brooke ’13, Whitney Krebs, Matthew Hilton, Mark Triolo, Jason Bowlsby, Jamie Grimm ’11, Jessica Herman, Chris Miller, Kelly Nemecek, and Brenden Padden.”

We extend our congratulations to Jordan and Brennan, and look forward to seeing them and their classmates again soon on The Bluff.

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N O T E S Marissa taught for two years while earning her degree – in her case at Holy Cross School in North Portland, teaching middle school math and religion. To see another graduate from this year’s PACE cohort, see the inside back cover of this issue.

Faculty, Staff, Friends

Here’s a note from recent grad Elizabeth Tertadian ’15, who writes: “I graduated from UP’s master of arts in teaching program in May, and will be teaching 7th grade language arts and social studies at Fowler Middle School next year. I will also be coaching soccer there.

I got married on July 11 to the love of my life, Marcus Roshak, who is a graduate of University of Oregon. Many UP alumni were in attendance (12 to be exact!), including my entire bridal party, Ashley Wilson, Kelsey Nevins (now Budge), Hillary Theriault, and Rachelle Leduc. We met at UP, studied abroad in Australia together, lived together, and have kept a wonderful friendship ever since, despite all living in different states! People pictured: Breanna Johnson ’15, Megan DuPuy ’13, Jasmine Dudly ’13, Emelia Gubrud ’13, Keaton Beyer ’14, Katie Endresen ’13, Kelsey Budge ’13, Ashley Wilson ’13, Hillary Theriault ’13, and Rachelle Leduc ’13.” ’11 Welcome, Isaiah!

Patrick and Aundrea Mitchell welcomed their second son, Isaiah Thomas Mitchell, into the world on March 28, 2015, in Spring Lake, NC. According to Mom, “His big brother Elijah is his biggest fan!

They love to play together and are already best friends.

Isaiah is looking forward to one day being a Portland Pilot and carrying on the family tradition.” Thanks Aundrea, congratulations on your growing family and we’ll save a spot for our future Pilots.

tistics and Algebra II starting in the fall as I enter my fourth year of teaching. I hope to bring my team back home to the Chiles Center in the near future to play for a state title!”

Congratulations Derek, and we’ll be there cheering your boys on.

’15 Keeping PACE

The beaming PACE alumna pictured below at left, Marissa Alcorn, earned her M.Ed. on The Bluff this summer, and heads to St. Brendan’s Catholic

Kevin Alexander, son of the late UP biology professor David Alexander, was featured in a story by Wendy Owen titled “Valley Catholic valedictorian aims to write novels, a job bounded only by his imagination” in the May 20 edition of the Oregonian. We anticipate big things from young Kevin, yes we do. See the article at http://tinyurl.com/of5mo7x.

Prayers, please, for Rev. Thomas Bill, C.S.C., who passed away at Holy Cross House on July 15, 2015, at the age of 87. He was ordained on June 8, 1955, in Sacred Heart Church, Notre Dame. After earning a master’s degree in

philosophy there in 1957 and teaching for two years, he earned a doctorate in philosophy at St. Louis University in 1963. Fr. Bill then began a long career in teaching at the University of Portland, where he was also a sought after

We forget that the University’s twentieth president is a UP alumnus now: honorary doctorate, Class of 2014. Fr. Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C., was back on campus in June, with longtime University provost Br. Donald Stabrowski, C.S.C., for a dinner celebrating retiring nursing dean Joanne Warner; that’s the admirable Joanne’s grandson here, probably amazed at the presidential cradle.

’12 A Dream Fulfilled

A note from Derek Duman, who writes: “In June I fulfilled my dream of becoming a head boys basketball coach when I accepted the job at West Albany High School in Albany, Ore. I will also be teaching AP Sa-

confessor, counselor, and spiritual guide. Students’ faces in his classes often displayed a combination of bafflement, wonder, and astonishment as Fr. Bill expounded on Martin Buber’s I and Thou, among other mind-grappling concepts. In 1988, he became the Archbishop’s liaison to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal Program for the Archdiocese of Portland. In 2008, Fr. Bill moved to Holy Cross House in South Bend. He is survived by his sister, Holy Cross Sister Clare Alfred Bill of the Sisters of the Holy Cross at St. Mary’s College, as well as many nieces and nephews. Our prayers and condolences to the family and the Holy Cross community.

Longtime UP public safety director John William Garner, Jr. passed away on June 27, 2015. After his military service he became a police officer in Walla Walla, Wash., later working in Seattle, St. Helens, and Gearhart. He came to The Bluff, where he remained for 22 years, in 1979. Survivors include his wife, Jeannette; children, Ian Clanton, Tanya Garner, David Garner, and Robert Garner; mother, Mary Otto; sisters, Laureen Gunter and Lynn Garner; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Retired UP history professor Jim Shand passed away on July 15, 2015, at home of natural causes, at the age of 80. Jim taught on The Bluff for nearly 20 years, and was beloved by students and colleagues alike. “A loyal and

School in Bothell, Wash., near Seattle, to teach mathematics.

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The Kingsmen, from left: Fathers Jack Ryan, Tom O’Hara, Jim Lackenmier, and the estimable stern stentorian poet David Sherrer, all back on The Bluff this summer for the Holy Cross chapter meeting. Jack is the current president of Kings’ College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a fellow Holy Cross-affiliated university, and his confreres were all King’s presidents, too, in their time. Jim Lackenmier has long been a University of Portland regent, Tom O’Hara is the poor soul recently elected provincial of the order in America, and Dave Sherrer has been a literature professor and vice president on The Bluff; he still lives here, his home for forty years. good friend to the University,” in the words of his colleague Rev. Art Wheeler, C.S.C. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Deaths

Dan Leary ’31, May 13, 2015.

Helen Gaylord ’42, July 12, 2015.

Paul Joseph Madden ’42, August 1, 2014.

Robert Friedhoff ’45, January 21, 2014.

Alfred J. O’Brien, Jr. ’45, June 16, 2015, Tualatin, Ore. James Sahli ’46, May 10, 2015.

Robert Labbe ’47, March 23, 2015, Bellevue, Wash.

Dolores Keys ’47, Aug. 13, 2014.

Anna Blickle ’48, May 12, 2015.

Robert Beaudry ’49, June 20, 2014, Vancouver, Wash.

Kenneth Mehlig ’50, June 4, 2015.

Anna Craviotto, wife of Robert Craviotto ’50, Nov. 19, 2014.

Ronald Leon Williams ’50, March 18, 2015 Jack Schutz ’50, March 3, 2013.

Leo Garrow ’50, June 8, 2015.

Geraldine Morin, wife of Lawrence Morin ’51, June 21, 2015.

Carl Markgraf ’51, May 31, 2015.

John K. Vitas ’51, April 11, 2015, Portland, Ore. William Tsuyoshi Hirata ’51, February 20, 2015.

Rev. James T. Burtchaell, C.S.C. ’51, April 10, 2015, Notre Dame, Ind. Donald M. Ham ’52, July 18, 2015, Milwaukie, Ore. Kevin Wager ’53, May 17, 2015.

John Paul Kent, Sr. ’53, May 29, 2013, Walla Walla, Wash.

Edith E. Brown ’55, May 7, 2015.

Robert “Rip” Corrigan ’55, July 15, 2015, Hillsboro, Ore.

Darrell Louis Cornelius ’56, May 9, 2015.

Charles E. Leis ’57, August 4, 2014, Portland, Ore. Larry James Caldwell ’58, June 15, 2015.

Terry Cline ’59, May 19, 2015.

Jim Howe ’60, February 6, 2015.

Janice Choruby, wife of Larry Choruby ’62, June 26, 2015.

Lawrence J. Salimena ’64, May 26, 2015.

Thomas Gregory Reilly ’65, January 25, 2012, Riverside, Ala. Leonard Hartley Taylor, husband of Sally Ann (Larson) Taylor ’65, May 10, 2015.

Kathleen (McMahon) Lerman ’65, November 22, 2014.

Madeleine (O’Brien) Faller ’65, July 2, 2015, Portland, Ore. William Charles Medak ’68, June 17, 2015.

Mary Ann Merrill ’69, January 12, 2015.

Sterling Eltagonde ’79, July 23, 2015.

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Diane Alexander, wife of James Alexander ’79, May 21, 2015.

Margaret Teske O’Reilly ’80, February 3, 2015.

Sandra Wood ’81, May 20, 2015.

Richard Henry Voss, husband of Susan Voss ’82, May 3, 2015.

Donald Ross Beaton ’86, April 4, 2015.

Greg T. Ritter ’91, June 28, 2013, Norman, Okla.

JoAnn Leipzig, mother of Richard ’77, Frank ’83, and Robert Leipzig ’88, May 11, 2015.

Dana Mount-Berrett, sister of Susan Surayani ’75 and Petty Doherty ’73.

Mary Candida Garaventa, mother of Silvio Garaventa, Jr. ’71, Cookie Garaventa Adler ’73, Joseph Garaventa ’81, June 29, 2015.

Rev. Thomas Bill, C.S.C., July 15, 2015.

John Garner Jr., June 27, 2015.

James Shand, July 15, 2015, Portland, Ore.

L E S S

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T R A V E L L E D

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R O A D S

Every once in a while there’s a photograph with everything young and shy and brave in it; like this one, of the late Leo Aloysius Garrow, at age 18, about to sail into war in the Pacific. Portland boy — Saint Stephen’s Parish, Central Catholic, and an engineering degree on The Bluff after he returned from the savagery.

Seven children with his beloved wife Mary Elaine, a long career as a test engineer, but it is his son Peter’s encomium that we think the best pithy prayer for Leo: “as humble and kind as anyone you would ever want to meet.” What higher compliment could you give than that? Humility being the final frontier, and tenderness the clear and present evidence of the holy in and around and among us all.

Portland 48

PHOTO BY STEVE HAMBUCHEN

Question: What kind of alumni does the University of Portland fervently wish to produce?

Answer: Folks like our man Ramon “RJ” Tagorda, who graduated this summer with a master of arts in teaching through the University’s booming remarkable Pacific Alliance for Catholic Education program. Mister Tagorda, cheerfully called Mister T. or Coach by his giggling students, returns to Holy Cross School in North Portland, where he will be teaching middle school language arts and heading up the technology program. PACE will have a record 44 teachers in the field in 2015-2016, in Oregon, Washington, Utah, Alaska, Hawaii and California; it also welcomed a record 28 new students this summer. All told the program has emitted 137 graduates in 16 years; more than 90% are still teachers, and almost all (85%) are teaching in Catholic schools. Wow. The whole point of the program is to sculpt terrific committed dedicated creative young teachers for Catholic schools in the West that sometimes don’t have eight cents to rub together; students earn their master’s in two years while living in communal houses, actually teaching in Catholic schools, and spending summers in classes on The Bluff.

Terrific idea, terrific program, nationally renowned success, and alumni like our man Mister T.? There’s a cool University of Portland verb in action.

Could we use gifts large and small to help PACE students, and riveting new ideas like the PACE inclusion initiative for teachers of kids with significant learning differences, and the PACE retreat program by which students, eight times over their two years, get deeper than merely craft, down into tenderness and prayer and witness? Dear yes. Call PACE director Dave Devine ’97 directly if you like – 503.943.7344, devine @up.edu – he’s a good guy and he will know immediately the best target for your gift. And thanks, always, for your generosity.

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THE MISTY AISLES

THE CLARK LIBRARY ART COLLECTION Born in Massachusetts, the late Joseph Corish loved painting the sea and ships (his work hangs today in the U.S. Naval Academy Museum, the U.S. Naval War Museum, and in the American embassies of England, Japan, Germany, and Spain). He donated this lovely work (“Out of the Fog,� 1930) to the University of Portland many years ago; it is one of hundreds of riveting paintings on campus, most of them in the renovated Clark Library.

Does the University accept all sorts of glorious art as gifts to be exhibited or respectfully converted into scholarship funds for eager creative tall children? Why, yes, of course we do!

Also houses and boats and beaches and bonds and suchlike! With pleasure! Avidly!

Call Amy Eaton right now! 503.943.8551! pettycre@up.edu!

Tell her Joseph Corish sent you!