Portland Magazine Winter 2012

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THE BEST SOCCER PLAYER IN THE WORLD Sat at a rickety table the other night, behind the looming south wall of Merlo Field, on which there is a fifteen-foot-high photograph of herself in her University of Portland jersey, and signed autographs for, by my count, two hundred children. The children were mostly girls but there was a startling number of boys and they had the same look on their faces as the girls did, something like anticipation and awe and delight and trepidation and wonder that they were actually no kidding about to shake hands with and be smiled upon by the Best Soccer Player in the World, who looked remarkably like a regular human being, with scruffy sneakers and surfer shorts and a shy smile, despite the fact that she is the Best Soccer Player in the World, and millions of people around the planet had just stared at their screens in amazement as she had the greatest performance in Olympic soccer history, and soon she will score more international goals than anyone ever, this after having one of the greatest college careers ever on the field near where she sat at the rickety table, signing programs, scraps of paper, a baseball mitt, hats, shirts, two casts (both left arms, oddly), photographs, and a proof-of-insurance card that a dad hurriedly pulled out of his wallet when his daughter was about to burst into tears because she had nothing for Christine Sinclair to sign.

I stood there for a while and watched the children shuffle closer and closer until they were in the Presence, and a remarkable number of children stood and stared down at their shoes as their moms and dads urged them to at least say hi or something after waiting in line for so long for heavenssake, and I have to say that the way most of them then utterly shyly glanced up at the Best Soccer Player in the World and found her grinning gently at them and quietly saying hey, you excited for the game tonight? you love soccer too, don’t you? isn’t it the greatest game? gave me the happy willies, because the children’s faces then lit up like lamps! because She was talking to them! and She was friendly and gentle and not officious and cocky and self-absorbed in the least! She’s like a regular person!

Most of the children then did proffer something to be signed, but more than a few just stood there thrilled and agog as they shook Her hand, and beamed even more as She said something gentle and friendly to them as their moms or dads edged them past the rickety table, because the line must keep moving, there are lots of other kids waiting to talk to Her, but I watched a few kids, as they got past the table and were steered toward the field by their moms and dads, stare at their autographed scraps of paper like they were objects beyond any calculation or measurement of value, which they were. One girl who looked about six years old kissed her scrap of paper before she tucked it away carefully in a stunning pink purse.

After about an hour it was time for the Best Soccer Player in the World to wrap up, and the table was dismantled, and She ambled off to watch her alma mater open another season with another victory, but I stayed where I was, watching her wade through a shallow sea of small children who reached up to touch her hands as she passed through them like a tall dream. Then She turned the corner and vanished, and it was time for the game to begin, but you would be surprised how many children stayed right where they were, there in the concourse, even as their moms and dads were chivvying them toward the field. I watched one small girl be expertly herded toward the stands by her dad, who angled himself so she couldn’t see the huge candy bars for sale, but just before they entered the tunnel the girl turned and looked back, as if perhaps Christine Sinclair would again magically appear, looking like a regular human person! You wouldn’t believe that the Best Soccer Player in the World is a regular human person with scruffy sneakers and surfer shorts and a shy smile, but this is so, and She was back on campus the other night, and there are hundreds of children who will never forget the moment that She leaned down and said something gentle and funny to them and shook their hands and looked them in the eye and saw them for the holy astounding shy beings they are.

Some moments, it seems to me, are beyond any calculation or measurement of value. I saw a few, the other night, behind Merlo Field.

Brian Doyle

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14 / Food Forward, by Todd Schwartz He served 140 million meals last year. He changed the way Americans eat.

He’s not a tenth as famous as he ought to be. Who is Fedele Bauccio ’64?

20 / The End of Cooking, by Michael Pollan “You want to eat less? Here’s a diet for you, short and simple.

But it’ll never catch on, because we’re cheap and lazy…”

30 / Confessions of a Hophead, by Robert Michael Pyle Notes in a righteous Northwest treasure.

32 / The Providers, photographs by Steve Hambuchen Some of the men and women and children who grow and make the University’s food.

46 / On Not Eating, by Pico Iyer On doing without, to see what is within.

50 / The Foodie Roadie, by Isaac Vanderburg ’02 The adventures of soccer star turned food activist Matt Domingo ’02 58 / How to Brine an Elk Steak, by Ana Maria Spagna Why do we talk about food so much these days? What are we really talking about?

62 / This Is How to Forgive, by Joan Sauro, C.S.J. It is impossible to have the grace to forgive. And yet…

64 / The Top of the Continent, by Edward Hoagland One of America’s finest writers wanders through the wild state that has sent thousands of students to The Bluff.

68 / A Christmas Psalm, by John Daniel Singing a song of the glorious What Is.

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4 / A foggy day…in Pilot town...

5 / ‘But we are vulnerable’: University president Father Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C. 6 / Seven Meals: University superchef Kirk Mustain 7 / THIS WAY TO U.P.!

8 / January 12, 2010, 5:50 p.m., Port-au-Prince, Haiti 9 / The willing hands of Rebecca Chavez ’13 10 / Engineering’s Zia Yamayee in Afghanistan, 2001-2012 11/ Matthew Cole ’14: two photographs 12 / Sports, starring marathonist Colleen (Salisbury) Little ’06 13 / News & notes: Top ten in the west again...

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page 58 THE UNIVERSITY OF PORTLAND MAGAZINE

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Cover sculptures, back and front, by Mary Miller Doyle.

Winter 2012: Vol. 31, No. 4 President: Rev. E. William Beauchamp, C.S.C. Founding Editor: John Soisson Editor: Brian Doyle Testy Argumentative Designers: Matt Erceg & Joseph Erceg ’55 Whimpering Assistant Editors: Marc Covert ’93 & Amy Shelly Harrington ’95 Fitfully Contributing Editors: Louis Masson, Sue Säfve, Terry Favero, Mary Beebe Portland is published quarterly by the University of Portland. Copyright ©2012 by the University of Portland. All rights reserved. Editorial offices are located in Waldschmidt Hall, 5000 N. Willamette Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97203-5798. Telephone (503) 943-7202, fax (503) 943-7178, e-mail address: bdoyle@up.edu, Web site: http://www.up.edu/portland. Third-class postage paid at Portland, OR 97203.

Canada Post International Publications Mail Product — Sales Agreement No. 40037899. Canadian Mail Distribution Information—Express Messenger International: PO Box 25058, London, Ontario, Canada N6C 6A8. Printed in the USA. Opinions expressed in Portland are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University administration. Postmaster: Send address changes to Portland, The University of Portland Magazine, 5000 N. Willamette Boulevard, Portland, OR 97203-5798.

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JOE PASCARELLI The energetic and revered education professor Joe Pascarelli died in June, at age 77, after a terrific career as teacher of teachers from Guam to Portland to Canada to Notre Dame. A former student sings his memory.

I remember the first class I took from Dr. Pascarelli; we were eight months into our master’s program studies, and we were feeling pretty good about our ability to do graduate work. Joe was describing for us the seemingly onerous process of conducting action research: formulating a question, writing a literature review, conducting research, writing a substantial report.... One of my classmates put up his hand and asked if we couldn’t just read something and reflect in a journal instead of engaging in this exacting process. Joe was horrified.

“Certainly not,” he said.

“This is a master’s program.

A master’s degree means that you have learned how to do ethical research. That is what you must and will do to complete this course.”

We knew then that he meant business! He set high standards for us — and then he happily provided support so that we could engage in rigorous learning and meet his standards.

He worked with us oneon-one to frame our questions. He suggested certain authors we should consider. He asked so many questions! “What do you really

want to know? What will you do differently in your classroom? Is there anything in the literature to inform your practice? How will you know if you have made a difference?” By the end of that term, we had sweated bullets over our research papers, but we were accomplished; we knew how to ask good questions, how to find information to answer those questions, how to measure impact.

We had shifted our practice and expectations. We had worked our way through cycles of inquiry. We had had built relationships with our students as we helped them learn better. We had improved our teaching. We had become researchers.

That class with Joe was powerful learning that changed my teaching and got me hooked on research.

Joe also modelled another principle: the notion of working with students instead of doing to them.

Despite his considerable expertise, he didn’t lecture extensively. He told stories from the field, he showed inspirational films, he introduced us to the ideas of other scholars, and then engaged us in conversation, creating opportunities for us to connect these new ideas to our background knowledge and experience.

He allowed us to shape our assignments so they were meaningful for us in our diverse work contexts. Using a wide variety of learning activities, he challenged us to explore and articulate what we believed about teaching and learning, and inspired us to put it into practice in our work. He set the bar high, and also provided choice and flexibility so that we could reach it. He pushed us to uncover and articulate our foundational values as educators, and celebrated our success when we did.

Perhaps the greater testimony to his influence

was that so many of us wanted to introduce him to our friends and colleagues.

Many University graduate students engaged him to do further consulting work with groups of principals, assistant principals, and staffs opening new schools.

“There is no one here who can do what Joe does,” we would say, and we were right. It wasn’t that he gave us some silver bullet to make teaching and leading easy. Rather, he inspired us to reflect deeply, questioning how we could be better people and better educators, in the service of children.

Whether he was working with two people or four hundred, he created an effective space for learning.

Sometimes he would tell stories about some ineffective or inappropriate practice, and then he would say, “But I’m sure that never happens in Canada.”

We would shift in our seats, laughing nervously, because of course it did; but his rebuke was gentle, and done in a way that we were inspired to make sure that didn’t happen on our watch.

Such was his influence that if Joe was in town, I wanted to be a part of what was happening. It didn’t matter the topic or how big the group, if I could be a part of his learning community I wanted to be there. Whatever books he placed on the table at the back, I bought them and read them. He often invited me to share my learning journey with other University of Portland cohorts, a small contribution I was happy to make.

Through story, I wanted to say, “Listen to Joe, trust him, and engage fully. This learning can change your life. It changed mine.”

Alongside his passion for teaching and learning was a deep connection to his family. Joe spoke often with deep respect for his wife Betty; for the support

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LETTERS POLICY We are delighted by testy or tender letters.

Send them to bdoyle@ up.edu. that she provided to him, and of her partnership in the work. He talked about his daughters with pride, describing their challenges, insights, and accomplishments. He demonstrated a dual commitment to making a difference in the world, while also loving and honoring family. And he lived this until the end.

He continued to work as long as his health and strength would allow.

During one session he said that he continued to teach and consult because it kept him learning. Many people benefitted from his sharp mind and teacher’s heart, and the learning he was so passionate about.

I hope that people on The Bluff know how significant his legacy in Edmonton is. The news of his passing spread quickly.

Another former student arranged a celebration in his memory at one of his favourite restaurants. We gathered, we told stories of how we knew Joe, we raised our glasses to honor his influence in our lives.

Because of our time with Joe, there are many educators here and around the world who will continue to use their minds and hearts well to promote excellent teaching and learning. I continue to be grateful that I knew Joe Pascarelli, and was a witness to and beneficiary of his life of significance and service.

Katherine Toogood, ’05 M.Ed. Principal, Parkallen School Edmonton, Canada

DRAWING BY LAURIE HEINZ-JENKINS

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THE SEASON “Late lies the wintry sun a-bed / A frosty, fiery sleepy-head / Blinks but an hour or two; and then/ A blood-red orange, sets again,” says the greatest of all writers in English, Robert Louis Stevenson… “Black are my steps on silver sod / Thick blows my frosty breath abroad / And tree and house, and hill and lake / Are frosted like a wedding cake….” ¶ Winter is the biggest break in the academic year on The Bluff; finals end mid-December, and classes do not begin again until mid-January. ¶ Among January’s saints: the freshly minted Brother Andre Bessette, C.S.C., the very first, and surely not the last, saint among the men and women of the Congregation of Holy Cross, the University’s order. Riveting lad, Andre: son of a woodcutter, an orphan at age twelve, and a lifelong jack-of-all-trades at Notre Dame College in Montreal. To his credit he was much annoyed at his fame as a healer, and snarled that he had nothing to do with it, that it was faith and Saint Joseph that moved mountains. We much admire the gnarl and blunt of the man, for whom a campus chapel is named.

STUDENT LIFE Winter is basketball and volleyball season on The Bluff; both teams start officially in November, and wrap up in March. Baseball also starts in winter, curiously; the Pilots open their long season (52 games) in February. See page 12 for sports news. ¶ The University’s Chapel of Christ the Teacher Choir will be on tour in the Seattle area in mid-

January; call Andy Sherwood in the alumni office for details, 503.943.8327. ¶ The University’s annual letter from the president about a slight tuition increase is usually sent in February; the University’s tuition remains the lowest among its peers, and below the national average. ¶ February 15-17: Junior Parents & Families Weekend, a great chance to dive into the seething energies of your child’s life on The Bluff. For details call the admissions office, 503.943.7147. ¶ April 9: the University’s annual Scholarship Lunch, during which donors of same meet recipients of same, and chat, and get to know each other, and are photographed laughing together. It’s so intimate and moving. Info: Diane Dickey, 503.943.8130.

quad to sign thank-you notes to donors and annihilate thousands of doughnuts. It’s wild.

Info: Trevor Harvey, 503.943.7826. ¶ April 9: Founders’ Day, the University’s annual celebration of its founder, Archbishop Alexander Christie of Portland, and the invaluable essential cofounder, Father John Zahm, C.S.C., who provided books and teachers for Christie’s dewy university. Nearly a thousand student presentations and performances fill the day; classes are canceled, events are rife, and creativity is the coin of the campus.

ARTS & LETTERS

THE UNIVERSITY A University night at Portland Center Stage: I Love to Eat, playwright James Still’s love letter to Portland’s own James Beard. A complimentary dinner outing with Bon Appétit star chef Kirk Mustain (see page 6), is offered before the show.

Tickets are $35; contact the alumni office at 503.943.7328. ¶ March 6 through 11: Pilot men’s and women’s basketball at the West Coast Conference in Las Vegas. Discounted rooms are available for alumni and friends at the Orleans, Palms, and Bellagio Hotels. ¶ March 1: Tuition Freedom Day on The Bluff; this is the day the University makes note of the fact that the average student’s tuition “runs out” and the rest of his or her school year is covered by gifts of all amounts from the University’s donors, as well as grants and income from the endowment. Approximately 20 percent of the cost of a UP education is covered by funds other than tuition dollars.

Students gather on the west

On Hunt Theater’s stage this winter: the drama Twelve Angry Jurors, February 27 through March 2, and the musical Bat Boy (April 12 through April 20). Information: 503.943.7287, email magohuntboxoffice@up.edu. ¶ Reading from their work on campus this winter: novelist Lois Leveen, on March 5 (at 7:30 p.m., in BC 163), and poet James Logenbach, on April 8 (also 7:30 p.m., BC 163). ¶ For the whole slate of visiting writers, performers, pontificators, brilliances, gurus, and visionaries, see www.up.edu, and wander through the event listings; most events are free, and those that cost cash are almost always a roaring bargain.

Trust us.

FROM THE PAST Born December 26, 1911, oldest of ten children of a steelworker in Chicago: Steve Kordek, who invented that classic work of American genius, the two-flipper pinball machine, on which you, yes

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you, spent a thousand hours.

“I had more fun in this business than anyone could ever believe,” said Mr. Kordek, who died last winter at age 100. ¶ Passing into the Light last December 13: the quiet generous Fred Fields, who gave the University Fields and Schoen feldt halls, the Schoenfeldt Visiting Writers Series, and much else. Raised on a farm in Indiana where he and his brother farmed 100 acres of corn while their dad worked in a factory, Fred served in the Army Air Force, played pro football in Canada, earned his engineering degree, and eventually owned and ran the Coe Company, a wood and technology firm. He had a cool sidelong grin that we miss. ¶ January 12, 2010: the Haiti earthquake. More than 100,000 people were killed, a million made homeless, and among the dead were Molly Hightower ’09, in whose name a scholarship blooms on The Bluff; see page 8. ¶ February 1, 1902: the great poet Langston Hughes is born in Joplin, Missouri. ¶ February 3: the Feast of Saint Blaise, to whom we turn when we are sore of throat. Riveting man, Blaise: a doctor and bishop in what is today Turkey, he lived in a cave, healed animals as well as people, could talk to wolves, and is the patron saint of wild animals. ¶ February 9, 1964: the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. ¶ February 10, 1952: The Blanchet House of Hospitality opens in Portland, founded by University alumni. What a great idea. ¶ February 12, 1809: the greatest of Americans is born in rural Kentucky: Abraham Lincoln. ¶ February 21, 1902: the University wins its first baseball game ever, 3-1, against Bishop Scott Academy, an Episcopal school. ¶ February 25, 1956: Nikita Khrushchev condemns his savage predecessor, Josef Stalin, for “intolerance, brutality, abuse of power,” and other vices and crimes. Sometimes someone calls something by its true name.

ART BY MILAN ERCEG

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Ah, we hardly ever run campus photographs just because, but if ever there was a shot that caught a winter morning on The Bluff, this is the one. Our thanks to Steve Hambuchen.

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HANDS & HEARTS From University president Father Bill Beauchamp’s opening speech to the faculty this year — blunt and eloquent soul, is Father Bill.

These eight years during which I have served the University as its president have been remarkable ones. We have experienced some of the most wonderful and successful times in the University’s history. Yet at the same time, the downturn in the national economy and the rapidly changing higher education landscape have created an environment unlike any that we have seen in our lifetimes.

For us on The Bluff, it has been the best of times, because of the evolution and maturation of the University, its growing strength and confidence.

Now, 111 years after our founding, we have the luxury of planning our own future. No longer are we in survival mode, when each new year was fraught with anxiety about whether we would enroll enough students to meet our budget. Our applications for admission have quadrupled in the last ten years. Ten years ago we had one student Fulbright scholar in our whole history; today we have forty.

In the last ten years we have two new residence halls, a bell tower, and 35 acres of riverfront property, as well as vast renovation and expansion of extant buildings. And there is much else that does not meet the eye: rising retention rate, steady faculty tenure rate, a wildly successful Rise Campaign to date, much else.

Yet you only have to read the news every morning to know that these are extremely difficult times for higher education and those who aspire to it.

The news is sobering. We are in the fourth year of a recession that has shattered dreams and that is corroding hope. Families are reducing their spending. Household net worth is down and the number of college students who live at home is up 9% this year alone. For-profit institutions are siphoning billions of educational dollars away from traditional schools like ours. The technological revolution has caused many people to challenge traditional methods of teaching and learning, and an aggressively pragmatic culture is abetting that challenge.

Meanwhile, the cost of a college

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education has risen dramatically, driven in large part by skyrocketing health care costs, improved salaries, and a ‘facilities competition,’ putting education out of reach of many worthy students; our own tuition has nearly doubled in the last decade, to keep up with those costs. Around the country many students and families are taking on significant debt to attend college, and this in one of the worst economic times in American history.

So in 2012 we find the University enjoying remarkable success, while higher education in the U.S. is in great distress; and it is this I wish to speak about today.

We are vulnerable. There are forces far beyond our control to which we must be ever alert so that ten years from now we do not find that we have moved from strategic planning to emergency planning. We don’t have the luxury of a large endowment or deep reserve funds to provide a measure of protection. Consequently, we must plan carefully and thoroughly

and act wisely to responsibly steward our resources and blessings.

And we must stay true to the secret behind all our successes: a steadfast focus on our mission and a careful adherence to the charge given to us more than 175 years ago by Blessed Basil Moreau, the founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross. For Father Moreau, true education required a balance of mind and heart — the balance between knowledge and skill, inspiration and discipline, information and insight, learning for its own sake and learning for the sake of utility. Through a century of enormous change in higher education, in the midst of the clamoring voices of the technological revolution, we have continued to provide a vocabulary for discussing ultimate questions that are of special importance to young people. True to Moreau’s charge, we have steadfastly helped students to develop their character, we have helped them learn how to live, just as we have helped them learn how to make a living.

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This is a crucial contribution to the landscape of higher education, I believe. But it is in serious danger.

Consider these facts: over the past ten years the University’s budget has increased by 7% per year; during that same period, our tuition has increased by 5.7% per year; 83% of our operating budget comes from tuition, room, and board; and we have a deferred maintenance requirement over the next four years of more than $17 million. My point: Because we are so heavily dependent on tuition, how we manage our enrollment influences everything we do. Enrollment affects salaries and benefits, it affects numbers of faculty and staff, it affects size of classes and size of classrooms, and it affects our aspirations, our vision, and our mission.

It does not require the keen minds of our math or finance faculty to show us that expenses are increasing faster than income, and have been for decades, and that such a method of operation is not sustainable. Our enrollment is twice what it was a dozen years ago, yet on the whole, our financial situation is about the same.

The good news is that we are not faced with a crisis, as are many schools around the country today. We are in a good financial position. The bad news, however, is that we are vulnerable to factors far beyond our control.

And that is why we, all of us, will devote this year to meticulous analysis of resources. We need your thinking — in a very real sense the University’s future depends on your creativity and ideas this year.

A few days ago the campus was filled with families who were entrusting us with their sons and daughters.

They believed in us enough to allow us to continue the work they have begun in forming the character of those young men and women. Our challenge — our responsibility — is to live up to that trust every day. That is what has been done so well here at the University for 111 years, and I vow it is what we will do so well in the year that lies before us now. It is a sacred calling, what we do, and today, in this room, we recommit ourselves to that vocation. We do so with Blessed Basil Moreau’s words ringing in our ears: “An education that is complete is one in which the hands and the heart are engaged as much as the mind. We want to let our students try their learning in the world, and so make prayers of their education.” Amen to that. n

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SEVEN MEALS We asked the University’s food guru, Bon Appetit manager Kirk Mustain, to think about meals and memories, and…

Food has been my professional life, my social life, my family life. I come from a big family (ten kids), and dinner especially was front and center; dinner was at six, and you did not miss dinner, period.

So, first great meal: my dad’s chicken tacos. Still my favorite thing to eat.

He would start by boiling a couple of chickens and pulling all the meat off, and then fry a fresh corn tortilla around the chicken to make a shell.

Serve with fresh guacamole. I make them for my kids this same way, and now my daughter Grace (Class of 2014) makes them the same way and nothing reminds me of home as much as dad’s chicken tacos. My dad also taught me that a great meal is better when shared with more people; my dad was legendary among my friends for saying “you’re staying for dinner, right?” Yes, my friends loved my dad. Me too.

Second: Katz’s deli in New York City — you know, where Meg Ryan and Bill Crystal have lunch in When

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Harry Met Sally. Pastrami on rye with mustard, pickles, and a Doctor Brown’s Cream Soda. One of the few places on earth where they still handcut the brisket. You walk up to the counter to order and the first thing the cutter does is put a chunk of pastrami on a plate for you to eat with your fingers. It’s greasy, peppery, and beyond good.

Third: Charlie Trotters’ in Chicago.

Charlie Trotter was Thomas Keller before Thomas Keller. This guy was so far ahead of his time that all celebrity chefs owe him a drink. I ate there one night with four other chefs, one being my good friend and the University’s head chef James Green.

We ordered the eight-course. I do not even remember what we ate as much as I do the whole tone of the evening; the food and presentation was impeccable, the service was perfect, and we stayed until closing time talking about how happy we were that the experience was even better than the anticipation. The maître d’ overheard our conversations and gave us a tour of the kitchens and wine cellars; you would’ve thought we were all kids in Disneyland for the first time. James and I used this experience as the basis for our Chef’s Table dinners in Bauccio Commons to this day.

Fourth: Christmas Eve Dinner at the University’s Salzburg campus.

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While visiting my daughter, who was on the Salzburg Program, I volunteered to cook dinner. University events director Bill Reed and I went through the Metro — the Austrian equivalent of Costco, like two kids in a candy store, planning a baked ham dinner for students and their families — 90 guests in all. As we were in the kitchen prepping, some of the parents came in to help — what kindness!

Fifth: The Lotus, Minneapolis, Minnesota,1983. This was the first time I ever had Vietnamese food.

I had eaten “Chinese food,” in the American style — chop suey ,chow mein. But this — this was real. Salad rolls with fresh lettuce and mint, pho with rice noodles and sliced beef in a broth that topped with fresh herbs and sprouts and a dash of chili paste to give it a kick. Bahn xao, a crispy mung-bean crepe with shrimp and basil and mint. I was amazed. I ate dinner there every day for the next two weeks until I had tried everything on the menu twice. I couldn’t get over how fresh everything was, how it was presented with such simple grace. Those meals shaped the way I would look at food for the next three decades.

Sixth: In and Out Burger. I grew up in southern California. There was an In and Out about a mile from my house. It had two drive-through windows and one walk-up window and a line down the block from the minute they opened until the minute they closed at one in the morning. The taste and smell of those burgers still, to this day, takes me immediately back to the house, and to warm sunny days at the beach.

Seventh: The Velvet Turtle. My first time ever in a “fancy” restaurant.

Lamb chops and vichyssoise. As I remember I didn’t love the meal, but I took away a real sense that dinner is theater, that presentation was an important part of the experience. Years later I discovered that Fedele Bauccio ’64 was in charge of that chain of restaurants, as well as a few others; Fedele, of course, then started Bon Appetit, which is now one of the biggest and best food providers in the world [see page XX]. Funny how things work out. n Note: Kirk and James Green’s next Chef’s Table (ten courses, with terrific wines) is Friday, February 1, starting at six p.m. in Bauccio Commons, $75 per person; call the alumni office for seats, 503.943.7328.

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Three years ago, Joe Kuffner ’05 had a cool idea: why not help new students migrating to the University with some well-placed signs along the way? And immediately the idea flew far, as you see. The distance record so far is American Samoa, the funniest is probably the annual sign placed on Gonzaga’s campus (left), the most poignant perhaps the ones from alumni serving in the Army and Air Force in Afghanistan. Thanks, Joseph.

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LIKE I WAS BORN AGAIN From an essay by Jean-Francois Seide for his freshman literature course. JeanFrancois is the first recipient of the Molly Hightower Scholarship, named for the young alumna killed in the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The scholarship aims to bring one Haitian student to the University every year.

It was a Tuesday, January 12, 2010, at 5:50 in the afternoon. I was coming from my usual activities, going to school and visiting friends and family.

Once home, I put my bag away and I was enjoying my favorite spot, the best spot in the whole room, facing the small white television on a table where my dusty books and school papers have been for what seems like forever. My friends and I are waiting for a Mexican drama called Frijolito, while the smell of spaghetti was invading the whole room and spreading into the neighbor’s apartment.

Suddenly, it was quiet. We felt that something strange was occurring. We were moving and the house was shaking. We were used to earthquake tremors, but this was different. It first wobbled the building but then became heavier. We were all staring at each other. “Run out!” I shouted. We all jumped for the door. We left everything: the spaghetti ready to eat, the television with the show just starting, my laptop, my books, school supplies, my clothes.

The building was two floors with a basement. It was made of walls that if

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you hit them too hard would crumble into your hands. I felt as if there were no beams in the building and the walls would fall instantly. We knew that if the house collapsed with us inside, there would be no chance of survival, as was the case for a lady in the apartment next door. I was in the middle as we ran down the stairs, one friend in front and another behind; we were holding hands until we got to one of the places free of trees and buildings.

So here I was, standing on a road with only a soaked shirt, shoes, and jeans to my name; one friend had only one sandal and the other had only one shoe. But we had been one step from death and now we were miraculously alive.

It was after a couple of minutes standing there that I felt like I was born again. I was running away from death and a past that was not acceptable. From that time, I decided to put a boundary between my new life and my old past — not to forget about the past, but rather to make something different now. Looking back to the past now that I have had all these opportunities from leaving it behind, I can see that it was only the life I was born into. I made the right choice by starting over again on a new path.

After a couple more minutes I felt like I had my feet back on earth. My friend slapped me on the back but I wasn’t paying attention. Instead I was thinking deep inside myself: Who am I, what am I doing here, what has just happened to me? Why do I feel like I am drowning? I felt like there was no air. There was a heavy humid gust of wind carrying all the sand of the shore into the city.

The blue sky I knew was replaced by

one as dusty and grey as an old coal factory. In the distance I heard people crying but I had no clue about their grief. Their voices were filled with panic and pain and fear and despair.

I looked up and saw that the building where my apartment was had broken in half. I saw people gathered where we used to play soccer every afternoon and gathered in other places where there were no trees and buildings. I was wondering what they were fleeing from. Everything seemed to mingle in my mind. I couldn’t picture what was really going on. If I was dreaming, this was the most frightening nightmare I ever had.

I started to calm down when my friend shouted “watch out!” and I felt it again, the heavy, powerful, underground movement that makes you feel as if you’re surfing and lose all your equilibrium and are about to fall down straight down. You could feel the emptiness of the underground like a balloon that lost its air.

Then I knew I was not dreaming.

I felt like that was the moment that I was waiting for. I felt like a voice inside me said “Don’t go back! Take this new path!” Sometimes now, I think back on the last moments of my old life: I had wanted to do something different in my life, because I was tired of the same old life, but I had no motivation. Since the earthquake happened, and I lost everything, I left it behind. Instead of going back to rescue my belongings, I walked away to find out about my family and friends. My counter was back to zero and I thought that it was the best time to try something different, like I had always wanted to do. I decided to leave the past in the past and walk into the future. n

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The third recipient of the annual Molly Hightower Award, honoring seniors who encapsulate the verve and zest and grace and grinning generosity of the 2009 graduate killed in the Haiti quake: Rebecca Chavez, whose first volunteer work, she says with a smile, was wheeling disabled adults to Mass when she was nine years old. “My dad taught us about our obligation to stand with those in need,� she says. Future plans: try for a Fulbright Award for a year or two in Chile, working with bruised girls and young women.

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TEN YEARS LATER From a longer essay by engineering dean emeritus Zia Yamayee, an Afghan native who earned his first college degree at Kabul University. Zia was a terrific dean here from 1996 to 2011.

In 2001, when the Taliban ran Afghanistan, the only productive factories in the country were those where artificial limbs, crutches, and wheelchairs were produced by international aid agencies. Women were barred from work outside the house.

All girls’ schools were closed. Female employees of the government agencies had been dismissed. All entertainment was banned, including music, television, playing cards, and flying kites. Men were jailed for hair that was too long and beards that were too short.

I visited Afghanistan in June of that year, to see my aging parents.

I saw life under the Taliban. There was despair. There were checkpoints everywhere. There was little electricity. There were no phones. At one checkpoint I was nearly arrested: my beard was too short. I was released because my beard was gray.

The only positive aspect of Taliban control was security: no more warlords. But the price for security was the loss of dignity and freedom.

In October of that year, U.S. and British forces began air strikes against the Taliban, who had sheltered Osama bin Laden and his AlQaida terror network. In November,

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the northern alliance entered the capital, Kabul, after the Taliban fled.

In December, a conference of Afghan representatives created a transitional government, and Taliban rule ended.

I visited again this past spring. The most dramatic change is in the lives of women and girls. Today, girls can go to school, walk and jog in public, go shopping, and do almost anything men can do. Most roads are now paved, many villages now have electricity (some have solar power) and clean water, and women serve on governing councils. My granddaughters are going to high school, and teaches in a secondary school. A number of my nieces have finished university and are also teachers.

There are more women teachers in Herat than there are places for them to teach. There is so much interest in schools that many schools run three shifts to deal with the influx of students. Because of so much interest in education, private schools have been established across the Herat. At the university level, women are now on the faculty and almost 40% of the students are women. My niece who was kicked out of college by the Taliban government is now a professor in the same college, Herat University.

Consider this. Afghanistan was a failed state for 30 years, from 1973 to 2002. Most Afghans, including the current president, were children or not even born when war, fighting, and destruction began. The world community, I believe, needs to continue to help to rebuild Afghanistan as a nation to avoid another tragedy

with disastrous consequences for the human family. There has been much good done since the fall of the Taliban, but there is more to be done before Afghanistan can survive as an independent nation and stand on its own feet.

The process of nation building will be a long one. I think Afghanistan now has a functioning government, but it needs our help and support for years to come. When I was in Afghanistan this spring, President Obama came to Afghanistan, and he and Afghan President Karzai signed a strategic alliance treaty between the United Sates and Afghanistan after our troops leave Afghanistan in 2014.

That treaty was ratified by the Afghan parliament by a huge majority vote soon after the Presidents signed it.

I believe this action shows that most Afghans have a very positive view of the United States, and they want our continued support and assistance as they make progress toward a functioning democracy.

I believe the world (especially Russia, United States, China, and Saudi Arabia) has a moral responsibility to help rebuild Afghanistan as a nation/state, because those countries contributed directly or indirectly to its destruction. Finally I would advocate patience as a virtue as we try to help Afghanistan become a functioning democracy.

Here in the U.S. we have the best democracy the world has ever known. But we have been at it for 235 years, and still work to improve it. By comparison, Afghanistan has been at it for less than 10 years. We need your help. n

And speaking of rebuilding, the University is indeed slowly chugging away at the new river campus north of the bluff; first up will be a new baseball field, but eventually fields and trails and a science lab and a boathouse and‌ask Colin McGinty for details, 503.943.8005.

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Matthew Cole was one of the student photographers savoring a show of their work this fall on campus; he caught both the balloon man and the gentle pedestrians in downtown Vancouver, a stone’s throw (well, a heroic throw) from The Bluff. Our thanks to the University’s superb photography teacher Patricia Bognar for jazzing her students.

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O N S P O R T S Cross Country The Pilot men were fifth in the nation at presstime, best in the West; the women were ranked sixth in the West; and both were aiming at not only their WCC titles but national honors. Among the highlights: the men sweeping the top four spots at the Charles Bowles Invitational in Salem, one point away from a perfect team score (Stephen Kersh (was sixth by a hair), and Merel van Steenbergen running away with the Warner Pacific Open 5K in 17:22, first by 11 seconds.

Volleyball Among the highlights for the Pilots, 6-17 at presstime: a run of four consecutive wins early, and how refreshing to see an excited team and crowd; Ariel Usher’s 1000th winning shot, making her only the tenth Pilot ever with 1000 kills; and a thrilling win against UNLV to win their own Portland Invitational title.

Soccer The Pilot women, ranked 13th nationally after their early 2-1 defeat of North Carolina and a tense tie with Notre Dame, were 8-4-3 at presstime, led by Amanda Frisbie’s 28 points. Among the highlights:

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roaring sold-out crowds for NC, ND, and BYU, and Rebekah Kurle’s two goals on five total shots so far: a terrific conversion percentage. ¶ The Pilot men, led by Steven Evans’ 24 points, were 5-7-1 as we went to press; among the highlights was a 4-1 drubbing of Gonzaga at Merlo Field. ¶ It is interesting to note that the Pilot women will lead the nation in attendance for the ninth straight year, with an average 3,567 fans per game, before any playoff sellouts. Wow. The men are averaging 1,170, which is more per game than any of their WCC opponents.

Women’s Basketball It’s a young (six sophomores), quick (eight guards), and internationally flavored (two Finns, an Italian, and a British Columbian) Pilot team this year, but accomplished; all-WCC Kari Luttinen is back, as are junior wings Alexis Byrd and Cassandra Brown. And the newcomers are tall and deft: redshirt center Erin Boettcher joins new forwards Sara Ines Hernandez (who played on Italy’s national team) and Annika Holopainen, who played on Finland’s.

Men’s Basketball The Pilot men are also a young squad (guard Derrick

For Clive! The women’s winner of the 2012 Portland Marathon, in 2:51: Colleen Salisbury Little ’05, who ran with 4 CLIVE on her jersey, honoring the wry coach she had as a Pilot soccer player on both the 2002 and 2005 title teams. “Every time I compete, I compete in remembrance of him,” she said. “He taught all of us to be good athletes, but also to be amazing people. His suffering pushes me toward everything I do.” Little, now a physical therapist in Lake Oswego with her marathon sights set on the 2016 US Olympic Team, cooled down after her win and then came up to The Bluff for…a soccer game and celebration honoring the 2002 national champs.

Rodgers is the only senior) but the kids are experienced: junior forward Ryan Nicholas, who averaged 12 points and 8 rebounds last year, will be joined by slashing wing Kevin Bailey and David Carr, from Portland’s Central Catholic High, at the point.

For once the Pilots have the luxury of two good centers, Thomas van der Mars and Riley Barker, and the new faces are fascinating players, among them guard Oskars Reinfelds from Latvia, Oregon 5A Player of the Year Jake Ehlers from Corvallis, and Bryce Pressley from Sacramento. The men face 15 teams that went to playoffs last year, among them UNLV, Kentucky, New Mexico, and archrival Gonzaga (in the Chiles Center on January 17).

Baseball Back for the Pilots, 27-25 last year, are freshman All-American pitcher Travis Radke (against whom WCC batters hit a spindly .197), and all-WCC outfielder Turner Gill (who hit .314, with 88 total bases). Among the new faces for Chris Sperry’s team, which opens play in February, is pitcher Zach Torson, from Mountain View High in Vancouver, Washington, where he struck out 65 batters in 55 innings last year, with an ERA of 1.40 (and also hit .390).

Among the games not to miss at Joe Etzel Field: Oregon State (March 5 and May 7), BYU (April 11-13), and Oregon (April 16 and 23).

Tennis First impressions from the opening matches of the season: for the men, sophomore Stefan Micov and junior Ratan Gill look good, and all-WCC Michel Hu Kwo returns; for the women, all-WCC senior Valeska Hoath and star sophomore Nastya Polyakova return to join talented freshmen Saroop Dhatt (from British Columbia), Milagros Cubelli (Argentina), and Tori Troesch (San Luis Obispo).

Rowing Highlights for the women this fall: a close match against Oregon State on the Willamette in Corvallis, a whopping eight rowers named National Scholar Athletes (grades of 3.5 or better), and a new assistant coach, Todd Vogt, who recently helped Lewis and Clark win the Northwest title and Willamette University to rise to twelfth in the nation. He has also coached a U.S. Rowing Club national champion team.

INFORMATION, TICKETS, SCHEDULES: PORTLANDPILOTS.COM, 503.943.7117

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O N B R I E F LY Sixth in the West, says U.S. News & World Report magazine about the University’s general excellence among its 121 Western peers; it is the eighteenth year in a row the University was ranked in the top ten. U.S. News also ranked the University sixth in the West for “bang for the buck” — excellent education at reasonable cost.

Other recent national rankings: first for Fulbright grants among its peers (Chronicle for Higher Education), and third in America for service to the community (Washington Monthly).

The University was also named among the best ten large companies in Portland, by The Oregonian, and one of the healthiest, by The Portland Business Journal.

The Class of 2016, the secondbiggest ever at 880 students, averaged an average high school GPA of 3.64 and SAT score of about 1200. Forty percent were from outside Oregon and Washington. Total enrollment this year was nearly 4,000, including some 700 graduate students.

Student & Faculty Feats The Beacon student newspaper earned a whopping nine national awards from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, headquartered in Columbia U Journalism School in New York; nearly 1,000 other student papers competed for the rings. Wow. ¶ Nursing professor Carol Craig was named one of the nation’s top 100 nurses by BSNtoMSN. org, which lauded her passion for rural health issues. Our congrats. ¶ And German professor Laurie McLary was named the top foreign language teacher in Oregon; Laurie was the energy behind the University’s booming German Studies major, a major factor in our recent burst of Fulbright grants. Wir gratulieren!

The RISE Campaign, launched in December of 2010 with a $175 million goal to abet scholarships, a rebuilt library, and a new recreational center, among other adventures, is up to $140 million at presstime, with two years to play. ¶ Among recent generosities: $30,000 from Michael Nelson ’76, to create the Walter Nelson Professorship in business, honoring his dad, a Navy veteran who founded the Nelson Company while home on leave during the Second World War. ¶ And $100,000 from another Navy veteran, the late William Isaac Phillips ’50, to create scholarships in arts and sciences. ¶ And $858,000 from M.J. Murdock

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Charitable Trust to renovate the Clark Library, which reopens next summer.

Raised by senior Sam Bridgman: $30,000 from Ride Ataxia Portland, a bike ride on Sauvie Island to gather cash to fight Friedreich’s Ataxia, the disease that clocked Sam when he was 15. For more see a short film by University videographer Jeff Kennel at vimeo.com/43579515.

The National Science Foundation and the Noyce Foundation of California awarded the University $1.2 million to create the Noyce Program to aid science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students and teachers. The program is a wildly creative partnership among the College of Arts and Sciences, the Shiley School of Engineering, the School of Education, the Moreau Center for Service, Portland’s Saturday Academy project, and the Portland public school system; its captain will be the University’s exuberant math professor Stephanie Salomone.

Doctor Doctor The University’s second new Ph.D. program, in education (joining nursing) will begin in May 2013; Ed.D. students can concentrate in neuroeducation or organizational development. Previous doctoral programs on The Bluff, long gone: psychology, and yes, education.

The New Blanchet House of Hospitality opened in September, on Glisan Street downtown; the gleaming $13 million structure is adjacent to the ragged old barn that housed the mission for the past 60 years.

Blanchet was started by University students in 1952, kids who took Christ’s message to heart and set to work without ado; their brainchild has served over 15 million meals since then, and temporarily housed thousands of men in need. It’s one of the best examples of the University’s energy in blunt hourly action. Congrats.

Retiring this fall, after 41 years of quick, efficient, creative, amused, and thorough service as University historian and archivist: Martha Wachsmuth, who tried to retire in 1991 but wasn’t allowed to, because we would have lost our collective memory altogether. What a woman.

To call archives (503.943.7116) and not get Martha…unthinkable.

This Magazine raised some $94,000 last year, by asking politely; among the highlights, at least for the editor, were gifts from Richard Nixon (of Salt Lake City), gifts from Lebanon, Japan, Canada, Greece, Switzerland, Australia, Brazil, Norway, Indonesia, and New Zealand, and five thousand dollars from regent Darlene Shiley.

Sometimes there are people who are so good at what they do and so unassuming and unegoish and untrumpeting that they don’t get the shouts they deserve. Here’s one: University chemist Sister Angela Huffman, of the Order of Saint Benedict, who has, count ’em, four international patents for her work with anticancer substances in trees and plants. She was just named an American Chemical Society Fellow, an immense professional honor. She’s worked with hundreds of University and high school students. She’s changing the universe. She’s a treasure. We are shouting this.

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Food Forward Few people, if any, have ever done more to get America eating better, healthier, and more sustainably than Fedele Bauccio ’64. A visit with a visionary.

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y recorder dances around like water in hot olive oil as Fedele Bauccio unconsciously taps hard on his desk with every third word. He is talking about nothing less than the future of food production, preparation, quality, and sustainability in America, and he got excited about the subject in less time than it takes to sear a scallop.

This is a man for whom good (real, local, safe, delicious) food is his love, his life, his business, his mission. This is a man who, long before food journalists like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser put the local-sustainablehealthy food ethic back on America’s table, was building a company based on fresh, flavorful, from-nearby eating — farm-to-fork eating, as he named it back in 1999. How much influence does he have? This is a man whose company, Bon Appétit Management, serves more than 140 million meals each year.

At 70, Bauccio is a wealthy man who could easily dial down the flame on his business and retire to large boats and fast cars. Instead, he often leaves his car in the garage and rides a red scooter around the streets of San Francisco, where he lives with his wife. Now, here in his Palo Alto office, he launches into his thoughts on improving farmworker safety and fair wages. I reach for my recorder, which is threatening to flip like a piece of grass-fed, antibiotic-free beef being turned on the grill.

But make no mistake, Fedele Bauccio is a serious market-analyzing, revenuerevering MBA business guy. There’s nothing flakey about him. He is an overflowing marketbasket of unexpected ingredients: a one-percenter who’s also an activist for good, a restaurant guy who’s also a number-cruncher, a corporate CEO who likes nothing better than giving his employees freedom and opportunity. He’s an Italian-American with a deep, gravelly Gregory-Peck-meets-Gary-Cooper voice.

He’s the builder of an $800 milliona-year company who has never emBauccio with Julia Child, 1998.

ployed a salesperson. He’s a very generous University donor (see, for example, the gorgeous Bauccio Commons) who cares less about his name on the building than the flavor and quality of, say, the heirloom tomatoes or the petrale sole in grape leaves or the pepper-crusted tombo tuna served within it. He runs one of the world’s largest contract food service companies with more than 500 locations and 14,500 employees in 37 states; he absolutely hates the word “cafeteria.”

Yet very few people know who Fedele Bauccio is, which concerns him...not a bit.

“I don’t care at all that most people haven’t heard of me, he says, tapping like someone sending Morse Code, “But I do want them to know that Bon Appétit Management is doing extraordinary work, and we will continue to raise hell until we can see a more sustainable future.”

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1942 and raised with his two brothers in the orange-grove-serene Southern California of the late ’40s and early ’50s, Bauccio had gone to a Holy Cross high school, which is how he heard about UP. His family didn’t have a lot of money — Bauccio’s first job was shining shoes in his father’s barbershop — and they made it clear that Fedele needed to get a job to pay for some of his college expenses.

“My first day on campus,” he remembers, “I walked over to the dining hall, and by that evening I had a job washing dishes. I think that same dish machine is still there” — in the building which now bears his name over the door. After a few months Bauccio moved up, or rather over, to the pot sink, which came with added responsibilities, one of which was to lock the kitchen up after the students and the priests had left.

By the end of his freshman year, Bauccio had decided that dentistry wasn’t for him, and switched to economics and business. At about the same time, the UP chef, an older French gentleman named Vern Mansau, took Winter 2012 15

Bauccio aside and asked if the pride of the pot sink would like to come in after classes and learn to do prep work in the kitchen. “He said he would teach me how to use the French knife and cut vegetables and so forth,” Bauccio says. “He was a tough boss, but he liked me and he spent a lot of time with me in the kitchen. We had a baker named Booker T. Washington who was also a terrific guy, and before long the Commons was my second home. It seemed like I lived there more than I lived in my dorm room.”

Food had always been big in Bauccio’s life — é Italiano, dopo tutto. “My mother was a great cook,” he says. “I spent a lot of time with her in the kitchen. The first thing I learned to make was her spaghetti sauce. We would all go to Mass on Sunday, then as soon as we got home — I can still see that big pot with the olive oil and the onions just starting to brown, then the tomatoes going in. It would cook for hours, and at 4 p.m. we’d have this big family meal with all the relatives.

God forbid if we weren’t at that table on time; my mother would kill us!”

One of his earliest memories is driving up to the fields of Santa Barbara with his grandmother to pick mustard greens. “She would have this big apron on, and she’d hold it open as we filled it with fresh greens. Then we’d go home and she’d make a huge pot of minestra, kind of a beans and greens soup, made from just what we could find in the fields, and we’d eat and enjoy that dish for days. Red meat was seldom on the menu in those days.”

The proclivity was in place, then; but Bauccio was still floored when, after the manager of the dining hall quit, University president Father Paul Waldschmidt called the junior in and said “Fedele, here are the keys to the Commons. You run it with the chef.”

“I was scared to death,” Bauccio recalls, “But I figured I knew enough to pull it off. So for the last year-and-a-half of my undergraduate time on the Bluff I ran the dining hall as a student.

That’s how I got into food service. It

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF BONNIE POWELL / BON APPÉTIT

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was really an amazing recipe for opportunity.”

And nearly 50 years later, Bauccio is still enjoying that dish.

“At first it was difficult,” Bauccio says of starting Bon Appétit in 1987, “and I realized very quickly that my concept wasn’t for everyone. We didn’t make any money at all for the first four or five years. My vision was to create a unique restaurant company that would work in the contract environment. I felt strongly that the whole idea of cans of vegetables and mystery meat, menu cycles and recipe boxes, and what students and employees were eating at their cafeterias 25 years ago was disgusting. I wanted to hire great chefs and let them create custom seasonal menus. I wanted great flavor from fresh, local, authentic ingredients.

I wanted cafés, not cafeterias, places that were true to their locations and had a baseline of great food and the best ingredients and social responsibility. I wanted to change the industry and at the same time build a distinctive brand. Of course people thought we were crazy.”

For his potential clients, corporations and colleges and anyone else with in-house food service, the bottom line was, and had always been, cost.

No one knew that better than Bauccio, who was a veteran of 20 years with a very large contract food service company when he left to start Bon Appétit.

He had steadily risen to the heights of the California-based company after earning his M.B.A. at UP in 1966. His brother Michael Bauccio was also an executive of the company, and neither one of them figured they’d ever work anywhere else.

Until their company was the subject of a hostile takeover by the Marriot corporation.

“Everything changed,” says Fedele Bauccio. “My brother was on a plane with his new boss, and Michael offered to tell him about his key people. The guy looked at my brother and said, ‘I don’t care about your people. What I want to know is if you are going to make your numbers.’ We knew it was just a matter of time before we’d leave.”

And it wasn’t long before Bauccio found himself gone from the gold bathroom fixtures and the putting green of his old company’s lavish offices, working at a card table in a warehouse across from the San Francisco city jail.

He took a legal pad and wrote down the Kitchen Principles that are relatively unchanged today: Make everything from soups to salad dressing from scratch, cook what you want, make it great. Bon Appétit, such as it was, was born.

His first client was the executive dining room at the now-defunct Bear Sterns investment bank. Eventually a call came from Xerox, whose typewriter plant in Fremont, California, Portland 16

had 2,000 employees and lousy food.

Two years later, the demise of typewriters closed the plant, while Bon Appétit was still struggling to make a profit. But the very technology that killed the typewriter, plus an explosion of enterprise that came to be known as Silicon Valley, was about to change everything.

“People knew we were going to spend more money on our model of flavor and sustainability,” Bauccio says, “and why would they want to pay more? But I knew that if we stayed true to the vision and delivered on our promises, it would someday take hold. And more than any other group, I thought young people would get it.

That they would care about the same issues we did. The trick was staying in business until it happened! We worked like hell, and we also got lucky.”

Michael Bauccio joined his brother at Bon Appétit early on, and with him came the first educational account: the four nuns who ran the Santa Catalina School in Monterey. And then came the luck: just down the road the technology boom hit a rolling boil.

The competition for top young tech employees was furious, and food, the kind of outstanding food that these new companies could offer employees to keep them “on campus” for lunch, became a recruiting tool. Oracle sought out Bon Appétit, and so did Cisco. Eventually Yahoo and eBay and, more recently, Google and Twitter

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followed suit. And as those companies spread to other cities and states, Bauccio went with them. Always, Bauccio used his chefs and managers to convince new accounts, never a sales team. Mostly, people came looking for him.

The message of delicious, local, sustainable food also resonated, as Bauccio had guessed, with that other group of young people who eat on campuses: college students. Over the years more and more private schools, from UP to U Penn and Duke, came into the fold. Today, some 140 million times each year, people sit down at a college, a corporation, or a museum (like the Getty in Los Angeles, or the Seattle Art Museum) and have a meal that no food service company could have even imagined 25 years ago.

An upscale-restaurant-quality, locally sourced, nutritious farm-to-fork meal served with a healthy side of passionate food culture and ethical beliefs, from sustainable seafood to cage-free eggs, rgbh-free dairy to zero trans fat, low-carbon diets to food waste reduction, student gardens to farmworker rights and protections.

All which have been championed by others — but, for better or worse, a lot more people in power take notice when the message comes from a leading national corporation that buys, for example, more than 10 million eggs per year.

“I have to say,” Bauccio emphasizes, “that these initiatives were most often culinary acts for me, rather than political acts. We started Farm-to-Fork because I was concerned with flavor and quality, but when I started to see local farmers coming to me to thank me, the light bulb went on. We had a powerful social responsibility role to play. I started to immerse myself in the issues of soil and water and monocropping and antibiotics. I learned about the science of factory farming and the environmental and health impacts of how we eat today. I partnered with a number of NGOs to get the messaging out there. Our job is to act differently than anyone else in the industry. To be better; to think about the future of people, not just the business. It’s harder, it costs more, but it’s so much more rewarding.”

They argue with each other about profit vs. the people all the time: “They” being Fedele Bauccio, M.B.A.trained business guy and Fedele Bauccio, food and future guy.

“Oh, I have that conversation with myself all the time,” the head of Bon Appétit says, laughing. “My philosophy has always been that even if it costs us more on the bottom line, if we stay

true to our mission and focus, and the dream we imagined in the very beginning, then I’m not going to worry about that bottom line. It will pay off. Which I think we’ve proven. We’ve never tried to grow by cutting costs.

We’ve always worked to create value to drive revenues — always attacked the top line. Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what my M.B.A. professors would have advised back in the day!”

A few days after I meet with Bauccio, I’m standing with Kirk Mustain, who runs the Bon Appétit café in the Bauccio Commons at UP. He’s proudly showing off the gorgeous Oregon Star heirloom tomatoes from a nearby farm — he’ll buy 1,800 pounds of them this week. Which leads us to pizza: it’s Wednesday, which is pizza night for the 30 Holy Cross priests who

live on campus, and Mustain and chef James Green are thinking margherita.

Mustain takes a quick call from a local farmer who needs help (“All my eggplant has to come off today!”), and Mustain is happy to buy it. Then two Muslim students come up to him and ask if he has found a source for halal meat, which he has. It’s clear that Mustain and his chef make the decisions without a lot of corporate control.

“Fedele is the source of the passion we all have for preparing great food,” Mustain says. “I’ve known him 20 years and he’s a very inspiring guy.

He hasn’t changed the original vision.

All he asks is ‘make it local, make it great.’ And he always asks ‘What’s the next thing we can do to be better and get the message out about healthy eating?’”

So I asked Bauccio that question: What is the future of healthy, local, seasonal eating in America? Will it be something determined by class? Today, Winter 2012 17

it’s expensive; will only people with money be able to really eat well?

“That’s a good question,” he says.

“I believe that this food revolution isn’t going away. We have huge issues with obesity and Type 2 diabetes, with factory farming and pesticides, on and on. And the world will soon have 10 billion people to feed. I think that young people in particular really get it, and as more and more people understand that the real costs of bad, cheap food in our agricultural model are hidden: in health care costs, environmental costs and more. Add those billions of dollars to food directly, and local farm-fresh produce and meat would look pretty cheap. Eating fewer, better calories is a pretty inexpensive way to buy improved health and wellness. And we also have change our ag model to treat our farmworkers with more dignity, better conditions, better housing. We barely mention the people who harvest our food in this country. I don’t have an answer for all the immigration issues, but I do know we have to solve them in a way that makes sense.”

Bauccio is leaving the next day for Washington, D.C., to help push the stalled Farm Bill and incentives for small farmers. He still works six days a week and loves it all, even when he’s fighting uphill. Celebrated food pioneer and Chez Panisse restaurant legend Alice Waters, who along with Bauccio was honored with the Leadership Award of the James Beard Foundation in 2011, has said of Bauccio’s efforts to drive good with a big corporation, “It takes a superhuman person like Fedele, someone who is willing to take a lot of risks. He admits that he can’t do everything he wants to do; that’s the unfortunate part. Until there’s reform at a high level, he can’t even find enough antibiotic-free meat to fulfill his needs.”

So he’ll keep looking. And serve less red meat. And, of course, keep growing and making a profit.

“Look,” he says, tapping so hard on the desk I fear he may jam a finger, “it’s not one or the other. We have to make a profit to do good! We’re not stopping, and we’re getting big enough that people have to listen to us. I’m often asked when I’m going to retire” — the look he gives me makes me glad I didn’t ask that — “but every morning when I get up I have a million ideas. I’m excited as hell.” n Todd Schwartz (schwartz@spiritone. com) is an Oregon writer who has contributed a dozen lively profiles to this magazine over the years, for which we thank him, for once.

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Pears F

or nine years now, Sam Asai has loaded 46-pound boxes of his Hood River pears – Anjou, Bosc, Asian, Concorde, Bartlett, Starkrimson, and Comice – into his truck and driven them along the Columbia River to the University of Portland, to be sure they are fresh and safely handed over to the school that was his first college account. Sam also raises apples and cherries, continuing a family tradition four generations strong. A&J Orchards is named for his son, Aron, and his daughter, Jessica; Aron and a cousin are fourth generation of Asais to tend to their trees, keeping the legacy alive through poor growing seasons, internment of Sam’s grandfather by the United States government during the Second World War, and whatever else the world threw at them.

Once his pears reach the University, they are immediately cooled; Sam picks his pears when they are mature, but not ripe. Pears can be kept cool for weeks, if necessary, without any damage; finally the Bon Appétit chefs bring the pears to room temperature over three days, and when they are perfectly ripe they are eaten as is and in soups, smoothies, salads, sandwiches, and sauces. Most popular among students: red pears (especially Bartletts and Starkrimsons), says executive chef James Green. Green and general manager Kirk Mustain write menus that play to the seasons.

In late summer, as students trickle back onto campus, they are served fresh water with slices of red pears.

When the rains begin in November, students huddle by the Commons’ fireplace with pear and chèvre pizza.

Spring, when the rains hint at ending: roast pear salads. Pears are poached, sautéed, baked. Paired with pork, cranberries, chicken. Sliced, cubed, whole.

The pear, says James Green with a smile, is a lovely block of marble in a menu-sculptors’ imagination...

Brittany Wilmes Portland 18

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THE END OF COOKING? There are endless food shows on television…but Americans cook less than ever before. Why?

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was only eight years old when “The French Chef” first appeared on American television in 1963, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that this Julia Child had improved the quality of life around our house. My mother began cooking dishes she’d watched Julia cook on television: boeuf bourguignon (the subject of the show’s first episode), French onion soup gratinée, duck à l’orange, coq au vin, mousse au chocolat. Some of the more ambitious dishes, like the duck or the mousse, were pointed toward weekend company, but my mother would usually test these out on me and my sisters earlier in the week, and a few of the others — including the boeuf bourguignon, which I especially loved — actually made it into heavy weeknight rotation.

So whenever people talk about how Julia Child upgraded the culture of food in America, I nod appreciatively.

I owe her. Not that I didn’t also owe Swanson, because we also ate TV dinners, and those were pretty good, too.

Every so often I would watch “The French Chef” with my mother in the den. On WNET in New York, it came on late in the afternoon, after school, and because we had only one television back then, if Mom wanted to watch her program, you watched it, too. The show felt less like TV than like hanging around the kitchen, which is to say, not terribly exciting to a kid (except when Child dropped something on the floor, which my mother promised would happen if we stuck around long enough) but comforting in its familiarity: the clanking of pots and pans, the squeal of an oven door in need of oil, all the kitchen-chemistry-set spectacles of transformation. The show was taped live and broadcast uncut and unedited, so it had a vérité feel completely unlike anything you might see today on the Food Network, with its A.D.H.D. editing and hyperkinetic soundtracks of rock music and clashing knives. While Julia waited for the butter foam to subside in the sauté pan,

you waited, too, precisely as long, listening to Julia’s improvised patter over the hiss of her pan, as she filled the desultory minutes with kitchen tips and lore. It all felt more like life than TV, though Julia’s voice was like nothing I ever heard before or would hear again until Monty Python came to America: vaguely European, breathy and singsongy, and weirdly suggestive of a man doing a falsetto impression of a woman. The BBC supposedly took “The French Chef” off the air because viewers wrote in complaining that Julia Child seemed either drunk or demented.

Meryl Streep, who brings Julia Child vividly back to the screen in Nora Ephron’s charming comedy, Julie & Julia, has the voice down, and with the help of some clever set design and cinematography, she manages to evoke too Child’s big-girl ungainliness — the woman was 6 foot 2 and had arms like a longshoreman. Streep also captures the deep sensual delight that Julia Child took in food — not just the eating of it but the fondling and affectionate slapping of ingredients in their raw state and the magic of their kitchen transformations.

But Julie & Julia is more than an exercise in nostalgia. As the title suggests, the film has a second, more contemporary heroine. The Julie character (played by Amy Adams) is based on Julie Powell, a 29-year-old aspiring writer living in Queens who, casting about for a blog conceit in 2002, hit on a cool one: she would cook her way through all 524 recipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days and blog about her adventures.

The movie shuttles back and forth between Julie’s year of compulsive cooking and blogging in Queens in 2002 and Julia’s decade in Paris and Provence a half-century earlier, as recounted in My Life in France, the memoir published a few years after her death in 2004. Julia Child in 1949 was in some ways in the same boat in which Julie Portland 20

Powell found herself in 2002: happily married to a really nice guy but feeling, acutely, the lack of a life project. Living in Paris, where her husband, Paul Child, was posted in the diplomatic corps, Julia (who like Julie had worked as a secretary) was at a loss as to what to do with her life until she realized that what she liked to do best was eat.

So she enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu and learned how to cook. As with Julia, so with Julie: cooking saved her life, giving her a project and, eventually, a path to literary success.

That learning to cook could lead an American woman to success of any kind would have seemed utterly implausible in 1949; that it is so thoroughly plausible 60 years later owes everything to Julia Child’s legacy. Julie Powell operates in a world that Julia Child helped to create, one where food is taken seriously, where chefs have been welcomed into the repertory company of American celebrity and where cooking has become a broadly appealing mise-en-scène in which success stories can plausibly be set and played out. How amazing is it that we live today in a culture that has not only something called the Food Network but now a hit show on that network called “The Next Food Network Star,” which thousands of 20- and 30-somethings compete eagerly to become?

It would seem we have come a long way from Swanson TV dinners.

The Food Network can now be seen in nearly 100 million American homes, and on most nights commands more viewers than any of the cable news channels. Millions of Americans, including my 16-year-old son, can tell you months after the finale which contestant emerged victorious in Season 5 of “Top Chef.” The popularity of cooking shows — or perhaps I should say food shows — has spread beyond the precincts of public or cable television to the broadcast networks. It’s no wonder that a Hollywood studio would conclude that American audiences

PAINTING BY EDWARD BURRA, “THE SNACK BAR”, 1930 / TATE GALLERY, LONDON / ART RESOURCE, NY

By Michael Pollan

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had an appetite for a movie in which the road to personal fulfillment and public success passes through the kitchen and turns, crucially, on a recipe for boeuf bourguignon. (The secret is to pat dry your beef before you brown it.)

But here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.

That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances in technology that made it easier for

them to do so. Cooking is no longer obligatory, and for many people, women especially, that has been a blessing.

But perhaps a mixed blessing, to judge by the culture’s continuing, if not deeping, fascination with the subject.

It has been easier for us to give up cooking than it has been to give up talking about it — and watching it.

Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have Portland 22

2. THE COURAGE TO FLIP When I asked my mother recently what exactly endeared Julia Child to her, she explained that “for so many of us she took the fear out of cooking” and, to illustrate the point, brought up the famous potato show, one of the episodes that Meryl Streep recreates brilliantly on screen. Millions of Americans of a certain age claim to remember Julia Child dropping a chicken or a goose on the floor, but the memory is apocryphal: what she dropped was a potato pancake, and it didn’t quite make it to the floor. Still, this was a classic live-television moment, inconceivable on any modern cooking show: Martha Stewart would sooner commit seppuku than let such an outtake ever see the light of day.

The episode has Julia making a plate-size potato pancake, sautéing a big disc of mashed potato into which she has folded impressive quantities of cream and butter. Then the fateful moment arrives: “When you flip anything, you just have to have the courage of your convictions,” she declares, clearly a tad nervous at the prospect, and then gives the big pancake a flip. On the way down, half of it catches the top of the pan and splats onto the stovetop.

Undaunted, Julia scoops the thing up and roughly patches the pancake back together, explaining: “When I flipped it, I didn’t have the courage to do it the way I should have. You can always pick it up.” And then, looking right through the camera as if taking us into her confidence, she utters the line that did so much to lift the fear of failure from my mother and her contemporaries: “If you’re alone in the kitchen, WHOOOO” — the pronoun is sung—“is going to see?” For a generation of women eager to transcend their mothers’ recipe box (and perhaps, too, their mothers’ social standing), Julia’s little kitchen catastrophe was a liberation and a lesson: “The only way you learn to flip things is just to flip them!”

It was a kind of courage — not only to cook but to cook the world’s most glamorous and intimidating cuisine — that Julia Child gave my mother and so many other women like her, and to watch her empower viewers in episode after episode is to appreciate just how much about cooking on television — not to mention cooking itself — has changed in the years since “The French Chef” was on the air.

There are still cooking programs that will teach you how to cook. Public

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the time for.

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television offers the eminently useful “America’s Test Kitchen.” The Food Network carries a whole slate of socalled dump-and-stir shows during the day, and the network’s research suggests that at least some viewers are following along. But many of these programs—I’m thinking of Rachael Ray, Paula Deen, Sandra Lee — tend to be aimed at stay-at-home moms who are in a hurry and eager to please. These shows stress quick results, shortcuts, and superconvenience but never the sort of pleasure—physical and mental — that Julia Child took in the work of cooking: the tomahawking of a fish skeleton or the chopping of an onion, the Rolfing of butter into the breast of a raw chicken or the vigorous whisking of heavy cream. By the end of the potato show, Julia was out of breath and had broken a sweat, which she mopped from her brow with a paper towel.

(Have you ever seen Martha Stewart break a sweat?) Child was less interested in making it fast or easy than making it right, because cooking for her was so much more than a means to a meal.

It was a gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the muscles. You didn’t do it to please a husband or impress guests; you did it to please yourself. No one cooking on television today gives the impression that they enjoy the actual work quite as much as Julia Child did.

In this, she strikes me as a more liberated figure than many of the women who have followed her on television.

Curiously, the year Julia Child went on the air—1963—was the same year Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression. You may think of these two figures as antagonists, but that wouldn’t be quite right. They actually had a great deal in common, as Child’s biographer, Laura Shapiro, points out, and addressed the aspirations of many of the same women. Julia never referred to her viewers as “housewives” — a word she detested—and never condescended to them. She tried to show the sort of women who read The Feminine Mystique that, far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention. (A man’s too.)

Second-wave feminists were often ambivalent on the gender politics of cooking. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex that though cooking could be oppressive, it could also be a form of “revelation and creation; and a woman can find special satisfaction

in a successful cake or a flaky pastry, for not everyone can do it: one must have the gift.” This can be read either as a special Frenchie exemption for the culinary arts (féminisme, c’est bon, but we must not jeopardize those flaky pastries!) or as a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.

3. TO THE KITCHEN STADIUM Whichever, kitchen work itself has changed considerably since 1963, judging from its depiction on today’s howto shows. Take the concept of cooking from scratch. Many of today’s cooking programs rely unapologetically on ingredients that themselves contain lots of ingredients: canned soups, jarred mayonnaise, frozen vegetables, powdered sauces, vanilla wafers, limeade concentrate, Marshmallow Fluff.

This probably shouldn’t surprise us: processed foods have so thoroughly Winter 2012 23

colonized the American kitchen and diet that they have redefined what passes today for cooking, not to mention food. Many of these convenience foods have been sold to women as tools of liberation; the rhetoric of kitchen oppression has been cleverly hijacked by food marketers and the cooking shows they sponsor to sell more stuff.

So the shows encourage home cooks to take all manner of shortcuts, each of which involves buying another product, and all of which taken together have succeeded in redefining what is commonly meant by the verb “to cook.”

I spent an enlightening if somewhat depressing hour on the phone with a veteran food-marketing researcher, Harry Balzer, who explained that “people call things ‘cooking’ today that would roll their grandmother in her grave — heating up a can of soup or microwaving a frozen pizza.” Balzer has been studying American eating habits since 1978; the NPD Group, the firm

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he works for, collects data from a pool of 2,000 food diaries to track American eating habits. Years ago Balzer noticed that the definition of cooking held by his respondents had grown so broad as to be meaningless, so the firm tightened up the meaning of “to cook” at least slightly to capture what was really going on in American kitchens. To cook from scratch, they decreed, means to prepare a main dish that requires some degree of “assembly of elements.”

So microwaving a pizza doesn’t count as cooking, though washing a head of lettuce and pouring bottled dressing over it does. Under this dispensation, you’re also cooking when you spread mayonnaise on a slice of bread and pile on some cold cuts or a hamburger patty. (Currently the most popular meal in America, at both lunch and dinner, is a sandwich; the No.1 accompanying beverage is a soda.) At least by Balzer’s non-too-exacting standard, Americans are still cooking up a storm — 58 percent of our evening meals qualify, though even that figure has been falling steadily since the 1980s.

Like most people who study consumer behavior, Balzer has developed a somewhat cynical view of human nature, which his research suggests is ever driven by the quest to save time or money or, optimally, both. I kept asking him what his research had to say about the prevalence of the activity I referred to as “real scratch cooking,” but he wouldn’t touch the term. Why? Apparently the activity has become so rarefied as to elude his tools of measurement.

“Here’s an analogy,” Balzer said. “A hundred years ago, chicken for dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking and gutting a chicken. Do you know anybody who still does that?

It would be considered crazy! Well, that’s exactly how cooking will seem to your grandchildren: something people used to do when they had no other choice. Get over it.”

After my discouraging hour on the phone with Balzer, I settled in for a couple more hours with the Food Network, trying to square his dismal view of our interest in cooking with the hyperexuberant, even fetishized images of cooking that are presented on the screen. The Food Network undergoes a complete change of personality at night, when it trades the cozy precincts of the home kitchen and chirpy softball coaching of Rachael Ray or Sandra Lee for something markedly less feminine and less practical. Erica Gruen, the cable executive often credited with putting the Food Network on the map in the late ’90s, recognized early on that, as she told a journalist, “people

don’t watch television to learn things.”

So she shifted the network’s target audience from people who love to cook to people who love to eat, a considerably larger universe and one that — important for a cable network — happens to contain a great many more men.

In prime time, the Food Network’s mise-en-scéne shifts to masculine arenas like the Kitchen Stadium on “Iron Chef,” where famous restaurant chefs wage gladiatorial combat to see who can, in 60 minutes, concoct the most spectacular meal from a secret ingredient ceremoniously unveiled just as the clock starts: an octopus or a bunch of bananas or a whole school of daurade. Whether in the Kitchen Stadium or on “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star” or, over on Bravo, “Top Chef,” cooking in prime time is a form of athletic competition, drawing its visual and even aural vocabulary from “Monday Night Football.” On “Iron Chef America,” one of the Food Network’s biggest hits, the cookingcaster Alton Brown delivers a breathless (though always gently tongue-incheek) play by play and color commentary, as the iron chefs and their team of iron sous-chefs race the clock to peel, chop, slice, dice, mince, Cuisinart, mandolin, boil, double-boil, pan-sear, sauté, sous vide, deepfry, pressurecook, grill, deglaze, reduce, and plate —this last word I’m old enough to remember when it was a mere noun. A particularly dazzling display of chefly “knife skills” — a term bandied as freely on the Food Network as “passing game” or “slugging percentage” is on ESPN — will earn an instant replay: an onion minced in slo-mo. Can we get a camera on this, Alton Brown will ask in a hushed, this-must-be-golf tone of voice. It looks like Chef Flay’s going to try for a last-minute garnish grab before the clock runs out! Will he make it? [The buzzer sounds.] Yes! These shows move so fast, in such a blur of flashing knives, frantic pantry raids, and more sheer fire than you would ever want to see in your own kitchen, that I honestly can’t tell you whether that “last-minute garnish grab” happened on “Iron Chef America” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star” or whether it was Chef Flay or Chef Batali who snagged the sprig of foliage at the buzzer. But impressive it surely was, in the same way it’s impressive to watch a handful of eager young chefs of “Chopped” figure out how to make a passable appetizer from chicken wings, celery, soba noodles and a package of string cheese in just 20 minutes, said starter to be judged by a panel of professional chefs on the basis of “taste, creativity and Portland 24

presentation.” (If you ask me, the key to victory on any of these shows comes down to one factor: bacon. Whichever contestant puts bacon in the dish invariably seems to win.)

But you do have to wonder how easily so specialized a set of skills might translate to the home kitchen — or anywhere else for that matter. For when in real life are even professional chefs required to conceive and execute dishes in 20 minutes from ingredients selected by a third party exhibiting obvious sadistic tendencies? (String cheese?) Never, is when. The skills celebrated on the Food Network in prime time are precisely the skills necessary to succeed on the Food Network in prime time. They will come in handy nowhere else on God’s green earth.

We learn things watching these cooking competitions, but they’re not things about how to cook. There are no recipes to follow; the contests fly by much too fast for viewers to take in any practical tips; and the kind of cooking practiced in prime time is far more spectacular than anything you would ever try at home. No, for anyone hoping to pick up a few dinnertime tips, the implicit message of today’s primetime cooking shows is, Don’t try this at home. If you really want to eat this way, go to a restaurant. Or as a chef friend put it when I asked him if he thought I could learn anything about cooking by watching the Food Network, “How much do you learn about basketball by watching the N.B.A.?”

What we mainly learn about on the Food Network in prime time is culinary fashion, which is no small thing: if Julia took the fear out of cooking, these shows take the fear — the social anxiety — out of ordering in restaurants. (Hey, now I know what a shiso leaf is and what “crudo” means!) Then, at the judges’ table, we learn how to taste and how to talk about food. For viewers, these shows have become less about the production of high-end food than about its consumption — including its conspicuous consumption.

(I think I’ll start with the sawfish crudo wrapped in shiso leaves...)

Surely it’s no accident that so many Food Network stars have themselves found a way to transcend barriers of social class in the kitchen—beginning with Emeril Lagasse, the workingclass guy from Fall River, Massachusetts, who, though he may not be able to sound the ‘r’ in “garlic,” can still cook like a dream. Once upon a time Julia made the same promise in reverse: she showed you how you, too, could cook like someone who could not only prepare but properly pronounce a béarnaise. So-called fancy food has

always served as a form of cultural capital, and cooking programs help you acquire it, now without so much as lifting a spatula. The glamour of food has made it something of a class leveler in America, a fact that many of these shows implicitly celebrate. Television likes nothing better than to serve up elitism to the masses, paradoxical as that might sound. How wonderful is it that something like arugula can at the same time be a mark of sophistication and be found in almost every salad bar in America? Everybody wins!

But the shift from producing food on television to consuming it strikes me as a far-less-salubrious development.

Traditionally, the recipe for the typical dump-and-stir program comprises about 80 percent cooking followed by 20 percent eating, but in prime time you now find a raft of shows that flip that ratio on its head, like “The Best Thing I Ever Ate” and “Diners, DriveIns and Dives,” which are about nothing but eating. Sure, Guy Fieri, the tattooed and spiky-coiffed chowhound who hosts “Diner, Drive-Ins and Dives,” ducks into the kitchen whenever he visits one of these roadside joints to do a little speed-bonding with the startled short-order cooks in back, but most of the time he’s wrapping his mouth around their supersize creations: a 16-ounce Oh Gawd! Burger (with the works); battered and deep-fried anything (clams, pickles, cinnamon buns, stuffed peppers, you name it); or a buttermilk burrito approximately the size of his head, stuffed with bacon, eggs and cheese. What Fieri’s critical

vocabulary lacks in analytical rigor, it more than makes up for in tailgate enthusiasm: “Man, oh man, now this is what I’m talking about!” What can possibly be the appeal of watching Guy Fieri bite, masticate, and swallow all this chow?

The historical drift of cooking programs — from a genuine interest in producing food for yourself to the spectacle of merely consuming it—surely owes a lot to the decline of cooking in our culture, but it also has something to do with the gravitational field that eventually overtakes anything in television—or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else. The ads on the Food Network, at least in prime time, strongly suggest its viewers do no such thing: the food-related ads hardly ever hawk kitchen appliances or ingredients (unless you count A.1. steak sauce) but rather push the usual supermarket cart of edible foodlike substances, including Manwich sloppy joe in a can, Special K protein shakes and Ore-Ida frozen French fries, along with fast-casual eateries like Olive Garden and Red Lobster.

Buying, not making, is what cooking shows are mostly now about — that and, increasingly, cooking shows themselves: the whole self-perpetuating spectacle of competition, success and celebrity that, with “The Next Food Winter 2012 25

Network Star,” appears to have entered its baroque phase. The Food Network has figured out that we care much less about what’s cooking than who’s cooking. A few years ago, Mario Batali neatly summed up the network’s formula to a reporter: “Look, it’s TV! Everyone has to fall into a niche. I’m the Italian guy. Emeril’s the next exuberant New Orleans guy with the big eyebrows who yells a lot. Bobby’s the grilling guy. Rachael Ray is the cheerleader-type girl who makes things at home the way a regular person would.

Giada’s the beautiful girl with the nice rack who does simple Italian food.

As silly as the whole Food Network is, it gives us all a soapbox to talk about the things we care about.” Not to mention a platform from which to sell all their stuff.

The Food Network has helped to transform cooking from something you do into something you watch — into yet another confection of spectacle and celebrity that keeps us pinned to the couch. The formula is as circular and self-reinforcing as a TV dinner: a simulacrum of home cooking that is sold on TV and designed to be eaten in front of the TV. True, in the case of the Swanson rendition, at least you get something that will fill you up; by comparison, the Food Network leaves you hungry, a condition its advertisers must love. But in neither case is there much risk that you will get off the couch and actually cook a meal. Both kinds of TV dinner plant us exactly where television always wants us: in front of the set, watching.

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4. WATCHING WHAT WE EAT To point out that television has succeeded in turning cooking into a spectator sport raises the question of why anyone would want to watch other people cook in the first place. There are plenty of things we’ve stopped doing for ourselves that we have no desire to watch other people do on TV: you don’t see shows about changing the oil in your car or ironing shirts or reading newspapers. So what is it about cooking, specifically, that makes it such good television just now?

It’s worth keeping in mind that watching other people cook is not exactly a new behavior for us humans.

Even when “everyone” still cooked, there were plenty of us who mainly watched: men, for the most part, and children. Most of us have happy memories of watching our mothers in the kitchen, performing feats that sometimes looked very much like sorcery and typically resulted in something tasty to eat. Watching my mother transform the raw materials of nature —a handful of plants, an animal’s flesh —into a favorite dinner was always a pretty good show, but on the afternoons when she tackled a complex marvel like chicken Kiev, I happily stopped whatever I was doing to watch. (I told you we had it pretty good, thanks partly to Julia.) My mother would hammer the boneless chicken breasts into flat pink slabs, roll them tightly around chunks of ice-cold herbed butter, glue the cylinders shut with egg, then fry the little logs until they turned golden brown, in what qualified as a minor miracle of transubstantiation. When the dish turned out right, knifing through the crust into the snowy white meat within would uncork a fragrant ooze of melted butter that seeped across the plate to merge with the Minute Rice. (If the instant rice sounds all wrong, remember that in the 1960s, Julia Child and modern food science were both tokens of sophistication.)

Yet even the most ordinary dish follows a similar arc of transformation, magically becoming something greater than the sum of its parts. Every dish contains not just culinary ingredients but also the ingredients of narrative: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Bring in the element of fire — cooking’s deus ex machina — and you’ve got a tasty little drama right there, the whole thing unfolding in a TV-friendly span of time: 30 minutes (at 350 degrees) will usually do it.

Cooking shows also benefit from the fact that food itself is—by definition — attractive to the humans who eat it, and that attraction can be enhanced by food styling, an art at which the

Food Network so excels as to make Julia Child look like a piker. You’ll be flipping aimlessly through the cable channels when a slow-motion cascade of glistening red cherries or a tongue of flame lapping at a slab of meat on the grill will catch your eye, and your reptilian brain will paralyze your thumb on the remote, forcing you to stop to see what’s cooking. Food shows are the campfires in the deep cable forest, drawing us like hungry wanderers to their flames. (And on the Food Network there are plenty of flames to catch your eye, compensating, no doubt, for the unfortunate absence of aromas.)

No matter how well produced, a televised oil change and lube offers no such satisfactions.

I suspect we’re drawn to the textures and rhythms of kitchen work, too, which seem so much more direct and satisfying than the more abstract and formless tasks most of us perform in our jobs nowadays. The chefs on TV get to put their hands on real stuff, not keyboards and screens but fundamental things like plants and animals and fungi; they get to work with fire and ice and perform feats of alchemy. By way of explaining why in the world she wants to cook her way through “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” all Julie Powell has to do in the film is show us her cubicle at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, where she spends her days on the phone mollifying callers with problems that she lacks the power to fix.

“You know what I love about cooking?” Julie tells us in a voiceover as we watch her field yet another inconclusive call on her headset. “I love that after a day where nothing is sure — and when I say nothing, I mean nothing—you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. It’s such a comfort.” How many of us still do work that engages us in a dialogue with the material world and ends—assuming the soufflé doesn’t collapse — with such a gratifying and tasty sense of closure? Come to think of it, even the collapse of the soufflé is at least definitive, which is more than you can say about most of what you will do at work tomorrow.

5. THE END OF COOKING If cooking really offers all these satisfactions, then why don’t we do more of it? Well, ask Julie Powell: for most of us it doesn’t pay the rent, and very often our work doesn’t leave us the time; during the year of Julia, dinner at the Powell apartment seldom arrived at the table before 10 p.m. For many years now, Americans have been putWinter 2012 27

ting in longer hours at work and enjoying less time at home. Since 1967, we’ve added 167 hours—the equivalent of a month’s full-time labor — to the total amount of time we spend at work each year, and in households where both parents work, the figure is more like 400 hours. Americans today spend more time working than people in any other industrialized nation — an extra two weeks or more a year. Not surprisingly, in those countries where people still take cooking seriously, they also have more time to devote to it.

It’s generally assumed that the entrance of women into the work force is responsible for the collapse of home cooking, but that turns out to be only part of the story. Yes, women with jobs outside the home spend less time cooking — but so do women without jobs. The amount of time spent on food preparation in America has fallen at the same precipitous rate among women who don’t work outside the home as it has among women who do: in both cases, a decline of about 40 percent since 1965. (Though for married women who don’t have jobs, the amount of time spent cooking remains greater: 58 minutes a day, as compared with 36 for married women who do have jobs.) In general, spending on restaurants or takeout food rises with income. Women with jobs have more money to pay corporations to do their cooking, yet all American women now allow corporations to cook for them when they can.

Those corporations have been trying to persuade Americans to let them do the cooking since long before large numbers of women entered the work force. After World War II, the food industry labored mightily to sell American women on all the processed-food wonders it had invented to feed the troops: canned meals, freeze-dried foods, dehydrated potatoes, powdered orange juice and coffee, instant everything. As Laura Shapiro recounts in “Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America,” the food industry strived to “persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations.” The same process of peacetime conversion that industrialized our farming, giving us synthetic fertilizers made from munitions and new pesticides developed from nerve gas, also industrialized our eating.

Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the work force but as a supplydriven phenomenon. In fact, for many years American women, whether they worked or not, resisted processed

PAINTING BY DICK KET, “THE THREE BREAD ROLLS”, 1933 / THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

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foods, regarding them as a dereliction of their “moral obligation to cook,” something they believed to be a parental responsibility on par with child care. It took years of clever, dedicated marketing to break down this resistance and persuade Americans that opening a can or cooking from a mix really was cooking. Honest. In the 1950s, just-add-water cake mixes languished in the supermarket until the marketers figured out that if you left at least something for the “baker” to do – specifically, crack open an egg – she could take ownership of the cake.

Over the years, the food scientists have gotten better and better at simulating real food, keeping it looking attractive and seemingly fresh, and the rapid acceptance of microwave ovens—which went from being in only 8 percent of American Households in 1978 to 90 percent today — opened up vast new horizons of home-meal replacement.

Harry Balzer’s research suggests that the corporate project of redefining what it means to cook and serve a meal has succeeded beyond the industry’s wildest expectations. People think nothing of buying frozen peanut butterand-jelly sandwiches for their children’s lunchboxes. (Now how much of a timesaver can that be?) “We’ve had a hundred years of packaged foods,” Balzer told me, “and now we’re going to have a hundred years of packaged meals.” Already today, 80 percent of the cost of food eaten in the home goes to someone other than a farmer, which is to say to industrial cooking and packaging and marketing. Balzer is unsentimental about this development: “Do you miss sewing or darning socks?

I don’t think so.”

So what are we doing with the time we save by outsourcing our food preparation to corporations and 16-yearold burger flippers? Working, commuting to work, surfing the Internet and, perhaps most curiously of all, watching other people cook on television.

But this may not be quite the paradox it seems. Maybe the reason we like to watch cooking on TV is that there are things about cooking we miss. We might not feel we have the time or the energy to do it ourselves every day, yet we’re not prepared to see it disappear from our lives entirely. Why? Perhaps because cooking—unlike sewing or darning socks — is an activity that strikes a deep emotional chord in us, one that might even go to the heart of our identity as human beings.

What?! You’re telling me Bobby Flay strikes deep emotional chords?

Bear with me. Consider for a moment the proposition that as a human activity, cooking is far more important

—to our happiness and to our health— than its current role in our lives, not to mention its depiction on TV, might lead you to believe. Let’s see what happens when we take cooking seriously.

6. THE COOKING ANIMAL The idea that cooking is a defining human activity is not a new one. In 1773, the Scottish writer James Boswell, noting that “no beast is a cook,” called Homo sapiens “the cooking animal,” though he might have reconsidered that definition had he been able to gaze upon the frozen-food cases at Wal-Mart.

Fifty years later, in “The Physiology of Taste,” the French gastronome JeanAnthelme Brillat-Savarin claimed that cooking made us who we are; by teaching men to use fire, it had “done the most to advance the cause of civilization.” More recently, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, writing in 1964 in “The Raw and the Cooked,” found that many cultures entertained a similar view, regarding cooking as a symbolic way of distinguishing ourselves from the animals.

For Lévi-Strauss, cooking is a metaphor for the human transformation of nature into culture, but in the years since “The Raw and the Cooked,” other anthropologists have begun to take quite literally the idea that cooking is the key to our humanity. Richard Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist, published a fascinating book called “Catching Fire,” in which he argues that it was the discovery of cooking by our early ancestors — not tool-making or language or meat-eating — that made us human. By providing our primate forebears with a more energy-dense and easy-to-digest diet, cooked food Portland 28

altered the course of human evolution, allowing our brains to grow bigger (brains are notorious energy guzzlers) and our guts to shrink. It seems that raw food takes much more time and energy to chew and digest, which is why other primates of our size carry around substantially larger digestive tracts and spend many more of their waking hours chewing: up to six hours a day.

(That’s nearly as much time as Guy Fieri devotes to the activity.) Also, since cooking detoxifies many foods, it cracked open a treasure trove of nutritious calories unavailable to other animals. Freed from the need to spend our days gathering large quantities of raw food and then chewing (and chewing) it, humans could now devote their time, and their metabolic resources, to other purposes, like creating a culture.

Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would likely have fed himself on the go and alone, like the animals. (Or, come to think of it, like the industrial eaters we’ve become, grazing at gas stations and skipping meals.) But sitting down to common meals, making eye contact, sharing food, all served to civilize us; “around that fire,” Wrangham says, “we became tamer.”

If cooking is as central to human identity and culture as Wrangham believes, it stands to reason that the decline of cooking in our time would have a profound effect on modern life.

At the very least, you would expect that its rapid disappearance from everyday life might leave us feeling nostalgic for the sights and smells and the sociality of the cooking fire. Bobby Flay

PHOTO BY THE WASHINGTON POST / GETTY IMAGES

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and Rachael Ray may be pushing precisely that emotional button. Interestingly, the one kind of home cooking that is actually on the rise today (according to Harry Balzer) is outdoor grilling. Chunks of animal flesh seared over an open fire: grilling is cooking at its most fundamental and explicit, the transformation of the raw into the cooked right before our eyes. It makes a certain sense that the grill would be gaining adherents at the very moment when cooking meals and eating them together is fading from the culture. (While men have hardly become equal partners in the kitchen, they are cooking more today than ever before: about 13 percent of all meals, many of them on the grill.)

Yet we don’t crank up the barbecue every day; grilling for most people is more ceremony than routine. We seem to be well on our way to turning cooking into a form of weekend recreation, a backyard sport for which we outfit ourselves at Williams-Sonoma, or a televised spectator sport we watch from the couch. Cooking’s fate may be to join some of our other weekend exercises in recreation atavism: camping and gardening and hunting and riding on horseback. Something in us apparently likes to be reminded of our distant origins every now and then and to celebrate whatever rough skills for contending with the natural world might survive in us, beneath the thin crust of 21st-century civilization.

To play at farming or foraging for food strikes us as harmless enough, perhaps because the delegating of those activities to other people in real life is something most of us are generally O.K. with. But to relegate the activity of cooking to a form of play, something that happens just on weekends or mostly on television, seems much more consequential. The fact is that not cooking may well be deleterious to our health, and there is reason to believe that the outsourcing of food preparation to corporations and 16year-olds has already taken a toll on our physical and psychological well-being.

Consider some recent research on the links between cooking and dietary health. A 2003 study by a group of Harvard economists led by David Cutler found that the rise of food preparation outside the home could explain most of the increase in obesity in America. Mass production has driven down the cost of many foods, not only in terms of price but also in the amount of time required to obtain them. The French fry did not become the most popular “vegetable” in America until industry relieved us of the considerable effort needed to prepare French fries

ourselves. Similarly, the mass production of cream-filled cakes, fried chicken wings and taquitos, exotically flavored chips or cheesy puffs of refined flour, has transformed all these hard-to-makeat-home foods into the sort of everyday fare you can pick up at the gas station on a whim and for less than a dollar. The fact that we no longer have to plan or even wait to enjoy these items, as we would if we were making them ourselves, makes us that much more likely to indulge impulsively.

Cutler and his colleagues also surveyed cooking patterns across several cultures and found that obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time spent on food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower its rate of obesity. In fact, the amount of time spent cooking predicts obesity rates more reliably than female participation in the labor force or income.

Other research supports the idea that

“We’re cheap and lazy. We’re all looking for someone else to cook for us. The next American cook is the drive-through supermarket.” cooking is a better predictor of a healthful diet than social class: a 1992 study in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that poor women who routinely cooked were more likely to eat a more healthful diet than well-to-do women who did not.

So cooking matters — a lot. Which when you think about it, should come as no surprise. When we let corporations do the cooking, they’re bound to go heavy on sugar, fat and salt; these are three tastes we’re hard-wired to like, which happen to be dirt cheap to add and do a good job masking the shortcomings of processed food. And if you make special-occasion foods cheap and easy enough to eat every day, we will eat them every day. The time and work involved in cooking, as well as the delay in gratification built into the process, served as an important check on our appetite. Now that check is gone, and we’re struggling to deal with the consequences.

The question is, Can we ever put the genie back into the bottle? Once it has been destroyed, can a culture of everyWinter 2012 29

day cooking be rebuilt? One in which men share equally in the work? One in which the cooking shows on television once again teach people how to cook from scratch and, as Julia Child once did, actually empower them to do it?

Let us hope so. Because it’s hard to imagine ever reforming the American way of eating or, for that matter, the American food system unless millions of Americans — women and men — are willing to make cooking a part of daily life. The path to a diet of fresher, unprocessed food, not to mention to a revitalized local-food economy, passes straight through the home kitchen.

But if this is a dream you find appealing, you might not want to call Harry Balzer right away to discuss it.

“Not going to happen,” he told me.

“Why? Because we’re basically cheap and lazy. And besides, the skills are already lost. Who is going to teach the next generation to cook? I don’t see it.

“We’re all looking for someone else to cook for us. The next American cook is going to be the supermarket. Takeout from the supermarket, that’s the future. All we need now is the drivethrough supermarket.”

Crusty as a fresh baguette, Harry Balzer insists on dealing with the world, and human nature, as it really is, or at least as he finds it in the survey data he has spent the past three decades poring over. But for a brief moment, I was able to engage him in the project of imagining a slightly different reality.

This took a little doing. Many of his clients — which include many of the big chain restaurants and food manufacturers — profit handsomely from the decline and fall of cooking in America; indeed, their marketing has contributed to it. Yet Balzer himself made it clear that he recognizes all that the decline of everyday cooking has cost us. So I asked him how, in an ideal world, Americans might begin to undo the damage that the modern diet of industrially prepared food has done to our health.

“Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It’s short, and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want — just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.” n Michael Pollan, who delivered a tart and hilarious talk on food and nutrition on The Bluff last year, is the author of many books, among them Second Nature, a quiet masterpiece. This essay is drawn from a longer article that originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine; we reprint with Michael’s cheerful permission, for which thanks.

PROF. DR. OTTO WILHELM THOMÉ FLORA VON DEUTSCHLAND, ÖSTERREICH UND DER SCHWEIZ 1885, GERA, GERMANY.

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Confessions of aHophead Notes on righteous Northwest treasure.

By Robert Michael Pyle

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fter I finished a talk about butterflies recently, a man in the audience asked me whether any butterflies feed on hops as their host plant, as monarch butterflies do on milkweed. “Yes,” I replied, and as I shuffled the facts in my mind for an accurate response, I found myself smiling at the mere mention of that golden word: hops!

One of the great ingredients of life, the noble hop, and long recognized as such. Humulus lupulus is one of the main components of nearly all beer brewed today. In fact, hops are one of only four ingredients in beer that’s made traditionally. Germany’s sixteenth-century Reinheitsgebot, or beer purity laws, limit the fixings to pure water, malted barley, yeast, and hops.

Nowadays many big brewers substitute cheaper rice for barley, some recipes call for wheat or oatmeal as the fermentable, and boutique brewers emulate the Belgians’ penchant for cherries in their beer by adding such impurities as raspberries, honey, pumpkin, and spices — all fine on their own, but nothing to do with beer, in my palate’s opinion.

Being a botanical, Humulus lupulus originated in the wide world beyond the brewer’s yard. It belongs to the marijuana family (Cannabaceae), but its finger-lobed leaves more resemble those of the related mulberry or figs.

The common hop abounds in open habitats around Eurasia and is naturalized in parts of North America, where it is sometimes hybridized with the native subspecies H. l. americanus for the taste and the hardiness it brings to the mix. Linnaeus named the genus Humulus from the Latin for hops, the species lupulus for its habit in Roman times of growing wild among willows like a wolf among sheep. It is a longlived perennial vine with chartreuse, papery flowers or “cones” borne on the female plants. These possess glands called lupulin, which produce the complex volatile oils and resins coveted by brewers. The ancient Greeks employed hops medicinally to calm digestive troubles and ward off leprosy.

For the First Peoples of North America, they serve as everything from a pickme-up to a sleeping pill. Hops shoots have been prepared and eaten like asparagus, though the hop tea I once tried was wretched.

Hops, cultivated for beer-making at least since the eighth century, serve two purposes in brewing. The first is preservation, since their essential oils have a naturally retardant effect on microbes that might spoil beer.

The second is flavor: hops, in a word, are bitter, which is why the basic British ale is known far and wide as “a pint of bitter.” Malted barley, when fermented through the action of yeast, turns into soluble sugars and alcohol.

In the absence of a bittering agent to provide balance, beer would be cloyingly sweet, sticky, or heavy on the palate. By boiling hops into the wort (an aqueous infusion of malt) “the desired mellow bitterness and delicate hop aroma” are imparted to the beer, according to the 1956 Britannica. Before hops, beers were probably molasseslike; coriander, bay, and juniper served as bittering agents at one time or another, and when hops weren’t available on the new frontier, new-growth spruce tips sometimes sufficed. Spruce beer is still brewed by Siletz Brewery on the Oregon coast, and by moonshining loggers and hoedads practicing the gentle art of zymurgy in the foggy evergreen outback of the beer-rich Northwest.

Hops are an acquired taste, but once acquired, much beloved — a “righteous joy,” in the words of the Stone Brewing Company. Botanist and chili-lover Gary Nabhan has told me about the over-the-top chili addicts who pop the supra-hot wild chilipequines as if they were popcorn. Similarly, your true hophead nibbles his herb raw, and can be seen snitching hop flowers on brewery tours. The humulophile’s preferred nectar is a subspecies of English bitter known as India pale ale. During the days of the Raj, British authorities had to ship ale around the cape to the subcontinent for Her Majesty’s troops, and it often went bad in the tropic latitudes. Brewers found they could prolong its life by making strong beer in the city of Burton-on-Trent, whose waters contained a lot of gypsum, like alcohol a natural preservative; and by adding extra hops both in the recipe and after fermentation (“dry-hopping”).

The malt used was not roasted black as for porter or stout, but left pale: hence, India pale ale.

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to a length of twenty-five feet or more, they are grown on rows of poles strung with high wires and twine known as hopbines. The best growing districts, in England, Germany, Washington, and Oregon, produce distinctive types with names like East Kent Golding, Fuggles, Tetnang, Hallertauer, Cascade, and Willamette. English hops are dried in kilns shaped like beaked cones, called oasts. Much of the Cockney population used to evacuate London during late summer, as whole families took a working holiday picking hops in Kent. It was a laborer in the Northwest hopfields, inspired by the successful Campaign for Real Ale in the U.K., who launched the modern microbrewing movement in the U.S.: Bert Grant worked to produce and improve Humulus lupulus for forty years, mostly for large brewers whose anonymous, watery products didn’t deserve him.

As a great authority on the subject, he knew he could make better beer than the gassy yellow norm. So in 1981 he launched Grant’s Ales out of an old opera house, and from this rivulet sprang a river of ales, all flowing into the ocean of microbrews we know today.

Though Bert is gone, the descendants of his well-hopped beers live on, and other brewmasters have taken his favorite herb to heights he never dreamed of. Beers with wonderful names like Hop Pocket Ale, Hop Ottin, and of course Hopalong all turn in formidable ratings as expressed in International Bitterness Units (IBUs).

At the apogee is Stone’s Ruination Ale, weighing in at 100 IBUs: “a liquid poem to the glory of the hop,” reads its bottle. A Bud or a Coors, by contrast, would manage a mere 8 to 10 IBUs. I am lucky to have a couple of fine locals, the Fort George and Wet Dog, that field truly redoubtable IPAs; my own personal favorite, however, for sublimity of both flavor and name, turned up in Austin, Texas: Dennis Hopper Ale. n Renowned lepidopterist and raconteur Bob Pyle, the University’s Schoenfeldt Series visiting writer in 1996, is the author of many books, most recently The Tangled Bank (Oregon State University Press), from which this essay is adapted.

Thanks, Roberto.

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The

Providers

We asked the noted Oregon photographer Steve Hambuchen to wander off into Oregon and Washington and chat with some of the men and women and children who grow and bake and ferment and raise the University’s food, and he did so with his usual grace in the pages that follow.

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Peter and Sheila Kaseberg at their Omega Farms in Ridgefield, Washington, where they grow 15 tons a year of terrific organic Bartlett pears.

“I love teaching people to understand when a pear is ripe and how to enjoy fruit, which is a way to share God’s spirit,” says Peter.

“We can't supply everybody, so we choose people who will appreciate our fruit. It’s fun. As is farming; if you get bored you can always go out and prune some trees.”

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Jeff Rosenblad and his sons Johnny and Sam at their Happy Harvest Farms in Mount Angel, Oregon. Jeff and his boys have grown broccoli, celery, peppers, cauliflower, berries, melons, and more for the University for seven years, in which time their farm has doubled.

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Suz Warjone ‘00 left her corporate desk job eight years ago to be a baker.

“I can’t sit still, I love being exhausted at the end of the day, and baking is so centrally human; when people are sad they bake, when they are happy they bake…”

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Brian Tansy ’85, his wife Monika, and their son Erik in the vineyard at their Olequa Cellars in Ridgefield, Washington. Right after this photograph was taken, Brian and Monika put Erik on the bus for his first day of first grade.

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Mike and Missy Stucky of Millennium Farms in Ridgefield, Washington, with their peppers and their goat Megan. The Stuckys also raise potatoes, apples, pears, herbs, tomatoes, turkeys, chickens, and, unforgettably, emus.

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Dave Flynn and Cory Carman, of Carman Ranch near Wallowa, Oregon, with their children Roan, Ione, and Emmet. The ranch dates back four generations in Cory’s family.

Unlike today’s crowded feed lots where cows consume high-calorie corn, Carman’s herd of 400 Angus and Hereford cattle grazes on grass, period. No other grain, hormones, or antibiotics.

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Hal Medici ’55 (left) and Dick Ferraro ’64 at Medici Vineyards in Newberg, Oregon. Hal was a teacher and engineer, Dick a U.S. Forest Service man, before they saw the light. They and other winemakers all share Hal’s facility to make their elixirs, and fine wines they are; we tested them carefully.

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Shari Raider, founder of Sauvie Island Organics near The Bluff, with her crew.

The company started with one acre; today it farms 18 acres, and provides not only the University but some 30 Portland restaurants with fresh produce.

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Brewmaster Chris Oslin ’81 stirring a batch of Copper Moon ale in his mash tun at the McMenamin Brothers’ Cornelius Pass Roadhouse – the very pub where he had his first “real beer” as a Pilot cross country runner.

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ON NOT EATING In doing without, to see how much we have within.

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step into one of the most celebrated Zen temples in the world, two hours from my home near Kyoto, Japan, and I walk into the luxury of emptiness.

The rock garden in Ryoanji is revered across centuries and continents for what it doesn’t tell you: the fifteen rocks, placed in a seemingly irregular pattern, around a bed of dry raked sand, might represent planets; or (some say) a tigress leading her cubs across a stream; or (I increasingly think) the way they defy every explanation you bring to them. But whatever the pattern means, or doesn’t mean, the rocks reflect back to you what is strongest in your mind. From nowhere can you see all fifteen stones simultaneously. Visitors sit, usually in silence, on a platform over the garden and look out at the space, and it reads them more than the other way round.

Around the corner, a simple stone basin outside the same building has a single character at each of its cardinal points, to make up the message, What you have is all you need. Don’t look elsewhere, it’s telling you; don’t go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Don’t succumb to the lures of greed or desire. Everything you need is right here, right now. God, or truth, or your Buddha nature (everyone has a different way of putting words around a light) is present at every moment; you come upon this not by getting more, moving faster, accumulating fame or money or accomplishments, but by stripping away, cutting back, seeing what’s essential.

The poetry of classic Japan is an exercise in simplicity; a sumi-e brushand-ink drawing holds you because the empty space at the center of the paper is often more charged than the few brush-strokes that impinge on it.

A haiku asks you to complete its meaning, the space around the words again as vast and inviting as the few characters at its core. A Japanese room, traditionally, was empty — save for one small item — so that those coming into it would bring all their attention to that single item and find in it everything they needed.

I moved to Japan from an office in midtown Manhattan — a center of the world, it could seem — in order to learn how much we’re defined by what isn’t there, or at least by what isn’t visible and isn’t spoken. I sensed that all the lines I was accumulating on my resume, the checks I was depositing in the bank, the miles I was gathering on my flights, weren’t taking me closer to who I am, or something changeless, but further away. We’re defined, I thought, less by what we have than by what we don’t need; indeed, if our needs are simple and met, then we’re living in a contentment hard to deface.

I write, of course, as the rare human being who’s never known hunger or homelessness or war; I have the luxury to think about simplifying my life because I‘ve never wanted for the basics. Only those who have satisfied their material needs can begin to see through them and then cut back on them. But the Japanese — like the Desert Fathers, or the Shakers, or the sages of China and India — have always sensed that, given our limited time and energy, we can fill our days and minds with hungers, or fill them, rather, with an acceptance that opens up more space in our lives. It’s surely no coincidence that the most luxurious and expensive hotels these days often volunteer to take away your cell-phones upon check-in, or offer rooms without televisions: being without can, more and more, be the ultimate luxury in glutted lives. For all the things I’ve been lucky enough to have in my life, it’s the things I can do without that have sustained me at the deepest level.

How might this all apply to food?

I love the small portions they serve in Japan, because I don’t feel daunted when they appear, or guilty (and wasteful) when I can finish only half my hamburger. I generally feel better when I eat less than when I stuff myself, a principle I’m painfully reminded of every time I take my mother on a cruise ship and, for the Winter 2012 47

first day at least, rarely leave the round-the-clock buffet. A few years ago, my doctor suggested I cut down on sugar and cholesterol-rich foods; I halved the amount of sugar I put into my drug of choice — strong black tea — and now I wonder why I ever thought I needed more. Sometimes I think I’ve been hypnotized — mostly by myself — to think I need to do more, add and add, buy stuff and assume that bigger is better; sickness or circumstances force me the other way, and I’m slapped awake and wonder why I ever thought five meals a day might be better than two.

Friends of mine who go on fasts always speak of sharper minds, clearer beings, healthier bodies. Others I know deliberately go on walks for five days into the woods or leave their phones and their laptops at home, and the world opens up to them so that the descent of a Steller’s jay through a glade becomes an epiphany. A Japanese monk pours tea into a visitor’s cup, and keeps on pouring and pouring until it overflows. What’s going on, the visitor asks? It’s only when you’re empty, the wise man says, that you can be filled by something new, outside yourself.

In the Benedictine monastery where I regularly stay, the monks put out a hot meal every day at lunchtime; for the rest, they place bowls of soup and bowls of salad and cups of yoghurt and apples and cereal and loaves of bread in a communal fridge. I’ve never been hungry there. If I wanted, of course, I could snack all day; but just being in a place of silence reminds you of how full you feel, how nourished, by not having clutter in your life, and by simply sitting in a room, and watching the light pass across a patch of garden outside.

When, returning to “my” monastery last winter, I found they were putting out hot meals now at dinner-time too, a part of me felt sad.

Fasting, of course, is only a metaphor, a gateway, for some deeper kind of renunciation: I’ve done without words

PAINTING BY BEN SHAHN, “MAN”, 1946 / THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART / ART RESOURCES, NY. ART © ESTATE OF BEN SHAHN / LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK, NY

By Pico Iyer

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Fasting, I came to understand, was akin to the seventh day on which God rested, or the pause in a piece of music that gives the melody that follows extra breadth and resonance.

It’s like taking a deep breath, the better to see what’s around you; it’s only when you step out of your life – or the world – that you can better see what’s within them.

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for days at a time and what I find, when I emerge from silence, is that the sentences that come forth are almost as deep and clear and polished as a monk’s, pebbles made smooth and clean by long immersion in a well a thousand fathoms deep. I’ve gone on long bouts of chastity, and been reminded, as in any monastery, how nothing is more sensual, in terms of sharpening the senses and putting them on alert, than holding back a little.

On the occasions when I live without e-mail, I feel the space within my head growing larger and larger, slower, more spacious, richer; what seemed to be a congested convenience-store has become a great open space, with mystery and depth and light streaming through it.

The ideal of fasting has to do with restoring meaning and deliberation to our acts and gestures, and giving clarity to what we too often take for granted. In Egypt, three years ago, I endured the long, hot midsummer fractiousness and itchiness of Ramadan.

As our boat slipped out of Alexandria just as night was falling, fireworks began to go off across the clustered city, and the exploding lights might have spoken for the sudden release of excitement after long hours of restraint.

Mardi Gras or the classical Feast of Fools are both ways of recognizing this same cycle and need in us for emptiness and repletion.

Fasting, I came to understand, was akin to the seventh day on which God rested, or the pause in a piece of music that gives the melody that follows extra breadth and resonance.

It’s like taking a deep breath, the better to see what’s around you; it’s only when you step out of your life — or the world — that you can better see what’s within them. Pull back your bow, an archer says, and the further you pull back, the stronger and clearer the arrow will fly. Be silent for a while, I tell myself, and the words that ultimately emerge will be truer.

Gandhi once said, I gather, “This is going to be a busy day. So I should not meditate for an hour. But for two instead.” Fasting, he might have been saying, is not a penitential act, similar to forty days in the wilderness or selfdenial; it’s a kind of preparation, for bringing quality instead of quantity to the world, putting a frame around the day’s events. Besides, in doing without food, what we’re really giving up is will-power, or the illusion of control; we’re surrendering to the awareness that something much larger — call it God or Nature or Fate or Time — is wiser than we are; we don’t have to fight for our share, our share will Winter 2012 49

come to us.

In that sense, fasting is a leap of faith, an act of trust; it’s a kind of prayer, which involves laying down what one has and going naked to the door. It says, “Give me this day, or whatever comes of it, and I will accept it and find in it my sustenance.” It is the reason Emerson, in his essay called “Self-Reliance,” wrote, “Who has more obedience than I masters me.”

And it’s the reason that Moslems, Christians, so many give up food at times; it’s a Sabbath of the senses, and so an act of love. I’ll seek for nothing, but be found, you’re saying. I won’t bother about my welfare, but will trust that what comes to me is sufficient.

Those without enough food in their lives need not fast (though I’ve seen villagers in Ethiopia, barely able to feed themselves, go for long stretches without food so as to honor the holy caves and churches they walk for days to visit); fasting has meaning only if it’s voluntary, and there’s an alternative.

Fasting itself, if it becomes an empty rite or form of immoderation, can be as bad as gluttony: as Leonard Cohen sings, in one of his typically supple investigations of desire, “I need so much to have nothing to touch/I’ve always been greedy that way.” Fasting asks us why we’re doing without — for ourselves or for someone else? When I see the excruciatingly thin fashion victims around me in Japan (as in California), I wonder if they’re denying themselves as a form of vanity, rather than of real compassion. Fasting, after all, is not about how you look to the world; it’s about how you look at the world, and how you make space in your life for the many things that will always be beyond you. It’s a clearing out of an overfull fridge so you can see what remains and even cherish it. “None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life,” writes Emerson’s friend Thoreau, in the “Economy” section of Walden, “but from the vantage-ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.” In doing without, we see how much we have within. A child steps away from his father and finds that, if the father has been strong and selfless enough, he, in his infancy, has everything he needs. Give us this day our daily bread, we sometimes say, and, when we’re at our freest and most generous, we add, and let us give it back, so that Lent can lead to Resurrection. n Pico Iyer, the University’s visiting writer in 2010, is the author of many books, most recently The Man Within My Head, about the great English writer Graham Greene.

PAINTING BY JACOB LAWRENCE, “THEY WERE VERY POOR”, 1940-41 / THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART / ART RESOURCE, NY.

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ROADIE A chat with the cheerful and eloquent Matt Domingo ’02, founder of Farm to Fork Events.

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rowing up, my family spent our money on two things,” says Matt Domingo. “Traveling to soccer tournaments, and eating. Can you imagine how much food four boys playing soccer ate? It wasn’t just about getting enough calories, though. Food was part of our family identity. On my dad’s side of the family we are Pacific Islanders, and all the family gatherings on that side were centered around feasts.

Both my parents are great cooks, my grandparents were great cooks. We’re all in love with good food. We ate together to be together. It’s always been this way. My grandpa would come over with a cooler of some crazy protein — maybe half a dozen porterhouse steaks or live Alaskan king crabs or a whole salmon. He’d just drop it off and say this is for those boys. That was one of the ways he showed his love. And my parents used to pack all four of us boys up and go to Hog Island oyster farm north of San Francisco. We’d order several dozen oysters and sit there next to the water eating them fresh...sooo good...

“It kept going in college. We all went to the University, and when I lived in Haggerty Hall my brothers would come over to cook leg of lamb, sea bass, stuffed pork loin. Not your typical dorm food, right?

“The original intention of Farm to Fork Event Company was to be part of the marketing and public relations wing of Oregon’s local food movement.

We help local, small-scale, family farmers tell their stories and we help re-connect guests to farmland and farmers. These farmers, growers, winemakers are my heroes. Their stories and passion is what moves me. They stake their livelihoods on producing food that is good for people, that improves the soil. They talk about farming in almost revolutionary terms.

They say farming is a way to solve some of our biggest health and environmental problems, a way to strengthen our communities, to heal ourselves, to live right. Take, for example, Joe and Karen Schueller, who owns Rain Shadow El Rancho. Theirs is one of only a few USDA-inspected poultry plants in Oregon. They raise chickens, turkeys, and buffalo. Beautiful buffalo meat. I remember Joe talking during one of our dinners about his long personal journey, basically back to his boyhood, farming in Iowa. He talked about the struggles setting up his operation, finding the right property, getting state and USDA inspections, dealing with tiny profit margins and the constant worry about his animals and his property — and then he said he was amazed and delighted to be a farmer. Why? Because he loves growing good, clean, fair-priced food for people. He wouldn’t trade it for anything, and he was proud to be a part of the event.

“Each Farm to Fork event is a 72hour push of absolute crazy intense work. It’s a full day of travel, a full day of set-up, then hosting, schmoozing, entertaining, and cleanup. Even though it’s a bear, I enjoy it. I get to create my own reality. I like food and I like being on the road and I like eating with friends. I guess I’m a foodie roadie. I enjoy the manual labor and I like doing something that has creativity and theater involved. Basically, I like to entertain people. I like to be in the mix. I like to be in front of an audience. And to be outside in amazing places with amazing people.

“Each dinner has five acts: Welcome, Small Plate, Small Plate, Main Dish, Dessert. The goal is to create an experience for our guests, and yes, there’s a certain look and feel to the event.

Before each dinner, I send a letter to Winter 2012 51

staff describing the food we’re serving, why we’re serving it, why this particular farm is special, who some of our guests will be. I remind them to trim their nails, take off rings, wear close-toed shoes, carpool. I also let them know that sunglasses are totally acceptable and highly recommended.

All of this is a way to honor and celebrate the land, the farmers, and the purity of the food; and there’s an element of theater to what we do. Our vibe is sort of old-school vintage rustic shabby chic meets urban — but we also pore over fonts and logo placement and every tiny detail on the menu.

“These events are about so much more than food. At a private dinner in the Gorge, I worked with Dominio IV winery. Their wines are amazing, and they practice biodynamic agriculture. We poured a syrah, pinot noir, tempranillo, and viognier — all of which were made with grapes sourced from the Columbia Gorge and other select regions in Oregon. All of our produce came from local farms. And the coolest part of the event was the fisherman we invited named Doug Rigdon. Doug supplied the fish. I didn’t know what to expect from Doug, but when he got up to tell everyone about the fish they were eating, he blew everyone away. His speech exceeded all expectations. He told us about his business, Wild Columbia Salmon, which he started after leaving the Department of the Interior to find a way to support rather than hinder his community. He sources these amazingly beautiful fish — steelhead, coho, tyee — from native fishermen, and then sells them to restaurants and events like mine. But the thing that surprised me is that these fish are caught using the traditional long wooden dip nets on the Klickitat River.

Isn’t that the coolest thing you’ve

PAINTING BY DAVID EMIL JOSEPH DE NOTRE, “STILL LIFE WITH STRAWBERRIES, CARROTS, AND CABBAGE”, CA. 19THC / THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.

By Isaac Vanderburg ’02

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Photographs from a Farm to Fork Event at Kiyokawa Orchards in Parkdale, Oregon, on the northeast shoulder of Mount Hood – or Wy’east, as the first people ventures, see farmtoforkevents.com. Photos by Jen Jones (www.jentakespictures.com) and Bryan Mikota (www.mikotaphotography.com)

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there called it, before an English navy lieutenant named William Broughton named it for an English admiral in 1792. For more on Matt Domingo’s food ad-

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ever heard? And picture this, the event was at the Columbia Gorge Interpretive Center, and behind Doug as he spoke was a replica of the rocks on the Klickitat where they dip net, complete with a First Peoples fisherman at the top, holding a dip net. So as he explained how the salmon were caught, he could point up behind him and say, ‘like that.’ Perfect.

“He talked about the Yakama people and what the river and the salmon mean to all the Columbia River tribes.

He talked about his people’s history on the Columbia, and the history of the salmon, and about how the efforts to restore salmon to the river are helping.

He is hopeful. ‘By having a dinner this way, featuring salmon caught this way, you honor me and my people, you honor salmon,’ he said. A speech like that drives home the whole idea of Farm to Fork: reconnecting people to the food on their plate, reminding them that food comes from a place, food has a powerful story.

“Sure, there are a lot of dirty dishes after each event. It’s always terrible.

It’s the worst part about what we do.

After our first dinner, we filled up a truck, a station wagon, and a jeep hauling dishes to my mother in law’s house, where we borrowed her dishwasher and it took us 24 hours to wash everything. Right then we decided we needed a trailer and we got a sponsored one from the Party Place in Medford, Oregon. They let us use their fantastic dishwashing facility and equipment after our events. After every event we still spend five hours doing dishes, but it’s a lot better than 24 hours.

“And sure there are snafus. We approached one of our host poultry farms once and offered an experiment; if they would raise a new product, we’d buy it. They chose ducks. But raising is extremely labor-intensive, and getting them ready for the table is a real hassle. So the farm decided not to raise ducks again — although we did buy those ducks and seared them for 120 people on our cast-iron griddles.

Delicious. Another time we found the most beautiful buffalo shoulder from Full Circle ranch. Our plan was for the chef to braise it, let it sit in its juices overnight, and then bring it back up to temperature right before serving.

Letting it slow-cook breaks down all that connective tissue into pure unreal flavor. Unfortunately, for that event, the chef decided to cure and cold smoke it, almost in the style of pastrami. Smoking this particular cut of meat can turn it tough as a tire if you do it wrong. The chef did it wrong.

He didn’t smoke it hot enough. I re-

alized what happened right before the dinner was supposed to start, and spent the next half hour salvaging the good pieces of meat. In the end we could only serve half of it. Some people got really small portions or big gristly bites. It was heartbreaking.

It’s the single worst food incident we’ve ever had.

“One of the things that drives me nuts is what I call ‘local washing.’ A restaurant buys 20 pounds of beets from a store and 5 pounds from a local farmer, mixes them together, and markets a new “farm-fresh salad.” The restaurant gets to say they’re supporting such-and-such local farm, which is great marketing for them. But the farm only sold 5 pound of beets. There’s a lot of this kind of thing, and it makes me angry. It’s one reason why some people think the eat-local movement is elitist: a $15 hamburger next to a ‘local-washed’ salad. Ridiculous. That’s not eating local. Eating and cooking local means working with the seasons, tailoring your menu to produce as it arrives, supporting local businesses, farms, cheesemakers, brewers. Keeping your dollars local. You might pay a little extra up front, but there are costs to non-local food, too, of course — environmental damage, health damage for you and those you love, economic damage to our communities, our moral and spiritual and cultural relationships. Those costs are exorbitantly high, insanely high. Why should we continue to pay those costs?

“I challenge anyone who believes that local food is elitist to meet a local farmer in his or her community. Ask the farmer about his work, meet her family, get to know them. Watch how they treat the food we eat. Then tell me, if you can, that the local food movement is elitist. You’ll see that the price they charge for their product is more than fair.

“The future? I hope to grow a business that works for the greater good.

Like Bob’s Red Mill — that guy is a saint. He’s using his business for good.

I’d like to try to do good, make a difference, use the influence of our business to move us all towards something more healthy and sustainable.

Essentially we want to put money back into local communities, and we’re trying to create new income streams for local family farms and craft wineries. Essentially we’re trying to rebuild a local food infrastructure. We’re trying to figure out what role the government should play, what a healthy food system should look like, how we can recreate all those things, how we set ourselves and our kids up for the future. Things are broken right now in Winter 2012 55

the food world — subsidies, the farm bill, the commodification of food, rather than the genuine appreciation of it, where it came from, who grew it, the local work of it.

“One Farm to Fork dinner story?

There’s an orchard along the Hood River Valley fruit loop that I had admired for years called Kiokawa Family Orchards. They have more than 80 varieties of Heirloom apples, and I always wanted to do an event there.

We finally did. At the event, Randy Kiokawa told everyone about his family and their orchard. His greatgrandfather left Japan in 1906 to work on the railroad here. After five years he started an orchard, and grew it slowly by buying up small plots of adjacent land, one by one, and planting more trees. During the Second World War his family was rounded up and placed in the internment camps, and Randy spoke eloquently of his family returning to the orchard afterwards. In the 1980s prices from large packing plants fell, farms began failing, and their orchard was in trouble.

Randy came home to try to save the farm. He decided to sell apples right off the orchard, he planted more varieties, he added pear trees, he pruned trees lower so people could reach and pick the fruit themselves. It worked — it beyond worked, and Randy had saved his family’s legacy and history, really. “Perfect story to begin the meal.

“For the first small plate we served beet-pickled apples from the orchard, heirloom tomatoes, smoked and poached Oregon albacore tuna, a great wine. Delicious. But as this is being served a dark cloud forms over Mount Hood. Second small plate: beet and apple salad with a gorgeous yogurt sauce, jalapeno jam, hummus and crostini. The cloud descends the mountain and heads right for us. Main course: roast leg of lamb, braised lamb shoulder, seared lamb loin, with preserved lemon and salsa verde. The cloud looms closer. As we started serving dessert the rain hits lightly, but somehow, someway, it doesn’t get heavy. Randy stands up and says ‘Enjoy the rain! We live in Oregon!’

Everyone was laughing. I got up to speak a minute later and there’s a tremendous lightning flash and thunderclap. People cheered. Now that was a great dinner...” n Isaac Vanderburg ’02 is a director of the Alaska Small Business Development Center in Anchorage; he and Matt Domingo were Pilot soccer teammates, and Isaac and his marital teammate Kelly DuFort ’00 are the new parents of Margo Jane ’34.

PAINTING BY MANUEL LOPEZ VILLASENSOR, “EGGS””, CA. 20THC / THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.

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On Eating Healthy

Beef kidney stew (Bubriga)

Deep fried pastry strips (Krostule)

By Donald Erceg

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hen I visited Croatia recently with my son and nephew, it was great to see our relatives still making their own wine from grapevines that my dad planted there almost a hundred years ago. They also served us homemade cheese, fresh-baked hearth bread, ušipaka (Croatian doughnuts) and sarma (stuffed cabbage rolls).

For centuries, each household in Imotski depended on its own foodmaking and preserving skills to survive. When our mom and dad set up household on Woolsey Street, a mile north of the University of Portland, they did what came naturally, raising cows for milk and cheese, chickens and rabbits for meat, vegetable gardens, and fruit trees.

In 1956 an international group of scientists studied the diets and health of seven countries and concluded that the world’s healthiest diet was to be found on the Greek island of Crete, where heart ailments were almost unheard of and cancer rates were low.

The similarity of the food we ate when we were growing up bore a striking resemblance to the Crete diet: usually small portions of meat with a weekly chicken or rabbit from our coop and cages, lots of olive oil, fresh garden vegetables, wild greens, home-made sauerkraut, legumes, fresh fish or dried cod on Fridays, fresh or home-canned fruit, nuts and homemade bread.

Thanks to mom and dad and the abundance of nature itself, the family ate an incredibly healthy diet even with little or no money in the middle of the Depression.

Mom’s cooking represented the distillation of survival skills honed by ` in the generations of Ercegs and Perics mean, rocky soils of the Croatian and Bosnian outback. Life was not easy there, but people learned to live off the land and how to grow food and cook those foods in a way that provided nourishment for both body and soul. n Donald Erceg is the author of Ruža Peric` Erceg, a history of his Croatian immigrant family from which this text, the recipes and photos are taken; the Ercegs sent two children and two brothers-in-law to the University, and are the creators of the Erceg Family Scholarship on The Bluff.

*

RECIPE RECIPE 1 tsp. sugar 3 beef kidneys 1 large yellow (about 2½ lbs.) onion 3 15 oz. cans of 1½ tsp. sherry tomato sauce vinegar (unsalted) 2 cloves garlic 3 c. water 1 tsp. salt 2 large potatoes 1 bay leaf 1½ tbs. apple cider pinch of vinegar cayenne pepper 1 tsp. dry basil 1 tbs. olive oil Trim and discard all the white core out of the kidneys and cut into bite-size pieces.

Place in large sauce pan with the 3 cups water and cider vinegar. Bring to boil and simmer for 30-40 minutes (this stage does not smell wonderful).

Drain. Place olive oil and chopped onion in sauce pan and cook onion until translucent. Add fine diced garlic and cook one minute more. Add tomato sauce, kidneys, potatoes, bay leaf, basil, sugar, sherry vinegar, cay-enne. Bring to boil and lower to simmer. Simmer for 1½ hours stirring frequently to prevent burning. If sauce gets too thick, add quarter cup of stock (or water) or more as needed. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Serve with rustic bread and a good red wine.

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3 3 3 ½ ½ 3+

eggs tablespoons olive oil tablespoons brandy or sherry cup sugar tsp salt cups flour

Beat the eggs well. Add the oil, brandy or sherry, sugar and salt. Mix well. Add enough of the flour to make a firm dough.

Knead well.

When glassy and smooth, roll the dough out to ¼ inch thickness on a well floured counter or pastry board. With a knife or pastry wheel cut into strips.

Fry strips in hot oil (350 degrees) until golden brown. Drain on paper towels and dust with confectioner’s sugar while still warm.

*Mom’s hand-written recipe on the top is her endearing mix of Croatian and English.

Fritule (another name for Krostule) Pola Kop Sugar – half cup sugar 3 jaja – 3 eggs 3 Kasike ojel – 3 spoons oil malo Soli – a little salt malo Rakije – a little whiskey Brasno neke Stoji – flour let it stand neke Stoji 30 minuta – let it stand 30 minutes

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Croatian doughnuts (Ušipaka)

Stuffed cabbage rolls (Sarma)

Nut-filled sweet bread (Polatica)

**

RECIPE 4 c.

4 tsp. ½ c.

1 tsp.

5-6 1 c.

all purpose white flour baking powder sugar salt Eggs lightly beaten warm water (or milk for a richer taste) 1 c. white raisins (optional)—soak in water for half hour beforehand ¼ c. Sherry or Brandy Mazola Oil for deep frying (2½” deep)

Blend flour, baking powder,sugar and salt.

Add eggs, milk, sherry and raisins (if using) and stir (like biscuits, they should not be over stirred). Heat oil to 375°- 400° degrees.

Add tablespoon of batter at a time. Cook about 6 at time for 3 minutes and then turn over and cook for another 3-4 minutes until golden. Using a slotted spoon, drain on paper towel and dust with confectioner’s sugar (granulated sugar is fine also). For variation, try adding lemon zest or a teaspoon of vanilla.

**Polatica Volnac 4 Cop – walnuts 4 cups Honi Pola Cop – honey half cup Sugar Pola Cop – sugar half cup milk 1 Cop – milk one cup 3 jaja – 3 eggs

Note: There are some differences between the hand-written and the printed recipes.

RECIPE 1 head cabbage 1 tbs paprika 1 c. uncooked long grain rice ½ lb ground beef 2 cloves garlic diced 1 cup tomato juice ½ lb ground pork 1 onion finely diced

1 tsp salt ½ lb ground or diced ham 1 egg, lightly beaten 1 tsp freshly ground pepper 1 slice bacon, diced 1 lb sauerkraut

Fry the bacon. Add onion and sautée for five minutes. Drain excess fat and allow to cool.

Add ground beef, ground pork, diced ham, rice, egg, paprika, garlic, salt and pepper and mix well. Place head of cabbage in large soup pot and cover with water. Bring to simmer on stove and, using tongs, separate the leaves as they soften and cut from stem with a knife, set aside to cool. Continue until all leaves are removed from the head. Using your hand, form a small football shaped piece of meat mixture and roll into the cabbage leaf, tucking the edges in to hold the roll together.

Spread the sauerkraut on the bottom of a large sauce pan or wok. Layer cabbage rolls on top of the sauerkraut., seam side down. Pour tomato juice over the rolls and add enough water to cover. Simmer for about three hours on top the stove, adding more water as needed.

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RECIPE 4 c. all purpose white flour 4 eggs ½ c. sugar 2 oz. or 2 pkg. active dry yeast 1 c. milk ½ tsp. salt

FILLING 1 lb. walnuts ½ c. honey ½ c. sugar 1 c. milk 3 eggs

In a saucepan, scald the milk until bubbles form around the edge of the pan. Add butter.

Remove from heat and cool until lukewarm.

Add yeast and set aside for five minutes.

Beat the eggs with the sugar for two minutes. Add the rest if the ingredients and mix. On a floured surface, knead dough until smooth and elastic (5-8 minutes) adding enough flour to keep it from being sticky.

Form dough into ball and place into an oiled bowl, cover and let rise until doubled in size (1-2 hours).

While dough is rising, make filling. Scald milk for filling. Mix walnuts into milk. Blend in sugar and milk. Add beaten eggs one at a time and let cool.

Roll dough out on floured, clean cloth or baking sheet, spread filling over the dough, and roll up using the cloth or baking sheet.

Place onto greased baking pan and let rise again. Then bake @ 325° for one hour.

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HOW TO BRINE AN ELK STEAK Why do we talk about food so much these days? What are we really talking about?

By Ana Maria Spagna ast spring I took a road trip. I traveled from my home in the Pacific Northwest to Death Valley hoping to meet with the Timbisha Shoshone people, a small tribe that has reclaimed a sliver of their ancestral homeland in a place of seeming scarcity, and along the way I ended up in Marin County.

Marin County, like many fertile nooks in the region once dubbed Ecotopia, is devoted to food. Land set aside in agricultural trusts supports local dairies, who support local cheese makers, who support local restaurants that serve local wine and organic vegetables. All of it is admirable: it’s good for the land, good for the people who own the land and work the land, and good, too, for the people who sell the food, buy the food, eat the food.

I’m telling you: landing in Marin was like landing in Eden, only with no fruit forbidden. When I drove down the curvy redwood-lined road, headed for Death Valley, I left behind pungent chevre and fresh oysters the size of gorilla toes.

Oh, you can try to eat healthy on the road. You can carry a bag of almonds and when you tire of those, you can stare bleary-eyed at the poster on the fast food wall that lists all the variables to consider in making your choice: sodium, fiber, protein, calories, fat, cholesterol. You can get a veggie burger at Burger King, fish at Wendy’s, a personal pizza at Subway, thick and spongy and white, which is exactly how you feel after seventeen hours in a seatbelt. But at some point, it all seems futile.

PHOTO BY SUSANNA FIERAMOSCA NARANJO / GETTY IMAGES

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So you get back in your ancient Buick and scan the radio from preachers to public radio, and stumble, inevitably, on a cooking program. Next thing you know, you’re taking mental notes on how to brine an elk steak, and thinking about your mother, and well, that’s when things begin to unravel.

On Monday mornings my mother volunteers at the pantry, which is what she calls the food bank at the local parish, Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

Maybe they do not call it a bank because they don’t want to call attention to the fact that the church building looks so much like a bank. Maybe a bank is for saving up, for hoarding, while the pantry is for giving away.

Or maybe it’s just that pantry is a more gentle homey term with warm kitchen connotations. Mom has gone to the pantry every Monday since she retired from teaching a decade ago except for the year when she was in and out of the hospital with cancer. As soon as she was on her feet, she was back at it.

It’s the same drill every Monday:

before she goes to the pantry, she drives to a bakery downtown to collect the day-olds in a Tupperware, and then to Starbucks for the same, and finally to a funky new grocery store that caters to individual shoppers, older people, and sells items in plastic wrap — one green pepper and one red one, say, or two zucchinis or sometimes premade meals, small-sized — where she picks up everything nearing expiration. Then she takes it all to the pantry, to supplement the staples already stored there, and she spends the morning stocking paper bags with peanut butter and tuna, loaves of bread, fruit and vegetables, and an occasional pastry, and passes them out to those who wait in line each day, hungry.

Demand at food banks has risen exponentially in recent years, and there is no end in sight. During the week, Mom and her friends shop for the pantry with coupons they clip from the Sunday paper. They watch for deals and drive around town to stock up on staples at the maximum allowable purchase — ten bags of poPortland 60

tatoes for a buck, say — or sometimes, on the best days, they use double coupons and walk away with a carload of food and a refund. Each year I send her fifty bucks to spend at the pantry, a modest gift, nearly feeble, and she stretches that fifty thin as gauze. She can feed several families for the cost of a round of drinks in the city. It’s her version of loaves and fishes, and it leaves me in awe.

Here’s the problem: Mom would look askance at Marin. Those cheeses probably cost a pretty penny, she might say. And she’d be right. I wouldn’t dare tell her how one day at the grocery store I bought four potatoes, two apples, and a chocolate bar, and my twenty didn’t cover the cost.

The question that plagues me as I drive east through blooming almond groves, the one so obvious that it almost always goes unspoken is this: how can you justify paying so much to eat right when so many can’t afford to eat at all? And quick on its heels comes the rebuttal: But what are the costs of not eating right, of abusing the land and our bodies? And why do we al-

PHOTO BY AARON HUEY / NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC / GETTY IMAGES

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ways talk about costs anyway, talk as though the earth itself is a bank and not a pantry?

Food talk is everywhere. Click through the channels, surf the Internet, flip through a magazine at the doctor’s office and you’ll find recipes for lowfat fettuccine, color photos of posolewith-cilantro, growing tips for asparagus. There’s food minutia on The Today Show, in the local newspaper. Why? Is it pure entertainment? Or is there something missing in our lives, a void we try to fill with food or by denying ourselves food? Or is food the one thing that we can control in a world hurtling toward chaos? We can’t solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, say, but we can choose to be vegan or glutenfree. There are plenty of diagnoses and plenty of diets. There are big ideas and big words: egalitarianism vs. localism, fairness vs. righteousness, psychology vs. physiology. Mostly there is talk.

On the way to Death Valley, I switch the radio off and continue in silence: crawling through notches in grey granite mountains, tire tracks in slush swerving around wind-blown pine limbs, then pines giving way to juniper giving way to Joshua trees, until nothing is left but cloud shadows on alluvial fans.

Before heading into the park, I stop at a Nevada mini-mart and scour the shelves for something, anything, healthy to eat, but after a few minutes I give up. Label-reading at a gas station with the smell of stale cigarettes in the air and the jangle of slot machines in the background seems somehow wrong. Pretentious. So I grab Fritos and bean dip and head for camp. When I was a kid if I saw a person sitting alone in a restaurant, I would weep.

Nothing seemed sadder. Now I sit alone on hot sand by my tent, watching sunset illuminate lime-green mesquite blossoms, scraping the hot metal can with the Frito edge, and thinking about the Timbisha Shoshone.

The original inhabitants of Death Valley survived on pinion nuts and mesquite beans, bighorn sheep and quail. They focused no less on food than we do, but they were closer to it.

They watched these blossoms migrate from desert to mountains, and come fall, they followed the harvest the other way. They ground the seeds and saved the paste and remembered the old ways; they do it still. Traditional Ecological Knowledge, the anthropologists call it, TEK. Maybe that’s what we crave, not entertainment or control or even righteousness. Maybe we just want to be closer to the source.

After dinner, I walk a windblown ridge, feeling not quite hungry but not quite right, and think about the people who’ll line up in the morning at the pantry and the dairy farmers who’ll wake at dawn and how we’re all connected, in the end, by long freeway miles and radio airwaves, by rainfall and drought and elected leaders. In the fading light, the desert landscape appears stark and empty, as though it could not possibly produce enough food to go around.

But it did. For centuries, it did.

It’s possible that I’ve misunderstood the allure of cooking shows. Maybe the focus on food is not self-serving, but the opposite, a focus on what we can most easily share. Which brings me to the elk steak. Which I got wrong.

This steak — the kind of clean lean red meat that would cost a small fortune at Whole Foods — was a gift to us or more specifically to Laurie, my partner, who maintains a historic apple orchard. Each winter, around the full moon of February, a herd of elk visits the orchard to stand on the hard crust of snow and eat bark off the trees.

They are lovely animals, yes, regal, majestic even, but Laurie, on balance, cares more about the trees. She’s eager for local hunters to get lucky, but they rarely do since hunting season is November, not February, and the elk

are wily besides.

One day when we stopped to pick up milk from neighbors who keep a cow, there it was, a single steak wrapped in butcher paper and labeled with a Sharpie: “Apple-fed. Merry Christmas.”

We took it home and fried it in a pan, and even though it was the best Christmas gift Laurie received, even though it was the best meat I’ve ever had in my life, we could have done better. Pan fried? Really? When, on the road to Death Valley, I heard about that brine on the radio, I knew: that would’ve been the way. That slow brine would’ve been an act of honor, Winter 2012 61

of gratitude: for our hunter-neighbor, for the elk, for the apple trees that fed them.

In the morning, under a salt cedar tree, I listen to Timbisha elders talk about the mesquite beans and pinions, about TEK, which seems to them an acronym for the obvious; of course food and land and home are connected.

Duh! Then they talk about survival, how the miners and government tried for decades to run them off, and how troubles remain: the pressures of gaming, corruption in the BIA, unemployment which runs as high, at times, as eighty to ninety percent.

Sometimes it must seem like the situation cannot possibly improve. Do they ever feel like giving up?

“It’s easy to feel like giving up,” one elder says, “but it is very hard to give up.”

Sand blows against trailer homes.

Mourning doves call.

As noon approaches, grandchildren appear and serve us bologna sandwiches with potato chips, and cold water in plastic cups. The first bite transports me instantly to the days when I’d sit at a picnic table with a Scooby Doo lunchbox, or maybe the Flintstones, days when bologna was healthy for kids, like liverwurst and chocolate milk. Times have changed, and we know better, or think we do.

We want to make right what’s gone wrong. But it’s complicated. It’s not just what you eat, but how. Not just what you grow or hunt or choose to buy, but what you share. We are in this together, and we can do better.

There are still many miles left, for me, on this trip. Three more Buick breakdowns. Several more snowy passes. There will be more veggie burgers and French fries, smushy store-bought apples, and once, just once, a can of Red Bull. Later at home, we’ll return to doing the best we can. We’ll plant Swiss chard and tomatoes, buy grassfed beef from a friend and whole-grain bread from the local bakery. We’ll bring the best stuff to potlucks or save it for company. And when we have extra money, we will send it to Mom for the pantry.

Meanwhile, at the table under the salt cedar, I take one last bite of bread crust and drain the last of my water, and thank my hosts.

No food, the entire trip, will have been so nourishing. n Ana Maria Spagna is a writer in Stehekin, Washington; her most recent book is the terrific Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness. See anamariaspagna.com.

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It is impossible to have the grace to forgive. And yet...

By Joan Sauro, C.S.J.

One of a series of 26 ads created by Container Corporation of America from 1950 to 1975.

A different artist interpreted each ad on the theme “Great Ideas of Western Man”.

t is the rite of passage for every high school senior in our small town to head to the Green Gate Inn after the prom. Left behind is the school auditorium wonderland with its paper carnations and swing band and flash bulbs and the fervent signing of memory books.

It is springtime, the greening of the year, and I am in a green gown, sitting in the back seat of a car with my date, who has his arm slung across the top of the seat and is thinking about lowering his hand down to my shoulder in its green faille gown, which is, of course, another rite of passage, all connected to the green gate through which we will walk to the Inn, and like adults do, sit in the bar for a drink.

Then it’s back out through the green gate and into the car and again the date’s arm creeping across the seat because time is running out.

But my gown gets whiter and whiter, and the date’s hand does not descend, and soon my gown adds a conservative collar and long sleeves buttoned at the wrist, because I have left the green gate swinging and am heading through a convent gate, and the white prom gown becomes my nun’s bridal gown, and the date’s hand lies forever on the back seat of the car, and years later the Green Gate Inn changes to the French Kiss Inn, but not for us, on the night of the Senior Prom there is no kiss, French or otherwise.

Soon it is summer and I am walking with a priest across the parched dry late summer grounds of the school. We have never walked side by side before and never will again. This is not a summer stroll, although the priest is emoting about seasonal nothings, the air, the sky, the changing leaves, but no word about the nearby convent and the sisters inside whom I love and whose company I must soon leave.

Nor is he talking about the school we have just passed, and my teaching there, where he is in charge. On the contrary, he has informed my religious superior that I must leave, much to my unsuspecting self. He reports challenges to his authority during facWinter 2012 63

ulty meetings and the teaching of subversion like Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and the Greek play Antigone. Do already-rebellious teenagers need to see the young Antigone defy the law and bury her brother, to hear her proclaim, I will obey God and not man?

Is it any wonder that some students in my class think it just fine to steal Christmas lights off the homes of the rich to decorate the homes of the poor?

And so I am dismissed. I am to leave and say nothing about the matter to the priest whose red tight face is cracking like a late-summer tomato.

I am to get a move on, which I do, leaving innocence behind, not in the back seat of a car, but on the burnt summer grounds of the Catholic school.

A few years later the convent closes, the school hangs on for dear life, the priest elopes with an airline stewardess, and I am left wondering how to forgive the person who steals your innocence.

Many years later a new priest invites me back to be writer-in-residence at the school, which by this time has shrunk to elementary size. The new priest knows nothing of my history, nor do the children who write poems as if there is no tomorrow, who leap out of their seats waving their poems in my face with oooo, oooo, oooo, meaning call on me!, which of course I do, ooo, ooo, ooo. And thus it happens that working with children cleanses the soul, as the subversive author of The Idiot once noted.

After school, I walk the May path to the convent, let myself in, visit the empty rooms. In the barren chapel I touch the walls embedded with the prayers and hymns of a thousand sisters. I bow to where the Eucharist was. From the community room comes the familiar Rachmaninoff, blessing every room in the house and every memory. This is how to forgive, I tell myself, this is how to forgive, by walking the same ground in a new season. n Joan Sauro of the Sisters of Saint Joseph is a writer and teacher in Syracuse, New York.

ILLUSTRATION BY BEN SHAHN, 1968 / SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM / ART RESOURCE, NY.

ThisIs HowTo Forgive

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ART © ESTATE OF BEN SHAHN / LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK, NY

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THE TOP OF THE CONTINENT A wander through the wild state that has sent thousands of students to The Bluff.

By Edward Hoagland

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s a native New Yorker, thirty years ago, it was my pleasure and my passion to embark for Alaska periodically — that top hat of the continent. In Anchorage, “the closest city to Alaska,” as locals like to put it, once we passengers had debarked past the polar bear, Dall sheep, and caribou situated in glass cases to welcome us to the 49th State, the baggage carousel presented a headlong tumult of wooden crates, steamer trunks, huge taped cardboard boxes, tarpaulin sacks, and backpacks, snow gear, tents, stoves, and climbing equipment for “assaults” on Mount McKinley or the like that some had flown in for, as if life were not adventure enough already. The military contingent retrieved their troop-ship stuff, and civilian berserkers or trophy hunters and gun nuts had rifles in canvas cases to collect, and air mattresses, sleeping bags, helicopter parts in cartons. Some of us were here to try solving our problems; others probably to complicate them.

Alaska, twice as big as Texas, had only 420,000 people living in it thirty years ago, half of them around Anchorage, which the rest of the state considered “Los Anchorage,” with its wide streets, shopping malls and negotiable climate, drier than Juneau’s, warmer than Fairbanks. On an Anchorage barstool you’d meet a thirty-something fellow who has flown in from Bangkok with a money belt full of gemstones to sell in the gold, gun, fur, and ivory stores on Fourth Avenue. Another guy has burned out as a social worker in Fort Yukon, he tells us, because he was in charge of child welfare and family relations, and when children were beaten up by drunken parents he got accused of racism if he tried to intercede. Proposing to remove an abused child to foster care brought the old charge of deracination, cultural imperialism, when kids were shipped to distant boarding schools to remove “the Indian” from them—and threats by the father to shoot him in the middle of the night.

The Kuskokwim, eight hundred and fifty miles long, heads on the northern slopes of the Mount McKinley massif in Denali National Park and flows into Kuskokwim Bay on the Bering Sea, but during that shorter span than the Yukon’s eighteen-hundred-mileplus course, roughly parallels a good deal of the Yukon. And both rivers had friction points where the coastal Eskimos were prevented by the interior Indians from penetrating further inland. The salmon runs were glorious most of the way up, and elders could negotiate a balance of interests, but hothead battles did occur. Red Devil — although a white town with a youngish population of gold prospectors and the like — lay across the river from Crooked Creek and Sleetmute, two native settlements where historically the two cultures, upriver Athapascan and downriver Yupik, had rubbed shoulders and either traded or clashed.

The Yupik, a separate linguistic group of Eskimos from the Inupiat or Inuit of arctic Alaska and Canada, were sometimes called “Asiatic Eskimos” by early anthropologists because their real stronghold was over across the Bering Sea in Siberia; but the Yukon Indians on occasion battled with the Inupiat, too, north, across the Brooks Range, about salmon streams or caribou plateaus, as well.

White towns on these crosswise rivers in Alaska, like the Yukon and Kuskokwim, tend to be on the south bank, with a northern exposure, like Red Devil was, whereas the ancient Indian settlements like Crooked Creek were located facing south, for maximum winter sunshine, as well as on a bend where the king and chum salmons could be netted more efficiently.

Crooked Creek’s hundred-and-ten reserved and tetchy Yupik citizenry lived in chinked log cabins (not bargedin, white man’s prefabs and trailers), in spread-out fashion on a bench at the Great Bend of the Kuskokwim, where its namesake tributary flowed in, with gold-bearing mountains in Portland 64

relief on the northern skyline. Fish traps at the river’s elbow had fed innumerable dog teams during the successive minor rushes, auxiliary to those occurring more famously on the Yukon around the same period.

I met George Willis, 78, who built his barrel-stove-warmed cabin in 1945 after his discharge from the Second World War. “Georgetown,” a miners’ homesite at the mouth of the George River, was named for him. His Uncle Oswald had been prospecting on the upper Kuskokwim since migrating into the country from the Nome gold rush, as that flagged out in 1906, and had discovered some of the first cinnabar here. Already in Nome at fourteen, Oswald had been digging at a likely placer bench, but stopped a few feet higher in the sand than the strike was — the next guy got the gold. Also, he was shot there by an “outlaw,” but once he was well, “got his man.” With a pistol in his hand, old Oswald could throw a tin can in the air “and keep her a-bouncin’.” George himself had first arrived in Alaska in 1941 on board the S.S. Yukon, docking at Seward. But, trapping in the bush all that winter, he never heard about Pearl Harbor until he emerged with his furs the next April. In retirement now, he kept eleven chickens to watch and had collected seven eggs the day I visited with him. The 3:30 sunset streamed through the window, lighting his jutting nose and jaw and the white whiskers he was trimming with an electric shaver, using a small mirror and a generator that he cranked with his free hand, opening or closing the damper on the stove meanwhile with his foot.

His desk, of fancy oak, had been salvaged from a saloon that closed with the mining. Said last spring’s breakup occurred on May 10th, and barges could run until October. At the end of the airstrip he’d caught a lynx recently, near the unmarked grave of an oldtimer he knew, and last fall he chased a black bear up the beach with his headlamp, after it broke into his

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I found, when traveling, with particular reference to my handicap of a stutter, a more flexible stripe of sympathy in Indian towns. This may have been a cultural twist, if the original Athapascan religion left wiggle room for aberrant weaknesses that were perhaps thought to mask strengths — blind or stuttering shamans with clairvoyance, for instance. The climate on the middle-Yukon, with a hundredplus-degree temperature fluctuating, cascading fish runs, bird life and mammal migrations, allowed for subtle natural mysteries, laddered prosperity or poverty, and division of labor, a variety of talents. The vise-like Arctic, by contrast, over the centuries allowed less leeway for individuals whose stumbling could endanger the community. Grandpa with the broken hip was left behind on the ice. So my stutter in the Inupiat village of Point Hope, above the 68th Parallel, might provoke laughter — certainly no curiosity — whereas in protein-rich Fort Yukon, variegations in weather, bio-

diversity, the very presence of trees, allowed more margin for error, for limber judgments or an attitude of wait-and-see. Garbled speech might flow from or engender intuition. The relationship of Athapascan Indians to grizzly bears seemed more complex than the regard Inupiat Eskimos had for polar bears, as well, which were better eating and mainly food.

Wolverine pelts brought the trapper from $125 to $450; lynx, $150 to $350; otter, $60-$125; marten, $15 to $60, a spread determined by both color and size. Lighter marten were worth less, or if spruce pitch had gotten stuck in them. The Holitna River marten were orange like a fox and averaged $35 apiece, while on the main stem of the Kuskokwim below Sleetmute, the darker gene pool could earn $50 for the same length of skin.

The real rhythm of the season: the stop-start of winter traplines, with sets checked and rebaited, and then the yearly balance of moving to Spring Camp, when subsistence people left their winter huts for the marshlands, as the first migrating waves of ducks and geese were returning from the south and muskrats emerging from under the thawing ice. After all the sawing and boiling scraps off a rooftop Winter 2012 65

moose — more fresh duck than you could eat! And succulent black bears came out of hidden hibernation to gorge on wetland greens, on which moose also descended from the higher pitches where they wintered to feed.

Fresh too, salads, needless to say. Fish Camp followed, on the rivers, for the monumental salmon run; and Berry Camp in the fall, where the women, from tents or shanties, filled baskets with the winter’s sweeteners, while their husbands stalked any wildlife fattening on the same bushy slopes.

Before the clang and clash of mining equipment, the donkey engines, and steamboats on the arteries, people who were skimming silently downstream in a bark canoe, a skinboat or a dugout saw much more wildlife, including sometimes the “Hairy Men” or “Wild People,” who had kinky hair four to six inches long and left tracks in the snow or tundra moss seventeen inches long by four inches across (thus “Bigfoot”) — remarkably narrow, but blunt-toed, not with the claws marked out in front, like a grizzly bear’s. And if they stole from your fish camp, they did so neatly, almost “politely,” lifting the latch and taking a row or two of filets from the smokehouse without smashing and slathering every-

PHOTO BY MCT VIA GETTY IMAGES

smokehouse and sprang a trap that he’d set there. The trap didn’t catch it, but in its panic it got tangled in the chain, whose toggle snagged. So the bear went into the smokehouse again to cure, along with the fish.

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In Point Hope, the wooden frame houses had caribou antler racks on the roofs. The women standing in the doors, as we drove through from the plane, looked haloed by their whitebear or grizzly hoods, often with the claws left on. I went on to Joe Towkajhea’s snug, friendly home. He was an older, worldly guy who late the last April, in a skinboat manned by seven paddlers and a rudderman, had harpooned a twenty-seven-foot bowhead whale. It was important to the whole village that somebody land at least one whale every spring — a signature event — whereupon template hunks of meat, skin or blubber were distributed to other villages up or down the coast and perhaps along the Kobuk and Noatak rivers, too, for traditional feasts. Whaling vastly predated nineteenth-century contact with whites, and two gargantuan jawbones arched over the entrance to Point Hope’s festival grounds. If nobody speared one, a bit of the town’s cultural identity could be dismasted or dissolved. In the bad old days of forced assimilation, schoolchildren might be punished for murmuring to each other at recess in Inupiat or another indigenous language, but lately television had been much more effective at unstringing the coherence of the North. Caribou hunts continued in motorized form, but not previously central, but eclipsed subsistence rituals like collecting wild murre eggs by the countless hundreds off giddy ledges on the sandstone cliffs of Cape Lisburne and Cape Thompson during the birds’ brief hectic June nesting season. Colonies of whirling, “growling,” “moaning” thousands had been gleefully, danger-

ously robbed in the village-wide bash — everybody absolutely stuffing themselves on their only fresh eggs of the year.

Bowheads, like murres, migrated northward for the wealth of nutrition generated when the sun shines roundthe-clock. Also gray whales: but being more pugnacious, grays were left alone. The bowheads could weigh a ton per foot and grow much larger than Joe’s last one had been. The early migrants were easier to get at because the melting ice at first left narrow passages they had to swim through while keeping their access to air. The wooden frame of the longboat sat prophetically on a whalebone cache all fall and winter, but well before the season, Lucy, Joe’s wife, and the wives of the other men in the crew prepared by painstakingly sewing the skins of eight bearded seals, or “oogruk,” together in leak-proof fashion to cover the twenty-foot ribbed outline. These special seals can be eight feet in length, twice the size of the ringed seals I saw stacked as larder — nosed into the drifts in people’s yards, and shot at blowholes by young men.

They could weigh eight hundred pounds apiece, required more ambitious hunting, and their tough hides were also cut into harpoon lines, boot soles, and whatnot. Then, with April’s longer, warming days, the men hauled the big skinboat, with their white tents, Coleman stoves, the caribou skins they slept on, out five miles or more by snowmobile onto the ice, to reach the open-water leads that had split the winter’s cap. There, during the thaw, they kept watch night and day for the whales to arrive, hunting seals, perhaps, in the meantime, and watching for a possible shot at a polar bear, prowling, too, after seals.

Joe, after spotting his bowhead last spring, paddling hard with his crew of eight, and hurling the harpoon, finished it off, and towed it to where their Ski-doos all together could haul the carcass onto the ice, then toward land.

But first nine squares of skin were cut from its back for the crew to ritually chew, and a piece of the whale’s skull symbolically returned to the sea.

Not only every local received a token piece of meat, but each Inupiat village in the region. Other organs and parts were set aside for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the tail would be eaten throughout the village when the fall sea ice began to form.

The last of the whale was not consumed until the wives sat together next spring chewing muktuk (skin), while sewing a new skinboat’s skin. Some Portland 66

hunters employed walrus skins, instead of bearded seals’, for their boats, and after the bowheads had passed the Point, swimming toward the Beaufort Sea, migrating walruses became the quarry, for their tusks and mountains of flesh.

Seal-hunting: you went out for several miles on the ice on your Ski-doo to where the blowholes were, wearing your white parka, with a single-shot, pump-action rifle and a grappling hook. Then you lay camouflaged in the snow for a long while. After finally shooting one which had hauled out to rest and sun itself, using your spotting scope, you remained still, allowing it plenty of time to die in peace and mystification, not diving in terror back into the ocean under the ice, having figured out what and where its enemy was. Ideally, bewilderment would keep it filling its lungs in gasps, so even if it did slide into the blowhole again, its body would float. Harbor seals were already supplanting ringed seals as the species shot, although their skins were not as valuable for working into moccasins and mukluks.

Ringed seals, like bowheads, had gotten scarce.

Eight polar bears had been shot by Point Hope villagers so far this winter, drawn hungrily close by the smell of dogs and seal and caribou carcasses.

Occasionally you could shoot one out of your window, but last winter it had been the arctic foxes, short of food, appearing in town to surrender their white fur. I went to visit Hubert Koonuk, born in 1911 but looking ten years younger than that and still an ace bear hunter. He pursued his passionate specialty far out on the pack ice solo. Had totted up a reported thirty-six in his life, including the fresh one draped dripping underneath his skinboat on its rack at the side of the house. Koonuk’s hunts could be perilous affairs, I had heard, involving not only the possibility of the huge, ghostly beast turning the tables and stalking him, but the floe they were on breaking loose and floating away, while the same gale blew his skinboat off it and marooned him. More than once he’d needed to leap into the water and fetch the thing back, or else wait for a plane to maybe spot him after a day or two, when the storm cleared.

His vendetta against bears didn’t encompass the cultural import, collective effort, or sharing of the meat far and wide of a whale hunt, but brought him personal fame, tasty steaks, and a saleable commodity in the creamy hides. A couple of sealskins were also drying on bearpaw-snowshoe

PHOTO BY STEVEN KAZLOWSKI / SCIENCE FICTION / CORBIS

thing else with claw rips and bite scars, like a bear. The ancestors of the interior Yupik Eskimos living here when the Russians arrived reportedly had been ousted from the Kobuk River area, to the north, and driven south by Inupiat Eskimos raiding down from the North Slope coast: and themselves pushing out, in turn, the local Tuluksak bands. While crossing the Yukon to reach this less desirable haven of the Kuskokwim, they’d had to fight, as well, of course, the natives living there — arrows flying between flotillas of canoes — after concealing all their children in meat caches near the bank so they wouldn’t be kidnapped or killed. A recent battle almost started again when a boy from the Kuskokwim, in throwing a stone, put out the eye of a Yukon boy. The second boy’s clan wanted him turned over to them so they could gouge out his eye.

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frames, along with two caribou, curing in the sun as well. Koonuk was a rangier, moodier, pricklier fellow than Joe, and immediately asked me, “What outfit are you with?” A fair question.

My winter jacket with the coyote collar might mark me as a kind of wildlife cop nosing around. I explained I was a writer, and after stories, and therefore harmless. After opening the door, he had resumed what he was doing, sitting cross-legged on the floor, sawing cross-sections off a walrus tusk — which was curved like a saber-toothed tiger’s canine — to insert for decorative purposes into the lids and bases of several baskets his wife had woven out of baleen.

“So you won’t even leave us our stories, will you?” he remarked. “Now that you’ve stolen everything else?

You see how we live? And we don’t talk about how we hunt whales or walruses or polar bears now because they’re trying to stop us from doing that. So this is how the Eskimos live.

They drink coffee and carve ivory, and then they drink some more coffee and carve some more ivory.”

Alaska, like America, had been a magic name, but also “The Last Place,” as people said lately who weren’t

here so much because it was a land of opportunity as because they disliked the rest of the country, yet didn’t as a rule propose to do much of anything different here, just climb out on a limb and saw themselves off. In the northern interior one could run into a state trooper, a school superintendent or game warden responsible for territory equivalent to six Vermonts.

White people arrived to opt out of the grid for a spell to discipline or distract themselves, as a challenge or an escape, to procrastinate, or simply volplaning, putting miles under their belts, enlarging the theater of their lives, fulfilling a personal dream they didn’t expect to pan out but would regret quailing out of. Per capita income and divorce rates were the highest in the country. Statistically, nine times the national average of adults had a pilot’s license and the proportion of people over fifty was the lowest.

Hoosiers, Tarheels and Buckeyes whose foreheads wrinkled when they recalled being born on the wrong side of the tracks: their fathers’ drunks, their mothers’ bruises — Alaskans were generally a goaded group, masked by the beards they grew to ward off mosquitoes. But the Indians were native, not trippers, and floundering for Winter 2012 67

footing, having had the rug pulled out from under them, as the advent of satellite TV made painfully and daily clear to anybody too dull to have realized this by grammar school.

Alaska is a destination created out of anger and quests, with frequent infusions of both, where people decide how much wildness they want to have, maybe content with a suburb of Anchorage. Absent its oil, Alaska is a kind of coccyx on the body politic, reminding us — if we dream on it — of a Captain Cook, Lewis-and-Clark past. As with jazz, the blues, rodeos, we sample a whiff of what has elapsed, in a national dreamscape severed from the hourly news. Nature has long since been knocked to its knees, and to “move on” has become the national mantra. Our callused eyes are inured to such realities as we “reinvent” ourselves. But what invention will equal Alaska? n Edward Hoagland, the University’s Schoenfeldt Series Visiting Writer in 1994, is the author of many books of fiction and nonfiction; this piece is drawn from his newest book, Alaskan Travels (Arcade Publishing).

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A Christmas Psalm

By John Daniel

Singing a song of the gift and glory of what is.

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Spirit whose name I do not know, Spirit of darkened meadow and the pointed trees silhouetted around me, Spirit of the great sky strewn with stars, Spirit of streamwater swirling over mossy stones down to the old and ageless river, Spirit of salmon and steelhead facing the current, holding in darkened pools, Spirit of bears adrift in their rank havens and veering bats sounding the night, Spirit of moles and earthworms and the smaller lives thriving underground, Spirit whose name I do not know, Spirit of vole and plunging owl, Spirit of doe with fawn in her belly, Spirit of cougar who rips the belly, Spirit of the garden and the snake in the garden, Spirit of chance and purpose, of all that has been and all that shall be, Spirit of the one way and Spirit of the many, Spirit of all ends and beginnings, Spirit whose name I do not know, Though it glints in fire across the sky tonight and speaks itself in silence, Though as near as this clay ground I stand on, Though I hear it in the stream singing in darkness and the river whispering below, Though it is part of me like the breath that clouds and vanishes before me, Spirit within me, Spirit without, Spirit of form and the absence of form, Spirit of these mountains rising and wearing away, Spirit whose name I do not know, Of all who sleep or wake in these mountains tonight I am the one who doubts and falters, who loses himself in distraction, I am the one who sees and smells and hears the least and stumbles the most, But I am the one who speaks words aloud with mouth and tongue, And tonight I speak to praise you, Spirit, Because in all that I name and cannot name I know you are born, you are born this night and all nights and all days, And you are here in these mountains, in this river canyon, and in all places of Earth.

Spirit whose name I do not know, Though tonight or tomorrow or a day sure to come I must fall to the clay, To the stones and flowing cold waters, Though my body must burn to ash or dry into dust or molder, tunneled by worms, Though I must relinquish this small light of mind I have thought of as my own, Though I know these things as surely as I now breathe, Though I stand afraid tonight in this meadow, Spirit, I understand tonight and I accept tonight that in this darkness lives your way.

Spirit whose name I do not know, Beneath your fierce stars and the black of space I rejoice tonight that you are born, And that Earth and its numberless lives are born of you, And the other worlds and their numberless lives, And I rejoice tonight that in all creatures born, bacterium to blue whale, You yourself are born, you honor us to bear your desire to be flesh and bone and blood, To be the suffering of illness and dying, To be the pleasures and agonies of love, To be the joys of consciousness and also its griefs.

Spirit whose name I do not know, Though I am afraid tonight, and tremble tonight, I am glad beyond measure that in finding your way you have given me life, And I am glad beyond measure that in finding my way I in some small manner give life to you.

I thank you this night for the privilege of being.

I thank you this night for the mind and heart and voice with which I speak.

I thank you this night for my life, my death, and all lives and deaths that may come of me.

Though I will not know who I am, I shall serve you and serve your journey forevermore, On Earth and in all the darkness and fire of the heavens.

by John Daniel, twice the University’s visiting writer, from his new collection of poems, Of Earth.

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ALUMNI AWARDS The University is asking all alumni and friends to nominate candidates for the Distinguished Alumni Award (notable accomplishments and creativity over a life and career), the Father Tom Oddo, C.S.C., Award (service and spiritual example), and the Contemporary Alumni Award (honoring younger alumni).

See alumni.up.edufor a list of past award-winners, to view nomination criteria, and to fill out a nomination form. Or call the alumni office at (888) 8725867, or email alumni@up.edu.

PILOT POKER? Yes, we condone egregious card-playing on campus: Friday, January 18 is the National Alumni Board Poker Tournament. Your $50 entry fee supports the National Alumni Board Scholarship Fund. A pre-tournament buffet meal will be served at 6:45 p.m. At 7:30 p.m., the chips hit the table in this no limit Texas Hold-’Em tournament.

THE HIVE The University’s Hive Entrepreneurs Network is an open forum for alumni of all ages, current UP MBA students, and University of Portland friends interested in business and entrepreneurial activity within the University community.

The Hive organizes events focused on connecting and assisting people in finding new business partners,

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clients, and investors through networking and interactive and fun educational presentations. If you have a speaker in mind or would like to host a Hive event, please contact the Hive committee directly at hive@pilotwm.com. To learn more about upcoming Hive events please visit its website at uphive.wordpress.com.

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niversary of the Class of 1988.

Among the many events: a Reunion 5K race around campus with cross country alumni, the legendary barbecue, plenty of mini-courses featuring University faculty.

Info: (888) 872-5867, alumni@up.edu, alumni.up.edu/reunion.

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day-shelter, to sprucing up a yard and doing minor home repairs. If you would like to coordinate a day of service in your area please contact Andy Sherwood at 503.943.8327, sherwood@ up.edu.

I LOVE TO EAT THE SALZBURGERS

WCC BASKETBALL The West Coast Conference playoff tournament returns to Las Vegas beginning Wednesday, March 6, 2013 and ending on Monday, March 11, 2013.

The alumni office is hosting all sorts of events around the games — a golf excursion, an exclusive spa day, and a stage show. Join us for pre-game events two hours prior to the start of the first Pilot men’s basketball game of the tournament. Special rates for Pilot fans exist at The Orleans, Palms, and Bellagio Hotels. Information: (888) 872-5867, alumni@up.edu. NOTE: Tickets for the tourney itself must be purchased through the WCC or the Orleans arena.

All-session tickets (which include admittance to all men’s and women’s games) are currently available to the general public. To buy tickets, visit the WCC web site at http://wccsports.cstv.com/ ot/westbaskbl-tournament. html or call the Orleans ticket office at 888-234-2334. March is sort of tomorrow; better purchase tickets as soon as possible!

…of the last fifty years will begin a year-long golden anniversary celebration of the University’s oldest and largest study-abroad program in Austria; the first event is a trip on the Danube River and three days in Salzburg, where guests will be able to enjoy a tour of the city and two group dinners. On September 11, 2013 guests will have the option of embarking upon a week-long cruise of the Danube River beginning in Vienna and ending in Nuremberg. Along the way the ship will cruise through the vineyard-rich Wachau Valley and the Bavarian forest before finally moving through MainDanube Canal en route to the historic city of Nuremberg.

Prices start at $3,708 per person double occupancy for both the Salzburg tour and cruise. The University has almost sold out of cabins, so please hurry! Info: Carmen Gaston, 503.943.8506 or gaston@up.edu.

ALUMNI SERVICE DAY… REUNION 2012… ...will be June 27-30. Among the particular celebrations: the 50th anniversary of the School of Education, the Golden Anniversary of the Class of 1963, and the Silver An-

…across the nation will be Saturday, April 27. Pilots from coast to coast and their families and friends will donate time and energy to various charitable causes. Each alumni chapter organizes a different volunteer activity, from sorting food boxes, to serving a meal in a

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Join us on January 10, 2013 in Portland to spend a delightful evening in the kitchen at Portland Center Stage, as it were, with the charismatic Portland original James Beard. Before Julia Child and Rachel Ray, there was James Beard, the first TV chef. An optional dinner outing with University master chef Kirk Mustain (see page 6) will take place prior to the show. Tickets are available for $35 per person. Info: (888) 872-5867, alumni@up.edu.

THE STATE OF THE U… …is Wednesday, March 19, 2013 at noon at the Multnomah Athletic Club in Portland.

This annual event has grown amazingly in recent years to be a cheerful and often moving hour. University president Father Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C., will speak on the University’s progress and dreams (look for a Campaign update and notes on the new library and river campus, and also see page 5 of this issue). We will also honor the three 2013 Alumni Award winners and recognize the student recipient of this year’s Tom Gerhardt Award for student leadership. Info: (888) 872-5867, alumni@up.edu.

We cannot emphasize enough how important alumni are for nominating the most generous and creative among us, as sweet examples of what the University so very much wishes to make of its students.

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C L A S S Peter F. Sandrock Sr. ’32 CP passed away at the age of 98 on August 23, 2012. To the best of our knowledge, he was the University’s oldest alumnus. A Portland native, Peter graduated from Columbia Prep, attended Columbia University (name later changed to University of Portland, in 1935) and graduated from Notre Dame in 1939. Peter served in the Caribbean and Philippines as a naval officer in World War II, and worked as a telephone company engineer for 29 years. A lifelong believer in service to others, he logged more than 5,000 volunteer hours at Providence hospital.

Peter was married to Mary Elizabeth O’Brien from 1945 until her death in 1972. Two years later, he married Lorraine “Lea” Miller of Portland, who died in 2000. In 2002, he married Barbara Collins of Klamath Falls. He is survived by Barbara; son, Pete Jr.; and many stepchildren; grandchildren; and great-grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

FIFTY YEAR CLUB Life regent John C. Beckman ’42 and his wife Patricia were honored at Oregon Public Broadcasting’s (OPB’s) annual dinner on Sunday, September 9, 2012. The dinner honored

the Beckmans (along with the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer family) by presenting them with OPB’s Leadership in Philanthropy Award. Patricia and John Beckman were founding

members of OPB’s Cornerstone Society, which was established in 1989, and have remained leading volunteers.

Thanks to their devotion and generosity, the Cornerstone Society now provides more than 20 percent of OPB’s operating budget. A lovelier, more generous couple we have never met.

Jack Hoggins ’44 passed away quietly on Friday, June 17, 2011, at his residence in Oroville, California. He lived and worked most of his life in Hermiston, Ore., but resided in Oroville since 2007. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II, and was briefly reactivated during the Korean Conflict. He married Catherine Schummers in 1945; she predeceased him in 1985. He then married Dorothy Clary of Hermiston; she died

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Mary Ellen Lajoy, wife of Frank Lajoy ’47 died on July 18, 2012, in Portland, Ore. She was born June 26, 1922, in Istria, Italy (now Croatia). She immigrated to the United States in 1929, and grew up in North Portland. She resided in Salem until moving to the Claremont Retirement community in Portland in 1997.

Survivors include her husband of 65 years, Frank; younger brother, Joseph (Kathy); five children, Ron (Sandy), Ken (Barb), Frank (Donna), Karen (Tim Bickler) and Dennis (Robin Bunch); 11 grandchildren; 10 great-grandchildren; and two nieces and three nephews. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Charles Patrick McCarty ’49 passed away peacefully at home in Ashland, Ore., on September 5, 2012, surrounded by his wife and sons.

Charles was born to Charles and Zena McCarty on May 4, 1924, in Portland, Ore., and earned a master’s degree at Santa Clara University. He served in the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service in both the European and Pacific theaters of World War II, and married his beloved wife, Rosemary, on July 1, 1950, at the Church of the Madeleine in Portland, Ore. He was a long time employee of SRI International. He was a member of the Knights of Columbus and with Rosemary was a volunteer for the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. He was a long-time parishioner of Our Lady of the Mountain Catholic Church. Survivors include his wife of 62 years, Rosemary; sons Thomas [Kim], James, Steven [Ellen], and Patrick [Colleen]; grandchildren Caroline, Michael, Dominic, Claire, and Kathryn; and great granddaughter Layla. He was preceded in death by his daughter, Teresa A. McCarty Quarman. Memorial contributions may be made to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul at Our Lady of the Mountain Church.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Wayne Arnold Olsen ’50 passed away on September 8, 2012. Wayne’s lifelong occupation was as an educator for the David Douglas School System, proudly serving for 31 years, first as a school teacher, later a

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principal, and retiring as assistant superintendent for David Douglas. Survivors include his sons, Ronald and Daniel Olsen; and daughters, Karen and Larry Gratreak and Kathy and Todd Sander; brothers, Peter and Lance Olsen; grandchildren, Erik Olsen, Rick Sander, Michael Sander, Alex Sander, Casey Stedman, Andy Stedman and Jill Stedman, Karia Eichelberger, Grant Gratreak, and Jeff Gratreak; stepgrandchildren, Wendy Isaac, Curt Stirewalt, Laura Stirewalt, Beth Elder and David Stedman; four great-grandchildren; and three step-greatgrandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Edwin Wilson ’53 passed away on September 10, 2012, in Seattle, Washington, from complications from a heart valve replacement surgery. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Joe T. Namba ’53 passed away on June 14, 2012, peacefully at home with his family by his side at the age of 80 after a brief bout with leukemia. He was an Army veteran who had a long career as a freight-forwarder with his own company.

Survivors include his wife of 48 years, Noriko; his three children, Patty ’83, Craig and Blake (Melissa); grandchildren, Kenji Maeda, Jake and Emma; and his sister, Rose. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

We got a note from Jim Flynn ’55 recently (pictured below on the old UP tennis courts behind the Pilot House), letting us know that he was inducted into the United States Tennis Association (USTA) Pacific Northwest Hall of Fame on October 20, 2012. Jim was honored for his “significant achievements and contributions to the sport of tennis

tennis in the Pacific Northwest” and his many years of public tennis activities in the Portland metro area. USTA hall of famers have made contributions as officials or as people in some related tennis activity which are so outstanding over a significant period of time as to justify the highest commendation and recogni-

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C L A S S tion. And that, ladies and gentlemen, describes Jim Flynn’s lifetime love of tennis. We once heard a rumor that Jim was seen on campus without his racket, but the claim was never proven. Congratulations, Jim! Ronald M. Marshall ’55 passed away on August 31, 2012. Survivors include his beloved wife, Kristen van Kranenburgh of Aloha; and brother, Rodney of Ravensdale, Wash. His surviving children are sons, Jeff and Scott Marshall; daughters, Renee, Theresa and Julia Marshall; and stepchildren, Karin and Eric Tooley. His daughter, Cheryl, died in 1964. He delighted in his grandchildren, Hannah, Josh, Tate and Lincoln. His career was marked by service to people, from developing community-based centers for emotionally disturbed children to working as a therapist in independent practice.Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Please remember Arthur Wiens ’56 and his family in your prayers after the loss of his wife, Ruth Helen Avery Wiens, on September 17, 2012, in Lake Oswego, Ore., “holding hands with her loving husband and in the presence of family, with the majesty of Mt. Hood looming in her bedroom window.” Survived by her husband, Arthur N. Wiens, to whom she was married for 63 years, she was the love of his life. Survivors include Arthur, her husband of 63 years; children, Barbara Ann Wiens-Tuers, and husband, Dan of Altoona, Pa., Bradley Allen and wife, Molly Ringo Wiens, Mercer Island, Wash., and daughter-in-law, Carol Fuller Wiens, Hillsboro; four grandchildren; five stepgrandchildren; and five greatgrandchildren. Ruth was preceded in death by her son, Donald Avery Wiens. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Prayers, please, for Della Bachman ’60, who lost her husband, Marvin A. Bachman, on July 30, 2012. Marvin owned and operated a blacksmith shop in Iowa before moving to Portland in 1966. He worked as a welder and truck mechanic until retiring in 1984. Survivors include Della, his wife of 44 years; son, Garth; daughter, Joyce; three grandchildren; and three brothers and a sister. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Richard Moorman ’62 passed away on Thursday, August 30, 2012, at his home surrounded by his family. He worked for Mercer Steel, then Interna-

tional Harvester Credit Corp., and became office manager of Webfoot Truck and Equipment in Medford, eventually buying the business and working there until the end, not wanting to retire just yet. Survivors include his wife of 48 years, Lynnea; sons Paul (Kelly) of Spokane, Wash., Scott of Sherwood and Mike (Melissa) of Central Point; grandchildren Blake, Madyson, Rylee, and Addin; sisters Patricia Westerlund of Beaverton, Kathy Williams of Longview, Wash., and Marylee Vuylsteke of Beaverton, along with many other extended family members. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’63 SAD NEWS Richard Cooper passed away on September 8, 2011, according to a note from our development office. He died at home with his family by his side after an extended battle with Parkinson’s disease. He graduated from the University with a degree in music education, and went on to teach high school vocal music. He retired from Silverton Union High School in 1997. He is survived by his wife, Debbra; daughter, Laura Gobbel; sonin-law, David Gobbel; daughter, Holly Cooper; son, Scott Saylor; sister, Maria Cooper; her son, Mark Cooper; his wife, Elena Cooper; and their daughter, Emilia Marie Cooper; grandchildren, Rachael Gobbel, Darren Gobbel, Mathew Linderman, Logan Linderman, and Spencer Linderman.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’65 PRAYERS, PLEASE Gerald E. Roth passed away on August 25, 2012, at St. Vincent Hospital, surrounded by family and friends. He is survived by his wife, Marlene; and his children, Tom, Lisa, and Diana.

Donations may be made to Macular Degeneration Research or St. Luke Lutheran Church Music Fund. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’71 GREETINGS TO ALL! We heard recently from Stephen Jeffries, who writes: “Greetings to all. We moved in July from Northern California to Valparaiso, Indiana. In July and August we were trying to adapt to the extreme hot weather, and now in September, it’s starting to get cold, so we’re getting ready for snow.

Both Anne, my wife, and I are retired so now we can pursue other activities while our tenyear-old goes to school and

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We heard from Kathy Lindsay Fritz ’66, who writes: “My mother and father dated in the late 20s and early 30s. Dad went to Columbia U. from about 1927 to 1929, and being raised in Canada, he and his future wife were great friends with fellow Canadian Brother Godfrey Vassallo, C.S.C. My mother would sit at freezing football games and have at least one hand in Brother Godfrey’s pocket because he never wore a coat and was always so warm. She said these two pictures [above] were of Brother Godfrey taking a picture of her while she took a picture of him. Notice the great quality of her picture that he developed himself. My parents were Harold and Bernice Lindsay.” Thanks so much, Kathy, we’re always happy to add to our supply of “B.G.” stories. our twenty-year-old looks for work. We’re interested in hearing from other UP graduates in the area.” We can probably help with that: Stephen can be reached at sjeffrie4299@sbcglobal.net.

’72 EVERYONE KNOWS KENT Carolyn (Van Driesche) Jeschke writes: “The runner with Jim Nuccio on page 47 of the fall 2012 Portland Magazine sure looks like Kent Nedderman ’71, who was on the track team when I was at UP in 19681970. Let me know if that’s him.” Thanks for writing, Carol, hopefully more people will chime in and we’ll find out for sure.

Well, that didn’t take long... we heard also from Gary Rowles, who writes: “Jim Nuccio’s running mate in the photo in your recent edition of the alumni magazine is Kent Nedderman ’71. He’s also mentioned in the article on Jim Grelle in the same edition. Although I wasn’t a star, I had the opportunity to run for a season with Nuccio, Nedderman, Bowler,

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Kirkland, McCabe, Jeff Keene, and Rob Werley in 1968 before I transferred to another school.

I still enjoy getting your magazine.” Thanks Gary. It looks like Kent Nedderman is indeed the mystery man in the photo.

And now we hear from Judi (O’Connor) Nuccio, who writes: “That speed demon next to my husband is Kent Nedderman ’71. Didn’t Jim have a fine head of hair? p.s. We love this publication!” Thanks Judy, and we love to hear from our alumni.

Mike Olson writes: “I’m sure the mystery has long been solved. My brother Jerry ’74, who lives in Portland, received his copy of the magazine last week and called to alert me about the Jim Grelle article (We were both on the track team in the early ’70s).

I just received my copy today and confirmed Jerry’s suspicion that it was Kent Nedderman ’71 running with Jim Nuccio. In fact the image was from a slide I scanned for a classmate, Diana Foran.” Thanks

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This picture is from Bob Wright ’66, and features the 1962 Mitchell Rifles champions. Bob is working on compiling a history of the Mitchells; we were able to gather a group of Mitchell Rifles alumni at Reunion 2011, and hope to do it again. Hosted by members of the team that won the 1962 Western Region ROTC Drill Competition, all alumni who were part of the Mitchell Rifles, the Arnold Air Society, the Angel Flight, and indeed all alumni who served in the Armed Forces, were welcomed back to gather and swap stories. We were even able to show recovered video of the trophy-winning Mitchell Rifles team in action.” Thanks Ken, and we look forward to seeing that history of the University’s crack ROTC drill team.

Mike, we’ve heard from lots of your classmates, and Kent is indeed the man speeding along with Jim. And proving that it is a small world, we heard recently from Diana Foran, who writes: “My son Marcos got married on August 3, 2012. Bob Edmondson ’73 and his wife Jan came to Spain for the event. Also, Nancy ’63 and Ted ’67 Michaud were here to help us celebrate.

It was wonderful to have them with me as they are, to me, part of my family, as is Manuel Macias, who was with us in sprit because he was unable to travel.” Thanks Diane, congratulations on Marcos’ marriage and we know what you mean about Manolo being a beloved part of the family. He was chipper as ever last time we saw him on campus.

’73 PLEASE NOTE A correction: in the fall 2012 Class Notes we made a mistake in the death notice for Dr. Dan Beavers. His survivors include his mother, Tilda; and wife of 35 years, Debbie. We regret the error and apologize for any confusion it may have caused.

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N O T E S 58 years, Marie; seven children (sons Erik, Mark, Chris, Paul, and Peter, and daughters Mary and Anne Marie), nine grandchildren; two greatgrandchildren; and three sisters. Gerald was a firm, quiet, hard-working man whose family meant the world to him.

Their comfort and safety and well-being came first in his book, and the Heim family homes (first on North Willamette Blvd., then on North Melrose Drive) were open, welcoming places for the troops of childhood friends who gravitated around the boisterous Heim kids. Gerald loved cars (Barracudas!) and was known to be somewhat of a packrat, a happy trait when he was proprietor of his own antique and collectibles emporium, Store II. In lieu of flowers, donations to: Central Catholic High School, which Gerald and his sons attended, or St. Mary’s Academy. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’79 LORRAINE’S REPORT We heard recently from Loraine M. Domine, who writes: “I moved back to Oregon in May of 2010 and built a home on property southeast of

’76 SAD NEWS William Edward Anderson passed away on June 27, 2012.

Survivors include his wife, Susan E. Cannon; sons, John, Robert, Jeffrey (Karen) and SFC Michael (Jane Satarra) Anderson; stepdaughter Emily Terwilliger Hawkins; and five grandsons. He was a Vietnam War veteran and recipient of the Bronze Star. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’77 A FINE, FINE MAN Prayers, please, for Erik Heim and his family on the death of his father, Gerald Thomas Heim, on July 31, 2012. Survivors include Gerald’s wife of

Prineville, in the central Oregon high desert. I have authored a three volume history book of my native county in Montana titled Mettle of Granite County, books one, two and three since I retired from the Portland VA Medical Center in 2001. I now have six great grandchildren. I do not have any pictures of the six together yet; the youngest one was just born and lives in Idaho so he won’t be included in group photos until Christmas. I will attach a picture of the five taken on June 16, however: from left to right are Hailei Hansen, Zander Baker, Riley Englund, Brayden Hansen and Gracie Baker. The newborn’s name is Conner Englund.” Thanks Loraine, they look like a happy bunch.

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’82 A BIG JOB We heard recently from Scott Cruickshank, who writes: “In April 2012 I was appointed as executive director of the Oregon Convention Center.” Congratulations, Scott!

We heard recently from retired physics professor Karl Wetzel, who writes: “In the September 6, 2012 edition of the Oregonian you will find a story about Stuart Palmiter, a physics graduate, with the story of his being awarded the Portland Police Bureau’s Life Saving Medal.” Palmiter, a Portland police officer, was one of four individuals who helped save the life of New York DJ Jonathan Toubin, who was run over by a cab in a freak accident at Portland’s Jupiter Hotel. See the story at http://tinyurl.com/9eq7tjh.

’83 A MAN ON A MISSION Mark Pelletier has been selected as the new director for Cottonwood, Arizona’s Old Town Mission. Robert Goode, chairman of the Mission Board, said the recruitment process attracted as many as 80 applicants from throughout the United States and Europe. As director, Pelletier promises to bring strong spiritual leadership, organization development skills, team-minded concepts and a heart for community service. He served as executive director of Hi-Venture Ministries and as administrator and a certified relationship specialist for Family Life Services in the Portland-Vancouver area. He also worked with Transitional Youth, whose mission was feeding, clothing, and otherwise helping homeless people living on the streets of Portland, targeted toward 18- to 25-year-olds. He and his wife, Catherine, have four grown children.

’84 PRAYERS FOR CHRIS Christopher J. Lumsargis passed away at St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood, Colo., on July 19, 2012. He was surrounded by his wife and children. Chris was a school psychologist for San Luis Valley Board of Cooperative Educational Services, and enjoyed computers, the outdoors, being a handyman, and especially time spent with his family. He spent one summer, in 1982, laboring in the kitchen of Camp Howard, a CYO summer camp outside of Sandy, Ore., where he was summarily appointed as camp baker.

His battles with recalcitrant yeasts, doughs, and batters are the stuff of Camp Howard

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C L A S S legend, but in the end Chris persevered, and the scent of his cinnamon rolls baking on cold, rainy mornings was a thing to savor. Survivors include his wife, Julia Rebeil Lumsargis; three daughters, Marianne, Elizabeth, and Ana Elena; two sons, Joseph and Michael; father, Donald; brothers, Brady and Donald Jr.; and numerous nieces, nephews, and cousins. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’86 A NOTE FROM FR. PETER We heard recently from Fr. Peter Mubiru, who writes: “A lot has happened since I left UP. Here in Uganda I have been pastor of one of our city parishes (Our Lady of Fatima, Jinja and presently I am in Kamuli, 100 kilometers to the north, as pastor). It has been quite challenging but thanks be to God I took my short stay at UP seriously. As I write, I am preparing to go to Kaliro National Teachers College as chaplain and lecturer to contribute to the formation of the badly needed new group of high school teachers in our country. Uganda is very far away from Portland so many things may not happen like one would expect, for example, attending reunions or sporting events. One day maybe, God, willing but my spirit is firm within UP.” Sad news to report: Kathleen "Eannie" Henry passed away unexpectedly on Monday, July 16, 2012, in Salinas, California. Kathleen Gibbons was born October 19, 1960 in Portland, where she spent the first nine years of her life. She met her future husband, Mike Henry, at the tender age of five as their childhood homes shared a common fence. Mike was the love of Kathleen’s life and she said her greatest accomplishment was her children. Survivors include Mike, her husband of 26 years; children, Kristen (Kamaron) Rianda, Joseph Henry and Justin Henry; granddaughter, Kolbie Rose Rianda; sisters, Carla (Mike) Cullerton, Joanne (Kevin) Castello, and Karen Gibbons; and nine nieces and nephews. Kathleen was preceded in death by her parents, Joseph ’53 and Nancy Gibbons and her brother-in-law, Rick Henry. In lieu of flowers, the family requests memorial contributions may be sent to The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (www.lls.org/ waystohelp/donate/donateonline/). Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’88 LIVING THE DREAM Kecia M. Carlson and her husband David became strategic partners when she left her corporate life and became an entrepreneur, starting a landscape design firm 10 years ago. “We had a dream for years to develop a retail landscape nursery, working a little bit each winter on a business plan but never quite pulling everything together to launch the new venture,” according to David. “In the spring of 2011 we decided to fully commit to getting the plan completed.

On April 11, 2012 we had a grand opening for Madeline George Garden Design Nursery in Boise, Idaho. ’Madeline’ is the little French girl from children’s books, a favorite of my wife’s when she was a little girl. My favorite childhood character was Curious George, so we joined the two and ’Madeline George’ was born.

Our goal is to provide people with the guidance and resources to help create a stylish and sustainable garden. The retail nursery site allows us to retail and to showcase design ideas and our quality workmanship.” Find out more at www.madelinegeorge.com/.

’93 A WRITER WRITES Elizabeth Zach wrote “In Germany, an Unlikely Art Hub Honed by Enthusiasm,” an article on Ingrid Mössinger, who oversees three museums in Chemnitz, Germany, published in the New York Times on July 27, 2012. “Truth be told, I’d long aimed to write a story that had both Karl Marx and Bob Dylan making cameos, and now it’s come to pass,” she writes. The article is one of four to run in the Times since March. Of her writing career, she says: “It’s been a fun ride, wild and hectic at times.” See the article at http://tinyurl.com/8q v9wcj.

’96 GOIN’ TO KATHMANDU Dawood A. Luqman writes: “I have moved to Kathmandu, Nepal with my family (my wife, two daughters, and one son) and started working as the chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation at the US Embassy in Kathmandu in late August.” Thanks for writing, Dawood. Sounds like a wonderfully rewarding career.

Joan Anita Haddix passed away on September 4, 2012.

She is survived by her son, Bryan Haddix (wife, Terry); brother, Mark Scott (wife, Cheryl); and two grandchildren, Jacob and Sarah. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

N O T E S We were delighted this summer when The Woman Formerly Known as Julie Carleton ’03 strolled into our offices with a grin bigger than she is tall; today she is Sister Cecilia Rose, of the Sisters of Visitation, and works at the Sacred Heart of Jesus Convent in Manhattan with pregnant women and new mothers. This “spiritual tent,” as the sisters call it, allows pregnant women and new mothers of any and no faith a place to rest, to begin to be mothers, to find refuge when abortion seems the only option. Great idea. For more see sistersoflife.org. PHOTO BY JOHN CARLETON ’99 SHANDI SAYS: “BE PREPARED!” Shandi (Stracke) Treloar has been promoted to associate with Dewberry, an architect, engineer, and consultant firm Fairfax, Virginia. She has been a project consultant in Dewberry’s emergency management, disaster, and mitigation services branch for seven years, with a successful record in managing projects related to emergency management and homeland security preparedness and planning on the local, state, and federal governmental levels. Shandi has a blog at http://tinyurl. com/8cbuljx, for those who would like to know more about emergency preparedness.

’00 MOVING ON UP Sean Naughton has been promoted to the position of director of engineering at Williams Controls, Inc. He will be responsible for managing the company’s pedal and sensor engineering and development activities worldwide, including products designed at Williams’ innovative Conceptual Development Center in Portland. Naughton joined Williams Controls in 2005 as

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an engineer and was quickly promoted to floor pedal team manager in 2007. Most recently, he was the company’s manager of mechanical engineering.

We got exciting news from Mike Tomford, who writes: “I’m moving to Norway at the end of August to coach the men’s Norwegian National Gymnastics team. I never thought in a million years that the kid doing flips in the gym would one day have the opportunity to take kids to the Olympics.

I guess it just shows you what passion, hard work, and love can do.” Thanks Mike, that it does. Please let us know how your new career is advancing, and we’ll keep an eye out for you at the 2016 Olympics in Rio.

’02 PUTZING IS GOOD We heard recently from Michael Driessen, who writes: “I am mostly enjoying putzing around at the moment and making fig jam here at home with my two little rascal bearcub children. We’ve just come back to Italy (I’m a professor of international affairs at John Cabot University in Rome), after a hot but beautiful year in Doha, Qatar, where

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Jen (Swinton) Williams ’00, alumna and former Pilot women’s basketball team member, writes: “Finally, a fun update for the beautiful Portland magazine. After eight years together and adventures that took us from California to Texas to North Carolina to New York, I was thrilled to marry Greg Williams on July 20, 2012, in San Francisco. And the best part is, a number of Pilots were able to join us for the celebration. Here’s a picture from the best day ever that includes (L-R) Heather (Thibodeau) Carlton ’00, Jerry Carlton ’01, Todd Spear, Kristin (Hepton) Spear ’98, Jen (Swinton) Williams ’00, Greg Williams (imagine my excitement when our ladies soccer team beat his alma mater, UNC!), Heather Reeder, Jud Bordman ’00, Rachel Draper ’99, Jenny (Francis) Lindsay ’00, Clayton Lindsay, Amanda Stupi ’00, and Trisha (Felts) Hosley ’01. I love that I found my dearest friends on the Bluff! After a honeymoon in Italy, Greg and I returned to New York City, where he is an investment banker and I work in sports marketing. Can’t wait to see these fine faces again soon!”

I was a post-doctoral fellow at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and thought a lot about hummous.

I’ve just finished a book on Catholicism, Islam, and democracy in the Mediterranean and am working on some interfaith friendship stuff here in Rome. Our doors are aways open, the wine here is cheap, and we love visitors.”

Thanks for the update, Michael, that sounds like a thinly-veiled invitation for UP alumni to drop by any time.

’03 TOM & MUM & BUB Wonderful news to share from Tom Gannon: “My wife and I welcomed our son, John

William Gannon, on August 28. He was 3.8 kgs and 53 cms, and Mum and bub are happy and well. Dad is pretty proud!”

Proud papa Tom serves as campus minister for the University of Notre Dame Australia in Fremantle.

’04 EVERYBODY’S FRIEND Sad news to report; shocking really: Randall (Randy, DeDe) Alan Stupey died suddenly and tragically in a hiking accident on August 31, 2012. Randy was a self-employed businessman and skilled carpenter and also worked in the Stupey Insurance Agency with his father, John, and sister, Shellie.

“Randy was an incredible father who cherished his children and loved spending every possible minute with them,” according to his obituary.

“Randy’s amazing smile, infectious sense of humor and love of family have left giant footprints in the hearts of all who loved him.” Survivors include his wife, Elene; sons, Landon and Parker; parents, Lauray and John; three brother

and three sisters; and 18 nieces and nephews, all of whom adored their fun-loving "Uncle DeDe" and will miss him greatly. He is also survived by his grandfather, Herb Knudson, Sr. and his loving aunts, uncles, and cousins.

“Our world was forever changed when he was born and completed ’The Stupey Seven,’” according to his family.

“He brought joy, laughter, love and loyalty to everyone who was lucky enough to know him. He was everyone’s best friend, everyone’s favorite

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uncle; the world’s greatest little brother; an all-around great man who could be witty, warm and wise beyond his years. He soared like an eagle and is now at home in the loving arms of God.” In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to the JSL Trust for Landon and Parker Stupey at PO Box 1887, Everett WA, 98206 or to Snohomish County Search and Rescue. Our prayers and condolences to Randy’s family and friends.

Sheena Barclay writes: “I got married in March of 2010 and my name has changed, it is now Sheena O’Rourke. I like to read the magazine, it still goes to my mother’s house but if you could please update your records with my new information that would be lovely.” You bet Sheena, congratulations on your marriage too.

’05 WEDDING BELLS Andrew Willis married Katie Gray on June 23, 2012, in Vancouver, Washington. The afternoon ceremony was officiated by the bride’s brother, Will Gray. Katie works as a pediatric speech language pathologist in Portland, Oregon. Andrew works as a computer engineer at Plexsys Interface Products. The couple resides in Vancouver, Washington.

We heard recently from Jessica DeMarre Asay, who writes: John Asay and I wanted to let the alumni office know of our address change. We switched apartments in the same complex. I would love if our alumni records would be updated, as we’d still love to be in the know about the UP community.” You bet Jessica.We’re happy to help you be in the know. There’s a lot going on here on The Bluff.

We got a Rosco clan update from Eveline Roscoe Mahoney, who writes: “All is well and fine. We (all 7 of the sibs and my parents) live in Clark County. Can you believe that?

Telling of the greatness of the Pacific Northwest! And love of family too! All the hunters’ wives are getting hunkered down up here for hunting season. The guys have been planning and scheming all summer in preparation for deer and elk season. Good grief.

Colin, my husband, a previous UW grad, just started the MBA and master of science in finance program at UP last week. Finally, I’ll make a Pilot outta my guy! He’s very excited and very impressed with UP thus far. He’ll be in the 2017 class (I think, depending on how many credits he can squeeze in each semester

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Here is a picture of the two newest grand babies. My daughter, Aileen Zenaide, and Matt’s son, Finnegan George.

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Franciscan Health System in Washington. Most of my clinical rotations and staffing obligations will be at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington.” Congratulations, Shawn, and thanks for the update.

We heard recently from Joseph “Joey” Bansen, who writes: “I would like to note that Cristin Sammis and I were married on August 4, 2012.”

That’s great news, Joey, feel free to let us know how married life suits you and Cristin.

’07 ALLISON’S MARRIED!

They were baptized by my dad this spring at our church, Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Battle Ground, Washington.

Aileen was born January 1st and Finn was born January 28th. Back Row: Colin (my husband) is holding Barrett Daniel (Matt’s son), and of course, the one and only Jack Roscoe Front Row: Evie Mahoney is holding Aileen, Colleen is holding Finnegan, Matt is holding Lillian Elise.

Mattie Roscoe and my son William (Liam) Declan were not pictured.” Thanks as always for letting us know what’s up with the ever-expanding Roscoe family.

We heard recently from Mark Driessen, who shared the following with Rev. Art Wheeler, C.S.C., who shared it with us: “I am very excited that my sister Rebecca chose to attend UP, I now have an excuse to come visit her and the UP campus again! I am currently working in Maui, where I am pursuing my maritime captain’s license; I’m planning on finishing my seatime early this winter and I will be able to sit for my exams then. I’m working with the oldest sailing charter coming here in Hawaii, Trilogy Excursions, and guiding dives and taking clients out on sailing charters, which is not a bad life!” We also have a note from Mark’s brother, Michael Driessen ’02, his class year section.

’06 MORTAR & PESTLE Shawn Hagland writes: “I graduated from the University of Washington School of Pharmacy with a doctor of pharmacy (Pharm.D.) degree in June 2012. I then began a one-year hospital-based pharmacy residency program through the

We heard recently from Allison Dale, who writes: “I got married and changed my last name from Dale to Supnick.

My parents have been receiving mail sent to me from UP at their house so I wanted to make sure you have my updated name and address.

Thanks!” Thank you, Allison, and congratulations on your marriage.

Andrew Elliott writes: “On June 30, 2012, I married my best friend, Beth Watje, an English/French/education major from the Class of 2008.

Our wedding was held at Holy Redeemer Church in North Portland. Maureen Briare ’92 arranged great music with a couple of our friends.” Thanks Andrew, and congratulations to you and Beth.

Barbara Farney ’08 and Sarah Carroll ’07 (l-r) smile for the camera while standing atop Oregon’s iconic Mount Hood in June 2012. They didn’t ride a chair lift, either—Barbara and Sarah summited the hard way, one foot in front of the other, and also helped their team raise more than $10,000 for charity through a partnership between their employer, NIKE, and the Summit for Someone program. Find out more at www.summitforsomeone.org.

’09 BACK TO CAMPUS Charlie Saarinen writes: “I graduated in August 2009 and married my best friend in August 2011! I started work at OHSU in September 2009 and I am still working there. Most recently I was offered a job at the University of Portland as a clinical faculty associate and assistant! I will start in September 2012 while I also continue my employment with OHSU.” Welcome to the campus family, Charlie, or should we say, welcome back?

We heard recently from Alison Burke, who writes: “I will be starting graduate school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in August to obtain a clinical doctorate in audiology (AuD).”

Corinne Kugel writes: “I have moved and am married.

Corinne Rose Rademacher is now Corinne Rose Rademacher Kugel.” Thanks Corinne, congratulations on your marriage.

Alice Rossignol writes with wonderful news: “Andrew Crane and I, who met and fell in love at UP, were married at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry on August 11, 2012. Hooray for love!”

We’ll second that motion, yes

indeed. Thanks for sharing the news and congratulations on your marriage!

also conducted research as part of a Thailand research experience for undergraduates program.” Thanks Warren, sounds like we haven’t heard the last of the Parks twins.

James S. Rost passed away on August 8, 2012, of natural causes. A beloved husband, brother and uncle, James is remember as a teacher to all.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

We heard wonderful news recently from Jennifer Lofft (Goolkasian): “I recently married my college boyfriend, Joseph Lofft. We are both alumni of UP. We got married at our

’10 DOUBLE TROUBLE We heard recently from UP chemistry professor Warren Wood, who writes: “I wanted to let you know that Joe and Josh Parks (twins, class of 2010) both received 2012 National Science Foundation (NSF) graduate research fellowships. They are both Ph.D. graduate students at the University of California Santa Cruz. Joe and Josh were chemistry majors while at UP—Joe conducted research with me and participated in a NSF funded international research experience for undergraduates in France, and Josh conducted research with Ray Bard and Angela Hoffman. He

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alma mater on July 14th, our first time back to the campus after graduating, and it was amazing to celebrate our marriage at the place that held so much special significance to

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C L A S S Jason Geis ’93 has been busy since his days on The Bluff, where he was a baseball All-American for coach Terry Pollreisz ’69 and earned his degree in communication management.

These days he runs Blue Chip Tek in Sunnyvale, California,with his wife Jessica, who founded the privately held company in 2002. Blue Chip Tek, which has doubled its sales every year to over $40 million last year, is a Silicon Valley IT consulting firm and high tech integrator focused on selling the products that run the Internet. It is 20 employees strong (including three UP graduates), and offers technology solutions to businesses like Mozilla, YouTube, and eBay, all Blue Chip customers long before they became household business names.

“The main core of our business is to build the infrastructure for internet companies,” Jason explains.

“They tell us what they’re trying to do online, and we tell them how much Cisco or Dell or HP they’ll need.

We sell them the hardware and software that creates the website, so if you go to, say, eBay to buy something you’re going through equipment we sold them to build their site. Customer loyalty is key to our success. We listen to them very closely because they literally create our business. All of our technology solutions are the result of customer requirements.”

Jason keeps close tabs on the University’s remarkable growth and progress, and is particularly impressed with the nationally renowned entrepreneurship center, ranked first in the nation last year. “My degree prepared me well for the business world, but I wish they had some of those entrepreneurial programs when I was there,” he says. “But it’s great to see the evolution of the University since my time.” The University, he notes, is a family affair for him; Jason’s father-in-law is life regent Steve Farley ’66, his brother-in-law is Dan Farley ’93, and his sister Tina Geis ’95 played basketball for the Pilots. We assume it is only a matter of time before Jason and Jessica’s children Jake and Jordan are enrolling, probably escorted by their beaming grandfather Steve. What a day that will be.

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N O T E S us. Father Gary Chamberland was our celebrant. Currently we are both living in San Jose, California. I work as an RN at Good Samaritan Hospital, and Joseph works as a mechanical engineer at Air Systems Inc. We would love to be featured in the Portland Magazine class notes for 2010!” Congratulations, Jennifer and Joseph, and we’re happy to share your joy with your fellow alumni.

’11 TAKING THE PLUNGE We heard from Sam Harris recently, who writes: “I am starting graduate school at George Washington University, seeking a master of science degree in security policy studies, hopefully by 2014.” Thanks for writing Sam, and good luck to you!

Congratulations to Louis Piano, who completed basic training for the United States Navy at Recruit Training Command, Great Lakes, Ill., in August 2012. During the eightweek program, Piano completed a variety of training which included classroom study and practical instruction on naval customs, first aid, firefighting, water safety and survival, and shipboard and aircraft safety.

An emphasis was also placed on physical fitness. The capstone event of boot camp is "Battle Stations,” designed to galvanize the basic warrior attributes of sacrifice, dedication, teamwork and endurance in each recruit through the practical application of basic Navy skills and the core values of honor, courage and commitment.

’12 A GOOD NURSING YEAR The University’s School of Nursing has a lot to celebrate when it comes to the success of their 2012 graduate students. One hundred percent of the school’s doctor of nursing practice (DNP) graduates successfully passed their national certification exams qualifying them as family nurse practitioners. They are now prepared to meet the nation’s growing need for excellent primary health care, especially through their preparation in caring for vulnerable populations. One hundred percent of UP’s master’s graduates have successfully passed their national certification exams as clinical nurse leaders, too. These graduates are prepared to improve quality and safety at the point of care in a variety of populations, and are ready to play leading roles in the effort to make needed changes in health care. “These accomplishments provide external

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evidence that our graduates have met or exceeded national standards determined by the discipline of nursing,” says School of Nursing dean Joann Warner. “We celebrate our outstanding graduates, and give credit to our strong team of nursing faculty for helping them achieve their success.”

UP senior Sam Bridgman was the driving force behind Ride Ataxia in Portland, a bike ride to raise money for Friedreich’s Ataxia (FA) research on Saturday, September 22. It was the first in the Northwest and one of six Ride Ataxia events across the country to benefit the Friedreich’s Ataxia Research Alliance. The nonprofit organization is working toward finding a cure for the

rare, degenerative neuro-muscular disorder. Bridgman hoped the ride would increase public awareness about the debilitating disease, which affects about one in 50,000 people (including Bridgman) in the United States. The more than event raised $______ Find out $30,000.

Find out more at more at rideataxia.org/portrideataxia.org/portland.

To land.

To read about Sam and readexperiences about Sam and hisUniverexperihis at the ences the University of Portsity of at Portland go to ORne.ws/ land go to ORne.ws/ samsam-bridgman.

To see a short bridgman. To see short documentary filmaby JeffdocuKenmentary

by Jeff Kennel nel of thefilm UP marketing teamof thetoUP marketing team go to go http://vimeo.com/ http://vimeo.com/ 43579515.

43579515.

FACULTY, STAFF, FRIENDS Holy Cross seminarian Mark DeMott, who serves as Shipstad residence hall director, will make Final Vows and be ordained to the Order of the Diaconate next weekend at Notre Dame, Indiana. In April 2013, he and two others will be ordained to the priesthood.

We were saddened to learn of the death of UP education professor emeritus Joe Pascarelli on June 11, 2012. Joe had a long and successful career serving with distinction for almost two decades at the University of Portland. Joe cheerfully and graciously taught on campus and at offcampus sites in Canada, Washington, Oregon and Guam,

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and was influential in the design and founding of the ACE program at Notre Dame, launching and teaching in its academic program. His research was wide ranging and accomplished; his vita lists over 70 publications with a world-wide reach working in the area of mentoring and fostering resilience in youth. He will be missed by faculty, alumni, students, and friends.

Our prayers and condolences.

We got a cool photo from University Museum coordinator Carolyn Connolly ’88, ’90, who writes: “Remember Mack’s Market? The neighborhood market that was just a few steps away from the campus and served students from 1954 until it was torn down in 2003? It was located behind Haggerty Hall on Willamette Blvd. Since 2003, the University museum has been the caretaker of the original Mack’s Market sign. Now that a new

‘Mack’s Market’ convenience store has opened on the lower level of the Bauccio Commons, the museum has loaned the sign to the new Mack’s Market. The sign just went up at the beginning of the fall 2012 semester.” Thanks Carolyn, that should stir plenty of memories of late-night trips for jerky, Funyuns, and various malt beverages à la the late lamented Mack’s Market.

Prayers, please, for longtime UP sociology professor Bob Duff and his family on the loss

of his wife, Vivian GedalyDuff, who passed away at their home in Portland on September 6, 2012, after a fouryear battle with breast cancer.

Also present at her side were her younger sister, Alice Wells of Medford; and dear friend Mary Cruise from California.

Survivors also include her brother, Stephen of El Paso, Texas, and many aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. Vivian taught in the School of Nursing at the University of Portland for four years, and for the past 29 years she was on the faculty of the School of Nursing at Oregon Health and Sciences University teaching Child and Family Nursing. She will be remembered by all who knew her. In lieu of flowers, donation will be accepted by the schools of nursing at Oregon Health and Sciences University and the University of Portland to assist student learning with scholarship support. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

The loud wail heard last spring coming from the direction of Waud’s Bluff was the result of Fr. Bob Antonelli, C.S.C., announcing to his colleagues that he intends to retire from his position as University archivist. The editors of this particular publication, especially, are bereft at the idea of an Antonelli-less University of Portland. Since he arrived on The Bluff in 1999, Fr. Bob has worked miracles in the cavernous University Archives, located in the basement of Shipstad Hall. His ability to inflict quiet, efficient order on hundreds of thousands of documents and artifacts is a thing to behold. We feel much better after meeting his successor, Rev. Jeff Schneibel, C.S.C., who seems to be a wonderfully able and affable chap. When pressed to produce a photo from his younger days, Fr. Bob had this to say: “Attached is a scanned photo from our Province Review from 1965 and it is not of good quality. I have none of my own, I’m afraid.

As for retirement, there is no rest for the wicked me. Fr. Schneibel may be coming as the new archivist this week but I will still be here showing him around for at least the next year and so

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On an Irish pilgrimage of sorts this past spring: Katie Beaubien ’10, who attended the International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. “I was blessed to attend the closing Mass at the Congress where I saw for myself how the Catholic Church stands true to its title of universal,” writes Katie. “I was surrounded by people I didn’t know, but during the sign of peace, regardless of our race, culture, or language, we engaged each other as one Church—fellow Catholics wishing peace upon each other. It didn’t matter what color our skin was, where we were from, or what language we spoke; we all shared our Catholic faith together as we shared our peace with each other. It was incredible. I love being Catholic! Which, I suppose is why I am enjoying my job as youth minister in Southern Oregon.” there will be no discontinuity in service. We both know that he has a lot to catch up on, but he is a quick learner. I was on staff at the seminary when he entered Holy HolyCross Crossand andso sohave have known known him for him a long for a time.” long time.”

DEATHS D Peter EATHS F. Sandrock ’32, August 23, Peter 2012.F. Sandrock ’32, August 23, Jack2012.

Hoggins ’44, June 17, 2012, Jack Oroville, Hoggins Calif. ’44, June 17, 2012, Mary Oroville, Ellen Lajoy, Calif. wife of Mary Frank Ellen Lajoy Lajoy, ’47, July wife 18,of2012, Frank Portland, Lajoy Ore. ’47, July 18, 2012, Portland, Charles Patrick Ore. McCarty ’49, Charles September Patrick 5, 2012, McCarty Ashland, ’49, September Ore. 5, 2012, Ashland, Ore. Wayne Arnold Olsen ’50, SepWayne temberArnold 8, 2012.Olsen ’50, September Edwin Wilson 8, 2012. ’53, September 10, Edwin 2012, Seattle, Wilson Wash. ’53, September 10, Joe T. 2012, Namba Seattle, ’53, June Wash.14, 2012.

Joe Ronald T. Namba M. Marshall ’53, June ’55,14, August 2012.

31, 2012.

Ronald Ruth Helen M. Marshall Avery Wiens, ’55, August wife 31, of Arthur 2012. Wiens ’56, September Ruth 17, 2012, Helen Lake Avery Oswego, Wiens, Ore. wife

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of Marvin Arthur A.Wiens Bachman, ’56, September husband 17, of Della 2012,Bachman Lake Oswego, ’60, July Ore. 30, Marvin 2012. A. Bachman, husband of Richard Della Moorman Bachman’62, ’60,August July 30, 30, 2012.

Richard Moorman Cooper ’63,’62, September August 30, 8, 2012.

2012.

Richard Gerald E.Cooper Roth ’65, ’63,August September 25, 8, 2012, 2012.

Portland, Ore. Gerald WilliamE.Edward Roth ’65, Anderson August 25, ’76, 2012, June 27, Portland, 2012. Ore. William Gerald T.Edward Heim, Anderson father of Erik ’76, June Heim 27, ’77,2012.

July 31, 2012.

Gerald Christopher T. Heim, J. Lumsargis father of’84, Erik Heim July 19, ’77,2012, JulyLakewood, 31, 2012. Colo.

Christopher Kathleen “Eannie” J. Lumsargis Henry ’86, ’84, July 19, 16, 2012, Lakewood, Salinas, Calif.

Colo.

Kathleen Joan Anita “Eannie” HaddixHenry ’96, Septem’86, July ber 4,16, 2012.

2012, Salinas, Calif.

Joan Randall Anita Alan Haddix Stupey ’96, ’04, September August 4, 2012.

31, 2012.

Randall James S. Alan Rost ’10, Stupey August ’04,9, 2012.

August Joe Pascarelli, 31, 2012. longtime UP James education S. Rost professor, ’10, August June 9, 11, 2012.

Joe Vivian Pascarelli, Gedaly-Duff, longtime wife UPof education UP sociology professor, professor June Bob11, 2012.

Duff, September 6, 2012, PortVivian land, Ore. Gedaly-Duff, wife of

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A note from Andy Matarrese ’10, editor of The Beacon for two years: “After graduation I got a job with the U.S. Forest Service as a wildland firefighter on the Ochoco National Forest in central Oregon. I stuck with the job to pay for graduate school at Northwestern University’s journalism program, which I finished this past June.

This will be my third season on fires. I’ve been applying for journalism jobs, but until that pans out, it seems there will still be plenty of fires to fight. Here are some photographs; getting good shots of firefighting can be tough because you’re busy, well, firefighting.”

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N O T E S Br. Fred Williams, C.S.C. passed away on August 4, 2012, at the age of 74. Students who attended the University from 1978 to 1986 will remember the quiet, earnest man who served as head resident in Kenna Hall and various student life roles, mostly counselling and career placement.

Brother Fred’s teaching career began at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, Calif., where he also served as the attendance officer. After a short stay at St. Francis High School in Mountain View, Calif., he moved to Long Beach, where he served 12 years as a teacher, a department chair, a director of student activities and eventually as principal for five years. After that he taught and served as chair of the religious studies department at Moreau Catholic High School in Hayward for two years.

While serving in the Portland area he became active in minority student affairs and in the Willamette Valley Racial Minorities Consortium, the Black Catholic Lay Caucus and other programs of the Archdiocese of Portland. He was sought out by many groups as one of a very few African American religious or clergy in the Archdiocese of Portland. He spent the latter part of his career in Portland at the DePaul Center and Providence Hospital, where he worked in helping those with chemical dependencies and addictions. When his health began to deteriorate in the late 1990s, Brother Fred moved to Austin and the Brother Vincent Pieau Residence in 2002. He spent the last several years at Dujarie House at Holy Cross Village in South Bend, Ind. Our prayers and condolences to his family and colleagues.

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A note from Sara Sundborg Daubenberger ’04 and her husband Michael ’03: They married in September 2011, in Port Townsend, Washington, and then sailed away through the Bahamas for a year on their boat the Tanqueray.

They returned from the coolest honeymoon ever late this summer; Sara to her work as an electrical engineer with Bonneville Power, Michael as a structural engineer with Parkin Engineering. Sigh. We could stare at this photograph for weeks. For more on their travels, see sailingthetanqueray.com.

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Or here’s a Campaign story. In 1936, a lanky kid named Kenneth Ford opened a sawmill in southern Oregon, in the Hundred Valleys area of the Umpqua River drainage. He was not yet thirty years old. His sawmill prospered, and the tiny Roseburg Lumber Company grew precipitately; today it owns more than half a million acres of sustainably harvested timberland, employs three thousand people in eighty communities, and is still a family business. In 1957 Kenneth and his wife Hallie Ford, a teacher and artist, started The Ford Family Foundation, which now annually provides millions of dollars for Oregonians for education, the arts, and community support of all kinds. In the past few years The Ford Family Foundation has given University students nearly three million dollars to pursue their riveting educations on The Bluff. Let us type that again: nearly three million dollars of scholarships and grants that our kids do not have to borrow, dollars that help them become nurses, teachers, entrepreneurs, engineers, and anything else you can imagine that sparks and jazzes and foments community in Oregon. That’s amazing. And it all started, really, with a lanky kid with a wild idea. So, let’s review: a kid with a wild idea works really hard, and his idea turns out to help thousands of other kids chase their wild ideas. What is the University of Portland’s Rise Campaign really about, down deep? That’s what it’s about. Thank you, Kenneth and Hallie Ford, for your dreams and generosity.

Courtesy of Donna Wolford and Norm Smith, The Ford Family Foundation. Our thanks.

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THE FOOD ISSUE Rarely do we run two covers for an issue, but we could not resist here, because the ingredients inside these covers are delicious: Michael Pollan on the decline of cooking, Pico Iyer on the savory aspects of not eating, Bob Pyle on Northwest ales, Ana Maria Spagna on elk steaks, chats with food visionaries Fedele Bauccio ’64 and Matt Domingo ’02, and a lovely spread of photographs of the men and women and children in Oregon who grow and make the University’s food. Such an ancient holy crucial sacrament, sharing food; as the mysterious Christ told us to do, many years ago....