Vermont Quarterly Spring 2017

Vermont THE UNIVERSITY OF

Q UA RT E R LY

GORGEOUS NEUROSCIENCE MEETS STUDENT LIFE SPRING 2017

Vermont Quarterly DEPARTMENTS

2 President’s Perspective 4 The Green 18 Alumni Voice 20 On Course 47 Class Notes 64 Extra Credit FEATURES

22

Follow Through

30

Pioneers

The commitment between Josh Speidel, his family, and the Catamount basketball program transcends life on the court. | BY AMY WIMMER SCHWARB

The step to college that many take for granted is a leap for first-generation students as they navigate college life without the guidance of parents who have traveled the same road. | BY THOMAS WEAVER

35

Gold Dome Grads

The top leaders in Montpelier’s Statehouse share common heritage as UVM grads. | BY SALLY POLLAK

40

UVM PEOPLE: Katie Elmore Mota ’04 Creating platforms for a diversity of voices drives alumna Katie Elmore Mota’s focus as executive producer on “East Los High” and other Wise Entertainment projects. | BY ANDREA ESTEY

42

Gorgeous Neuroscience

Using the lessons of contemporary neuroscience to influence undergrad behavior, UVM is helping students establish healthy habits early, when they matter most. | BY SARAH TUFF DUNN

SPRING 2017

Two days after a car accident put Josh Speidel, a star high school basketball player and prized UVM recruit, in an Indianapolis hospital with a serious brain injury, his future coach John Becker was at his bedside. What can a basketball coach say to the parents of a basketball player who lies next to them, appearing lifeless? Becker offered this: “We’re with your family. Josh is a part of us, whether he plays basketball or doesn’t. He’s a Catamount. We have a spot for him, whenever Josh can get to us.” | PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMIE SCHWABEROW

| PRESIDENT’S PERSPECTIVE

A Winning Strategy for UVM

In all of our pursuits— academic, athletic, and extracurricular— the University of Vermont’s core mission is to prepare students to be ethical leaders who serve the global community. Every day I see this mission in action in colleges and departments across UVM. As you will read in the inspiring story on page 22, this student-centered commitment is on display in our varsity athletics program as well.

By all accounts, our varsity Catamounts have been highly successful on the playing fields so far this academic year. The fall season was highlighted by the nationally ranked men’s soccer team’s advancement to the second round of the NCAA tournament. Senior Brian Wright became the first Vermont player ever drafted in major league soccer when he was picked in the first round by the New England Revolution.

Other fall successes included our women’s field hockey team, which earned its highest win total in the past eight years; and the women’s soccer team, which advanced to the America East semifinals. Our winter teams have continued the winning ways, with men’s basketball undefeated in conference play and our nationally ranked men’s hockey and women’s hockey both competing at or near the top of their respective leagues as I write this article in early February.

This momentum on the playing field underscores the steady rise to greater competitive levels for UVM sports. But UVM’s winning strategy has more at its core than

2|

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

physical prowess and well-honed team dynamics. At a time when the trend in the highly competitive environment of NCAA Division 1 athletics is toward ever greater commercialization of intercollegiate sport, UVM’s dedication is to the development of our players as student-athletes and to their individual maturity and personal growth.

Our varsity athletes are earnest students who take their academics as seriously as their sport. As our coaches meet with potential athletes, UVM’s focus on “academics first” is their top talking point.

Those athletes who choose UVM know that our first-level commitment is to their academic performance and their overall development as leaders and citizens. This doesn’t mean that our goal for every team is anything less than competing at the championship level. Make no mistake: we play to win. But we are convinced that winning on the field and winning in academics go hand-in-hand.

Competitive athletes, who are also serious students, play at the top of their game in both arenas. For the last twelve years, our varsity athletes—more than 400 students each year on eighteen teams—have scored a collective GPA above 3.0, higher in twenty-two of those twenty-four semesters than the student body as a whole. UVM is in the top three percent of the NCAA in terms of graduation rates of our student-athletes.

We have taken home the Academic Cup twice as many times as any of our competitors in the America East conference.

Our student-athletes are business majors and budding engineers, pre-med and prelaw students and environmental studies majors—every major at UVM boasts students on our current or past athletic teams.

Athletes who sign on to play at UVM know they are expected to excel in their studies, for their team, and for their community. In addition to a full class schedule and Division 1 competition, every varsity athlete is involved in community service.

Teams volunteer for the Special Olympics, assist at the Ronald McDonald House, and help the Make-A-Wish Foundation to realize kids’ dreams. Last year the Athletic Department and our student-athletes provided more than 700 hours of volunteer time to the community of Burlington and beyond, giving back to the community that so enthusiastically turns out for and supports our UVM players. They are a source of pride and energy for UVM students, faculty, staff, and alumni as well as for of all Vermont.

The energy level in the Athletic Department and throughout our whole campus was recently ramped up even higher with the unveiling of an exciting concept for a transformational facility. A new Multipurpose Center initiative includes an almost six-fold increase of dedicated health and wellness space for our students (from 15,000 to 86,000 square feet) and a new Events Center that will host cultural, social, academic, and entertainment events, as well as serving as the home for UVM SALLY MCCAY

Basketball. The Events Center will be integrated fully with the iconic Gutterson Field House, which will be improved significantly and preserved as the home for UVM Hockey. The Board of Trustees provided an initial endorsement of the concept at its February meeting as well as funding to move forward with the next phase of design and cost estimating.

The summer issue of Vermont Quarterly will carry a feature on this new facility, which will be a wonderful resource

for our students, alumni, and the wider Vermont community.

As its core, the University’s central responsibility is to promote the health, well-being, and safety of our students as we support them in their successful educational journey through UVM. Our investments in scholarship, financial aid, great learning opportunities, and competitive facilities portends well for all of us.

—Tom Sullivan

Big event in your future?

T H I N K A LU M N I H O US E .

A beautifully-restored, historic home coupled with a large, new event pavilion nestled in the heart of Burlington’s Hill Section, the UVM Alumni House is an elegant setting for weddings, cocktail parties, dinners and meetings for the public and the UVM community.

In the main house, individual rooms are clustered around the grand hall offering comfortable space for intimate dinners, client meetings and staff retreats.

For larger gatherings, the Vermont–inspired Silver Pavilion can accommodate one hundred and fifty guests in a light-filled space that boasts a vaulted ceiling with wooden beams and state-of-the-art technology including an LED wall.

Together the main house and pavilion can be combined for a one-of-a-kind event space.

MORE INFORMATION:

VQ

EDITOR Thomas Weaver ART DIRECTOR Elise Whittemore CLASS NOTES EDITOR Kathleen Laramee ’00 CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Joshua Brown, Chris Dissinger, Sarah Tuff Dunn, Andrea Estey, Maria Hummel ’94, Kathleen Laramee ’00, Sally Pollak, Mark Ray, Jon Reidel G’06, Amy Wimmer Schwarb, Jarrett Van Meter, Basil Waugh PHOTOGRAPHY Clinton Blackburn, Joshua Brown, Chris Dissinger, Andy Duback, Ryan Strand Greenberg, Emily Howe ’15, Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist ’09, Brian Jenkins, Mike Kelly ’09, Caleb Kenna, AJ Mast, Sally McCay, Robin Naidoo, James Runde, Jamie Schwaberow, Thomas Weaver ADVERTISING SALES Vermont Quarterly 86 South Williams Street Burlington, VT 05401 (802) 656-7996, tweaver@uvm.edu CORRESPONDENCE Editor, Vermont Quarterly 86 South Williams Street Burlington, VT 05401 (802) 656-2005, tweaver@uvm.edu ADDRESS CHANGES UVM Foundation 411 Main Street Burlington, VT 05401 (802) 656-9662, alumni@uvm.edu CLASS NOTES classnote@uvm.edu VERMONT QUARTERLY publishes March 1, July 1, November 1.

Produced by UVM Creative Communications Services, Amanda Waite’02 G’04, Director.

PRINTED IN VERMONT Issue No. 77, March 2017 VERMONT QUARTERLY ONLINE uvm.edu/vq instagram.com/universityofvermont twitter.com/uvmvermont facebook.com/universityofvermont youtube.com/universityofvermont

uvmalumnihouse.com Andrea.VanHoven@uvm.edu SPRING 2017 |

3

YOU SHOULD KNOW

“

We must recognize the importance of advancing polar science to understand how our world works. And, right now, because we’re pumping huge plumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we really need to know how our world works.”

—Paul Bierman. The UVM geology professor’s most recent research publication on the Greenland ice sheet was widely covered by the media, from the BBC to Time Magazine.

30 30 UNDER

Kristof Grina ’12 earned a place on Forbes’s “30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs of 2017” for his work co-founding Up Top Acres, transforming Metro Washington, D.C., rooftops into organic farms. go.uvm.edu/grina

2

#

UVM’s Sustainable Entrepreneurship MBA moved up the Princeton Review rankings to the second spot among “Green MBA” programs.

JAMES FALLOWS will deliver the graduation address at UVM’s 2017 commencement ceremony, Sunday, May 21. uvm.edu/commencement

H

UVM GOVERNORS

H

Before Governor Phil Scott, just six UVM graduates have held the state’s top office: Madeleine Kunin, who earned a master’s at UVM, was the most recent, preceded by Joseph Blaine Johnson, 1955-’59; Urban Andrain Woodbury (MD) 1894-’96; Roswell Farnham, 1880-’82; Asahel Peck, 1874-’76; and John Gregory Smith, 1863-’65.

See story on page 35.

BEST BOOK

Ground: A Reprise of Photographs from the Farm Security Administration, a project by photographer and UVM professor of art Bill McDowell, recently earned accolades as one of 2016’s top publications. Mother Jones included Ground on its list of standout photo books of 2016, and Artnet News placed the volume among its top ten art books of 2016.

SOLDIER-SCHOLAR Cadet Kaelyn Burbey, a senior in the Honors College majoring in environmental engineering with a math minor, received the ROTC Legion of Valor Bronze Cross Award, given annually for achievement of scholastic excellence in military and academic subjects. Just thirteen cadets nationally receive the award.

UVM has long had strong study abroad programs. But a new step, joining the Institute of International Education’s Generation Study Abroad initiative, looks to raise participation 40 percent by 2020.

4|

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

RIGHT: EMILY HOWE ’15

THE GREEN News & Views

#InstaUVM In December and January, we received nearly 200 submissions to our #InstaUVM winter photo contest on Instagram. Shots came from around campus and Vermont, including this 'gram of antler-like branches cocooned in ice by Emily Howe ’15. See the winners at go.uvm.edu/winter-pics, and follow us on Instagram @universityofvermont.

FA L L

2 0 1 6

SPRING 2017 |

5

| THE GREEN

Lens Life

A scene from Kairos Dirt and the Errant Vacuum, the latest feature film by Madsen Minax, assistant professor in Art and Art History.

FILM | Compared to his own undergraduate education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the students in Madsen Minax’s film classes bring a different perspective, that of the broader university.

The new assistant professor, who joined the UVM faculty at the beginning of the academic year, says he has enjoyed that difference in some respects.

“I really love the idea of someone’s artwork being informed by their research in psychology or biology or whatever discipline. You need to have multiple points of interest to make interesting work.”

Early in his career, Minax juggled life as a touring musician (his principal instrument is stand-up bass), the inevitable day jobs (barista to dog walker), and four years of hard work on his first featurelength film, the documentary Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance. The film made a mark at independent film festivals from 2009-2011, earning best documentary prizes at the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival and Reeling Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, in addition to audience choice awards at several others.

After stints at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the University of Memphis for the past four years, the faculty post at UVM is a return north for Minax, a native of northern Michigan. He’s happy to be back in hiking and Nordic ski country, but

6|

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

admits to some readjustment to the cold. A large, kitschy rug depicting several majestic deer in a snowy scene adorns the floor of his office. Asked if it’s homage to his homeland, Minax laughs. “No. I just like it.”

Other objects around his Williams Hall office are truer revelations of career and character. Camera and sound cables looped on the wall, black cases of camera equipment, a guitar case and a small amp, a bass drum kick pedal on the windowsill. Though Minax doesn’t perform much anymore as a musician, due to repetitive stress issues in his wrist, he writes and performs all the music in his films.

Minax’s latest feature-length film, Kairos Dirt and the Errant Vacuum, recently earned Best Feature at the Indie Memphis Film Festival. The Memphis screening was an unofficial premier, as Minax is still completing color corrections and other fine tuning. Official release is planned for March, film festivals to-be-determined.

With Kairos Dirt and other projects in various stages of production, Minax continues a familiar pattern, balancing features with shorter projects.

“I feel pretty exhilarated and accomplished when I finish something that took four years to make,” he says. “I try to hold onto that feeling for a little while.

Then I let that go and figure something else out.”

TOURNEY TIME As this issue of the magazine went to press, the Catamounts looked ahead to potentially promising post-seasons on a number of fronts.

Science for All Kids EDUCATION | Leon Walls knows, loves, and wants to transform the science classroom. The associate professor of elementary science education is working to change the way we teach science, both by studying the experiences of young science students of color and by finding ways to incorporate sustainability and a sense of stewardship into the science curriculum of our youngest learners.

Toward that end, Walls joined the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center’s (GLBRC) Research Experience for Teachers Program last summer, conducting sustainable biofuels research and developing curricula. Walls immersed himself in an RET research project investigating the details of the carbon cycle, testing different types of soil substrates and their capacities for keeping carbon in the soil.

“It’s really thrilling to me to be in a science lab,” Walls says. “The fact that I’m actually working alongside these scientists, actually making measurements, that’s invaluable. To know the actual procedures and processes, to be able to talk to my students about the measurements I took and why, I can then relate that to the process skills I want them to focus on in their classrooms with children.

I can speak to them from a more authentic position.”

Looking back at Walls’s career, it’s clear that the RET is just the most recent instance of following his strong sense of curiosity to JAMES RUNDE

its end. Before he was an education professor, Walls taught middle school science in Milwaukee Public Schools for ten years.

“I, like a lot of people,” Walls says, “wondered ‘why are the black kids, why are the Latino kids, struggling in my class?’”

Unlike a lot of people, Walls left teaching to enroll in a graduate program in geoenvironmental science education at Purdue University. There he first encountered critical race theory, which gave him the tools he needed to study education at the intersection of race. Soon thereafter, he began exploring how children of color conceive of and understand the practice of science and scientists.

“Children of color have been excluded, marginalized, in science education, in environmental movements, and in sustainability discussions,” he says. “My focus in everything that I do is transformation. We need to change, to transform, how we teach science and how we think about science and who we are inclusive of as far as science goes.”

Next up for Walls is a large-scale data collection on children of color in the science classroom—how they conceive of scientists and how they understand science practices— that he hopes will impact the way in which his field, as well as teachers in classrooms across the country, approach science education. “No matter where I go,” Walls says, “no matter where I am, my heart is still always in Milwaukee Public Schools, still with those students.”

MEN’S BASKETBALL was undefeated in America East league play, 21-5 on the season, in early February, and hoping to continue their winning ways through the conference tournament to earn an NCAA Tournament berth.

MEN’S HOCKEY was building a strong season, rising as high as #10 in the national rankings.

The WOMEN’S HOCKEY team was drawing crowds to Gutterson, too—notching record attendance and wins, holding third place in Hockey East in early February.

The SKI TEAM’s usual dominance on the Eastern Circuit was being tested by Dartmouth, winners of the season’s first two carnivals.

New Englanders can get out and cheer on the Cats as UNH hosts the 2017 NCAA Championships, March 8-11.

For the latest Catamount sports reports: Uvmathletics.com

SPRING 2017 |

7

MAP TO MONGOLIA On the eighth day, Simon McIntosh ‘17 got off his horse and started walking. He was exploring a roadless mountain pass in the northernmost corner of Mongolia, near the border of Russia.

To his east, Lake Hovsgol stretched for more than eighty miles. “Some people call it the Blue Pearl,” he says. “It’s stunning around there— where the steppe grasslands and taiga forests meet the Siberian mountains.” In that region, nomadic Tsaatan people herd reindeer, and endangered ibex and Argali sheep roam. A few trucks and motorcycles meander through the grasses and mud. To cross the mountains, and descend into the Darkhad Valley, there is no improved road, only rough tracks.

“But that is changing,” McIntosh says. The Mongolian government has established new national parks in the area and built a paved road from the capital to Lake Hovsgol in 2013.

The government now aims to build a paved road from the lake over into the remote valley.

“But the question is: where?” McIntosh says.

Helping to answer that question became McIntosh’s senior thesis—and took him to Mongolia for the summer of 2016. It was his second trip there to make maps in partnership with local park rangers and the Mongol Ecology Center. An environmental studies major in UVM’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences—with a minor in geospatial technologies—McIntosh spent weeks trekking over five mountain passes with a Mongolian partner, and a pocketful of GPS equipment.

With support from the UVM Office of Undergraduate Research, a Simon Family Public Research Fellowship—and guidance from UVM professors Patricia Stokowski, Bob Manning, and Rick Paradis—McIntosh planned his independent research expedition.

“Write a thesis or do an independent study.

Find a project that is yours,” McIntosh suggests to incoming students. “You should look at college as something you do, rather than something that’s done to you.”

8|

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

IAN THOMAS JANSEN-LONNQUIST ’09

STUDENT FOCUS |

Answers for Adults with Autism NURSING | For most of his life, Kevin Hughes has felt like an outsider. A loner as a child, the 65-year-old comedian struggled socially as a teenager and lacked friends as an adult, often offending people without knowing why.

It wasn’t until a few years ago, after one of his comedy shows, that he first realized he might be among the millions of undiagnosed adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

“A couple came up to me who were doctors and said, ‘What a marvelous way to use your autism for a career,’” recalls Hughes. “I called my wife and kids to laugh about it, but there was dead silence on the other end—until they finally said simultaneously, ‘Dad, that makes total sense.’” That night was the start of a painful three-year journey to self-diagnosis.

Hughes is not alone. Approximately 1.5 percent of all U.S. adults (about 4.8 million) are believed to have ASD, with many attempting to self-diagnose. A recent study in the journal Archives of Psychiatric Nursing explores the experiences of this population, seeking to help healthcare workers identify adults with ASD before they become depressed or harm themselves.

“Healthcare professionals must have an understanding of self-diagnosis to help individuals transition to formal diagnosis and to adequately educate, support, and screen this population for comorbidities,” says study author Laura Lewis, assistant professor in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences. “Without knowledge of their diagnosis or supports in place, this undiagnosed population is likely at a higher risk of depression, anxiety, and suicide.”

Five major themes emerged from the qualitative study.

These include managing self-doubt; a sense of belonging; understanding oneself; questioning the need for formal diagnosis; and feeling “othered.” Many study participants reported always “feeling different” and “isolated” as children, which continued into adulthood.

“I thought every child spent months alone in their backyard building a radio telescope,” says Hughes. “I got in trouble in second grade for writing a paper about being from another planet. Even as an adult, I’ve never belonged. I’ve lived in three cities for more than a decade each and had no friends in any of them. A lot of things made sense after reading Laura’s paper.”

Likewise, a majority of the study’s participants said they felt an immediate “fit” after finding out they might have ASD. “I wanted to serve as a microphone to voices that were not being heard,” says Lewis. “I hope this research helps professionals and the public understand that, first of all, this group of individuals who are self-diagnosed exists; second, that their experiences and self-perceptions should not be dismissed; and finally, that healing is possible through understanding and awareness, whether that is facilitated by a professional diagnosis or not.”

SPRING 2017 |

9

| THE GREEN

Entrepreneurs in action

Price of Poaching

20,000 - 30,000

African elephants killed annually by poachers

$25M

Cost of poaching in lost tourism

$1.78

Return on every

$1.00 invested in protecting elephants

10 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS | In Africa, tens of thousands of elephants are killed by poachers each year. Now a new study shows that this poaching crisis costs African countries around $25 million annually in lost tourism revenue.

“Conservation is often seen as a luxury,” says Brendan Fisher, an economist at UVM who co-led the new study, “but our work shows that it pays big to protect elephants.”

Comparing this lost revenue with the cost of halting declines in elephant populations due to poaching, the study determines that investment in elephant conservation is economically favorable across the majority of African elephants’ range.

The research, undertaken by scientists at UVM’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the University of Cambridge, represents the first continent-wide assessment of the economic losses that the current elephant poaching surge (20,000-30,000 animals killed annually) is inflicting on nature-based tourism economies in Africa.

“While there have always been strong moral and ethical reasons for conserving elephants, not everyone shares this viewpoint. Our research now shows that investing in elephant conservation is actually

smart economic policy for many African countries,” says study author Robin Naidoo, lead wildlife scientist at WWF and an affiliate of the Gund Institute.

“If you close your eyes and think about Africa, there’s an elephant in that picture,” says Fisher. “So it makes perfect sense that as elephants disappear off a landscape tourists are less likely to visit those places.”

The research—using statistical modelling—shows that tourism revenue lost to the current poaching crisis exceeds the anti-poaching costs necessary to stop the decline of elephants in east, southern, and west Africa. Rates of return on elephant conservation in these regions are positive, signaling strong economic incentive for countries to protect elephant populations.

“The average rate of return on elephant conservation in east, west, and south Africa compares favorably with rates of return on investments in areas like education, food security and electricity,” says Fisher, associate professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and Gund Institute. “For example, for every dollar invested in protecting elephants in East Africa, you get about $1.78 back. That’s a great deal.”

The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

ROBIN NAIDOO/WWF

Green Mountain Saffron

FICTION VS REALITY

POLITICAL SCIENCE | Hillary Clinton’s stunning defeat in the 2016 Presidential election begs the question: when will the highest and hardest glass ceiling be shattered in the United States? While change is not yet coming to the nation’s political stage, it is under way on our screens, and new research reveals that the fiction we watch influences our gendered perceptions of what it takes to be an effective leader.

The number of roles for strong women has grown in the stories we’re watching— think Rey from The Force Awakens and Katniss from The Hunger Games—expanding beyond the limited portrayals of female characters of the past. And these changes are likely to have ramifications on our political landscape, says Jack Gierzynski, political science professor.

His study, conducted with help from students in his “Political Effects of Entertainment Media” seminar, used clips from The Hunger Games, Doctor Who, Star Trek,

and Battlestar Galactica, in which characters exhibited either stereotypically male or female leadership traits, each with positive outcomes. Results showed that after watching these clips, viewers valued female leadership traits (like compassion and empathy) over male traits (decisiveness and self-confidence).

This was especially true for the Doctor Who clip, in which the male lead drew on empathy and forgiveness to prevent a war, scoring higher points than the clips showing a female lead using these traits.

“It may be that we are more open to learning about the value of traits associated with women,” Gierzynski says, “only when they are shown to be effective by a man.”

Gierzynski points out, though, that acceptance of that gender fluidity doesn’t always flow both ways—and has created for women what he calls a double-bind.

“Since most Americans value stereotypical male traits more than stereotypi-

cal female traits in executive leadership posts, women who vie for those posts must exhibit those traits,” he says. “When female candidates do that, they violate our subconscious normative expectations of how women are supposed to act, and we end up not trusting them.”

Ultimately, the study adds to growing proof that what we watch has deep impact on how we think.

Gierzynski’s work, including his popular book about the effect of Harry Potter on Millenial support of Obama in 2008, is grounded in narrative transportation theory, which posits that when we become immersed in a story, and begin to engage with it as if it were real, it changes us— and our understanding of the world.

“There is some evidence that a change in the public’s notions of what makes a good leader has already begun,” Gierzynski says, “but this trend will need to continue in order to attain substantive gender equality in leadership.”

SPRING 2017 |

11

| THE GREEN

Warnings for Warming Lakes ENVIRONMENT | New research suggests that Lake Champlain may be more susceptible to damage from climate change than was previously understood—and that, therefore, the rules created by the EPA to protect the lake may be inadequate to prevent algae blooms and water quality problems as the region gets hotter and wetter.

“This paper provides very clear evidence that the lake could be far more sensitive to climate change than is captured by the current approach of the EPA,” says Asim Zia, lead author of the new study and associate professor in Community Development & Applied Economics. “We may need more interventions—and this may have national significance for how the agency creates regulations.”

The study, led by a team of ten scientists from UVM and one from Dartmouth College, used a powerful set of computer models that link the behavior of social and ecological systems. Their results show that accelerating climate change could easily outpace the EPA’s land-use management policies aimed at reducing the inflow of pollution from agricultural runoff, parking lots,

12 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

deforestation, cow manure, lawn fertilizer, pet waste, streambank erosion—and other sources of excess phosphorus that cause toxic algae and lake health problems.

The new lake model, with support from the National Science Foundation, integrates a much larger assembly of possible global climate change models and greenhouse gas pathways than the measures used in previous modeling. And the Vermont scientists delved deeply into the indirect and interactive effects of land use changes, “legacy phosphorus” that’s been piling up for decades in the sediment at the bottom of the lake, and other factors.

The new integrated assessment provides a powerful tool that goes far beyond understanding Lake Champlain. The overall model links together “the behavior of the watershed, lake, people and climate,” says Judith Van Houten, UVM professor of biology, director of Vermont EPSCoR, and co-author on the new study. This provides “a way forward to pull back the veil that often surrounds effects of climate change.”

The research was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

ABOVE, THOMAS WEAVER; RIGHT, DOUG GILMORE

Endowments Honor, Fund Educators At her core, Katie Shepherd is a special education teacher. She believes that every child, and every adult, deserves the chance to learn and flourish in a diverse and sometimes challenging environment for people with disabilities.

As a faculty member in the College of Education and Social Services, Professor Shepherd takes great pride when CESS graduates launch themselves as educators who will make a difference in the world.

Take Meg Ziegler ’15, for instance. A secondary ed major/special minor and Honors College student, she was awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship last year. After conducting research with Shepherd that resulted in a co-authored journal article, Ziegler is now teaching English to children in northern Thailand, weaving in a cross-cultural pen-pal exchange program with kids she taught in Shelburne, Vermont, during her student teaching experience.

Shepherd’s expertise and influence

extend beyond UVM and Vermont through her publications and current work as the project director for the U.S. Department of Education’s Transformative Leadership for Special Education Administrators.

This professor’s past work and future promise as both teacher and scholar was recently honored when Shepherd was invested as the University of Vermont’s first Levitt Family Green and Gold Professor.

Since President Tom Sullivan began his tenure at UVM, the university and the UVM Foundation have more than doubled the number of endowed faculty positions as a critical component of the Move Mountains campaign. President Sullivan notes how these endowed faculty positions serve as “magnets,” drawing and retaining the best and brightest faculty talent—not to mention attracting exceptional students.

In addition to Katie Shepherd, this fall Jane E. Knodell was endowed as the first

Mark J. Zwynenburg Green and Gold Professor of Financial History. In December, two professors from the Robert Larner, M.D. College of Medicine participated in formal investiture ceremonies. Dr. James T. Boyd became the inaugural Robert W. Hamill, M.D. Professor of Neurological Sciences, and Dr. Philip Ades was invested as the first Philip Ades, M.D. Professor of Cardiovascular Disease Prevention.

Campaign Progress CAMPAIGN GOAL $500M CURRENT GIFTS $404M

JOIN THE EFFORT | MOVEMOUNTAINS.UVM.EDU SPRING 2017 |

13

| THE GREEN

ALUMNUS ROSS NEW HEAD OF UVM EXTENSION Chuck Ross ’78—eighth generation of a Vermont farm family, former Vermont Secretary of Agriculture, longtime top staffer for Sen. Patrick Leahy, and a Catamount hockey standout back in the day—was appointed as the new director of UVM Extension in December.

“Becoming the director of UVM Extension is a wonderful opportunity to continue to work in the agricultural and food arena that shapes so much of Vermont’s economy, community, and culture,” Ross said when his appointment was announced. “Whether it be helping on water quality, implementing food safety, or helping to build a Vermont food system that is accessible to all, Extension and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has much it can do to help build a healthy population, economy, and environment in Vermont.”

Ross will build on Doug Lantagne’s outstanding leadership across thirteen years as dean of Extension. As Professor Lantagne returns to teaching and research, an administrative shift reintegrates Extension into the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

14 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

Doctoral student Morgan Cousins and chemistry professor Matt Liptak were part of a team that has deepened understanding of the generation of fluorescent light.

A New Light CHEMISTRY | Glow-in-the-dark stickers, weird deep-sea fish, LED lightbulbs— all have forms of luminescence. In other words, instead of just reflecting light, they make their own.

Now a team of scientists from the University of Vermont and Dartmouth College have discovered a new way that some molecules can make a luminescent glow—a strange, bright green.

“It’s a new method to create light,” says Matthew Liptak, UVM assistant professor of chemistry, who co-led the research. The new light may have many promising applications including novel kinds of LED bulbs and medical dyes “that can sense viscosity within a cell,” he says.

To understand how this new light is formed, consider maple syrup. It’s a thick liquid. The scientists at Dartmouth, led by chemist Ivan Aprahamian, were exploring some strange molecules, called molecular rotors, shaped like kayak paddles where both blades rotate around a shaft. (Yes, a very small shaft, many thousands of times thinner than a hair). In a thin liquid, like water, clumps of these rotating molecules—a kind of dye containing boron— give off a weak, reddish luminescent glow.

But when the scientists put the molecules into thicker and thicker maplesyrup-like solvents—in this case, mixtures

of glycerol and ethylene glycol—the fluorescent light from these molecular rotors didn’t get weaker as expected. Instead, they glow brightly, in a vivid green color nearer the blue end of the spectrum.

“That was very surprising,” says Liptak, an expert on computational chemistry. So the Dartmouth team turned to him and his students to explain why. As the UVM team investigated, making simulations at the Vermont Advanced Computing Center— and both teams further investigated the molecules using spectroscopy and other lab techniques—they came to an evenmore-surprising discovery: the way this light was being emitted required breaking a long-standing law of chemistry called Kasha’s Rule.

“We found a new way that the universe works that we didn’t understand before,” Liptak says. “It’s an exception to the rule.”

This new pathway to creating light may prove useful. “The compound we found is very bright, and due to its viscosity sensitivity, may have a multitude of applications,” says Morgan Cousins, a UVM doctoral student and co-author on the new study. “We see uses for these kinds of molecules from industrial materials to new kinds of LEDs to biomedical imaging.”

The discovery was reported in the journal Nature Chemistry.

JOSHUA BROWN

3

Q U E S T I O N S

|

Every four years, John Burke is in high demand as the foremost expert on U.S. Presidential transitions. His book Presidential Transitions: From Politics to Practice about the Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton transitions is considered essential reading, as is his book on the G.W. Bush transition. This year’s exceptional presidential transition has been no exception with regard to the questions UVM’s John G. McCullough Professor of Political Science has fielded from journalists, appearing widely in media from CNN to New Republic to The Globe and Mail.

Do you think Donald Trump’s differences with key people in his own party, like Speaker Paul Ryan, will affect his ability to get legislation passed?

John Burke

professor of political science President Trump made many promises on the campaign trail. How many of them do you think he will try to make good on?

BURKE: Let me frame this objectively. In terms of major promises, he’s going to have to make a good faith effort to satisfy his base. At the same time, he will need to focus on things that have more widespread appeal. Moreover, it’s important that he only focus on a few things; here history rather than partisanship informs. Presidents who come in with a laundry list of things they expect Congress to do—and Jimmy Carter is a good example of this—end up unsuccessful because Congress isn’t going to do all of them. You’ve got to guide Congress by saying, “Here are four or five things I think are important,” knowing full well you may only get a few of them. G.W. Bush’s experience is instructive here. The contested 2000 presidential election was difficult for Bush, but he was able to rise above it and push his own political agenda forward by governing as if he’d won with a huge majority, and I think that was very smart politically. Whether he made wise choices is another matter.

SALLY MCCAY

BURKE: I don’t think his possible struggles to pass legislation will be so much due to the fact that the party is split, but rather it will be about how our system of government works. It’s not a business corporation where the CEO gets to dictate things. I mean, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may listen, but they don’t have to do a damn thing. They are not accountable to him. He’s going to have to find a way to accommodate members of Congress. Trump would probably say, “Well, I’m a good negotiator,” but so are they. They aren’t fools. You just don’t simply tell members of your own party what they should do. Even Lyndon Johnson knew this, and he was the consummate negotiator with Congress. In short: you have a tough task, President Trump. Tougher than you have ever faced.

The Trump administration, by many estimates, has stumbled out of the gate. How does this compare to other administrations, and what are some steps that might help them recover?

BURKE: Early presidential stumbles are not unusual. Both Carter and Clinton faced criticism shortly after they took office of a White House in disarray and dysfunction in their decision making. Unfortunately, Trump does seem to have taken it up a notch, if not a couple of notches. Normally, a White House sensing "big trouble" internally would bring in seasoned hands as replacements, as Clinton did with Leon Panetta's appointment as chief of staff and David Gergen as a general counselor. This is what Trump ought to do, but he needs to clearly understand the situation and clearly signal his willingness to change. I am not optimistic that will occur. Nor is it clear who are the present-day Panettas and Gergens who have "Inside the Beltway" experience and a willingness to advance the Trump agenda.

SPRING 2017 |

15

| THE GREEN

New Home for Asian Art in Fleming’s Wilbur Room

VIRTUAL INCENTIVES, REAL REWARDS Pokémon GO has motivated its players to walk 2.8 billion miles. Now, a new mobile game from UVM researchers aims to encourage teens to exercise with similar virtual rewards.

The game, called “Camp Conquer,” is the brainchild of co-principal investigators Lizzy Pope, assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Science, and Bernice Garnett, assistant professor of education in the College of Education and Social Services. The project is one of the first in the area of gamification and obesity, and recently test launched with one hundred Burlington High School students.

Here’s how it works: Real-world physical activity, tracked by a Fitbit, translates into immediate rewards in the game, a capture-the-flag-style water balloon battle with fun, summer camp flair. Every step a player takes in the real world improves their strength, speed, and accuracy in the game. “It’s all about exciting kids to move more,” Pope says.

The team is working with Game Theory, a local design studio whose mission is to create games that drive change. Pope says forming these types of UVM/private business partnerships to create technology that can be commercialized is the whole point of UVMVentures Funds, which partially supported this project.

16 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

ART | The Fleming Museum of Art recently opened a new Gallery of Asian Art highlighting exemplary works from the permanent collection, focusing on China, Korea, Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Indonesia. The objects on view span ancient to contemporary examples of courtly, religious, and fine arts as well as everyday objects, including bronzes, ceramics, furniture, clothing and textiles, arms and armor, masks, sculpture, paintings, ink drawings, woodblock prints, and historic photographs.

“We’re thrilled to provide a beautiful new home for the highlights of our Asian collection, where works we’ve been given in the last few decades will dialogue with objects that have been in our collection for over a century,” says Andrea Rosen, the Fleming’s curator and the organizer of the installation.

The Fleming’s Asian holdings have grown more than any other aspect of the collection in the past twenty years, through generous gifts from donors such as David and Richard Nalin ’63, William Pickens III ’58, the Doris Duke Southeast Asian Art Collection, Henry D. Ginsburg, Anna Rosenblum Palmer G’88, Lester and Monique Anderson, and others. The legacy of early Fleming donors, such as Henry LeGrand Cannon and Katherine Wolcott, also plays an important role in the installation, demonstrating the ways that collecting and display, by both private citizens and museums, have molded the perception of Asia in the West.

Faculty and students in UVM’s Asian Studies Program have been involved in the process of planning the installation through classes and internships. In particular, the Honors College class Visualizing History: India, taught by Professor Abigail McGowan, generated student proposals for the installation of the South Asian collection.

The gallery is in the Fleming’s historic Wilbur Room, the first major long-term installation of permanent collection objects in this space. With refinished floors, a new layout, and a spectacular installation, the Wilbur Room has been transformed, while its historic essence remains The new Gallery of Asian Art was generously supported

by Eric Hanson, with loans from Elizabeth van Merkensteijn ’79, David and Richard Nalin ’63, and the Middlebury College Museum of Art.

Bust of Buddha, 200s-300s, Gandhara.

Gift of Dr. David and Dr. Richard Nalin ’63.

CHRIS DISSINGER

M E D I A

Unveiling the Real Rasputin For a historian working with source documents, there’s a certain visceral thrill of the chase to research. Admittedly, it’s not a Jason Bourne on a motorcyle chase, but a quieter kind. “I love that contact with the actual historical documents themselves— the physical fact that you’re holding papers that Rasputin wrote himself, or the tsar, or these various police agents,” says Doug Smith ’85. “The feel of the paper, the look of it, the ink, it brings you in contact with that world that your characters inhabited.”

As an accomplished Russian historian, whose five books have brought Russian history alive for a wide audience, Smith has spent a good deal of his career immersed in that world. His latest book, Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs, is an authoritative, critically celebrated biography that draws back the thick veil of myth surrounding the man variously described as angel or devil, and explores his role in the downfall of Tsarist Russia.

Smith’s Rasputin biography is the result of six years of work, taking the author to archives in seven countries. Filling in the sparse facts known of Rasputin’s youth drew Smith to an archive in Tobolsk, Siberia, a town near his birthplace. There, he found a scrap of knowledge that had evaded biographers for a century, documents that showed Rasputin was briefly jailed for the crime of cursing at the mayor.

“It’s a little clue,” Smith says. “But it’s a little clue that offers insight into who he was as a young man—this sort of rebellious, unruly side, a lack of respect for authority.”

Conversely, sometimes it was what Smith didn’t find in those archives that shed light. A popular story, seeded by Rasputin’s enemies, asserted that he’d been a horse thief as a young man. Smith found no evidence in police records. “Rasputin: Horse Thief” was fake news early twentieth-century Russian style.

With some 150 Rasputin biographies in the Library of Congress, the author

|

BRIEFS |

initially wasn’t sure that one by Douglas Smith needed to join the call number.

But as the centenary of Rasputin’s death approached, Smith was struck by how much myth still seemed to stand as fact with this famous life. “I came away from reading previous biographies not terribly satisfied,” Smith says. “It seemed like Rasputin was presented as a cartoon character.

He is ‘the holy devil, the saint who sinned.’

I just didn’t find it very convincing.”

Looking back at his evolution as a Russian scholar, Smith laughs, and admits to some embarrassment that his initial draw to languages may have been inspired by the bits of German he heard sprinkled into episodes of “Hogan’s Heroes.” At UVM, his interest in German took a turn toward Russian when he minored in the language on the advice of Professor David Scrase. “I fell in love with Russian that first couple days of classes—the new alphabet, the strange sounds and grammar.” Smith still has his copy of the introductory text, Russian for Americans by Ben T. Clark.

That minor would turn into a double major in German and Russian, and Smith went on to earn his doctorate in Russian history from UCLA. While an academic career seemed his most likely course, Smith took the road less travelled in writing books that bring Russian history alive for a lay audience.

“I love what I do,” he says. “I’m a true Russophile. I think it is such a fascinating country. I have great respect for the place and the people, and I like to share my passion for it with others who don’t get to spend every day thinking and reading about Russia.”

Kevin Dann G’85 explores a legend of American letters in his new biography, Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau, published on the bicentennial of the writer/philosopher’s birth. Dann brings his skills as historian, writer, and naturalist to the job, delving deeply into Thoreau’s mystical view of the well-trod forest paths of Concord and the cosmos beyond.

Frank Manchel, professor emeritus of English and film studies, continues his prolific retirement run of publications with Take Two: A Film Teacher’s Unconventional Story. It’s a wide-ranging volume, inspired by Manchel’s love of film and filled with the insight of decades spent studying and teaching the medium.

Will Alexander G’06 recently published Ambassador, the latest in his awardwinning run of fantasy and science fiction books for children and young adults. Alexander’s debut novel, Goblin Secrets, received the 2012 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

Richard Weintraub ’75 was a compassionate voice and tireless innovator and leader on behalf of Boston’s homeless population across three decades. He also had a love of writing poems and short stories. Following Weintraub’s death last summer, his widow, Eva Posner ’76, published two volumes of his work: The Teeny Tales and Love, Life, and Other Matters.

Vince Feeney G’68, a longtime lecturer in the UVM History Department, looks close to home with Burlington: A History of Vermont’s Queen City. The author’s accessible, finely told stories take Burlington lovers deep into the city’s past from the glory days of Big Lumber to the origins of a certain university on the hill.

SPRING 2017 |

17

| ALUMNI VOICE

Memory Gains In 1990, my first year at UVM,

BY | MARIA HUMMEL ’94

PHOTOGRAPH BY | SALLY MCCAY

18 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

I lived in Harris Hall with a Pennsylvanian named Elaine. We draped our room in paisley tapestries to hide the pale blue cinderblock, and cooked ramen in a hotpot. Elaine adorned her bed with a pretty floral comforter. Mine was navy and plain.

Elaine favored snug sweaters and jeans; I dressed in batik and European pajama shirts from the sale racks at Old Gold. We laughed at our differences and watched each other curiously.

That year, for the first time, I read Edith Wharton, Ford Madox Ford, Adrienne Rich, and H.D. Lines, and characters from their works still echo in my mind.

That year, I studied prehistoric archeology, yet all I remember from that class is a

gruesome textbook picture of a bogman: a wet empty sack of skin, eyeless.

That year, I played rugby, but I’ve since forgotten every rule.

Which way did my dorm room face?

What number or floor? I can’t recall.

In 2016, back at UVM as an assistant professor in English, I park at Gutterson and walk the same old wind-swept flank of the hill from East Campus to Main Campus. My body steers me on familiar paths, and I play a game of picturing my first-year self. She’s often hard to see.

I write to a friend who also lived in Millis in 1990. I’m walking the walk of our freshman year. It’s amazing how much I’ve forgotten. I remember other people, but not me.

it’s december now, and the tally

She writes back: I was just telling someone about your Tangled Up in Blue costume on Halloween.

My Tangled Up in Blue costume? Which Halloween?

For my first Arts and Sciences faculty meeting as a bona fide faculty member, I headed to Waterman. As soon as I entered the building’s grandeur and dimness, a wave of recollections washed over me: Upstairs I listened to Governor Dean talk to a group of us Vermont Scholars. Out on the balcony, I listened to members of Living Colour shouting to a rally during the takeover. My student mailbox was here. In these halls, before the age of e-mail, I ripped open letters from distant friends and read them right then, hungry for news.

“Maria!” Someone called to me from the Waterman stairs. The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it until I spun and saw, striding down the marble steps, my college German teacher, Dennis Mahoney. Still trim, spectacled, and bearded, still enunciating in the same patient baritone that once led my class through the jungle of German cases, he asked me to wait, waving a paper that he thrust in my hands.

I stared down at a mock newspaper that I had helped create in Mahoney’s class.

There were two articles I had written, in rather impressively complicated German.

I distantly remember writing one article, and the other not at all. I thanked Professor Mahoney, deeply touched that he had saved these early efforts of mine, and we hurried into the meeting together. As I listened to the unfolding agenda, my eyes kept returning to the memento, marveling at two things: 1) that I was once so darn fluent in Deutsch, and 2) that without my professor’s kindness this part of my past would be lost, even to my own memory.

of the recalled vs. the forgotten continues: I remember ducking into the back door of Williams and making coil clay pots in the basement, but I can’t recall the dining halls where I regularly ate; I remember learning igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rock in Environmental Studies, but could no longer say which is which. At this point a disclaimer is necessary: Yes, I did attend UVM during the height of its party-school reputation, and no, I didn’t fully abstain.

Furthermore, my youth was pre-Facebook, pre-Instagram, and the few photos I have are stuffed in a shoebox somewhere, uncatalogued. It’s inevitable that gaps and lapses would occur. Everyone forgets, but what I’ve forgotten matters to who I was and who I am.

I came to the UVM in 1990 as an Environmental Studies major, with the plan that I would eventually work in a nonprofit or NGO. I returned to UVM in 2016 as a novelist, poet, and assistant professor of creative writing. What happened?

At my faculty orientation this year, Jim Hudziak, the director of UVM’s wellness program, gave the keynote on critical changes in neurology in adolescence. As he flipped through colored slides of the brain and a video clip of one hapless guy trying to skateboard off his roof, Hudziak genially explained that during their college years most young people are particularly vulnerable to positive and negative influences because it’s a period of enormous brain development. If, in early childhood, kids grow the many-branching “tree” of their brain, then in late adolescence they begin pruning that tree, nurturing some limbs while letting others wither. Igniting students’ passion and helping them establish good habits could ensure a brighter future.

Bad habits are like the skater’s rolling plunge from the roof.

I took my first creative writing class in the year I lived in Harris Hall. I studied with David Huddle, the only living writer I had ever met. Tall, courtly, with a Southern accent and a teasing manner that often got

our class fiercely discussing and chuckling at the same time, Huddle helped me realize that I had always had another dream: to write. Huddle’s book, The Writing Habit, showed me a path. The directions were simple: write every day. So I did, every morning before I left for class. The practice anchored me. It gave my days order and my experiences meaning. As I plunged into wonderful courses in Environmental Thought, Hasidism and Jewish Mysticism, Eco-feminism, and Women in Sociology, my writing practice helped me connect their various threads of inquiry. I continued my Environmental Studies major, but I also adopted a second major, in English. By the time I graduated college, writing was my vocation. I would continue to incorporate environmental conservation into my life, but I would work with words.

These days when I remember the main image in a Margaret Atwood poem but not the definition of metamorphic rock, I can almost sense the spaces in my mind where one limb has fallen so another might thicken and bear fruit. It’s sad to give up on potential, but I’m relieved to know it’s inevitable, and even necessary for our true adult selves to begin. Perhaps the memories I’ve lost are not holes at all, but obstacles that kept me from growing.

As for the young woman who dressed as Tangled Up in Blue, I can almost imagine her, wrapping herself in blue crepe paper before she walks out with her dorm-mates on a cold October evening. She is happy to be with friends, to be young and free. The streetlights stain the path with an orange glow, her boots clatter, and already the crepe paper is ripping beneath her jacket.

She can hear the tiny sounds of it tearing, but by tomorrow she’ll be someone else anyway. It only has to last for tonight. VQ SPRING 2017 |

19

| ON COURSE

Hope on the wing Professor Trish O’Kane’s new

STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY | JOSHUA BROWN

20 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

course, “Birding to Change the World,” began far from Derway Island at the north edge of Burlington, where, one afternoon last autumn, her class of UVM students tromps through a floodplain forest with a crew of kids from nearby J.J. Flynn Elementary.

In 2005, standing inside the soggy remains of her Hurricane Katrina-ravaged house, a safety respirator strapped on to protect herself from the toxic stew of destruction, she had a strong sense that things needed to change—in her own life and in the world.

That August, O’Kane and her husband had just moved to New Orleans so she

could take a job as a journalism instructor at Loyola University, following ten years as an investigative journalist in Central America, exposing killings and other human rights abuses. Then the storm hit, pushing eleven feet of water through her living room. The soil became poisonous with benzene from oil spills, the air with asbestos from demolitions. Like so many of the city’s residents, “our house was bulldozed,” she says.

As she watched trashed buildings and toxic waste wash out into the Gulf of Mexico, O’Kane felt anguished and depressed.

She saw how the storm had slammed lowincome neighborhoods and disproportionately harmed African-Americans and other people of color. She also felt she didn’t sufficiently understand the water or the land or the creatures that lived there. “A new reality kept pouring in,” she says.

In the despair of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, a way to more broadly foster environmental connection was born.

BUDDING BIRDERS Eleven years later, O’Kane is walking along the edge of the Burlington bike path looking for birds with a group of students— some undergrads, some elementary. Tobey, a fourth-grader, points his binoculars overhead. He describes himself as a blue jay whisperer. “I can find them—fast,” he explains with a broad smile.

“Yes, he spotted three blue jays in about thirty seconds, before anyone else could see them,” says Sara Fergus, a sophomore at UVM. Tobey laughs out loud with obvious delight. Did he know he had this talent “before, say, today?” a reporter asks. “Nope,” he says, “but I do like blue jays.” Then he and Fergus pick out some gulls skimming the treetops.

This newly minted jay whisperer and the college student are “bird buddies” in an after-school birding club at the school.

Every Wednesday, they head out the side door of the school and walk more than a mile along the bike path to spend a couple of hours at Derway Island, a nature preserve. And for Fergus, the club’s weekly outings are the required lab—and heart— of Trish O’Kane’s new Environmental Studies course.

Before Hurricane Katrina, O’Kane “never cared about birds,” she wrote in an essay published in The New York Times.

After the disaster, she began to wonder how birds survived, and to see them as teachers. Soon she had left New Orleans and returned to graduate school at the Uni-

versity of Wisconsin to begin a PhD—pioneering new ways to teach about the links between ecological and social well-being.

In Madison, as a grad student, she created a Nature Explorers after-school club that connected more than one hundred Wisconsin undergrads with some 125 children at one of the city’s poorest middle schools. In 2015, she finished her degree and joined the UVM faculty in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. Now she’s working on the same model of teaching in Vermont, beginning by collaborating with staff at Flynn School to help connect UVM students with Flynn’s diverse student body; Flynn’s remarkable after-school program has students from more than thirty countries, including many refugee families.

LEARNING TOGETHER On the first day the club met this fall, most of the children took to birding immediately, but some worried about touching any dirt. “They thought they would get diseases,” Sara Fergus says. “We’re learning birds together and getting them more comfortable spending time outside. It’s a progression for everyone.” She explains how, in just a few weeks, some of the children went from concern about touching trees— to climbing them.

“Birding is a great way to connect with nature because birds are so connected with everything else,” says Nathaniel Sharp ’18, another UVM student who is taking this service-learning course. “Birds are accessible and exciting, whether you’re seeing a bald eagle or pigeons.”

Or, on this fine blue-sky afternoon, a pair of beavers. Some dozen of the bird club members have just cheerfully hacked their way through a formidable thicket of stinging nettles, calling out birds they hear—“downy woodpecker!” “Was that a yellow-rumped warbler?”—and stopped to discuss the beauties (and slight terrors) of a

very large spider tending its web.

Now they have gathered on a steep riverbank overlooking the final bend of the Winooski River before it flows under the bike path bridge and out into Lake Champlain. A wet shiny nose emerges from the water. Then another nearby. “Whuump!” A loud tail-slap.

Yadiel, a fifth-grader, B. Freas, a senior majoring in Parks, Recreation and Tourism, and professor Trish O’Kane, all smile and watch the beavers closely. “Can you see its eyes? What color are they?” O’Kane asks Yadiel. The boy adjusts his binoculars and watches the beautiful faint V of one beaver swimming toward its lodge. “Black,” he says.

AFTER KATRINA “In the long-term, what I’m really interested in is transformational justice,” O’Kane says. To get there requires some soul-work. “I want my college students to know that they can make a difference in the world. I see that many students who care about the environment are depressed or they are paralyzed,” she says. “I know how that feels because that’s how I felt after Katrina.” But the birding course can bring them to more firm ground.

“What is the environment?” asks sophomore Sam Blair who is taking the course.

“Let’s go out and touch it and smell it. Let’s get to know a bit of nature and enjoy it.” As a “co-explorer” (O’Kane’s carefully chosen name for the undergrads in the birding club), Blair has been building stick forts in the floodplain forest on Derway Island with the Flynn students he is mentoring.

“So much of the dialogue about the environment is about crisis and destruction,” he says. “It’s really disempowering to only hear about these huge global problems VQ that you can’t do anything about.”

SPRING 2017 |

21

A Native Son’s Gift

Photograph by Jamie Schwaberow of NCAA Photos

22 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

FOLLOW THRO UGH Basketball brought the Catamounts and Josh Speidel together.

Then came the accident, the coma, and the rehab— and now their bond is bigger than the sport.

By Amy Wimmer Schwarb

A BRAIN IS ON DISPLAY, its illustrated cross-section two stories tall on the screen at the front of the lecture hall. The surfaces of its lobes bunch together in efficient rolls, packing more brain into less space.

Reasoning, movement, memory, speech, vision—the core of a human starts here, in the valleys and crevices of gray matter.

“Look at that beautiful gyrification,” Professor Jim Hudziak says, admiring the brain’s folds. “Your brain’s not dead. It’s dynamic.”

In the back row of the lecture hall, a twenty-yearold UVM freshman sits clutching his right elbow with his left hand, willing his brain to be a little less dynamic. His right hand convulses with electric tremors his nervous system shoots to the appendage.

He tucks the erratic hand between his knees, hoping to stabilize it.

The professor goes on to describe neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to develop neural connections and build synapses that create new paths and reroute signals. This ability to reorganize helps

humans compensate for injury and disease and continue learning—a process that continues throughout most of life.

A student near the front asks: “When does the brain start to lose its plasticity?” Age twenty-five, says Hudziak, a pediatric psychiatrist. His students get the point, but he emphasizes it anyway: Their brains are in the prime of their lives.

“What you do to your brain,” he says, “will determine what you become.”

After class, Josh Speidel, the freshman with the errant arm, slides his laptop into his backpack. He pushes his right hand into a pocket of his khaki cargo shorts, another strategy for muffling the tremor. He shuffles out of class with a couple of hundred other students. As the pack thins, his stride becomes more visible: His left leg lags behind the sure step of his right.

And though the backpack is slung over both shoulders, his left hangs lower, as if carrying a heavy weight.

He walks the fifty feet to the bus stop, the day’s lecture on display.

SPRING 2017 |

23

AT 7:04 P.M. FEB. 1, 2015, Josh Speidel, a 6-foot-7 power forward on his Columbus, Indiana, high school basketball team, pulled his 1999 Honda Accord out of a KFC drive-thru and into the path of an SUV. The mom at the wheel of the SUV was treated for minor injuries at the scene; her two sons were unhurt. The eighteen-year-old girl in Josh’s passenger seat suffered minor injuries and would be released from the hospital that evening.

But the impact left Josh with an injury more vexing. The force snapped his head against the Honda’s door frame and fractured his skull. The high school senior They could have kept him close wasn’t carrying a wallet, and at first, emergency responders to home in the community that couldn’t ID him. Then, one recretired his high school jersey and ognized him from the sports pages of The Columbus Repubconsiders him a walking miracle. lic and beneath the basket at Instead, they sent him to college Columbus North High School games: “Oh, my gosh. That’s nearly a thousand miles from Josh Speidel.” home, just like he had planned.

He was the dominant, muscular big man for the Bulldogs, a kid who still had one-third of his senior season remaining but was already the top scorer and rebounder in school history. He had been readying his body for Division I competition at the University of Vermont in the months leading up to the accident, chiseling his husky, towering frame into 225 pounds of college-ready muscle. But when emergency workers cut through the car’s roof to remove him, Josh was unconscious, vulnerable, weak.

Four weeks passed before he woke up. When he did, he couldn’t walk. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t grip a small Nerf basketball made for toddlers.

Since then, his parents have celebrated every new neural connection but expected more and more, God willing. And after he recovered much of what he had lost, they faced a choice. They could have kept him close to home in the community that retired his high school jersey and considers him a walking miracle.

Instead, they sent him to college nearly a thousand miles from home, just like he had planned.

All because a high school basketball player committed to a school—and the school committed right back.

JOSH WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD the first time he stepped into Memorial Gymnasium at Columbus North in southern Indiana. His family, new to the community, came to check out a treasured landmark: a high school gym that seats 7,071 people, making it one of the largest cathedrals to basketball in a state

24 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

where the sport is religion. The gym lights were dim that summer day, his mom recalls, and her boy stepped to center court, spun around to absorb its size, and announced: “This is where I want to play basketball.”

Basketball. The sport casts a mystic spell in Columbus, the birthplace of Chuck Taylor, a World War I-era high school basketball team captain who went on to design the iconic shoe that bears his name.

Forty miles away is Indiana University, Bloomington, where five Division I men’s basketball championship banners hang in the rafters of Assembly Hall.

Basketball loomed large over generations of Josh’s family, too. His 6-foot-7 great-uncle set scoring and rebounding records in Huntington, Indiana, in the 1960s. Dave Speidel, Josh’s dad, played for the Eastern High School Comets in the 1980s in tiny Greentown, Indiana. Mary Speidel—“Grandma Mary” to Josh—is perhaps the family’s biggest fan. At seventy-two, she stands six feet tall and still follows Eastern in the high school tournament.

By the time Josh was twelve, the family was piecing together what kind of athlete he would be—the kind who delivered when it mattered. His Little League team advanced to the 2009 Great Lakes Region Tournament championship game. Josh wasn’t the star. His team didn’t win. But he did hit two home runs in a game broadcast on ESPN. “They never remember that I was 2-for-17 before that,” he muses.

His mom, Lisa Speidel, confirms: “When the lights are the brightest, he steps up.”

By the time he was in eighth grade, even his choice of high schools—Columbus East, the alma mater of his older sisters Jamie and Micayla, or rival Columbus North—was a subject of community interest.

Josh chose North and the gym that captured his heart years earlier.

He earned a spot on the varsity starting five as a freshman. By that point, basketball occupied him year-round. When Kyle Cieplicki ’08, then an assistant men’s basketball coach at Vermont and now an associate coach, visited to see Catamounts prospect Ernie Duncan of Evansville, Indiana, compete in an AAU tournament, he stuck around to watch Ernie’s younger brother, Everett, in the under-fifteen league.

And he got his first look at Josh.

“He had a great blend of power and mobility,” Cieplicki says. “I saw him as a physically strong and powerful kid, but still pretty graceful. He had a combination of skill level and understanding of the game.”

And Josh wasn’t done developing. He led Columbus North in scoring as a sophomore. As a junior, he again led in scoring and also became the top rebounder, averaging 17.2 points and 9.3 rebounds per game. Cieplicki returned, this time bringing head

coach John Becker with him. When Josh stepped onto the court, he found his dad in the crowd and made eye contact with him before tipoff—their traditional pregame connection. Josh demonstrated a versatility in that game against Evansville Harrison High School—featuring the Duncan brothers— that solidified the Catamounts’ interest. “We decided we really wanted to prioritize him,” Cieplicki says.

Josh’s skills didn’t escape other schools’ attention. He received scholarship offers from thirteen programs, including Vermont. His other top choices were Ball State University, Loyola University Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago—all drivable from his Indiana home. If he chose one of them, Grandma Mary could make it to some college games.

IT RAINED BOTH DAYS of Josh’s official visit to Burlington, Vermont—a disappointment for the Catamounts coaching staff, which was trying to make a good impression. Becker and Cieplicki took the Speidels to dinner on Church Street, the eclectic main drag just off campus, then walked to Ben & Jerry’s for ice cream. Indiana might be famous for basketball, but Vermont has its own homegrown selling points.

In a photo from that evening, the coaches pose with Josh under the downtown streetlights, their arms draped around him and his around them. The recruit wears a gray long-sleeved T-shirt bearing seven green block letters: V E R M O N T. “It’s hard to put into words, but when we talked to the Vermont coaches, they really connected with us,” Lisa says.

“They did a really good job of investing in Josh. We didn’t know how much, then.”

Two months later, on his 18th birthday, Josh announced his commitment to the Catamounts.

HOME COURT Head coach John Becker, standing, and assistant Kyle Cieplicki ’08, seated at Becker’s right, have grown close to Josh Speidel’s family.

The announcement meant recommitting to hard work. Josh began lifting more and followed Vermont’s progress in the season. The coaches also followed his as he pushed his scoring average to 25.6 points and once again averaged 9.3 rebounds. Josh became the top career rebounder in school history as a junior; by December of his senior year, he was the top career scorer, too.

But one person still wasn’t persuaded that Vermont was the right choice. Grandma Mary told her son and daughter-in-law she wanted to meet the coach herself.

They arranged the conversation when Becker visSPRING 2017 |

25

ited for the Columbus North–Columbus East rivalry game. Josh’s grandmother told Becker she was concerned about him going so far away for college. That she had never flown on a plane but wanted to see Josh play college basketball. She even told him she worried Josh might get a tattoo in college. “That’s a grandma thing,” Lisa says. “You do not ink your body.”

Becker told Grandma Mary that as long as Josh was on the team, Becker would do everything he could to schedule some Vermont games in the Midwest. And he mentioned the Catamounts’ schedule for Josh’s freshman season, which included a game at Purdue University, about an hour from her home.

Grandma Mary softened. Perhaps, she later told her family, she might board a plane for the first time to visit Vermont.

On Jan. 30, 2015, Vermont coaches watched a live stream of the Columbus North game on their phones from the team bus. Josh didn’t play his best; knowing his future coaches witnessed it from a distance didn’t help. “Sorry you had to see that,” he texted Cieplicki. But Josh recovered the next night at Whiteland High School in what might have been the best game of his life: 33 points, 18 rebounds.

Even a few dunks. That night, a girl from Whiteland—just two interstate exits north of Columbus—gave Josh her cellphone number.

The next day was Super Bowl Sunday. Josh lost interest by halftime, so he left the house, saying he was going to the gym to shoot.

Dave and Lisa Speidel ignored the first phone call. What telemarketer would call during the Super

26 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

Bowl? But when the phone rang a second time, they answered. On the line was a nurse from Columbus Regional Hospital. There’s been an accident, she said. We have your son.

The Speidels remember scenes from Columbus Regional in snapshots. The medical personnel outside their son’s room, looking at his parents as if they felt sorry for them. The image of their boy, alone and shaking on an exam table in a frigid room.

“He’s cold,” Lisa announced, alarmed to see him so uncomfortable. No, the nurses responded. He was posturing, his brain sending signals he couldn’t control. The Speidels remember, too, the sheriff’s deputy escorting them to a neighboring room to meet the girl who was in their son’s passenger seat. Who are you? Lisa asked, trying to make sense of what this stranger—a high school girl from Whiteland— was doing in this nightmare.

The staff readied Josh for transport to Indianapolis, the only city in Indiana with a Level I trauma center. He traveled by ambulance—the February weather wasn’t fit for a helicopter. It also wasn’t fit for two parents to drive fifty miles on the interstate, racing at speeds of ninety mph as they tailed the ambulance. They peered through the back window, hoping to pick up clues in what they could see—the bobbing heads of emergency workers trying to save Josh’s life.

Their prayers on that drive were urgent and specific. They asked God to flood them with every emotion so they could process all of them—the anger, the sadness, the denial—even as they sped on the icy highway. They wanted to work through each one there, in the car, so they would be prepared when they arrived at the hospital. Heads clear, hearts ready for whatever came next.

TWO DAYS AFTER THE ACCIDENT, in the middle of college basketball season, a Division I men’s basketball coach from New England sat at a hospital bedside in Indianapolis. It was midnight, and they were alone, just player and coach. Becker tried to make conversation with a nurse, hoping to scrounge some scrap of information he could turn into hope. She offered none. And so he focused on the patient—the stillness of his eyelids, the way his chest rose and fell with the pump of a ventilator.

Basketball didn’t matter in those hours. It wasn’t the important thing. And yet, it was Josh’s thing, which made it the only thing. What can a basketball coach say to the parents of a basketball player who lies next to them, appearing lifeless?

Becker offered this: “We’re with your family. Josh is a part of us, whether he plays basketball or

doesn’t. He’s a Catamount.

“We have a spot for him, whenever Josh can get to us.”

In those moments, his statement could have felt like an empty promise. But Dave was focused on the next step, whatever it might be, and Becker’s words offered possibility.

“OK, let’s go—Josh is going to be out of here in a week or ten days. Sectionals are still a month or two away,” Dave told himself. “Let’s go—what’s next?”

Two weeks passed, and still, Josh slept. If he didn’t begin rehabilitation soon, doctors said, he might miss his window for ever recovering at all. One told the family to consider long-term care and to get comfortable with the idea that Josh might not ever be able to care for himself.

Lisa cut off that conversation. “You know what?” she told the doctor. “I’m not going to listen to you.

We’re going to believe otherwise.”

Two more weeks passed. And then, on a day when winter had nearly turned to spring, Josh opened his eyes. Lisa turned to some friends gathered in the room, astonished: “Did he really just do that?”

At first, his eyes opened for only a few minutes a day. But Dave knew what eye contact meant to both of them.

Let’s go—what’s next?

In those weeks, Dave and Lisa took turns checking in on the house, catching up on bills and going to work. On one trip home, Lisa spotted a form letter from the university, alerting her that a deposit was due to hold her son’s spot.

She wrote the check and dropped it in the mail.

“We don’t know when,” she told herself, “but he’s going to go.”

Josh’s waking minutes became longer. Six weeks after the accident, he could make sounds—just guttural moans and growls. A team of therapists began strapping him to a tilt table and, degree by degree, over a couple of days, positioning him more and more upright. In a standing position, Josh couldn’t hold up his head—and only his dad was tall enough to hold it up for him—but a physical therapist asked his parents to bring in some basketball shoes. “I want to make this as real as possible,” she told them. “Basketball is what he knows—so let’s see what he knows.”

They placed Josh’s hands on a basketball, allowing him to touch the grain of the leather. They dropped the ball on the floor of the center, re-associating him with the bounce and its echo. More days passed, and he could toss a small Nerf lightly in his bed. His high school coach visited, borrowing language from practice to direct his player: “Josh, pass me the ball.”

One night in late March, on a night the Columbus North girls basketball team played in the Class

4A state championship, Josh sat in his hospital bed, watching the game on a laptop. The family thought he would fall asleep during the first period, but he stayed awake for the duration, his eyes following the action as his Columbus North What can a basketball coach say to classmates won the state title over Homestead High the parents of a basketball player School, 62-56. who lies next to them, appearing Let’s go—what’s next?

Ten weeks after the lifeless? Becker offered this: “We’re accident, Josh lobbed the with your family. Josh is a part of Nerf ball in the direction of a hoop hanging on the us, whether he plays basketball or back of his door. That same doesn’t. He’s a Catamount.” week, his dad thought he heard him say “Mom” after she had stepped out of the room. Lisa had to hear it for herself, so she placed Josh’s fingers on her throat so he could feel the vibration as she formed the word. He put his fingers on his own throat and repeated: “Mom.” More names came within days. “Jamie.” “Micayla.” “Grandma.” He looked at a picture of his basketball team and ID’d his teammates. Which one is No. 32? his mother asked. Josh replied: “Me.” Let’s go—what’s next?

One question haunted the Speidels in the weeks and months they spent waiting for their son to show them what he could do. Even if he opened his eyes, found his voice, relearned to walk—even if they dared to think he might once again shoot a basketball—other pieces of his brain might be forever changed. Would he still be the boy with the nonstop work ethic? Would he still have a big laugh? Would he still love Harry Potter? Would he even remember Harry Potter? Would he still tease his Grandma Mary that he wanted to get a tattoo of her face? Would he still have the soul of a star high school basketball player who, in a game of pickup ball, would choose first a top player from the girls basketball team?

What about the part of his brain that made him charming, kind-hearted, funny—would it be intact?

Ernie Duncan’s birthday arrived in early May as he was concluding his freshman year at Vermont.

Josh sent Ernie a video of himself, sitting up in bed at his rehab center. His words came slow, but clear.

“Hey, Ernie. Happy birthday. I miss you,” Josh began.

“I just wanted you to know that I’m a better basketball player than you. All right. Love you.”

Ernie Duncan forwarded the video to his younger brother, who was at his senior prom but watched the message again and again, laughing and crying in his tux.

This Josh felt like the one they knew.

SPRING 2017 |

27

ON THE EVENING THE SPEIDELS brought their son home to Columbus, the house lacked groceries, just as the family lacked energy. “Well,” Dave said, “let’s go out to eat.”

His son resisted. He had last stepped out in this town as a high school basketball star in the best physical shape of his life. His frame now carried fifty fewer pounds. Tracking conversations in public, where people spoke quickly and talked over one another, was difficult. And he still wasn’t mobile. “I don’t want to do that,” he said. “I’m in a wheelchair.

I’m embarrassed.”

“It’s not about you,” Dave replied. “We’re hungry.

Let’s go.”

Finally, after 117 days in three different medical facilities, Josh could be comfortable at home. But Dave and Lisa were determined not to let him get too comfortable. Laziness, no matter how appealing or deserved, doesn’t build brains.

Let’s go shoot baskets. Let’s go work out. Let’s read.

Let’s go to church. Each outing yielded a new opportunity, a fresh synapse.

Even the times when Josh lost his grip on his walker created chances to learn. Once, he took a spill in the yard in front of his house. He lay in the grass, processing how to find his feet. He rolled over on all fours, bracing his hands against the ground and planting his shoes in a sure spot. As he tried to find his balance, his arms gave way, and he fell to the grass once again.

“You better get up,” Dave told him. “Or “You better get up,” Dave told I’m just going to leave you out here in him. “Or I’m just going to leave the yard, and the ants can eat you.”

In Columbus—even throughout you out here in the yard, and Indiana—Josh was a hero, a remarkthe ants can eat you.” able testament to faith and hard work.

Just days after coming home, he rose from his wheelchair and took a couple of steps to accept his high school diploma at Columbus North with the Class of 2015. That summer, he stepped to center court, with help from his parents, to hear his name announced as an Indiana All-Star. That fall, he joined the Catamounts for the Purdue game the coach once had pitched in his appeal to Grandma Mary, and an NCAA waiver allowed Josh to sit on the bench with the men he had hoped would be his teammates. Josh received a Mackey Arena ovation.

But often, in the darker days, he tired easily. The smallest tasks required thought, and thinking consumed energy. Many days, he says, he just wanted to sleep. Watch TV. Play with his cats.

28 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

When Lisa, an elementary school assistant principal, returned for the fall semester in 2015, her superintendent offered a proposal. What if Josh joined the school staff as an instructional assistant? It promised a paycheck, a structured schedule, and a chance to put his brain to work.

Josh arrived at the school cautious and unsure of his role. But by the end of the academic year, he was confident enough to approach the teacher with his own ideas for presenting a math problem to a struggling fourth-grader. “I think they might get it,” Josh told the teacher.

He arrived the first day of class in a wheelchair and used his own legs to walk out on the last. In Josh, the children saw a living example of what hard work and tenacity can produce. And he picked up something, too—a possible new vision for his future. He thinks he might want to be a teacher.

The Speidels wanted to be anywhere but Columbus on the one-year anniversary of Josh’s accident.

So they boarded a plane and went to the other place Josh feels at home—Burlington, Vermont. The Catamounts introduced Josh during a home game, bringing fans to their feet, welcoming him to the fold.

Two weeks later, Becker called the Speidels. “You know what? Let’s get him here,” the coach said. “Let us have him, and let’s see where this goes.”

This time, it was Becker asking, “What’s next?”

Dave liked the sound of that.

SUDDENLY, THE PREVIOUS MONTHS seemed to hold value, as if they had been building toward a purpose all along.

The Speidels’ work with their son took on new urgency. “I’m not going to be there to help you get into the shower,” Lisa would say. “So what are you going to do?”

One day this summer, Dave and Lisa drove to a laundromat in Columbus. They introduced their son to the machines and left him there with dirty laundry and some quarters. “We’ll be back,” they said.

A couple of hours later, the parents returned to find Josh and clean clothes, folded in neat stacks.

“Well, look at that,” Lisa said. “The boy can do laundry.”

On the Vermont campus, Becker’s office is in the same building as Patrick Gymnasium. Sometimes when he works late, he’ll be packing up at 6 or 6:30 p.m. and notice the sound of a ball bouncing against the hardwood. “It’s Josh, shooting,” Becker says. “This kid’s unbelievable.”

Josh continues to rebuild his brain, synapse by synapse. Besides the tremor in his arm and the limp

in his gait, he ponders a question just as big, though common for a college freshman: Where does he fit into the social scene on campus? He still struggles to follow the rapid back-and-forth of party conversation, and sometimes rest sounds better than hanging out with teammates. He also lacks some of his old confidence.

But in other ways, reports Everett Duncan, now Josh’s roommate, he’s getting along fine.

I’m talking to this girl,” Josh told Everett earlier this semester. “She asked me to lunch.”

“Hey, that’s great,” his teammate encouraged. “You should go.”

“She probably just wants to take me to the dining hall,” Josh replied.

“No, no, take her to Church Street,” Everett urged.

“Take her somewhere nice.”

In the training room one day earlier this semester, Josh was on all fours, the weight of his body helping to tame the relentless tremor in his right arm. Marc Hickok, Vermont’s co-director of athletic performance, told Josh to crawl with his legs extended, his right arm moving in rhythm with his left leg, then the left arm with the right leg.

That movement—one arm with the opposite leg and vice versa—is what babies imprint when they crawl before they walk. Hickok wants to ensure it is natural for Josh, too, so he can carry himself, once again, like a basketball player.

Josh tried to stand, but his body slumped on the training room floor. He found a sure spot on the mat and braced his body with his hands. Hickok, standing nearby, offered: “Try again.”

On these days in the weight room, college feels a lot like home. “Mom and Dad were like, ‘Josh, get up—we gotta go to the gym,’” Josh recalls. “‘Josh, get up—we gotta go shoot some baskets.’ Dad was more the physical part, like basketball and lifting. He went to the gym with me a lot. Mom made me sit down at my table and read or do homework.

“I look back, and I get mad at myself for getting upset with them for pushing me so hard,” he says. “I guess I didn’t realize just what that did for me.”

It’s the second week of Vermont’s fall semester, and Josh’s academic advisor wants to see him in her office. He isn’t sure why. Josh’s short-term memory can falter, but so far he feels on top of his elevencredit-hour load. He relies on the calendar on his phone to be an extension of his brain.

Today’s lineup: an 8:30 a.m. class, a 10 a.m. appointment with Loren Dow, the athletics department’s assistant director of academic services, then an 11 a.m. workout in the training room.

On Dow’s agenda: Josh’s daily meetup with his

academic coach. He missed his appointment the day before, she notes. He also didn’t show up one day the previous week. Josh is alarmed—he can’t place where he was or why he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. “Are you suggesting I don’t take my academics seriously?” he asks.

“No, no, no,” Dow reassures. “The big thing is, it’s cool if something comes up—but you just need to let her know. Going forward, we should keep that time sacred.”

Time. These days, all of it is sacred.

Josh’s senior year of high school—from signing his letter of intent with Vermont to meeting the girl from Whiteland—is lost to him. His parents tell him he and the girl had grabbed a soda right before the accident. “They weren’t even together five minutes,” Lisa says. “We don’t know what God’s purpose is or why their paths crossed, but they did.”

The next few years are critical, doctors say, for restoring brain function. Josh will spend much of that time in classes, workouts, tutoring sessions, practices, exams, games, team meetings—each one edging him closer to his goal. “I want to be able to put on a University of Vermont uniform and take the court and play,” Josh says.

Let’s go. What’s next?

VQ

This article was originally published in the fall issue of the NCAA’s Champion Magazine.

SPRING 2017 |

29

1ST 30 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

Navigating the myriad mysteries of college— applications to financial aid forms, dorm life to choosing a major— first-generation college students blaze trails

AS BILL FALLS traces his family history and personal path to college, he evokes a place and time far removed from the stately, wood-paneled office of a UVM psychology professor and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Falls’s parents were both shift workers at the General Electric plant in Lynn, Massachusetts. His father—who dropped out of school at eleven, enlisted at seventeen, married at eighteen—was a pipefitter, working on large turbine engines for the Navy at G.E.’s Riverworks. His mother, daughter of Sicilian immigrants, left school after the sixth grade.

PIONEERS within their families.

BY THOMAS WEAVER

PHOTOGRAPHY BY IAN THOMAS JANSEN-LONNQUIST ’11

Jacqueline and Vincent Falls, raised their four children in the old red-brick mill towns north of Boston. All three of Bill Falls’s older siblings took directions in life that didn’t involve college—beauty school, auto body trade school, and the military. Up until junior high, Falls says he doesn’t remember considering continuing his own education beyond a high school diploma. “If I thought at all about what I was going to do, I was going to go work for G.E. like my parents,” he says.

Then Uncle Dom spoke up. More worldly than the rest of his family, Dominic Marino, had taken some college courses, lived in Rome for a number of years, read voraciously. He saw the intellectual spark in his nephew Bill and told his parents that their youngest should consider college. “What would you like to do? What could you be?” he asked his nephew, kindling the aspiration that would eventually lead Bill Falls to a bachelor’s degree from Bates College, a doctorate from Yale University, a full professorship and that dean’s office on College Street at the University of Vermont.

The stories of first-generation college students—17 percent of UVM’s current undergrad enrollment—all have their singular plot turns. But there are commonalities: the individual who first opened that sense of the possible regarding higher education, the challenges of pioneers navigating uncharted territory within their families, and, for some, the struggle to believe that they truly belong on a college campus.

SPRING 2017 |

31

PREVIOUS PAGES: Adrian Burnett ’19; Tracy Ballysingh, assistant professor in Higher Education and Student Affairs ; Krya Peacock ’20; Bill Falls, professor of psychology and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

32 |

KYRA PEACOCK is a young woman with a plan. It begins with the UVM bachelor’s degree in animal sciences that she began work on last fall, followed by veterinary school, work as a large animal D.V.M., traveling globally to work with large exotic species, and, along the journey, earning a PhD. Her lofty aspiration is rooted in the hard economic realities of her upbringing in Frederick, Maryland, where her parents’ unemployment and health challenges made for constant financial strain.

“Those are the reasons why I want to succeed so much,” she says. “I don’t want to be financially dependent on people like my parents or my grandparents. I want to be able to do it myself,” she says.

Yes, like any aspiring veterinarian, there’s a love of animals that motivates her, but also a keen sense of a clear career path that can provide a solid living.

With an admissions postcard that arrived in the mail, the University of Vermont, five hundred miles north, became the first step on the path to realizing that dream. “I got to see a little glimpse of the campus. Just the way it looked in the pictures started to draw me in,” she says. As her career focus sharpened, UVM’s strength in pre-vet and the CREAM Program, a student-managed dairy operation, deepened Vermont’s intrigue.

Peacock sighs when asked how she handled the college search and application process. “I guess I really took it day by day,” she remembers.

“Every three days I would panic, text a friend, this one kid who was in college at the time. I’d go to him for advice, like during sophomore year when I was freaking out. He assured me that I had time.”

Though Peacock’s parents didn’t have personal experience with college, they nurtured her aspiration. “My dad is the one who really pushed me since back to fifth grade. ‘I didn’t go to college; I want you to go to college. You need to go to college in this day and age in order to have a decent job and a decent living, you need to have a degree.’ He kept supporting me, kept me on track.”

When the family made an “Admitted Students’ Day” visit to Burlington last March, the allure in that initial postcard was confirmed. “Inside my gut, my soul, I just felt like I needed to be here,” she says. Peacock’s first semester has had its challenges, from roommate issues to illness to a tough

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

chemistry course, but she’s weathered them and remains firm in that draw she felt to UVM. Peacock acknowledges sensing a socio-economic divide with some of her classmates. But instead of despair, she takes inspiration from it.

“Sure, I get a little jealous when I hear people who don’t have to worry about loans, their parents are paying the whole tuition,” she says. “That kind of annoys me, but it doesn’t ruin friendships.

Everyone gets the stick they got. It’s what they do with it to make it better.”

Like Kyra Peacock, Adrian Burnett knows the bottom-line financial challenges that are part of college life for many first-generation students.

After completing two years at UVM, the environmental studies major, is taking this year off from school to work, saving up enough to pay the rent and continue his education next fall.

Burnett has balanced multiple jobs with paid roles on Senator Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and David Zuckerman’s successful run for Vermont lieutenant governor. Considering his aspirations after he finishes his degree, Burnett says, “I’d like to be involved in policy work, whether that is continuing working for non-profits or getting a job working as staff for government leaders.

I think policy has to play a huge role in tackling climate change,” he says. “I’d like to be part of that.”

Burnett’s path to UVM was one of special challenge. Raised by his family on a religious commune in Pennsylvania, he was outed as a gay man in high school, expelled from school and the community because of it. He found his way to St. Johnsbury, Vermont, via another past-member of the religious community, completed high school at St. Johnsbury Academy, then enrolled at the state university.

While many first-generation students face college challenges without the benefit of parents who have been through the same experience, Burnett faces them with no support and very little contact with his family. “Figuring out the financial aid process, figuring out registering for classes, moving forward with a degree, it is all done on my own and with the help of people like Cara (Chinchar) in the counseling office and TRIO,” Burnett says. “So I get help from the university, which is awesome.

I wish more first-gen students would know about the help that is available.”

THE TRIO STUDENT support services office that Burnett references is a key institutional resource for first-generation, low-income, and students with disabilities. Beyond TRiO, UVM students often find advocates among staff and faculty throughout the university. Cara Chinchar, a counselor in UVM’s Center for Health & Wellbeing, a first-generation college student herself, is sympathetic to their challenges and knows their potential.

Considering Adrian Burnett and another student who recently took a break from school for financial reasons, she says, “They are amazingly resilient. They are recognized by their teachers, by their employers, given multiple awards. The word of the last few years is ‘grit.’ These students have it.”

Chinchar adds that helping first-generation students requires an “it takes a village” mindset throughout the university. “It’s not one person’s job. This is everyone’s job. Everyone needs to take that extra five minutes, everyone needs to take that time to help a student make that phone call or figure out a question,” she says.

From staff member Cara Chinchar to academic

dean Bill Falls to undergrad Adrian Burnett, a common refrain for first-generation college student success is finding the courage to seek help and simply ask those questions.

Tracy Arámbula Ballysingh, assistant professor in Higher Education and Student Affairs, includes first-generation issues at the core of her academic research, an interest that traces to her own experience. Ballysingh grew up in Collinsville, Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis.

An immigrant from Mexico, her mother worked at Home Depot for twenty years and also ran a Mexican food truck; her father was a self-described “jack-of-all-trades.” Ballysingh estimates her parents’ combined income was around $16,000 when she applied to the University of Illinois in 1992.

The future professor might have never taken that leap to college if she had accepted a “gearhead” track a guidance counselor had placed her on, likely due to her mother’s thick Spanish accent. An engaged student, Ballysingh soon sensed she was in the wrong courses and made a change.

Looking back at her college years, Ballysingh

UVM trustees David Daigle ’89, chair, and Ron Lumbra ’83 were both firstgeneration college students from northern Vermont.

SPRING 2017 |

33

REMOVING BARRIERS First-generation college students will be among those to benefit from UVM’s new Catamount Commitment program, guaranteeing that all Vermonters receiving federal Pell grants will pay no tuition and no comprehensive fee to attend the university, beginning with the class entering UVM in the fall of 2017.

Pell-eligible Vermonters currently pay no tuition to attend UVM, because of institutional, federal and state grants, but do pay a comprehensive fee, estimated to be $2,259 in the next academic year. They also pay an acceptance fee of $495.

Under Catamount Commitment, both those fees will be paid by the university.

“The Catamount Commitment further removes financial barriers to higher education that many limited-income students and families in Vermont face,” UVM President Tom Sullivan said in announcing the program. “This further demonstrates the university’s strong commitment to providing financial access and support to an excellent education for high-achieving students with financial need who want to succeed at college and achieve their goals in life.”

In the fall of 2016, 26 percent of all Vermont undergraduates attending the university were Pell-eligible.

More information: go.uvm.edu/commitment

says the differences she felt were more due to economics than purely that her parents had not been to college. “The concept of ‘first-generation’ wasn’t something I had heard or embraced until graduate school at the University of Texas when I began working with these students who had experiences that were similar to my own,” she says. “I thought of myself as different because my friends on my dorm floor were from affluent suburbs of Chicago.

They had computers in their dorm rooms, and I had never touched a computer.”

Not all first-generation stories are necessarily rooted in financial hardship. The parents of David Daigle ’89, chair of UVM’s Board of Trustees, were both from large Vermont families and chose paths other than college. For Daigle’s father that meant, after years working for IBM, building his own successful small business, a feed and farm supply store in Richford, Vermont. Based on his own life, he didn’t see college as sole path to career success.

But David Daigle was a bright student, who

34 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

began to get encouragement to go to college from his high school teachers. At UVM, he would find more mentorship from professors and went on to an MBA from the University of Chicago and a successful career in the financial industry. Daigle’s brother Robert ’97, found his own way to UVM and, after some bumps along the way, success with an MBA from Columbia and a career in international security. “My father got behind our college,” David Daigle says. “He’s a huge advocate for higher education now.”

In Montgomery Center, Vermont, the other side of Jay Peak from where David Daigle was raised, Ron Lumbra ’83 grew up and charted his own firstgeneration path to the state university. Today, Lumbra, who is regional leader for the Americas with Heidrick & Struggles, an executive search firm, joins David Daigle on the university’s Board of Trustees.

Looking back on his UVM years, Lumbra says, “The exposure to out-of-state kids—new friends from Cleveland, Seattle, Syracuse, Silver Springs, Philadelphia—for a kid from small-town Vermont, it was the best possible thing I could have had. It flipped my script, that access to different ways of thinking from students with more urban backgrounds.” A mechanical engineering major, who would go on to an MBA from Harvard, Lumbra says he felt his confidence grow as he found he could hold his own when the academic going got tough.

Lumbra’s adoptive parents in northern Vermont hadn’t attended college themselves, but encouraged him as he excelled in both academics and athletics. For the nitty-gritty of what was next and how to get there, Lumbra found help from guidance counselors, teachers, and friends.

Today, from the perspective of a UVM trustee, Lumbra celebrates how providing opportunities for first-generation students synchs with the mission of a public university. It’s a thought that fellow trustee and son of Vermont David Daigle echoes. “Kudos to the first-generation kids, because they are breaking new ground within their family context and social structure,” he says. “That takes courage. And universities have a responsibility to encourage these students to take that leap.”

VQ

GOLD DOME GRADS University of Vermont alumni in the state’s top job have been relatively rare.

Just seven across more than two centuries of Vermont’s history. But the opening of the 2017 legislative session saw not only a UVM alumnus in the governor’s post with the inauguration of Phil Scott, but a circle of UVM grads taking key leadership roles in Montpelier.

BY SALLY POLL AK

CLINTON BLACKBURN

PHIL SCOTT, GOVERNOR VO-TECH EDUCATION MAJOR ’80 At Spaulding High School in Barre, Vermont, Phil Scott took academic courses in the morning and spent his afternoons in the vocational-technical program, working mostly in the machine shop.

“I loved to build and create and craft things,” Scott recalls. “I loved building anything. I was very involved in industrial arts, woodworking, drafting, I loved it all.”

Looking back on his teenage years, Scott says he was inspired in particular by Richard Flies, his industrial arts teacher. Flies was a role model, and instrumental in Scott’s decision to study vo-tech education in college.

Scott left Vermont to attend the University of Southern Maine, which offered an industrial arts program. After three semesters, he transferred to UVM. Scott’s father died of war-related injuries when Scott was a child, leaving his mother to raise three sons. Scott was responsible for a share of his college tuition, and he worked his way through school. UVM made financial sense, and work opportunities were more plentiful in his home state, Scott says.

His jobs included work in the construction industry, a job in a motorcycle shop, and service manager at a garage in Montpelier.

At UVM’s College of Agriculture, he majored in vo-tech education and earned a teaching certificate. He took classes in industrial engineering, agricultural engineering, as well as education and psychology. He was a student teacher at U-32 High School in East Montpelier.

Scott believes his education and hands-on experience

36 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

in design, drafting, engineering, and building has had significant bearing on his various pursuits: from racing cars to running a business to government service.

He has fond memories of his work in the UVM shops, where for one project he constructed wooden blades for a wind generator.

“One of my regrets is that because I had to work my way through school, and I had so many interests—including racing and working on race cars—I didn’t get involved in the campus life,” Scott says. “I didn’t take advantage of everything UVM had to offer at that time. But there were just so many hours in the day.”

Last fall on the campaign trail, Scott stopped at a store in Charlotte, where a group had gathered for coffee. One of the people was Charles Ferreira—a favorite professor of Scott’s. Their chance meeting occurred thirty-six years after his graduation “He was a great resource, a great mentor,” Scott says. “He encouraged creativity, and, I thought, helped me along.”

MITZI JOHNSON, SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES MAJOR ’93 The college admission letters arrived at Mitzi Johnson’s home in Clifton Park, New York, her senior year of high school. She was placed on the waiting list at Bowdoin, Cornell, and Dartmouth. The University of Vermont said yes.

Johnson enrolled, and on her first weekend in Burlington joined a group of students on an outing to North Beach.

She recognized the park, the lake, the beach. This was one of the places Johnson had camped as a young teenager on a CALEB KENNA, LEFT

Governor Phil Scott; Vermont House Chamber; Mitzi Johnson with her chief of staff, Katherine Levasseur.

bicycle tour of Vermont and Quebec. The memories came unbidden.

“It was one of those little flashbacks,” Johnson says.

Johnson majored in environmental studies with a focus on international development. A pianist, she took up percussion instruments to play in the UVM pep band. Johnson’s first year went well, and she returned as a sophomore prepared to be a resident advisor. But back on campus, she felt pressure to pick a major and at a loss for what that might be.

“I had the feeling of not really knowing what my options were,” she says. Talking with her parents, Johnson decided to stay at UVM and make plans for a junior year abroad.

She chose a program in Tanzania, and studied in that country the fall semester of her junior year. At the end of the term, Johnson decided to stay in East Africa another five or six months. She remembers calling her parents to break the news. “I just had a great program,” she told them. “By the way, I’m not coming home next week. Gotta go. Bye.” Johnson traveled, volunteered, and enjoyed an unfettered expanse of time. “I did the walkabout, so to speak,” she says. “The time off is really what gave me some focus.

That’s when I really decided to focus on issues around the environment, international development, and poverty.”

With the exception of a year in Hartford, Connecticut, during which Johnson worked on a community gardening project through AmeriCorps, she has lived in Vermont since arriving here as a student. She has worked as a farmer, ANDY DUBACK, MIDDLE, RIGHT

a piano teacher, an emergency responder, a hunger relief advocate, and served in the Vermont House since 2003.

“UVM helped me fall in love with Vermont,” Johnson says.

DAVID ZUCKERMAN, LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES MAJOR ’95 David Zuckerman arrived at the University of Vermont from Brookline, Massachusetts, intending to major in chemistry and become a doctor. That plan changed after Zuckerman took a year off to work in a pallet factory in the Shenandoah Valley and hike the Appalachian Trail.

Zuckerman started walking north from Springer Mountain in Georgia in the spring of 1991. He turned twenty on the trail, and finished his hike atop Mount Katahdin on September 27, 1991.

“That is the anniversary of my dad’s death,” says Zuckerman, who was thirteen when his father died. “As I got closer to the end, I realized that I could finish on that anniversary. I aimed to do that.”

When Zuckerman returned to UVM, he changed his major from chemistry to environmental studies and focused his student activism on social justice issues— causes that concern people of color, the LBTQ community, the environment, and more.

“In environmental studies, you inherently learn the interconnectedness of our environment and the various struggles people face,” says Zuckerman, an organic farmer.

In 1994, while a student at UVM, Zuckerman ran for the SPRING 2017 |

37

U VM TO MON T P E L I E R

Vermont House—losing the election by fifty-nine votes.

Two years later, he ran a winning campaign and went on to serve in the Legislature as a representative and then senator from 1997 to 2016 (with time off from 2011-2012). Zuckerman’s election to lieutenant governor elevated him to the highest statewide office to be held by a Progressive.

“I think it’s as much that I’m a Progressive as it is the time period in terms of the national dynamic politically,” Zuckerman says. “Bernie struck a deep chord across America. So I think I happened to be a beneficiary of good timing as well as hard work.”

At UVM, Zuckerman was a senator in the Student Government Association and commenced a bid for SGA president before pulling out. “I actually wanted to focus on academics and not as much activism my senior year,” he says.

A professor who Zuckerman called “a real inspiration” —a teacher who “stood out for a super-long time”— is Stephanie Kaza, a biologist/ecologist and Buddhist minister.

“I took three courses from her because she was so grounded and I am often zooming,” Zuckerman says. “And while I was never quite able to embody her calmer spirit, it was important for me to be able to absorb while I could.”

TIM ASHE, SENATE PRESIDENT PRO TEMPORE ENGLISH/HISTORY MAJOR ’99 Tim Ashe was hanging out on a couch at his apartment on Lafayette Place in Burlington, wearing shorts and a T-shirt and eating a bowl of cereal, when he got a call from Bernie Sanders’s office.

38 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

It was the spring of 1999, a week or so before Ashe’s UVM graduation. Sanders’s right-hand man, Phil Fiermonte ’77, wondered if Ashe could hustle downtown for a job interview with Vermont’s U.S. Congressman, an independent member of the House of Representatives. Time was short: Sanders was about to catch a plane to the nation’s capital.

Ashe kept his T-shirt on and raced to Church Street to talk with Sanders.

“My interview was both mind-blowing and fun and sort of scary at the same time,” Ashe recalls. “I got a call that day or the next, and a week after graduation was my first day working in the office.”

Thus began the political life of Tim Ashe, who started as a “jack-of-all-trades” for Sanders. He went on to serve on the Burlington City Council for four years before his election to the Vermont Senate in 2008.

Ashe grew up in Holliston, Massachusetts, and said he was drawn to UVM for its liberal arts curriculum and the caliber of the humanities faculty. He majored in English and history, yet wrote his honors thesis—about Czech President Vaclav Havel and the role of intellectuals in elected office— under the guidance of Robert Taylor, a political scientist.

“I really received kind of a classic humanities education,” Ashe says, recalling a group of “fantastic teaching professors.” They include: Tom Simone (English); Richard Sugarman (religion); Taylor (political science); and Denise Youngblood (history).

In their classes, Ashe considered a series of fundamental questions: What type of person am I? What type of life do I want to lead?

He affirmed for himself that he wanted to pursue a life ANDY DUBACK (ALL)

David Zuckerman presides over a session on the senate floor; Tim Ashe speaks with his chief of staff, Peter Sterling (right), and Representative Kevin Mullin; Jim Condos.

of public service. This type of work was most valuable and meaningful to him, Ashe says.

“Trying to improve the lives of others originated and matured while I was at UVM,” he says.

Ashe left Vermont for two years to get a master’s degree at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

“While I was there I realized that I was going to be coming back to Burlington,” Ashe says. “It’s where I want to be.

The moment I graduated I was in my car driving back.”

JIM CONDOS, SECRETARY OF STATE RESOURCE ECONOMICS MAJOR ’74 Forty-plus years after graduating college, Jim Condos recalls details of college with admirable detail. For instance, the win-loss record of the UVM soccer team on a 1970 road trip to Europe: 1-8-1. Not quite glory days. “We got our asses handed to us,” Condos says.

Condos was a goalie on the JV team for that tour. After freshman year, he turned his attention to intramural football and hockey instead. But as a fan, he would become a Catamount varsity sports legend: leading the cheers at hockey games from 1969 to 1997. Dressed in a green down vest and yellow rubberized fisherman’s cap, Condos employed his deep booming voice to rev up the crowd.

“Go, Cats, Go!” he implored, and the fans joined in.

“Gimme a V; Gimme an E; Gimme an R,” Condos chanted, leading the crowd to spell V-E-R-M-O-N-T.

Gutterson had long felt like home to Condos, a townie who went to UVM hockey games as a high school kid.

“Back in those days, there was no glass around the rink,” Condos recalls. “There was fencing, we called it ‘chicken wire.’ You didn’t want to get your face crushed on the fence, I can tell you.”

Attending college three miles from home, Condos lived in a residence hall for two years and a fraternity house, Sigma Nu, his junior and senior years. His mother, Irene Condos, was administrative assistant to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Condos would walk through Waterman on his way to classes to say to hi to her.

“UVM years were great years,” Condos says. “You make a lot of friends. You grow up a lot there.”

He majored in resource economics, a course of study related to municipal and regional planning. That educational background served him well when he entered the political arena, as his initial involvement concerned a zoning issue in his South Burlington neighborhood of Mayfair.

The effort propelled him to an appointment on the Zoning Board, and onto a winning bid for the South Burlington City Council. Condos was on the council from 1989 to 2007, a tenure that coincided with his election to the Vermont Senate (2001-2008). After a two-year break from government service, he was elected Secretary of State in 2010.

Condos credits his predecessor in the Secretary of State’s Office, fellow UVM alum Deb Markowitz ’83, with suggesting he run for his latest role in public service.

VQ SPRING 2017 |

39

UVM PEOPLE

Katie Elmore Mota talks with actors during shooting of “East Los High.”

40 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

Katie Elmore Mota ’04 A NEW VOICE

Katie Elmore Mota is shaking up Hollywood. As founder, co-president, and executive producer of Wise Entertainment, she’s breaking ground with smart, socially relevant content that tells the stories of underrepresented audiences. Wise’s first project, the five-time Emmy-nominated “East Los High,” is the first English-language television show with all-Latino cast members, creators, and writers. “Our goal is to create things that people love and that make them say, ‘I’m seeing myself for the first time on TV,’” says Mota.

RURAL ROOTS

Mota championed diverse stories long before #hollywoodso white was a trending topic. Born in NYC and raised on a farm in Westford, Vermont, her mixed-race family includes a biological brother and four partially adopted siblings who lived with their biological parents part-time. They were one of the only non-white families in town. “We had so many different experiences even though we lived under one roof,” says Mota.

The family made movies every summer that touched on the discrimination they experienced. “I look back at my writing from grade school and that’s what I was writing about, because I couldn’t make sense of it.”

ROCKIN’ IRA ALLEN CHAPEL

AT UVM, Mota focused on social history and earned a place in the John Dewey Honors Program, precursor to the Honors College. “I really loved the study of people and how social movements shape our country and the world over time,” she says.

Mota also took every photography class she could.

In addition to academics, she helped reboot the student concert bureau and organized up to twenty shows a year, ranging from Jurassic 5 to Mike Gordon ’87. “I looked at pop culture as a way to create a sense of community. It makes sense; there’s a lot of crossover with the company I have now.” She credits that experience with preparing her for the path she’s taken. “There are hurdles, especially being a young woman running a production company. I learned a lot about how to deal with them during my time at UVM.”

by Andrea Estey

AUTHENTIC STORIES

While earning her master’s in media studies from The New School for Social Research in New York, she met her husband, Maurício Mota, a native Brazilian. Together they founded Wise Entertainment, committed from the outset to a different approach. “We really wanted to tell stories for women by women and underrepresented audiences,” Mota says.

Although many in Hollywood were skeptical of “East Los High,” it’s now Hulu’s longest-running original show. Mota credits the show’s success, in part, to Wise’s unique in-house research and development group, which keeps its fingers on the pulse of what’s happening culturally around the country and feeds the team authentic, specific stories.

“When we look at culture from a macro view, we lose the humanity. We want to capture what daily life is like,” says Mota.

In the last season alone, “East Los High” featured storylines around hate speech, undocumented immigrants, and was the first U.S. television program to show a detention center. These heavy topics are combined with love stories and occasional dance numbers, which Mota says help keep audiences engaged and reflect every person’s highs and lows. “This is not a documentary, but it’s an amazing piece of entertainment that also presents a reflection on life.”

The Wise team has more trailblazing projects in development, including a new show co-created with Get Lifted, John Legend’s production company. “The opportunity to tell these stories is a gift,” says Mota.

VQ SPRING 2017 |

41

H O W U V M ’ S W E L L N E SS E N V I RO N M E N T I S R E W I R I N G C O L L EG E ST U D E N T S ’ B R A I N S

GORGEOUS NEUROSCIENCE

BY SAR AH TUFF DUNN 42 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

SHUTTERSTOCK/ MEYERS KONVERSATIONS-LEXIKON 1897

MEETS STUDENT LIFE

ANDY DUBACK

SPRING 2017 |

43

“I’m an optimistic fellow, and I believe in the goodness of people, and I believe in young people, but in many universities, it’s difficult to make healthy choices.”

—Dr. James Hudziak

44 |

it’s 6:20 p.m. on a Thursday in mid-September, sixty-

three degrees out, and the first-year students around McAuley Hall are thirsty. No, not in a “Thirsty Thursday,” wink-wink kind of way that suggests a trip down the hill to Last Chance Saloon.

It’s a more virtuous thirst on display. For instance, Luke Nawrocki has just ridden back from calculus class and eyes the water fountain as he locks up his bike. Also working up a sweat, weightlifters rotating through sets on the Precor machines, runners on the treadmills in the residence hall’s fitness center, and a class of students in a “Lunar Flow Yoga” session.

Says instructor Nalini Flanders as she lights a candle, “Release through your head.”

Release through the head, indeed. This is a glimpse of the Wellness Environment (WE), a profound new program at UVM that is changing the way many undergrads go about their every day, from taking better care of their physical and mental health to engaging as mentors. While other campuses crack down on the binge drinking practiced by as much as 42 percent of undergraduates (Ohio State)—banning hard liquor or kegs, as reported by The New York Times in

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

late October—UVM is lifting up a new model.

Pioneered by Professor James Hudziak, M.D., Dr. Jim to his students, WE has significantly reduced substance abuse on campus while earning national buzz for its novel and ground-breaking approach to neuroplasticity, mindfulness, and the charismatic mastermind behind the program. No college has tried at this level before.

WE goes way beyond pulling the plug on poor behavior. Grounded in the latest research on neuroscience and health promotion, the program shows students how brains are physiologically different, depending on how you treat them.

“I’m an optimistic fellow, and I believe in the goodness of people, and I believe in young people, but in many universities, it’s difficult to make healthy choices,” says Dr. Hudziak. “So my idea was to create an environment that will incentivize you to practice mindfulness, yoga, fitness and good nutrition, and to avoid alcohol and drugs.”

Introduced at UVM in 2015, WE is hitting a major nerve in northern Vermont. In just one year, the number of students opting out of “happy hour” and opting into another higher level of happiness has quadrupled to 480, with demand outpacing supply in residence availability.

NBC News, the Boston Globe, and other major media outlets have all taken notice of this novel approach to clean living. Alcohol violations at UVM, meanwhile, dropped from 1,000-plus in 2013 to 657 in 2015. Drug violations dropped from 682 violations to 318 in the same two years. Though there was a crowd lighting up on Redstone on 4/20 day last year, a larger group was lining up for a WE-sponsored 5K around the golf course loop.

“This is just a huge paradigm shift for the way colleges have operated,” says Dr. Jon Porter, director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing and strong supporter of WE. “The bar has just been set too low in higher education for too many generations.”

GRAY MATTERS

brain science has arguably never been a hotter

topic, with Scientific American Mind appealing to millennials and octogenarians alike, and paper after paper illuminating that what we thought we knew about our noggins may no longer be true.

This is especially prevalent among young people.

As Richard Friedman points out in an October 8, 2016, op-ed piece in The New York Times: “Neuroplasticity— the brain’s ability to form new neural connections and be influenced by the environment—is greatest in childhood and adolescence, when the brain is still a work in progress.”

While Friedman goes on to explain how recent CALEB KENNA (2)

research is showing that older adults can recapture the brain’s earlier plasticity, he hits on an illness prevention strategy that Hudziak, whose primary job is serving as director of the Vermont Center for Children, Youth and Families, has been quietly and almost exclusively promoting for more than two decades. He believes there’s no such thing as a bad kid, just bad brain wiring.

“Some of my scientific peers have said, ‘Well, you just made WE up,’” says Hudziak. “But no, I’ve been working on it for twenty-five years with the families and children I work with in the clinic, and so WE was just the Vermont family-based approach goes to college.”

In his research, Hudziak and his colleagues have been following 100,000 twins since their birth in the Netherlands, examining how their surrounding environment affects their genomes. “It affects our thoughts, actions, and behaviors,” he extrapolates.

“So all health comes from emotional behavioral health.”

THE ROAD TO WE

born and raised in the Midwest, Hudziak attended

St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. He suggests that his own early undergrad days weren’t exactly wellness focused. “I made a number of bad decisions, so sophomore year I decided to hang out with Theresa,” says Hudziak, referring to his wife of three decades, who went to the sister school of St. John’s. “She is very smart and disciplined and I was neither, so it was nice to learn those skills.”

Dr. Hudziak joined the Department of Psychiatry at UVM’s College of Medicine in 1993, landing in a place that fit just right with his love of ice hockey (he has coached youth sports) and of engaging with kids and families at a critical juncture in life. When it came time for his daughter to apply to college, he began to closely examine the environment in which he was teaching and working. How could it be better?

The co-author of more than 175 peer-reviewed papers in scholarly publications from Psychoneuroendocrinology and Neuroimage to Current Sports Medicine Reports and The American Journal of Psychiatry, Hudziak is a consummate researcher who understands developing brains on a highly sophisticated level. But it’s one thing to study epigenetic mechanisms and their influence on health outcomes—the subject of a current project for the National Institutes of Mental Health—and another to actually explain that to students, let alone equip them with the tools to benefit from outcomes.

“I read exhaustively and aggressively,” says Hudziak, who hits PubMed (an online database of 26-million-plus science-based citations) every Monday

morning before turning toward the kinder, gentler Science section of The New York Times on Tuesdays.

“This helps me relate back to students the science I read,” he explains. “But I cross literatures—wellness, neuroscience, genomics, mindfulness. And the best neuroimaging on stress, anxiety, aggression and substance abuse; that’s a must read.”

What Hudziak shares with students is what will empower them to make better choices. “Are there frustrations and are there times when an idea is too big?” he says. “Sure. Am I always understanding and tolerant of that? Probably not. But we all work together.”

It was with this premise that Hudziak assembled a team to create WE, which is a work in progress— much like the man behind it. He began meditating five years ago, is learning to play cello, and dedicates just about every moment of his spare time to promoting positive living. Jon Porter calls his friend Hudziak “a freight train of a man.” (For the record: The Boston Globe went with “affable bear of a man” for Hudziak descriptor.)

What begins as a single cellular change in the

WE goes way beyond pulling the plug on poor behavior.

Grounded in the latest research on neuroscience, the program shows students how brains are physiologically different, depending on how you treat them.

SPRING 2017 |

45

football around Carpenter Auditorium and are followed by several minutes of group meditations before lectures on neuroscience, sleep, nutrition, and relationships, among other topics. Leading many of these discussions are national and international experts who arrive via Skype or in person to much fanfare, including legendary mindfulness author Jon Kabat-Zinn.

brains of UVM students grows exponentially to impact the entire campus. Vice president for student affairs Annie Stevens says that WE has been so popular among new students, it’s changed the way the university looks at residential living.

“It’s a challenge logistically,” she says. “But it’s a challenge we all believe is well worth it, as long as the students are healthy and happy. Any time you have that many students living together, bonded by one common goal to be healthier in their lives, they’re naturally going to be happier.”

Near the former footprint of Chittenden-Buckham-Wills halls, an impressive new 700-bed residential complex rises which will be home to WE students when it opens fall 2017.

“I had no idea that my brain could be shaped this way—this program has changed my life in more ways than I thought was possible,” says first-year student C.J. Cropper. “I started running again, I started meditating, and I started studying the principles, and I could feel myself getting healthier—I was blown away.”

Adds fellow first-year Brenna Coombs, “I’m fascinated by how much neurological information we’ve been given, and how applicable it is to college life.

It’s not necessarily that we’ve gotten smarter, but we more understand the how and the why.”

DON’T JUDGE, JUST PRESENT

WE’s foundation is the “Healthy Brains, Healthy Bodies” class taught by Hudziak. Sessions typically begin with the professor tossing a brain-shaped

46 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

There are pilgrimages over to the neuroanatomy lab for a look at how scientists are picking apart real brains, and final group projects that see creative ideas ranging from a WE pet program to a WE app that prevents drivers from starting their cars until they’ve done a five-minute meditation.

One week Hudziak brought in Kelley Gibson, a nineteen-year-old patient whose psychosis had led to hospitalization and over-medication. Music, diet, weight-lifting, and meditation all brought him back to wellness.

“The brain is in an incredibly vulnerable period of development when it goes off to college,” says Hudziak, who has compared the mind of a twentyseven-year-old to a beautifully painted house, but that of a seventeen to twenty-three-year-old as one still under construction. “WE is about making it possible for individuals with those brains to promote healthy brain growth. We don’t judge—we just present gorgeous neuroscience.”

WE is poised to take it up a notch with a new mentorship program that partners past participants with newcomers to share the journey on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. They have Apple watches with a WE app that incentivizes students to engage in the health promotion activities in WE: yoga, mindfulness, fitness, nutrition, and mentoring.

“The evidence is very strong that mentors live healthier lives,” says Hudziak. “They’re less likely to use alcohol and drugs, they’re less likely to have academic problems, and they report elevated mood.”

That helps explain the congeniality behind the mentor-in-chief of the WE program—Hudziak himself.

“It’s an incredible privilege to work with and serve these students. They buoy me. They’re young, they’re dynamic, they have strong feelings, they’re passionate,” he says. “But in the end, as a group, they’re just extraordinarily positive human beings. What drives me is the habits they form in college, the relationships they form, and how they value themselves during this critical period of brain development they’ll carry with them for the rest of their lives.”

VQ CALEB KENNA

CLASS NOTES Life beyond graduation

“

Ray Bello '64 reminisced with Paul Toussaint about his visit to Paul's hometown in the fall of 1963. Paul took city-boy Ray deer hunting for the first time. Ray said, "So we're going to try to catch deer."

Paul simply replied, "You don't catch 'em. You shoot 'em." ­—Class of '64

Even Ira can't resist the call of fresh tracks. A look back into our magazine archive.

33-64

Green & Gold Reunion October 6-8, 2017

If you are interested in planning your upcoming reunion, email alumni@uvm.edu.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

SPRING 2017 | IAN THOMAS JANSEN-LONNQUIST ’09

47

| CLASS NOTES

39

Ferne Bristol Williams passsed away on July 19, 2016. She made many lifelong friends at UVM who will be saddened to hear the news.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05401 Alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

411 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05401 Alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

45

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street Burlington, VT 05401 Alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

40

46

41

47

42

48

43

49

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street Burlington, VT 05401 Alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street Burlington, VT 05401 Alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street Burlington, VT 05401 Alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes I was very glad to hear from Betty and Harry Twitchell. In September 2016, on Harry's 95th birthday, his three sons arrived in Greenwich, Connecticut, with the exciting plan of a sail on a 12-meter sailboat, an America's Cup contender, to celebrate the big day. Unfortunately the sail had to be aborted for lack of wind, but still a good story. Betty and Harry keep busy with their frequent visitors and attending the symphony and musical shows. I also had a very warm and happy communication from Dorothy Cole in Shelburne who seems to be enjoying life immensely. Patty Pike Hallock is now living at the Meadows in Rutland, a retired community and her old pal Mary Beth Davis is nearby at the Gables. Lastly I would like to offer the condolences of our class to the family of Lucille Clark Myron '42, of Napa, California, who passed away on December 15, 2016 at the age of 96. Lucille was a volunteer for the Napa Humane Society and did many good works. She was appreciative of the long healthy life she lived and expressed this thought in a note she left.

Send your news to— June Hoffman Dorion Maples, Apt.114 3 General Wing Road, Rutland, VT 05701 junedorion@gmail.com

44

Kathleen J. Keenan '71 has published a book, What God Has Done with Me: The Faith of Ione Lacy Keenan. This book (along with On Tuesdays We Iron: Memoirs of Ione Lacy Keenan) is available at Amazon.com. Coming this fall: 25,000 Miles in Vermont: The Walking Diary of Dr. Edward A. Keenan, Jr. '42, MD '44.

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association

48 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

Send your news to— Mrs. Harriet Bristol Saville 468 Church Road, #118 Colchester, VT 05446 hattiesaville@comcast.net Send your news to— Louise Jordan Harper 15 Ward Avenue South Deerfield, MA 01373 louisejordanharper@gmail.com Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street Burlington, VT 05401 Alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes Send your news to— Gladys Clark Severance 2179 Roosevelt Highway Colchester, VT 05446 severance@bsad.uvm.edu

50

Send your news to— Hedi Stoehr Ballantyne 20 Kent Street Montpelier, VT 05602 hedi.ballantyne@gmail.com

51

It was delightful to hear from Dr. Dagmar Mollenkamp Langberg in Freiburg, Germany. He attended UVM on a scholarship for our senior year along with five other foreign students: Elisabeth Schoeppe, also from Germany, two students from Austria and two from Japan. Dagmar returned to the UVM campus for our 35th reunion, but has not been back here since. He has been living in a senior housing facility for several years, celebrated his 90th birthday in April with family and friends in a nearby Black Forest village. Dagmar wrote, "I remember Vermont and UVM with great pleasure." A friend of Thomas Snelson’s daughter wrote that he died on November 23, 2016. Tom retired from Alcan Aluminum as a senior executive in 1985 and then started his own public relations and travel company from which he retired in 2006. Tom and Bill Reis ’50 won Kake Walk for Sigma Nu during Bill's senior year. Ruth Warrell MacKay and her husband Al MacKay ’52 now live in a senior housing facility at Sunrise of Falls Church, Virginia. In October, five class of 1951 home economics majors who live in the Burlington area met for lunch together near campus. Mary Ellen Fuller Fitzgerald was able to get Betty Lawrence Gadue, Betty Kerin Bouchard, Marjorie Allard, and me together. We

UVM ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

GREEN

&

GOLD

Connecting alumni ages 60+ alumni.uvm.edu/ getinvolved/affinity

enjoyed talking about "the good old days" and hope there may be others from our class who also majored in home economics that would join us in the future. At a spring presentation in Shelburne on Vermont creameries, Marjorie Allard's name appeared on the roster of attendees, and I sought her out. There was a somewhat familiar looking and very attractive woman there who appeared to be much younger than any of our classmates would be, but it turned out to be our Marjorie (a.k.a. Marge). She has had a most interesting and fulfilling life giving to others worldwide. For two years after UVM, she taught home economics at the junior and senior high schools in West Rutland.

After teaching, she enrolled in a three-year nursing program at the DeGoesbriand Hospital in Burlington and then worked in the operating room there for thirteen years. After that, she was with Project Hope, a people-to-people approach to medical care that serves individuals around the world.

Marjorie signed up for thirteen-month stints that included two months of travel to and from the destinations where she would be stationed for ten months at a time. After this work, she returned to Burlington before going back to school at Salem University where she earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in nursing. Saudi Arabia was next for three years, followed by faculty work at Saint Michael’s College and Fanny Allen Hospital, both in Colchester, Vermont. Marjorie rounded out her professional life in the Peace Corp from 1989 to 1991. That was quite a career, don't you think?

Send your news to— Valerie Meyer Chamberlain 52 Crabapple Drive, Shelburne, VT 05482 valchamber@aol.com

52

Jane Wilson Durie attended the September reunion and writes, “I had lunch with Val Meyer Chamberlain ’51 and Barb Hardie Densmore and saw other old friends. I attended the opening of the new Alumni House at the Delta Psi House, which brought back old memories and fun times. I am amazed at the new wealth of the university and to see the start of a new STEM building. How times have changed.”

Send your news to—

UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street, Burlington, VT 0, 5401 Alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

53

Robert L. Barker writes, “Jean Barker Spear '54 and I just made the big move to Victory Place, an independent living facility in Plattsburgh, New York, two miles from our younger daughter and family. I am looking forward to spending more family time together and attending events at UVM, PSUNY and Plattsburgh High School. At 85 and 84, it was time.�

Send your news to— Nancy Hoyt Burnett 729 Stendhal Lane, Cupertino, CA 95014

54

Hal Lee Greenfader Apt. 1, 805 South Le Doux Road Los Angeles, CA 90035 halisco@att.net

56

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street Burlington, VT 05401 Alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

55

recently retired after a lengthy career in the financial world. He is always a joy to talk with, funny and upbeat! I hope all of you 55ers continue to stay in good health wherever you might be. Do take a moment and send a note to me. Handwritten works as well. More anon, loyally, Jane.

Send your news to— Jane Morrison Battles Apt. 125A, 500 East Lancaster Avenue Wayne, PA 19087 janebattles@yahoo.com

I trust that those of you who made it back to campus this past fall had a grand time. I received a note from our classmate, Joan Blakeman, reporting that her husband, Alan, passed away in May following a period of declining health. Although not a UVM graduate, he enjoyed and participated in all events and was recently remembered at the October event. I had a great chat with Ben Aibel and Nancy Aibel who still reside in Manhattan. Ben

Robert J. Gauthier writes, “Al Turner showed up at the T-Bird Motel in Shelburne, Vermont one day last July looking for me, his classmate. I wasn't there at the time but Al promised to return in the spring when he had more time to renew old friendships.�

Damon Lee writes, “I am sorry to report that my father, Edward “Ted� Lee passed away on September 11, 2016, surrounded by his family. Ted was born and raised in Kingston, Ontario, and attended Albert College in Belleville. As a teenager, he learned to ski in the Gatineau Hills and the Laurentians. He was also a keen tennis player, who competed in the Canadian Junior Championships in Ottawa. After graduating from the University of Vermont, Ted continued with postgraduate

work at New York University. He initially worked in the securities and document imaging industries, but then rebuilt his late father's Toronto commercial real estate investments. Ted remained happily self-employed until retirement. Vermont was his second home, where he enjoyed the Green Mountains, fresh air, good food and friendly faces. Stowe was the site of annual winter and summer vacations. Ted skied for 70 years, culminating with his last trip to Stowe in 2015. His favorite spots elsewhere in the world included St. Moritz, Val d'IsèreTignes, Munich, Paris, New York, and MontrÊal. Ted spent enjoyable hours in his garage and driveway.

His interests extended from 1960s American muscle cars to the latest European sports sedans.� We will always keep Ted warmly in our hearts.

Send your news to— Jane K. Stickney 32 Hickory Hill Road, Williston, VT 05495 stickneyjanek@gmail.com

57

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street Burlington, VT 05401 Alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

58

Ronald E. Downer writes, “I chose to remain in Virginia after my 25 years in the Air Force, including seven at the Pentagon. Now I'm in retirement again, this time from interior home design and decorating. I've still kept my hand in music since University Band and

Growing Community :DNH 5RELQ 9HUPRQW¡V ÀUVW lifeplan community is growing!

Maple, our new independent living apartment building, is scheduled for completion in 2018. Maple will include DSDUWPHQWV QHZ RSHQ Ă RRU SODQV and 1 cost saving opportunity.

Live the life you choose in a vibrant OLIHSODQ FRPPXQLW\ ÀOOHG ZLWK interesting people. Visit our website or give us a call today to schedule a personal consultation.

802.264.5100 / wakerobin.com

200 WAKE ROBIN DRIV E, SHEL BURN E, V ERM ON T

| CLASS NOTES University Orchestra at UVM playing trumpet in a swing band, brass ensemble, and concert band, and playing violin in a seniors orchestra. Great fun!

I've been in contact with schoolmates Mike Zacchilli, Bob Duryea ’59, and Dave Dunbar ’57. I now have eight grandkids and one great-grandchild. My wife, Barbara, and I like to swim, hike and bike to keep fit.” Steve Slater Rozen writes, “I’m finally retired, but Midge and I will do a mission with UCONN Dental students in Guatemala.

We split our time between Connecticut and Florida. We just got back from Japan and Korea. I am still married to my first bride for 56 years. I pass my time fishing and a tolerance of golf. I am looking forward to the 60th class reunion in 2018.”

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05401 Alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

59

Ann K. Scribner died on August 16 at her home. An active member of Delta Delta Delta sorority, she graduated from UVM and went on to study for a master’s degree at the University of Connecticut School of Social Work. Ann was passionately concerned with the welfare of other people, and worked as a crisis intervention therapist, drug and alcohol counselor, and child and family therapist at Rensselaer County Family Services, Blue Hills Hospital, Lenox Hill, and St. Peter’s Hospital Addiction Recovery Center. After a long and rewarding career, Ann retired in Arlington, Virginia. Frank Hammett died on June 3 after a long illness. I got the word from his wife, Ann. We all (everybody) knew Frank; loveable guy who lived large, had to carry a stick on campus, and was a most colorful personality. He roomed with Ed Thorn, third floor across the hall from me and Bill Mitchell, and kept the door closed to keep smoke from billowing out into the hallway. Those of you who wish to send a note to Ann, the address is: 1467 Van Antwerp Rd. Schenectady, NY 12309. Andy' 58 and Barbara Skroback are enjoying retirement in their hometown of East Longmeadow, MA, spending time with children and grandchildren, and pursuing new projects such as the 2016 publication of Andy’s book on politics and economics No Risk, No Reward. Andy has also created a blog featuring videos of the 40th and 50th reunions of the classes of ’58 and ‘59! All are invited to view: uvmreunion. blogspot.com. God willing, Barbara and I look forward to seeing you at our 60th reunion.

Send your news to— Henry Shaw, Jr. 112 Pebble Creek Road, Columbia, SC 29223 hshaw@sc.rr.com

60

Sue Alenick proudly shares, “On Thanksgiving Day, I became the 5,878th Points of Light Award recipient for 21 years as volunteer weekly columnist for the United Way.” Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05401

50 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

Alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

61

Charles “Chuck” Tierney emails, “My spouse, Bobbi, and I have lived in Sarasota, Florida, since 2003. Both of us are retired Federal employees. We have enjoyed the many cultural opportunities of Sarasota and recently attended the marriage of my younger son on the beach in Vero Beach, Florida. Of course, before we moved here in 2003, I assured Bobbi that hurricanes were not an issue in this part of Florida.

Then came the hurricanes (thankfully NOT local) of 2004 and 2005 and I had some explaining to do. Fortunately, we've been good to go since then, including the 2016 hurricane season.” John Simonds reports, “I celebrated Thanksgiving with my three children at a resort on the Oregon Coast, called Salishan. Everyone voted for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner including the sweet potatoes and marshmallows. I continue to write essays for Classic Chicago Magazine, and tend to my responsibilities as a board member of the Lincoln Park Village; a nonprofit organization with 450 members committed to help seniors live productive and vibrant lives in their homes. As a post script, I am spending several days each week in the gym doing interval training and pumping a little iron to fend off the Grim Reaper.” Jan Mashman writes, “I have retired from the practice of neurology in Connecticut and Susan and I have moved to Charleston, South Carolina. We have a condo in town and a beach home on Dewees Island, 20 minutes away. Charleston is a wonderful city full of social, cultural and culinary opportunities. I am working on the Ethics Committee of Medical University South Carolina and Roper Saint Frances Hospital. I am also doing neurology consultations at the Smith Free Clinic in Georgetown, South Carolina, for incredibly poor people.

Susan continues to do her calligraphy and is teaching it as well as producing it. We have a close relationship with Joyce and Bob Hobbie MD ’65 who have been our closest friends since the 50's. Daughter, Pam Venn, has moved to St. Louis, where she lives with her husband and daughter. She works as a manager for Nestle Purina. Son, Walter, practices cardiology in Atlanta. His wife is an anesthesiologist and their two eldest sons attend Emory University; youngest is a junior in high school. Life is excellent.”

Bob Murphy emails, “After 40 years of running, I finally suffered a knee injury. Surgery was in June and I am still trying to get back to where I was. However, running is only one of my passions, so I am filling the time with painting and genealogy. (Retirement is so great!) Shortly after retirement from the Vermont Agency of Transportation in 1996, I began painting and have recently served as an officer (prior president, current treasurer) of the local painting group, the Paletteers, participating in three to four shows a year at Barre’s Aldrich Library.

I’m also a long-time genealogist, have served as president of the Genealogical Society of Vermont, and am in the process of giving genealogical presentations at the Aldrich Library and the Barre Area Senior Center. By the way, Lynda and I recently took a trip to France (back to Paris after 50 years!), and had a wonderful time. We heartily recommend

European river cruises.” Dianne George Thornton says: “Sorry not to have made the reunion, I was really hoping to. I had a wonderful trip this year to Alaska with my kids and three teenage grandchildren and Naples, Florida, for the winter. I am thankful for my wonderful group of friends. I continue to miss my wonderful George who passed away in 2014, but fill my time with golf, offshore fishing with my son and all the other fun things here in the sunny south.” Carole Demas wrote, “After Thanksgiving, for two weeks, I joined three other Broadway stars as headline entertainers on a Broadway and film-themed Crystal Cruise to French Polynesia.

We were working, but it was a dream gig and my husband, Stuart Allyn, joined me and had his first real vacation in many years. On our return, I sang for "Follies of the Air", playing Billy Burke in a benefit performance depicting a 1933 radio broadcast, for the New York Ziegfeld Society, at the Cutting Room in New York City. My "Magic Garden" cohort and dearest friend, Paula Janis, and I appeared at Barnes & Noble in Tribeca, New York City, in a special event to celebrate the launch of Barnabas Miller's YP novel, The Girl With No Name, in which "The Magic Garden" is featured. As time goes by, I am especially grateful to still be singing and sharing the gift I was given. Thanks to UVM, professors Greg Falls, Ed Feidner and Howard Bennett, I truly learned that this was to be my life's work.” Marvin Vipler says, “I'm still a real estate agent in Manhattan and enjoy living and keeping busy in New York City. Elaine and I spend most of November in California visiting family, celebrating birthdays and Thanksgiving.

In February, we traveled to South America; visiting Argentina, Chile and Patagonia. Best regards to my fellow UVM Class of '61 alumni.” Roy Kelly writes, “I am in my second year as organist/choirmaster at Saint Michael's Episcopal Church in Holliston, Massachusetts. I have been on the 'bench' since 1959.

I will be stepping down as artistic director with the Snug Harbor Community Chorus in the spring of 2017 after 15 years. I am now the accompanist for a Ms. Massachusetts pageant winner, performing different genres for senior citizens; most recent and very popular: Songs of WWII. As long as the fingers keep moving, I'm still working.” Maralyn Steeg reports that her husband Frank A. Steeg died on October 21, 2016. Ray Johnson responded that he had never sent news before, and then he attached enough information to fill our entire column! He has had a distinguished career dealing with radiation safety and received the 2016 Founders Award for exceptional service to the radiation safety profession and to the Health Physics Society at their annual meeting in July. And, class scribe Steve Berry reported in late November, that ski season had started with the Women’s World Cup ski races at Killington and he had already skied one day at Stowe, and was hoping for many more and a snow season better than last year.

Send your news to-Steve Berry 8 Oakmount Circle, Lexington, MA 02420 steveberrydhs@gmail.com

62

Lawrence F. Simon continues as director of surgery at Nyack Hospital. He sold the boat so there is more time for the 10 grandkids. Fred Goldberg writes, “I thought some of my old classmates might like to know that my book, The Insanity of Advertising, is now available in paperback. It traces my career from Young & Rubicam to Chiat/Day to Goldberg Moser O’Neill, working with folks like Steve Jobs, Andy Grove, Ernest Gallo, Larry Ellison and John Wayne to name a few: www.theinsanityofadvertising.com.

Send your news to— Patricia Hoskiewicz Allen 14 Stony Brook Drive, Rexford, NY 12148 traileka@aol.com

63

Send your news to— Toni Citarella Mullins 210 Conover Lane Red Bank, NJ 07701 tonicmullins@verizon.net

64

I'm wishing you all good health and happy times in 2017. I'm sure you feel as I do that time is flying by so very fast. Ray Bello writes, “You might remember that I was the editor-in-chief of the Vermont Cynic.

Editing, keeping it brief and interesting is hard to do. I tried to keep it pithy. Getting the facts right is important too. My memory is a bit fuzzy about a big mistake I made by naming the wrong class president on the front page of the Cynic! I think you remember that one. Please reply and lift the fuzzy patch in my memory.” Paul Toussaint and Ray were football teammates and dorm roommates. Paul grew up in St. Johnsbury Center, Vermont, and Ray in Union City, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City. They kept in touch over the years. When Ray returned from the Peace Corps in Ethiopia in 1967, he visited Paul who was in the Army and stationed in Munich, Germany. Most recently, Ray reminisced with Paul about his visit to Paul's hometown in the fall of 1963. Paul took city-boy Ray deer hunting for the first time. Ray said, "So we're going to try to catch deer." Paul simply replied, "You don't catch 'em.

You shoot 'em." Paul is the retired director of the Transportation Research Center at The University of Kentucky and Ray is still active after 42 years as a State Farm agent in San Diego, California.

Send your news to— Susan Barber 1 Oak Hill Road, P.O. Box 63 Harvard, MA 01451 suebarber@verizon.net

65

Dr. Sumner Silverman has been awarded a professional certificate in cannabis science and medicine from the UVM Larner College of Medicine.

Send your news to– Colleen Denny Hertel 14 Graystone Circle, Winchester, MA 01890 colleenhertel@hotmail.com

RYAN STRAND GREENBERG

A Gift of Global Perspective “When I hear people say globalization doesn’t work, it puzzles me. Globalization is like gravity; it just is. Whether it ‘works’ or not is determined by what we do,” explains Faith Abbey, Class of 1954.

“We studied physics and look where that led us. We need to study globalization and see where that leads.” To that end, Abbey recently committed a $250,000 bequest to benefit the Global Studies Program, which has surged in popularity in recent years.

In her professional life, Abbey worked with students at Eastern Michigan University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University where she was a College of Liberal Arts academic advisor with special responsibility for international students.

In that capacity, she was frequently asked by students, “Why do I need this?” or “What will I do with this?” Her reply? “If you don’t know something, you can’t use it, but the wider your knowledge, the more opportunities you have and the more you bring to your career and life.”

As a native Vermonter, Abbey values her Vermont heritage but, she explains, “I also know the benefits of expanding that

foundation and enjoying the riches of engaging in this changing world”—a sentiment she hopes to spread through her donation to the Global Studies program, which will fund study abroad experiences and internship opportunities for undergraduate students.

“The cost of travel and program fees and the generally un-funded nature of internships means that not all students can afford to undertake them,” explains Pablo Bose, UVM’s director of Global Studies. “This is why the generosity of Ms. Abbey's gift is so overwhelming—it will enable Vermonters and other students who might not otherwise be able to go abroad or take on an internship to do so. In a very real sense, what Ms. Abbey is providing is the ability for students to learn about the world first-hand, whether at home or abroad.”

Abbey views us all as citizens of a borderless environment. “To be effective, responsible and possibly even happy citizens,” she reasons, “we need to know, experience and accept that environment.”

For information on including the University of Vermont in your estate plan, contact Amy Palmer-Ellis, Office of Gift Planning The University of Vermont Foundation 411 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05401-3411 PHONE: 802-656-9536 FAX: 802-656-8678 E-MAIL: amy.palmer-ellis@uvm.edu

SPRING 2017 |

51

| CLASS NOTES

66

Henry Hebb writes, “Just want to say hello to my fellow classmates; spending my time in Maine and Florida and

all is well.”

Send your news to— Kathleen Nunan McGuckin 416 San Nicolas Way, St Augustine, FL 32080 kkmcguckin@prodigy.net

67

50th Reunion October 6-8, 2017

If you are interested in planning your upcoming reunion, email alumni@uvm.edu. James “Jim” Cunningham writes, “After 45 years of employment at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (Daytona Beach, Florida) as professor of humanities, dean of academics, associate provost and associate vice president, I retired as faculty emeritus. Cheryl (also a retired professor) and I now spend four months at our family camp on Colchester Point enjoying Vermont’s spectacular summers and early fall athletic and alumni events at UVM, including this past September’s dedication of the former Delta Psi house. We will always be Catamounts at heart!” Esther Sundell Lichti writes, “Having retired from positions at Texas Tech University, my husband and I moved to Vermont in August from Lubbock, Texas, where we lived for 37 years. We are enjoying the change in scenery and climate and are busy updating the house my parents bought back in 1957.”

Send your news to— Jane Kleinberg Carroll 44 Halsey Street, Apt. 3, Providence, RI 02906 jane.carroll@cox.net

68

Curt Tobey sent a picture of his four grandchildren: Ellie, Blake, Annie and Jake, that was posted on the Alumni Association’s Flickr photo gallery. He writes, “They are a lot of fun. I continue to do some investment consulting, and also work with Save the Children, the international humanitarian organization. I am on my own now, and am spending time at my apartment in Boston, an apartment in Connecticut, and am also looking for a place in Florida. Best to all my classmates, and it would be great to hear from you. Cheers!”

Send your news to— Diane Duley Glew 23 Franklin Street, 2 Wheeler Farm Westerly, RI 02891 ddglew@gmail.com

69

Send your news to— Mary Moninger-Elia 1 Templeton Street West Haven, CT 06516 Melia1112@comcast.net

70

Judy Coulman Rice writes, “After teaching physical education as well as coaching field hockey and basketball at Mt. Abraham Union Middle & High School over 37 years, I retired nine years ago. My days are spent

52 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

doing arts and crafts and spending time with my three adult children and their families; especially those eight wonderful grandchildren.” Chris Borneo Harris is splitting his time between Kingston, Canada, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He's currently waiting for Whoopi and Al Sharpton to stop by, since he has an extra room. As for Doug Arnold's new business, Chris wants to remind him, “I'm a former Benways driver (862-1010). Problem is I only know the way to Beansies and the Redwood. Life is good. Doubted in 1970 we'd be ushering in 2017, but here we are.” Richard “Dick” Mable retired from his administrative position as chief strategy officer for the Reading Health System on October 1, 2016. He and his wife, Colleen, have been doing some traveling visiting family and friends in Vermont, California, and Washington, D.C., and plan to spend several weeks in Naples, Florida, this coming winter. Lawrence Perlmutter writes, “My son has joined me in the practice of ophthalmology this year in Albany, New York. My daughter is practicing dermatology in Manhattan. Our oldest grandchild of just four years is rapidly improving his game of chess to the point where he can challenge many adult recreational players.” Lorraine Parent Racusen MD’75, and Richard Racusen PhD’75 continue to enjoy life in suburban Maryland. Lorraine is professor emerita at Johns Hopkins, and still lectures, most recently in Turkey. Sons, Chris and Darren Racusen ’11, still live in California. Chris is engaged to Michelle Yi; both are satellite engineers. Darren is doing internet marketing and is an avid mushroom hunter. Lorraine and Richard plan to continue to travel, with plans to visit Barcelona and Mysore in the coming year, but also enjoy the wood stove and life as close to rural New England as they can make it! Bryant Dorsch shares exciting news, “I got remarried to a wonderful girl from New Jersey. I started teaching English as a second language to adults and children and that keeps me busy. I regret that I cannot get back to Vermont to meet some of my world-class classmates.” As I write this note to our class, I’m sitting outside by the pool on an 83 degree day. I feel very blessed to be here with such pleasant weather. I discover more and more UVM alums down here in Southwest Florida all the time—some just visiting—others here year long. In December, I went to a UVM basketball game down here in Fort Myers. It was a tournament of eight teams where UVM earned runner-up status. While at the game, I saw several local UVM alums and met the new athletic director. Great to see UVM win! I just recently got a note from Paul Shea who lives about ½ mile away from me off the same street. Paul has been down here for a while and has an office in Fort Myers, but he is slowly retiring to play more golf in their Naples golf community. I also heard from Franklin “Paco” Otto who just recently published Locutores Hispanos: Perspectives desde las Grandes Ligas.

For those of you who aren’t Spanish fluent, it is an historical/socioculture study of Hispanic baseball broadcasters at the Major League level. Certainly a challenging read for those who took Spanish with Professors Ugalde and Chinchon. Thankfully, as I have been anxiously waiting for a definitive tome

on this subject. I also heard from fellow swim team member and classmate, Carl Jacobs, who is now Dr. (Ph.D.) Carl Jacobs and has been living with his wife Irene in Jerusalem, Israel for the past six years.

Their two children and grandson live in the United States. Carl was kind enough to express that he likes reading this column to keep up with his UVM classmates. That being stated, why not send me some information/news on what you are doing or have done. So, like Carl, the rest of us can stay current on our classmates’ lives, families, accomplishments and moves. People do want to know. So, contact me below.

Send your news to— Douglas Arnold 11608 Quail Village Way, Naples, FL 34119 darnold@arnold-co.com

71

I want to apologize for the lack of content in the last couple of issues, except for those notes sent in directly by classmates (thanks to them, there were notes). No excuses, and the offer still stands for Owen Jenkins to take over! I even received an email from Doug Arnold ’70 telling me that his Class Notes column was much longer and more interesting than mine last issue! So, this column will reflect some old news, but hopefully will be of greater interest than the Fall VQ ’70 Class Notes! Peter Rousseau reports that his wife, Billie Gates Rousseau, has retired, and now they can spend more time with the couple's three grandchildren. Son, William Arthur is a professional model working for Wilhelmina Los Angeles as well as a singer/songwriter in the Los Angeles area. Check him out at Wilhelmina.com. After our Alumni Weekend (45th Reunion, by the way), I ran into Marybeth Siska Rust, who still works in real estate, walking in her neighborhood which isn’t too far from mine! She and Bill Rust made it to the Delta Psi celebration and the dedication of the Alumni House over the Alumni Weekend where they connected with many old friends. Our reunion celebration was wonderful and generously hosted by Richard Cate. We had a great time, and Richard had a slide show with Freshman Review pictures of each of us attending, with additional photos from the late ’60s. Those attending: Walt Blasberg, Liz Mead Foster, Elise Guyette (check out information on Burlington Edible History website with fascinating information about her work) and her husband, David Shiman, Owen and Wendy Reilly Jenkins ’73, Pat Vana, Dick Peisch, Barbara and Doug Wells, Myron and Grazyna Grauer, Mags Caney Conant, and our host Richard Cate. Pat Vana was encouraged to attend our reunion by Jeannie O’Donnell ’70—glad that they could both make it. It’s amazing that after 45 years, we still had things in common and could have fun conversations. Joanne Czachor Magliozzi couldn’t make it since she got married on October 1! And Tom Reilly was heading out of the country for a case he’s working on in an undisclosed location, so we missed him too. Carl Korman wrote days before our reunion, “We are still in Peru right now after visiting Machu Picchu and the Amazon River. So looks like I'll just have to try and hang in there and shoot for our 50th! But please give my best to Steve

Levenson ’73 (my AEPi little brother) and anyone else who can still remember me.” And, while we are on who’s out of the country, I understand from some source that I cannot remember that Jason Robards is living in Thailand. Chances are that he won’t be receiving this Vermont Quarterly, so if anyone is in touch with him—please let him know we are thinking about him! I saw Chris Warden Malley and Ed in Darien in October—it’s always fun to catch up, and they were about to head to Palm Springs for the “old rockers” show with: Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, Neil Young and The Who. They brought their kids along to experience “our music”! I just saw Carol and Bill Fitzgerald at a UVM men’s basketball game and believe they will be heading to Florida in the near future. I also had the most delightful dinner with Linda Blackwood in San Francisco mid-October. She is doing all sorts of cool things since retirement, and I am in awe of her long and successful academic career at San Francisco State University. And, I received an updated message from our local classmate, Kathleen Keenan, who writes, “I have just published a book about my father, 25,000 Miles in Vermont: The Walking Diary of Dr. Edward A. Keenan Jr. '42, MD '44.

On Nov. 7, 1999, Ed, just shy of his 80th birthday, reached his goal of walking every road in Vermont, Class 4 or better (except interstates). He is believed to be the first and only person to have accomplished this amazing feat. Along the way, he used several walks to raise thousands of dollars for local charities.” Let’s hope we can all keep up Dr. Keenan’s pace when we are his age! Gary Gabso writes, “I have recently received a second kidney transplant at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. I am so grateful to my donor family's generosity and would encourage my friends and classmates to sign up to become donors and give the gift of life to over 100,000 on the waiting list. My wife Heather Hitchcock Gabso ’73 recently retired from teaching in Boca Raton, Florida, after 36 years. Our daughter lives in New York City and our son in Charlotte, North Carolina. We have four grandchildren.”

Send your news to— Sarah Wilbur Sprayregen 145 Cliff Street, Burlington, VT 05401 sarah.sprayregen@uvm.edu

72

Glyn Reinders writes, “After UVM, I got my master’s in education at Springfield College and, in the fall of 1977, I got a job at Hanover High School in Hanover, New Hampshire. I served as director of athletics for 10 years before the desire to go back to teaching and coaching was too much to resist. I taught physical education for another 25 years and coached the varsity golf program for almost 20 years. In the late 1980s, I began an outdoor education program at Hanover and built one of the largest ropes courses in the world. Our ninth-grade curriculum was based on the outdoor program and it has been a huge success over the past decades. As the golf coach, I retired with an overall record of 771 wins and 50 losses. We won 10 State Championships and were runners-up another five times. Many of my former players joined the PGA and are still in the golf busi-

ness. I was honored last spring to be inducted into attended the Vermont Ski & Snowboard Museum’s the New Hampshire Coaches Hall of Fame. I also annual Hall of Fame Banquet that was held at The spent years coaching AAU basketball and high Stoweflake Resort in Stowe, Vermont, in November. school softball during one of my daughter’s playing Chip Lacasse was inducted into their Hall of Fame. careers. I retired after a total of 40 years of teachAlso in attendance was Denny Lambert ’78, Rick ing in June of 2012, and my wife will be retiring Farnham ’69 and Jeff Schulman ’89. Margo de this spring after many years of teaching sixth gradCamp writes, “All four children have moved east, ers here in Lebanon, New Hampshire. We are enjoybut Dave and I still enjoy the good life in the couning our four kids and our six grandchildren who all try in Ohio. Don't have horses any more, but I do bring us great joy. I recently checked one off my train my dogs for obedience and one as a therapy “bucket list” by becoming a certified open water dog. I enjoy being active, gardening, hiking and SCUBA diver along with an Enriched Air/Nitrox ratx-country skiing, but I do wish we had more snow!” ing. I enjoy playing a lot of golf here in Lebanon Send your news to— and, if not for a total knee replacement three years Debbie Koslow Stern ago, would still be playing basketball and all those 198 Bluebird Drive, Colchester, VT 05446 things I did so many years ago. I think back fondly debra.stern@uvm.edu on my years at UVM, remembering all of my professors along with my coaches: Art Loche, Ed Kusiak, Doreen Stickney and Tim Stickney and Bill Nedde.” Joe Wetherell has become a douare now the proud grandparents of ble retiree, first as a Lieutenant Colonel from the a precious baby girl. Temperance was Army Corps of Engineers in 1999, and now as assoborn on July 5 to their daughter, Katie, and her ciate director of admissions, University of Scranton husband, Tim. Susi Taylor writes, “This past Septhis June. Neither retirement really stuck as he contember many of us from the original class of the tinued to oversee ROTC and other veteran activiExperimental Program/ Coolidge Hall gathered ties on campus after military retirement, and has back at UVM. What a blast we had reliving stobeen hired back to a part-time position to manries. We are planning another EP Reunion for all age admissions events and commencement week classes, October 5-7, 2018 so mark your calendars. for the university. He does now have more time to Also, check out our Facebook page: UVMExperivisit his three Army-brat kids as well as eight grandmentalprogramalumni, and also pictures and stochildren spread around near the military bases in ries that we encourage you to add to: alumni.uvm. the mid-Atlantic states. He also hopes to reinstitute edu/experimental. Those in attendance included: an informal meeting of the UVM Acacia Brothers of Lars Larsen, Phil Gentile, Louis Warlick, John the late 60s. David Holton and Rick Carrick '70 Goodhue, Faith Gaskell, 3:33 EllenPMSulek, Barclay Pillsbury_SouthOpenHouse_Sept_4.5x4.45.pdf 1 9/22/15

73

Independence with the Support You Need in a Warm Residential Setting

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

Offering a High Level of Assisted Care Services that include: Offering a High Level of Assisted Care Services that Dementia include:Supports · Integrated Early-Stage · Respite Stays · Integrated Early-Stage Dementia Supports · Hospice · Respite Stays · Diabetic Care Program for · Hospice Insulin-Dependent Diabetics ·· Diabetic CareCare Program for 24/7 Nursing Insulin-Dependent Diabetics · Three Home-Cooked Meals Daily · 24/7 Nursing Care · Exercise Classes, Outings, Social Events, · Three Home-Cooked Meals Daily and More! · Exercise Classes, Outings, Social Events, and More!

CMY

K

Call to schedule a personal visit:

802-861-3750

Visit our web site: pillsburyseniorcommunities.com Visit our Independent Living at Allenwood and Harborview!

20 Harborview Road, South Burlington

SPRING 2017 |

53

C ATAMOUNT NATION

| CLASS NOTES Morris, Paula Kane, Betsy Morrison, Ace “Alan” Bugbee, Andrew McKeever, David Alexander, Linda Bloch ’74, Professors Richard Sugarman, Roger Cooke, and Bill Davison. I apologize if this list omits people, and hope they post also.

There were many more in attendance from all five years. It was terrific to get together after 40 years!”

James A. Pietrovito writes, “In September, Janet Early Pietrovito and I, accompanied by Betsy Post Hayden, her husband and his cousin, Bob Hayden '69, were part of a six-couple group on a European river cruise. During one of the first dinners served, someone walking by our table heard us mention UVM. He then introduced himself as Bill Moore '76. Imagine, we're nearly half way around the world but still surrounded by UVM friends!” Albert “Bert” Thayer writes that he has been representing UVM at college fairs in southwestern Texas for more than 20 years, and he says that students from the San Antonio area seem to be applying in increasing numbers. This year Bert was at the San Antonio private schools fair one day in October. “There were reports of snow that day in New England, but it was 85 degrees in San Antonio,” he said, adding that when representing UVM in the Lone Star State, “it helps to know as much about Texas as Vermont.” He recalled that that when he first arrived in Texas, “UVM had a football team; smart phones would have sounded like something out of a science fiction movie, and nobody discussed global warming, but some said we were going into the next ice age.” Chuck Hawley hasn’t had much contact with classmates since graduating from the School of Engineering (Mechanical), but he’d like to. Retired since 2008, he and his wife, Sandy, spend their winters in The Villages, Florida, and summers in the Traverse City, Michigan, area. He writes that he’d love to hear from classmates, especially if they may be in the vicinity of either locale.

Send your news to— Deborah Layne Mesce 2227 Observatory Place N.W. Washington, DC 20007 dmesce@prb.org

74

Willard Mayo ’73 reports the passing of his wife, H. Stephanie Arno Mayo, on October 31, 2016 after a three-year battle with pancreatic cancer. Bill met Stephanie in her freshman year, specifically the fall of 1970, 46 years ago. Margo David DiIeso, Emily Schnaper Manders, Irene Kwasnik Kowalski ’73 and Marilyn Berkman Sturman ’73 met in Boston for brunch in November. It was a multi-state reunion: Irene came from Connecticut, Marilyn came from Vermont, Margo came from Florida, and Emily came from Massachusetts.

They had a great time reminiscing and catching up. Paul Kenny writes, “I opened a new residential real estate brokerage in Sun Valley, Idaho, to complement my commercial firm. I purchased an Engel & Volkers franchise. We are the 91st Engel & Volkers shop in North America. We are a luxury real estate brokerage with an international presence. Engel & Volkers is the largest residential

54 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

Gail Shampnois ’81 WORK: Director of UVM’s Office of Student Community Relations, Shampnois was

recently honored with Burlington’s Peter Clavelle Award for her “advancement of social equity, environmental stewardship, quality education, economic growth and vitality in Burlington.”

HOME: Burlington, Vermont.

UVM DAYS: An Environmental Studies major, Shampnois was strongly influenced by a service-learning class that connected her to community when she worked with local kids on Vermont Children’s Magazine.

IN HER WORDS: “I think that the university and our students have the moral imperative and the responsibility to be a good neighbor. When a neighbor says, ‘Wow, those students really cared about us,’ that’s monumental.”

Read more: go.uvm.edu/shampnois

real estate franchise in Europe.” Christopher Corbett was just published in the international Palgrave Handbook of Volunteering, Civic Participation and Nonprofit Associations (Basingstroke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan). He worked with researchers from Uganda, Lebanon, and the United States.

They jointly authored a chapter entitled: "SelfRegulation in Associations" (Corbett, C.J., Vienne, D., Abou-Assi, K., Namisi, H. and Smith, D. H.). The chapter is designed to prevent nonprofit scandals by empowering nonprofits and NGOs to improve their governance by intervening at the board level of intervention. More information is available at palgrave.com.

Send your news to— Emily Schnaper Manders 104 Walnut Street, Framingham, MA 01702 esmanders@gmail.com

75

Patricia Pisanelli MD’79 and Stephen Lutz recently met up with fellow UVMers Craig Allen ’76 and Lynne Crowell Allen ’76 in Santa Barbara, California. After 40 years, there was much catching up to do. Gina Rayfield, Kathy Bowers, Birdie Flynn and Carol Wolk have been having annual weekends together for the last few years. They

travel from New Jersey, Massachusetts, California and New York to rendezvous somewhere fun. The most recent one took place back in Burlington in late October where they also reconnected to Deb Call Goyette. So great to all be together!

Send your news to— Dina Dwyer Child 102 N. Jefferson Rd, South Burlington, VT 05403 dinachild@aol.com

76

Norman Barbera would love to hear from some of his classmates! Judy Holmes is still running, cutting back to half marathons now. The five she ran in 2016 were mostly in Maine, but with the first in Moab, Utah, in March and the last in Naples, Florida, in November. She continues to extend a welcome to all classmates who may be skiing in the Vail Valley this winter as she and her husband have now spent 31 seasons in Beaver Creek. Join her for a run or two—or a 10k on snowshoes! She enjoys visits to UVM and Burlington twice a year as part of the UVM Foundation Leadership Council.

Send your news to— Pete Beekman 2 Elm Street, Canton, NY 13617 pbeekman19@gmail.com

77

40th Reunion October 6-8, 2017

If you are interested in planning your upcoming reunion, email alumni@uvm.edu. Susan D. Jewell shares, “I've been with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service for 24 years. Currently, I am the injurious wildlife listing coordinator in the Washington, D.C., headquarters, trying to keep invasive and otherwise harmful wildlife species out of the United States. In August this year, I traveled to Vermont for a reptile and amphibian conference.

There I ran into fellow wildlife biology classmate Doug Blodgett, who was leading a field trip for Vermont Fish and Wildlife. I also got to see another classmate, Doug’s wife, Kim Royar ’76. We had a great time reminiscing and catching up.” Wendy Pearce Nelson writes, “Still working and playing in Colorado. I helped publish a new full-time adult recreation guide, coloradofunguide.com. It’s wonderful to learn a new business! I like to think I'm a very young 61 years...And a Mimi now to my son's 20-month-old, Layla. Such fun! Can life get any better?” Rob Waxman writes, “I retired in June after 33 years of teaching adults with disabilities and high school diploma students in Fairfield, California. I am still hitting tennis balls. I play in an Allman Brothers tribute band called Idlewild West.

We're on Facebook. I may be joining a surf band as well. Our daughter starts at the University of San Francisco in January in nursing. We paid off our mortgage in June as well. Our family now also

consists of two cats and three puppies!”

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05401 Alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

78

Malcolm M. Crittenden writes, “I created an event page on Facebook (Mac Critt) for “Art in the Dark,” my fluorescent blacklite painting exhibit in February 2017. The aim of the exhibit was to recreate the awe and wonder that falls upon those who gaze upon the Night Sky; like David in Psalm 19:1.

Stan Przybylinski writes, “It was great that Randall White '84 and his wife, Joanne, could join our families to celebrate the marriage of my oldest son, Eric, in Chicago in November. My niece, Anne Brady ’11 (UVM undergrad and grad in last 6 years), was also there with many of her cousins.”

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05401 Alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

79

Jeffrey M. Benway shares, “In October, I spent seven days in Uganda. I am a member of the Engineers Without Borders New Hampshire Professional Chapter and we are working to install wells at nine villages in Uganda.”

Send your news to— Beth Gamache

Investment Opportunity

58 Grey Meadow Drive, Burlington, VT 05401 bethgamache@burlingtontelecom.net

80

Heidi Winslow writes, “Last Thanksgiving, 37 years after graduating from UVM, I was able to see the college anew, through the eyes of my nephew, who is a freshman this year. I loved hearing the enthusiasm he expressed while sharing his first semester's experiences and impressions. UVM is definitely an incredibly relevant, progressive, and unique university that offers a remarkable liberal arts education. A large part of what makes UVM distinctive is the authentic, engaging, talented professors and educators they retain.”

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association Alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

81

Brad Aldrich and his son Patrick Aldrich ’12, joined Brad's lifelong friend Jim Metherall and Patrick's good friend Matt Ferrante ’11 for a walk-about in September, covering the five national parks in southern Utah and the north rim of the Grand Canyon. They all had an exceptional time and will cherish life-long memories of the epic adventure.

Megan J. Humphrey lives in Burlington, having happily stayed after graduation. She's executive director of HANDS, a small non-profit dedicated to getting food to low-income older adults in Chittenden County. Megan also creates two lines of

In the Southern Green Mountains Near Four Major Ski Resorts/Summer Recreation With High Traffic Counts All Year Round

Grocery • Cafe/Grill • Pharmacy • Gas Bar Sotheby’s Real Estate • Dessert Shoppe Post Office • Tavern Restaurant • Bank CommUnity Yoga • Gallery...

14 successful business with 2 great anchor stores on a 12 acre site with room for growth in a thriving first and second home market.

Stratton Mt. Bondville Jamaica Independent Grocery

Hardware Store

Art Center / Gallery

Peru Bromley Mt. Manchester

Tavern and Restaurant

U.S. Post Office

Londonderry • Magic Mt. • Chester I-91 • Weston • Ludlow • Okemo MT

Bobby Waite l Class of 1967 802 384 2990 l bobby.waite@fourseasonssir.com Realtor Emeritus l Londonderry

Intersection ROUTE 100 • ROUTE 11

| CLASS NOTES greeting cards through Sweet Basil Cards, based on vintage postcards and photography. She's also co-president of the Old North End Arts & Business Network. Megan's lucky enough to still be in love, 22 years later, with UVM graduate Terry Hotaling ’75. Terry works at Shelburne Orchards when he's not sailing on Lake Champlain or building yet another boat. Mark W. Knight had a mini reunion in Philadelphia with Louis Webster '80 in from Seattle, Washington, and John Hammer '85 in from Manassas, Virginia, in early December. Mark writes, “We all arrived as transfer students at UVM in 1977, but finished at our own pace! Needless to say, fun was had then and now.” After 23 years in Orange County, New York, Dan Patenaude and family are happy to return to their New England roots, and are now residing in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on Boston's South Shore, where Dan is the sales and marketing manager for a highway construction and maintenance company. Catherine Cover Willson shares, “I recently renovated my house in Bristol, Vermont, and enjoy life in the village. I serve on the board of Art on Main, a craft gallery in the center of town and volunteer for Hospice in Addison County. I am enrolled in a ninemonth yoga teacher training program at Laughing River Yoga in Burlington overlooking the Winooski River. I welcome this shift in my life after full-time work as a preschool/elementary school teacher and an elementary school-based clinician.”

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association alumni@uvm.edu/classnotes

82

On Saturday, November 5, nine fraternity brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon gathered for dinner at West End Johnnies in Boston prior to attending a hockey game between the Boston Bruins and the New York Rangers. Attending this special get-together were Eric Burt ’80, John Babyak, Mark Houston, John O'Hara ’80, Alan McEacharn '81, Peter Ryan '81, Jeff Bacon '80, Richard McLaughlin '81, and David Kreider. Jeff Bacon had travelled from California to Boston for a few days to spend time with friends and John Babyak drove up from southwestern Connecticut to attend the dinner.

The other alums all live and work in the greater Boston area.

Send your news to— John Peter Scambos pteron@verizon.net

83 84

Send your news to— Lisa Greenwood Crozier lcrozier@triad.rr.com Scott Cohen writes, “I am a pediatrician working for Kaiser in the San Francisco Bay Area. I married in 2006 and have a six-year-old daughter and an eightyear-old son. In 2002, I started Global Pediatric Alliance (globalpediatricalliance.org). We work with indigenous midwives and health promoters in remote regions of Latin America. Check us out

56 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

and my best to all UVM alums.” Kingsley Belcher Knauss writes, “After my geology degree, I headed off in different direction as an interior designer, KBKinteriordesign.com. I am married, with two teenagers, recently featured in Design NJ Magazine.” Mercedes H. Ross shares, “UVM prepared me well! I am the national director for a nonprofit, Project Bike Tech, that places bike mechanic classes in the senior high school year. We are growing the program across the country.”

Send your news to— Abby Goldberg Kelley kelleyabbyvt@gmail.com Kelly McDonald jasna-vt@hotmail.com Shelley Carpenter Spillane scspillane@aol.com

85

Amy Sieger Daniels writes, “As executive director of an education foundation, I am always trying to raise awareness of the gap in public education funding. Thinking big, I’m climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in September 2017 for the cause! I am thrilled that the first to sign on was my friend, Josh Powers, an educator himself, as well as my friends and fellow backpackers, Ross Nayduch, Roddy Lewis, and Craig Mabie, who all understand the value of philanthropy. Their support in this endeavor means the world. We are raising funds for the expedition through gofundme.com/ amydanielsclimbs and our friends can watch the adventure unfold through a site my son created, amydanielsclimbs.com. We would appreciate any support at all! Thank you so much!” Jay Piccirillo writes, “I continue to enjoy life in St. Louis at Washington University. Teaching medical students clinical epidemiology and directing clinical research training programs. I was recently appointed editor of JAMA Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery. Active in clinical research in tinnitus and chemo brain.”

Send your news to— Barbara Roth roth_barb@yahoo.com

86

Helen M. Raboin Condry writes, “I earned my master’s in nursing from University of Central Florida in 2014.

I was hired to teach nursing full time at Eastern Florida State College this fall. I teach first-year students in the associate degree program and love it! I also recently co-authored and published an article in the International Journal of Nursing Science called: “Use of StatSeal Advanced Disc to Decrease Time to Hemostasis in Transradial Cardiac Procedures/A Quality Improvement Project.”

Send your news to— Lawrence Gorkun vtlfg@msn.com

87

Send your news to— Sarah Reynolds Sarahreynolds10708@gmail.com

88

Sonna A. Sween Allen writes, “My husband, Randy, and I welcomed our first grandchild in July, Jett James Dyar. I am in my 21st year as science department chair and chemistry teacher at Portledge School in Locust Valley, New York.” Melinda Lawson Masters shares, “I finally graduated with my master’s in counseling psychology and am on track to be a licensed marriage and family therapist. The work is inspiring and fulfilling. I am hoping to see Penny Gibson in the new year. While I love living in California, I do miss Vermont and hope to get back to Burlington soon.”

Send your news to— Cathy Selinka Levison crlevison@comcast.net

89

Betsey Green Dempsey writes, “It's hard to believe Don Dempsey and I are looking at colleges for our daughter already! Much has happened this year and we're very thankful. Don's business, Dempsey Investment Management, expanded and has moved to South Burlington. We also moved out of Williston as well. Our new house in Shelburne can finally be called home. It made sense to be in Shelburne as we moor our sailboat in the bay, and my mother and sisters, Deb Green Rooney '82 and Penny Green Fairhurst '92 live here as well. Don and I keep in touch with Jay Vanasse and Rachel Vanasse '90 frequently, as well as their four kids.”

Jeff Schulman represented President Sullivan and UVM at the inauguration of President Ron Liebowitz at Brandeis University on November 3, 2016.

Send your news to— Maureen Kelly Gonsalves moe.dave@verizon.net

90

Richard First shares, “I had the great joy of re-connecting with Peter Rosenberg and his family in New York City over the Thanksgiving break. Living in Vermont, it was fun having a native New Yorker as a tour guide in Manhattan. Pete is a great dad. His three kids were hanging all over him. Maybe it was the threat of ice cream?”

Send your news to— Tessa Donohoe Fontaine tfontaine@brandywine.org

91

Chris Masson writes, “Had a great time last fall with Lisa Holmes, Tim Kolk and Stacy Gardner Kolk, Justin Westin, Karen Jones Westin, and a few folks whose names I am failing to remember. Lots of laughs. Thank you Dr. Holmes! Looking forward to doing it again in 2041!”

Send news to— Karen Heller Lightman khlightman@gmail.com

92

25th Reunion October 6-8, 2017

If you are interested in planning your upcoming

reunion, email alumni@uvm.edu.

Send your news to— Lisa Kanter jslbk@mac.com

93

Scott A. Lawrence of Jericho, Vermont, passed away on October 19, 2016. He was born and raised in Westminster and was a graduate of the Bellows Falls Union High School. Scott went on to UVM, earning a bachelor’s in small business, and Marlboro College, earning a master's in business administration. He married Daniella Noyes in 1998 in Burlington. Scott was employed as a project manager with IBM for 20 years. Because he believed in the importance of education, he was a professor and chair of the BSMIS and MSIT programs at Marlboro College in his “spare time” for almost 10 years. Scott’s life was very full with the love of family and friends. He had a curious mind, a quick smile, a wicked sense of humor and an unbridled love of life. He enjoyed nothing better than a late-night philosophical discussion. His passion for life was only exceeded by the love he had for the many people whose lives he touched.

He volunteered countless hours to many charities and causes. He was captain of a local tennis team.

He enjoyed traveling and was a Disney fanatic.

He was an avid gaming enthusiast, poker player, brewed his own beer, and loved movies, music, and Monty Python. He was an ordained minister

96

After moving from Santa Barbara, Califronia, to Apex, North Carolina, two years ago, Renee Barsa opened her own practice called WellPath Acupuncture & Healing Arts. She enjoys the opportunity to assist others in their healing processes, and feels her degree in wildlife biology from UVM gave her a great foundation to grow from.

Send your news to— Jill Cohen Gent jcgent@roadrunner.com Michelle Richards Peters mpeters@eagleeyes.biz

NN

LUB

THE

94

Pete Corradino writes, “In 1998 I answered a classified ad for a tour guide with Everglades Day Safari. I spent my winters in the Everglades and my summers as a park naturalist for the Vermont State Parks. From 2002-2007, I worked for the Vermont Institute of Natural Science until I returned to Florida permanently. From 2007-2016, I was the fulltime director of operations for Everglades Day Safari, the only ecosafari certified by the Florida Society for ethical ecotourism. In September 2016 I bought the company. I happily run the business with my wife of eight years, Maria Elena, and with assistance from son, Theodoro (6), and daughter, Janela (1).

Send your news to— Cynthia Bohlin Abbott cyndiabbott@hotmail.com

95

Todd Schneider writes, “I have been currently working as stunt coordinator for a movie here at home in Los Angeles. A couple of movies came out in January that I coordinated on: the latest Underworld: Blood Wars, with Kate Beckinsale where we spent five months in Prague, Czech Republic, and XXX: Return of Xander Cage with Vin Deisel where he skis in the jungle with no snow—interesting shoot in the Dominican Republic. My kids are now teenagers and love it when I embarrass them. Daily.

Still skiing and enjoying our winters at Mammoth.

Married to Debra Lewin ’88.”

Send your news to— Valeri Susan Pappas vpappas@davisandceriani.com

C

PE

and took great pride in performing marriage services for a few of his friends. He was a faithful Jets fan and loved going to car races with his father and friends. He recharged his batteries every summer by kayaking, fishing, and taking long hammock naps at Lake Groton.

Send your news to— Gretchen Haffermehl Brainard gretchenbrainard@gmail.com

30 W. 44th Street, New York, NY 10036

The Penn Club of New York, located in the heart of midtown Manhattan, is an exclusive private club for alumni, students, parents, family members and business associates of the University of Pennsylvania and our select affiliate schools and organizations. The clubhouse offers members a wide range of facilities and services to enhance their visits to New York City. The Penn Club is a true “home away from home” for all of our members.

THE PENN CLUB

YOUR HOME AWAY FROM HOME IN NEW YORK CITY MEMBERSHIP IS RICH WITH BENEFITS, SOME OF WHICH INCLUDE: • Two complimentary all-you-can-eat and drink parties each year!

• Socialize & network at our monthly programs and events • 39 well-appointed guest rooms at discounted rates for members

“As an alumnus, I think it’s great to have a UVM home in New York City. The Penn Club is centrally located, has a great team working there and lots of good food for you and your guests to enjoy. I highly recommend anyone to join the Penn Club of New York.”

– Giacomo Landi ’93 Member, UVM Alumni Association’s New York Regional Board

• Business Center with complimentary wi-fi • 150+ reciprocal clubs in the United States and around the world

For more information contact the Membership Department at membership@pennclubny.org or 212.403.6627

| CLASS NOTES

Mike Kelley '09 WORK: A commercial photographer with a focus

on architectural work, Mike Kelley’s “Wake Turbulence” side project is a series of composite photographs that assemble multiple images of planes arriving or departing from a particular airport runway into one image. The visually startling results went viral and were aptly dubbed “airplane armadas”

by BBC.com.

HOME: Los Angeles, California.

UVM DAYS: Studied environmental studies and studio art. An airplane enthusiast since childhood, his design class projects tended to have an aviation angle, such as creating the color scheme for a fuselage or cabin interior.

IN HIS WORDS: On reactions to his airplane armada photos—“A lot of people are fascinated; a lot of people think it’s an image of what’s wrong with the world. It makes an invisible thing very visible.

I think that’s why it resonates.”

Read more: go.uvm.edu/kelley AMSTERDAM SCHIPHOL AIRPORT, POLDER RUNWAY

C ATAMOUNT NATION

C ATAMOUNT NATION Leo Sloan ’12 WORK: Founder/Owner of Good Bird, a sandwich shop in

New Orleans’s historic St. Roch Market. Food ratings giant Zagat named Sloan one of their “30 under 30: Rock Stars Redefining the Industry” for the city of New Orleans in August.

HOME: New Orleans, Louisiana.

UVM DAYS: While earning his UVM degree in entrepreneurship from Community Development & Applied Economics, Sloan started his journey in the food world at a Burlington institution, Leonardo’s Pizza.

IN HIS WORDS: On his first NYC restaurant job, working for famed chef Mario Batali: “I was making $7.50 an hour doing tasks like chopping huge piles of mushrooms for eight hoursstraight in a basement with no windows, and loving every minute of it.”

Read more: go.uvm.edu/sloan

97 98

Send your news to— Elizabeth Carstensen Genung leegenung@me.com

Justin Martin had a great time this past summer helping put together the 1996 UVM men’s hockey Final Four team 20th reunion. Justin also lives in the Burlington area and is COO of a parenting website, located right in Burlington, Vermont, called www.

Parent.co.

Send news to— Ben Stockman bestockman@gmail.com

99

Zoe Terry Frank moved to Manhattan Beach, California, a year ago from the East Coast with her family and are loving it! They have two kiddos: Landon, who is almost six, and Nola, who just turned four. Zoe and her husband both work at digital advertising agencies in Los Angeles and would love to connect with anyone who is in the same world as they are. Audrey Learned and significant other, Keith, added another little one to their family. They welcomed Benjamin Carter on November 25 to join a very excited big sister, Emily. Congratulations and thank you for the news! Please continue to send your notes in.

Send news to— Sarah Pitlak Tiber spitlak@hotmail.com

00

Jay Carpenter happily shares that he and his wife welcomed a second child, a son James (Jamie), in June to join their family, after daughter, Molly.

60 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Associationc alumni@uvm.edu/classnotes

01

After a UVM internship at Shelburne Farms that kicked off her career in environmental education, Kerri McAllister is excited to return to Vermont and to Shelburne Farms as their new education program manager and place-based educator. Jarret Cassaniti, MPH has been at Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Program for four years working on USAID's flagship knowledge management project. He recently traveled to Trinidad and Guyana to assist in capacity building efforts with a regional HIV organization. Related work brought him to Sierra Leone to assist with restoration of health services in the wake of the Ebola epidemic.

He is midway through a part-time master’s in science writing at Johns Hopkins University's Krieger School of Arts & Sciences' Advanced Academics Programs. Maggie Riley G’10 married Tim Banks ’00, G’09 in a small ceremony in Burlington over Thanksgiving weekend. Maggie received her master’s in mental health counseling from UVM in 2010 and currently works as a mental health counselor at Champlain College. Tim earned his master’s in business administration from UVM and is a wine distributor with his company, 802 Distributors.

Send your news to— Erin Wilson 8 East Dover Street, Nantucket, MA 02554 ewilson41@gmail.com

02

Send your news to— Jennifer Khouri Godin jenkhourigodin@gmail.com

03

Kimberly Quirk Donovan shares, “My husband and I are happy to announce our son, Ian, was born in March. We're excited to spend his first Christmas up in Vermont and are hoping for snow! Earlier this year, we also bought a house in Arlington, Virginia, and I was promoted to senior policy advisor at the United States Department of the Treasury.”

Erin Socha Leonard and her husband, Paul, live in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with their five-yearold daughter, Reilly, and three-year-old son, Rhys.

Erin manages the governance, risk and compliance sales engineering team for Dell Technologies/RSA and is currently training to run the 2017 Boston Marathon on behalf of the Pediatric Unit at Mass.

Eye & Ear Infirmary. Ross Feitlinger writes, “My wife, Sarah, just gave birth to our first child. Evelyn Rachelle was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, on July 10. She was 19 inches and 7.9 pounds at birth.

She is a beautiful happy little girl and we are loving every minute of her in our family.”

Send your news to— Korinne Moore Berenson korinne.d.moore@gmail.com

04

Adam Hergenrother shares, “In April 2016 I started Adam Hergenrother Training Organization. AHTO is my sixth company under Hergenrother Enterprises which includes Keller Williams Realty Vermont, Hergenrother Realty Group, BlackRock Construction, Hergenrother Capital, and Hergenrother Foundation. On August 8, 2016, my wife, Sarah Hergenrother ’01 and I welcomed our third child, Madelyn Rae Hergenrother. In the summer of 2016 I was a Men's Health Magazine “Ultimate Guy Search” quarterfinalist. On November 15, 2016, BlackRock

Construction (co-owned with my brother Tom Hergenrother ’00), won four awards at the 39th Annual Better Homes Awards sponsored by Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Northern Vermont. Hergenrother Realty Group was ranked #33 in the Country by Real Trends The Thousand as featured in the Wall Street Journal.” Rebecca McNeil is enjoying her new job in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working with higher education clients to promote their online learning programs. Rebecca and her husband are also thrilled to be expecting their first child and look forward to taking the little one up to Vermont! Brett A. Walker shares that he is an installation forester and national environmental policy act coordinator at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York. He has been there for three years.

Send your news to— Kelly Kisiday kellykisiday@hotmail.com

05

Chris Ciocca writes, “It's been a busy few months for the roommates of 24 East Ave (2003-2004). Two more power couples formed this fall, as Britt Miller and Mark Roman synchronized weddings, vowing to their brides, Wendy Johnson and Tate Bennett, respectively. Both gentlemen seem to have dated up. Also this fall, Andrew McMahon took some time off from sailing his boat around the Atlantic in order to conceive his first child. Gender is currently unknown, but Mitsy and Dane sit at the top of the list for possible girl/boy names. As for the fourth roommate (who asked to remain anonymous), we have no current news. However, we did learn that he is in the process of formulating an Italian red sauce recipe which he plans to sell in stores once he receives funds from the Shark Tank.” Melissa Quine married Cole Smith in October at San Francisco City Hall. Shawn Ross, Alex Vallecillo-Bone, Justin Tucker, Will Todisco ’06, and Kristen Kenney ’06 were in attendance at the reception.

Send your news to— Kristin Dobbs kristin.dobbs@gmail.com

06

Molly Gray shares, “In June 2016, I completed an LL.M in International Law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and have been living and working in Geneva, Switzerland. Always excited to connect with UVM grads overseas!” Amy Allen sat for the last section of the CPA exam in December.

Send your news to— Katherine Murphy kateandbri@gmail.com

07

10th Reunion October 6-8, 2017

If you are interested in planning your upcoming reunion, email alumni@uvm.edu. Alyssa Lazerow Homstead and Erik Homstead ’06 are happy to announce the birth of their son, Benjamin Peter

Homstead, on March 1, 2016. Kristina Purcell and Errol Anderson were married in Stowe, Vermont on September 4, 2016. UVMers in attendance indcluded: Mitch and Emily Matthews, Laura and Chris Whitaker, Eve and Dan Allen, Chris Zikakis, Paul and Lisa Valente, Michelle and John Peterson, Dave Lombardo, Eric Kauffman, Sean Nelson and Dave Eitler. Check out a group photo at alumni.uvm.edu/gallery.

Send your news to— Elizabeth Bitterman ekolodner@gmail.com

08

Nicholas Carter writes, “After a very rewarding decade of working in northern New England politics, starting with the Vermont Democratic Party, CCTV Center for Media & Democracy, Planned Parenthood of Northern New England and then working for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' as national political outreach director on his historic presidential campaign, I joined Hillary for America for the general and am now currently working for Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in his bid for DNC Chair. I now live in D.C., but will continue to be a frequent visitor to Burlington and to my family's summer house in Plainfield, Vermont.” Hallie Saunders married Joseph Paxton on October 22, 2016. They are now living in Boca Raton, Florida, where Hallie works for Premier Eye Care, a third party administration company that manages the ophthalmology and optometry networks for a few of the major national health plans. Hallie is team lead of the network contracting team and co-chair of the company's wellness committee.

Send your news to— Elizabeth Bearese ebearese@gmail.com Emma Grady gradyemma@gmail.com

09

Erica Bruno writes, “I have recently received a new job as a dealer retention specialist for the automotive software company, Automotive Mastermind. It is based in New York City and I will be covering southern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

I was at Nissan USA for two years as a fixed operations manager for seven months and then promoted to a district operations manager for 16 months. This makes the third major career move in my seven-year automotive industry career. Burton Putrah married Hillary Hutchins '11 on October 1 in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in the presence of family and friends. In attendance were UVM alumni Dave Bidwell and Katy Bidwell '10, Jon Kyle, Gordon Whelpley, Dan Belheumer, Taylor Lalemand, Ben Kingsbury '10, Katelyn Esterby, David Speer, and Mackenzie Kersbergen '11.

Burton and Hillary currently reside in Washington, D.C. After graduating from UVM's physical therapy program, Kelly Kreisher moved to Boston where she has been working for Mass General Hospital as a physical therapist. This year she will be running her first Boston Marathon for the MGH Emer-

gency Response Team. You can support her cause by donating at: crowdrise.com/kellykreisher. On July 16, David Volain and Claire Crisman '14 were married at Boyden Farm in Cambridge, Vermont. Catamount guests included wedding party members Dan Golden, Wiley Robinson, Nate Gondelman, Bryan Cordeau, Alyssa Church-Smith '14, Megan Downing '13, and many other UVM friends. Kimberly Shane Hochradel, Esq. has joined the legal services team of Premier, Inc., a healthcare improvement company uniting an alliance of approximately 3,750 U.S. hospitals and 130,000 other providers to improve the health of communities nationwide. Premier is a publicly-traded company headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina and Kimberly will be acting as corporate counsel.

Send your news to— David Volain david.volain@gmail.com

10

Christine Elliott Minott and Addison Minott were married on September 17, 2016 in Manchester, Vermont. It was an amazing reunion of UVM family and friends, and a great party! They currently reside in Boston. Addison is an engineer and Christine works in healthcare technology. Alana Oudekerk-Hanss and David Hanss welcomed daughter, Elliot Amelia, on July 13, 2016. Elliot joins her proud big brother, Rhys Alexander.

Send your news to— Daron Raleigh raleighdaron@gmail.com

11

Bob Just writes, “At the start of 2016, I was hired as the assistant director for leadership programs at the University of San Francisco. I am currently living in Dublin, California, with my partner of two years. I also serve as the Region VI representative for the New Professionals & Graduate Students Knowledge Community for NASPA and chair our regional leadership team.” Karia Young-Eagle and Daniel T. Riley are engaged!

Send your news to— Troy McNamara Troy.mcnamara4@gmail.com

12

5th Reunion October 6-8, 2017

If you are interested in planning your upcoming reunion, email alumni@uvm.edu Send your news to— Patrick Dowd patrickdowd2012@gmail.com

13

Ben Huelskamp writes, “I recently started a new job as the assistant dean of students and director of residence life at Rosemont College in Rosemont, Pennsylvaina, and moved to the Main Line Philadelphia area.”

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association alumni@uvm.edu/classnotes SPRING 2017 |

61

| CLASS NOTES

14

Jonathan Leo Connor shares, “On November 25, I was promoted to digital media generalist at the National Bank of Middlebury.” Jon Lott writes, “In March 2016, I hitchhiked across the United States, from D.C. to Los Angeles in 17 days, spending less than $100. After I returned, I ran (and lost) as an independent candidate for Massachusetts State Senate.” Marcy Solomon writes, “I am teaching first grade in Winchester, Massachusetts, and pursuing my master’s in early childhood education.” Grace Buckles Eaton and Mike Eaton got hitched this summer in Ludlow, Vermont, surrounded by loved ones and lots of Vermont beer, wine, and food!

Send your news to— Grace Buckles Eaton glbuckles@gmail.com

15

Samuel Chapman Chevalier shares, “I am pursuing a doctorate in mechanical engineering at MIT. I study power system stability with Dr. Kostya Turitsyn.” Kathryn M. Gray writes, “This is my second year at my dream job! I always wanted to be an elementary school teacher in a rural Vermont school and here I am in Montgomery, Vermont. Looking forward to many more years at this school!” Corey Paige McMullen is a project manager at Social Driver, a digital agency based in Washington, D.C. that creates websites, videos, and social media campaigns. Alex Morton writes, “I have recently moved out to Portland, Oregon, and am working at Otak in their Water and Natural Resources division.

I also just started the Portland UVM Alumni Chapter. We had our first event in November. Keep an eye on the UVM alumni website for our next meeting. We would love to see you all there!” Corina

Pinto writes, “I was recently nominated as a SPARK Impact Award finalist in the city of Boston for the work I do as a community health worker.”

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association alumni@uvm.edu/classnotes

16

Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association alumni@uvm.edu/classnotes

| IN MEMORIAM Margaret Kinsman Wachs ’34, of Stratford, Connecticut, July 23, 2016.

Ferne Bristol Williams ’39, of Middlebury, Vermont, July 19, 2016.

Arthur R. Bailey ’40, of Charlestown, New Hampshire, July 28, 2016.

Arthur D. Wolk ’41, MD'43, of Rutland, Vermont, November 17, 2016.

Ruth Boelsen Baird ’42, of Pinehurst, North Carolina, July 19, 2016.

Mim Mack Andrews ’43, of Bermuda Run, North Carolina, June 30, 2016.

Ruth M. Newell ’43, of Pawling, New York, November 21, 2016.

Harvey E. Goodell ’44, of Camas, Washington, September 3, 2016.

Charles Alexander Morrison ’45, of Barnet, Vermont, December 6, 2016.

Judith Gilbert Whitney ’45, of Tempe, Arizona, September 14, 2016.

Mary Louise Robinson Adsit ’46, of South Burlington, Vermont, September 11, 2016.

Aglaia Ballas Ploubides ’46, of Tewksbury, Massachussetts, October 23, 2016.

Elizabeth Towle Ohno ’47, of Saugerties, New York, September 20, 2016.

Betty Whitney Bolognani ’48, of Readsboro, Vermont, November 1, 2016.

Barbara Kilborn Frawley ’48, of Derby, Vermont, November 15, 2016.

Theo Orr Howe ’48, of Quechee, Vermont, December 3, 2016.

Edward W. Jenkins ’48, MD'51, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, September 17, 2016.

Jane Robbins King ’48, of Boca Raton, Florida, August 31, 2016.

Gladys Coates Nielson ’48, of Bennington, Vermont, February 13, 2016.

Myra Weinberg Wiedman ’48, of Atlanta, Georgia, August 1, 2016.

62 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

Francis D. Auger ’49, of Greenwich, Connecticut, August 6, 2016.

Howard Huntington Lyon ’49, of Ithaca, New York, September 14, 2016.

James E. Petersen ’49, of Salisbury, Vermont, December 2, 2016.

Marjorie Wright Stephenson ’49, of Middlebury, Vermont, September 18, 2016.

Thomas S. Banghart ’50, of Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, November 13, 2016.

Newell Hill Curtis ’50, of Cromwell, Connecticut, October 1, 2016.

Robert E. Edminster ’50, of Tempe, Arizona, October 20, 2016.

Robert A. Fordham ’50, G'52, of Hinesburg, Vermont, October 13, 2016.

John J. Goulet ’50, of Canton, Michigan, September 5, 2016.

Gordon T. Hay ’50, of Milford, New Hampshire, July 24, 2016.

Patricia Ault Headley ’50, of Thomaston, Maine, August 3, 2016.

David Roy Banta ’51, of Ellicott City, Maryland, October 16, 2016.

Stephen W. Berman ’51, of Newington, Connecticut, October 3, 2016.

Walter F. Carpenter ’51, of Orono, Maine, August 27, 2016.

Paul Ernest Pitts ’51, of Waterbury, Connecticut, August 17, 2016.

Thomas H. Snelson ’51, of Warren, Ohio, November 23, 2016.

M. Stanley Susskind ’51, of Bayonne, New Jersey, November 7, 2016.

Morton Dondes ’52, of West Hartford, Connecticut, September 29, 2016.

Janet Silsby Dunham ’52, of Madbury, New Hampshire, November 30, 2016.

Duane E. Graveline ’52, MD'55, of Merritt Island, Florida, September 5, 2016.

Curtis Adelbert Jacques ’52, of West Lebanon, New Hampshire, September 23, 2016.

Thomas E. Kendall ’52, of Meadow Vista, California, October 23, 2016.

Ann Della-Chiesa Smith ’52, of Yarmouth Port, Massachussetts, August 26, 2016.

Barbara Laselle Bredthauer ’53, of Worcester, Massachussetts, October 16, 2016.

Nancy Newman Graffis ’53, of Lake Linden, Michigan, September 20, 2016.

Jane Wood Baker ’54, of Venice, Florida, September 20, 2016.

Norman David Hadley ’54, of Weybridge, Vermont, September 5, 2016.

Elaine Clark Premo ’54, of Cocoa, Florida, May 20, 2016.

Nancy Jones Turkisher ’55, of Vancouver, Washington, September 28, 2016.

Irwin Ira Bernstein ’56, of Livingston, New Jersey, August 18, 2016.

John Frederick Brown ’56, of Barton, Vermont, November 2, 2016.

David N. Cass ’56, of Tucson, Arizona, September 11, 2016.

David A. Depatie ’56, G'58, of Rapid City, South Dakota, October 5, 2016.

Edward Lee ’56, of Ontario, Canada, September 11, 2016.

Rudolph M. Keimowitz ’57, MD'61, of Austin, Texas, October 19, 2016.

Edward R. Nugent ’57, of Orangevale, California, September 11, 2016.

Audrey Spooner Walker ’57, of Plattsburgh, New York, September 17, 2016.

Robert H. Erdmann ’58, of South Burlington, Vermont, October 19, 2016.

Stephen N. Ifshin ’58, of New York, New York, November 23, 2016.

Donald A. Lawliss ’58, of South Burlington, Vermont, September 30, 2016.

Marilyn Osterhout Reynolds ’58, of Fairfax, Virginia, September 27, 2016.

Edgar A. Boadway ’59, of Claremont, New Hampshire, June 29, 2016.

Arthur Wesley Dacy ’59, of Naples, Florida, October 1, 2016.

Frank C. Hammett ’59, of Schenectady, Ohio, June 3, 2016.

David John McGinty ’59, of Bradenton, Florida, August 17, 2016.

Daniel T. O'Connell ’59, of Quebec, Canada, November 28, 2016.

Anne St. Coeur Reeves ’59, of Daytona Beach, Florida, July 3, 2016.

David Sullivan Rugg ’59, of Shelburne, Vermont, September 20, 2016.

Ann Keithline Scribner ’59, of Loudonville, New York, August 16, 2016.

Nancie Anderson Weber ’59, of Lewisville, Texas, February 8, 2016.

Sally Sargent Hutchison ’60, of Brandon, Vermont, October 17, 2016.

Rosemary Breen Rennie ’60, of Shrewsbury, Massachussetts, October 17, 2016.

Leon Harold Rudd ’60, of Las Vegas, Nevada, November 7, 2016.

Lawrence R. Snowman G'60, of Liverpool, New York, October 21, 2016.

Richard Grant Allen ’61, of Stockholm, New Jersey, July 17, 2016.

Richard A. Bean ’61, of Hanover, Massachussetts, October 5, 2016.

John H. Hazen ’61, of West Hartford, Vermont, August 23, 2016.

Frank A. Steeg ’61, of White Plains, New York, October 21, 2016.

Frederick William VanBuskirk ’61, of Barre, Vermont, October 29, 2016.

Neil F. Rockoff ’62, of Oakhurst, New Jersey, September 7, 2016.

Phyllis G. Burbank ’63, of West Burke, Vermont, December 6, 2016.

David P. Hanlon G'64, of Canaan, New Hampshire, December 4, 2016.

Raymond B. Hitchcock ’64, of Chester, Vermont, November 20, 2016.

Dale Ainsworth Howe ’64, of White River Junction, Vermont, October 18, 2016.

Bernier L. Mayo ’64, of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, August 14, 2016.

Richard Demagall ’65, of North Adams, Massachussetts, July 30, 2016.

Mary Ellen Sessa ’65, of Bristol, Vermont, December 8, 2016.

Linda Clemons Tank ’65, of Fleming Island, Florida, November 14, 2016.

Olof C. Johnson ’66, of Concord, Massachussetts, March 30, 2016.

Cheryl Morrill Armbrecht ’67, of Camden, Maine, October 31, 2016.

Sara Firth DiPalma ’67, of Katy, Texas, March 23, 2016.

David A. Fayette ’67, of Milton, Vermont, September 29, 2016.

Susan E. Tebbetts ’67, of Kew Gardens, New York, October 5, 2016.

Stephen A. Bernardini ’68, G'77, of Barre, Vermont, November 8, 2016.

Ralph Edwin Coleman ’69, of Rawsonville, Vermont, November 27, 2016.

Keith G. Buik ’70, of Bristol, Vermont, August 10, 2016.

Catharine Chapman Bush ’70, of Groton, Connecticut, May 18, 2016.

Geoffrey L. Demong G'70, of Cornwall, Vermont, October 2, 2016.

Daniel A. Driscoll G'70, July 26, 2016.

Thomas J. LaPlaca ’70, MD'74, of Rutland, Vermont, September 18, 2016.

Martin L. Franklin G'71, of Cleveland, Tennessee, August 19, 2016.

Marcel Hubert Gregoire G'71, of North Andover, Massachussetts, November 6, 2016.

R. Marion Taylor ’71, of Johnson, Vermont, September 1, 2016.

Constance Marie DeMarse G'72, of Charlotte, Vermont, November 5, 2016.

Daniel Lynn Jerry ’72, of West Chazy, New York, June 8, 2016.

Leland F. Kinsey ’72, of Barton, Vermont, September 14, 2016.

Donald Louis Belleville ’73, of Mendon, Massachussetts, December 28, 2016.

Gilbert Henry Wood ’73, of Farmington, New Mexico, August 17, 2016.

Gail Woodman Fisher ’74, of Raleigh, North Carolina, September 15, 2016.

Jeremy C. Siegrist-Jones ’74, of South Burlington, Vermont, September 8, 2016.

Timothy Appleton Grannis ’75, of South Burlington, Vermont, September 6, 2016.

Margaret Drechsler Huestis ’75, of Raleigh, North Carolina, August 23, 2016.

Nicodemus McCollum, III ’75, of Boston, Massachussetts, October 7, 2016.

Robert Eagen Raiser G'75, of Cameron Park, California, July 30, 2016.

Wanda Farr Udy ’77, of Sterling, Virginia, November 11, 2016.

George H. Wightman ’77, of Boxford, Massachussetts, August 26, 2016.

Edward Benjamin Tumielewicz ’81, of Hinesburg, Vermont, October 14, 2016.

Beth Ann Murphy ’83, of Wellesley, Massachussetts, October 13, 2016.

Verne Jay Willard ’83, of Scottsdale, Arizona, June 29, 2016.

Edwin Standish Hunt ’84, of Sparks, Nevada, July 21, 2016.

Thomas K. Hildick ’87, of Beaverton, Oregon, November 13, 2016.

David Charles Baker ’89, of Salt Lake City, Utah, September 12, 2016.

Harold Joseph Flatau, III ’89, of Pine Plains, New York, August 21, 2016.

Stephen J. Wark ’89, of Colchester, Vermont, October 27, 2016.

Edward J. Duffy G'92, of San Rafael, California, November 18, 2016.

John J. B. True G'92, of Colchester, Vermont, November 1, 2016.

Christopher Clark Bumstead ’93, of Brattleboro, Vermont, October 30, 2016.

Scott Alan Lawrence ’93, of Jericho, Vermont, October 19, 2016.

Rebecca Ellen Murdock ’96, of Proctor, Vermont, October 31, 2016.

Jennifer Erin Pinkus ’96, of Vail, Colorado, March 18, 2016.

William J. Thrane G'00, of Thetford, Vermont, September 12, 2016.

Bradley Francis Beaudreau ’05, of North Adams, Massachussetts, December 18, 2016.

Michael Patrick Cronogue G'09, of Burlington, Vermont, October 13, 2016.

James Donald Danyow ’15, of Middlebury, Vermont, November 11, 2016.

| UVM COMMUNITY Robert Fuller,

assistant professor emeritus of wetlands ecology and wildlife management, passed away on January 20, 2017. Professor Fuller joined the UVM faculty in 1966 and developed a wildlife management concentration within the Department of Forestry. He will be remembered by many UVM wildlife and forestry alumni for his wildlife courses and as a mentor who truly cared and took the time to advise his students both professionally and personally.

Dr. Thomas John Spinner, Jr. passed away on December 2, 2016. Dr. Spinner taught British and European history at UVM for nearly thirty years. His research led to the publication of George Joachim Goschen, The Transformation of a Victorian Liberal. A Fulbright in Guyana resulted in the publication of A Political and Social History of Guyana, 1945-1983.

Deeply political, Dr. Spinner helped to organize campus demonstrations against U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Committed to labor rights, he coordinated efforts to unionize UVM faculty.

SPRING 2017 |

63

| EXTRA CREDIT

LAPTOP LANGUAGE 64 |

V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY

Want to know the passions, interests, favorite diversions of today's UVM students?

Take a stroll through the Davis Center at lunchtime and survey the stickers on the lids of all those glowing laptops. We offer a random sample.

SALLY MCCAY

UVM 2017 ALUMNI WEEKEND OCT 6-8

FIND YOUR WAY HOME. Campus, downtown, the lake.

They’re all right where you left them. Come home to Burlington with your fellow alumni this fall and make new memories.

Special celebrations planned for the classes of 1967, 1977, 1992, 2007, 2012 and 2017. alumni.uvm.edu/alumniweekend

NON-PROFIT ORG US POSTAGE PAID BURLINGTON VT 05401 PERMIT NO. 143

VERMONT QUARTERLY

86 South Williams Street Burlington VT 05401

UPWARD

Business education at UVM took a game-changing leap last fall with alumnus Steven Grossman’s landmark $20 million gift. Now, the Grossman School of Business is poised to ascend even higher.

The Grossman Challenge seeks to secure $10 million in gifts from other donors. When achieved, Steven Grossman ’61 will donate an additional $5 million.

With a June 30, 2017, deadline, the time is now to maximize your investment in business education at UVM.

SUPPORT THE GROSSMAN CHALLENGE uvm.edu / business /give

moveMountains