Vermont Quarterly Fall 2017

Vermont THE UNIVERSITY OF

Q UA RT E R LY

LakeView Exploring the big water at our doorstep

FALL 2017:

KARINA MARSHALL-GOEBEL ’10

ARTFUL CAMPUS

SAVING THE HERBARIUM

BAILLY & THE BEE

Vermont Quarterly DEPARTMENTS

2 President’s Perspective 4 The Green 16 Catamount Sports 18 Faculty Voice 20 New Knowledge 42 Homecoming 2017 47 Class Notes 64 Extra Credit FEATURES

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The Professor as Seen on TV

From childhood champion to revered official pronouncer, the National Spelling Bee is at the core of Professor Jacques Bailly’s character. | BY ANDREA ESTEY

UVM PEOPLE: Karina Marshall-Goebel ’10

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Public Art

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Lake View

Rising rapidly, alumna Karina MarshallGoebel has earned a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical and international recognition from Forbes. | BY ANDREA ESTEY

A spherical school bus, bronze whale flukes, an astroturf-upholstered rocking horse, to name a few—new sculpture installations enliven the campus landscape. | BY THOMAS WEAVER

Laboratory, playground, workplace, and beloved view, an exploration of Lake Champlain’s glories and mysteries. | BY JOSHUA BROWN, SARAH TUFF DUNN, THOMAS WEAVER

COVER PHOTO BY BEAR CIERI

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September 1, a construction crane hoists artist Richard Erdman’s “Areté Blu,” as the alumnus’s sculpture is installed outside the Davis Center’s west entrance. Story on page 28. | PHOTOGRAPH BY SALLY MCCAY

| PRESIDENT’S PERSPECTIVE

The Artful Campus

UVM has a strong tradition

of liberal education that promotes broad learning and cross-discipline connections.

Integrating the sciences, humanities, fine arts, and business curricula across the University encourages students to develop into mature thinkers and curious, engaged public citizens.

Creating an environment for expanding viewpoints and perceptions occurs at all levels at UVM—in the storied halls and classrooms of our beautiful campus, certainly, and also in the surrounding landscape. This is the significance of public art on our campus. Whether gracing an open view or beckoning from a quiet grove, a first encounter with an outdoor sculpture makes an impression. The experience enriches perception. Suddenly the space that you walk by each day is transformed— and so, possibly, are you.

In the past year, the public art experience on our UVM campus has been made more dynamic with additions of abstract, pop-art–inspired, and contemporary sculpture, including “Flukes” by Gordon Gund P’91, P’93, “Sparkle Pony” by Kat Clear ’01, “Unlocked” by Christopher Curtis ’74, “Bus Ball” by Lars Fisk ’93, and the most recent addition, “Areté Blu” by Richard Erdman ’75, H’16. All are gifts to the University or on loan from the artist, all UVM alumni or parents of alumni.

It is exciting to be actively developing our public art program at UVM, expanding

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the aesthetic forms and rich references of our collection with opportunities for surprise, wonderment, questioning, or repose in the pathways and green spaces throughout campus.

Public art is an experience both personal and communal. It is different from entering a museum with the intention of viewing works of art. Instead, public art experiences happen to you. Frequently an encounter with a piece of public art is serendipitous—you come upon a sculpture for the first time and are stopped in your tracks by its inherent beauty, its form, or by the way the piece interacts with the horizon or landscape. You experience a sculpture that you didn’t set out to see, or see a form that might not necessarily resonate with your aesthetic or your way of thinking, and in that moment you open to another view of life—a view mediated through the lens of the artist. Bringing inner vision to outer form, the artist invites viewers to open perceptually in experiencing the work.

Sculptures can exert a magnetic pull, quickly becoming a well-visited and intimate place—a place for study, connection, or contemplation in the midst of relentless schedule keeping. “Unlocked,” the granite puzzle sculpture by Christopher Curtis installed last fall, almost instantly became a central meeting point for students, developing its own microenvironment within the landscape of the UVM Green.

President Sullivan with sculptor Richard Erdman at the recent installation of “Areté Blu.”

Sculptures such as “Bus Ball,” with its round metal form and artifact interior, make you wonder how it was built, inspiring discovery. The curvaceous geometrics and dynamic upward thrust of “Areté Blu” can elicit a sense of movement and inspire questions about the artist’s message and intention. Organic forms such as Gordon Gund’s “Flukes” may spark an inherent recognition, creating a resonant feeling for the mammal that inspired the piece. And the many playful references in Kat Clear’s “Sparkle Pony” invite us to think about the artist’s sources of inspiration, and perhaps to explore our own.

These diverse sculptures in various expressions and styles complement our handsome nineteenth-century buildings at UVM. They create a dynamic presence between the traditional and the vanguard, between historic reference and open possibilities for the future. That physical closeness invites us to experience, to think, to open our senses, and to make meaning from our encounters, underscoring the University’s educational mission in this most aesthetic and tactile way, leaving memories that might last a lifetime.

—Tom Sullivan SALLY MCCAY

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EDITOR Thomas Weaver ART DIRECTOR Elise Whittemore CLASS NOTES EDITOR Kathleen Laramee ’00 CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Joshua Brown, John Gennari, Sarah Tuff Dunn, Andrea Estey, Kathleen Laramee ’00, Mark Ray, Jon Reidel G’06, Jeffrey Wakefield, Basil Waugh, Amanda Waite ’02 G’04 PHOTOGRAPHY David Barrington, Joshua Brown, Bear Cieri, Lauren Cozzens, Chris Dissinger, Andy Duback, Owen Egan, Porter Gifford, Shari Halik, Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist ’09, Brian Jenkins, Will Kirk, Jeremy Matt, Sally McCay ILLUSTRATION Glynnis Fawkes 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 Produced by UVM Creative Communications Services, Amanda Waite’02 G’04, Director.

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YOU SHOULD KNOW

“

There's more at stake here than the price of a nice espresso in New York or Paris. Climate change threatens the livelihoods of millions of people in vulnerable communities around the world.”

—Taylor Ricketts, professor and director of UVM’s Gund Institute for Environment.

Read about pioneering research by Ricketts and colleagues that suggests the negative impact climate change and declining bee populations will have on Latin American coffee crops: go.uvm.edu/coffee

GREEN GENES

REPRESENT

UVM is one of twenty-four universities nationwide to make the Princeton Review's “Green Rating Honor Roll” in recognition of sustainabilityrelated practices, policies, and academic offerings.

Catamounts have represented in every Winter Olympics for the past sixty-two years. Nordic skier Larry Damon ’55 got the party started in 1956, biathlete Lowell Bailey ’05, hockey player Amanda Pelkey ’15, and possibly others will keep it going come next February.

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THE CATAMOUNT COMMITMENT debuted with the arrival of the Class of 2021. Under the program, funded by the university, Pell-grant-eligible Vermonters pay no tuition and no comprehensive fee, a total of 171 students among the first-years.

Share the Wellness A $1.8 million grant from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation will help Dr. Jim Hudziak, founder and director of UVM’s Wellness Environment, study the effectiveness of programming and a new app. Goal: Help spread WE’s success in promoting wellness and reducing student use of alcohol and other drugs. More: go.uvm.edu/wegrant

The UVM Career Center is now using Handshake, a powerful platform for connecting students and alumni to employers, job and internship opportunities, career resources, and more.

Check it out: go.uvm.edu/shake

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KNOW YOUR CAMPUS NEW UVM MEDICAL CENTER PATIENT BUILDING (Summer 2019)

FLEMING MUSEUM

NEW RESIDENCE HALLS

KALKIN HALL IFSHIN HALL (Summer 2018) VOTEY HALL

INNOVATION HALL STEM (Summer 2019) COMPLEX DISCOVERY HALL

TORREY HALL RENOVATION (Completion TBD) BILLINGS RENOVATION (Fall 2018)

BAILY/HOWE LIBRARY

WILLIAMS HALL

OLD MILL

SALLY MCCAY

THE GREEN News & Views

"Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not at CBW anymore." Home to approximately eight hundred first-year students in the Wellness Environment, the new Central Campus Residence Hall includes a dining hall, fitness center, glass-enclosed footbridge to Bailey/Howe Library, and a lake view here and there.

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Maps Where They're Needed Most STUDENT LIFE | In the wake of disasters around the world, Noah Ahles ’14 and Nina Loutchko ’20 gather up a circle of students for a work party. When Hurricane Harvey roared through coastal Texas, they quickly got down to business, some twenty UVM students at computers in an Aiken Building lab.

It’s called a mapping party—a party with a critically serious aim to help first-responders, disaster planners, and anyone else in the region who needs an accurate map of what the storm has done on the ground. Yes, there are chips and salsa and Oreos, but there’s also Ahles at the front of the room saying, “We’re going to be working tonight in Houston to help them get back up on their feet.”

The students are volunteering their evening for the UVM Humantarian Mapping Club. It seems a bit like a video-game competition as they focus intensely at computers, drawing magenta squares on satellite maps.

Each box goes around a building and then is classified—“tonight we’re mostly just look-

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ing at houses,” Ahles says—joining their work to a global effort called OpenStreetMap that include teams of engineers, GIS professionals, humanitarians, and other groups of college students around the world.

The UVM club is part of an organization called YouthMappers with seventy-four chapters in twenty-four countries. “We’re exchanging emails with universities in Kenya, South Africa, and India,” says Loutchko, who joined the effort last year and now serves as president. “We’re collectively trying to get young people involved in mapping and humanitarian work.”

Noah Ahles, now on staff at UVM’s Spatial Analysis Lab, describes OpenStreetMap as the Wikipedia of maps. “Anybody can edit, anybody can download, and anybody can use it for free,” he says. “It’s powerful because it takes the red tape away from organizations that need to do damage assessment, or disaster recovery, or any situation where they need open-source data immediately."

ABOVE, WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT, SALLY MCCAY

Hub of Creativity Cohens’ gift funds integrated arts center

PHILANTHROPY | As Kelley Di Dio and Darina Mernicky walk the halls of Elihu B. Taft School, at the corner of South Williams and Pearl streets, they talk with admiration for the history and beauty of a 1939 Works Project Administration building, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt among the names inscribed on a bronze plaque at the entrance.

But Di Dio, associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of art history, and Mernicky, UVM’s project manager for the Taft renovation, are primarily focused on this old building’s new life, home to the university’s first integrated center for the creative arts.

A lead gift of $5 million from Michele Resnick Cohen ’72 and her husband, Martin Cohen, supports the initiation of this transformative project. The space will include galleries, studios, classrooms, and exhibition and performance spaces that will encompass the disciplines of art, art history, dance, theatre, music, film and television studies, and more.

Michele Cohen is a member of the UVM Foundation Board of Directors, and is also active in various education, nonprofit and arts-related boards in New York City. She is a long-time trustee at Alfred University, and currently serves as the chair of the board of trustees at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.

“We are so grateful to Michele and Marty for continuing our more than 225-year tradition of liberal arts education, integrating the humanities, the fine arts, business, and the sciences to promote broad and deep learning for our students,” said UVM President Tom Sullivan. “When we put heads, hearts, and hands together to study the arts, creativity is unleashed in all aspects of the education process.”

Bill Falls, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said, “This transformative gift will not only create a hub of collaboration and

JOIN THE EFFORT | MOVEMOUNTAINS.UVM.EDU

creativity; it will give us the opporKelley Di Dio, associate dean in the College of tunity we have been longing for, to Arts and Sciences, and rightly place the arts at the forefront project manager of the college, as a public face of Darina Mernicky tour UVM commensurate with the quala Taft School space ity of the scholarship and teaching, that has already been and mirroring one of the essential renovated. The entire qualities of Vermont, a commitment building is scheduled to to and strength in the arts.” open fall 2018.

Di Dio has helped lead a process working with faculty and architectural consultants to assess facilities needs in the arts across campus and create a plan for how to best leverage the newly renovated space. Digital arts and creative work that bridges artistic disciplines will be the focus at Taft. Work is under way at the school with plans to have the building open for use, initially as classroom space, with the fall 2018 semester. Ongoing fundraising supports fully realizing the vision for Taft.

Move Mountains Campaign Progress CAMPAIGN GOAL $500M CURRENT GIFTS $444M

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POUTINE PRESS March 2016, when Nicolas Fabien-Ouellet, a grad student in food systems and Quebec native, read that the Obama White House had poutine on the menu—as a Canadian national dish—for a state dinner with that country’s new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it raised an eyebrow.

The Quebeçois concoction made of french fries, gravy, and cheese curds was once mocked

by Canadians as declassé junk food favored by the lower strata of Quebec’s French-speaking community. But increasingly, as with the White House dinner, poutine is celebrated as Canada’s national dish, a cultural appropriation sleight of hand.

That transformation absorbs, dilutes, and ultimately weakens the culture of the Quebeçois minority that created it, Fabien-Ouellet contends in a paper published December 2016 in the peerreviewed, open-access journal CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures.

The media in Canada and beyond quickly took to the poutine scholarship. All told, more than thirty news stories on his paper have appeared to date.

“I knew that the concept of cultural appropriation would be of interest, but I could not have predicted that I would have to wake up every morning to a live interview show or go on live TV or do interviews over the phone for a week nonstop,” Fabien-Ouellet says.

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From the moment he entered the gym for a Special Olympics unified basketball team practice as a Burlington High School junior, Sam Donnelly ’20 felt it. “It was like a switch flipped,” he says, immediately drawn in by a warm welcome and seamless spirit of equality and inclusion. So began a passion.

Six days after high school graduation, Donnelly moved to New York for a gap year with, he admits, a vague plan and thin bank account for city living, built on mowing lawns and other high school jobs. Almost immediately, his shot-in-the-dark “Can I have an internship?” tweet at Special Olympics in NYC landed on the right phone. Yes, you can. Unpaid, but Donnelly stacked up experience and later earned a paid internship at Special Olympics Vermont.

During his first year at UVM, 2016-17, Donnelly deepened his Special Olympics work on both a local and global scale— founding the UVM Special Olympics Club to rally like-minded students and traveling to Graz, Austria, last spring for the Special Olympics Global Youth Summit. There, Donnelly presented on his idea, funded by a $2,500 Special Olympics grant, to create a social inclusion class at Vermont high schools.

As his sophomore year begins, Donnelly already has a strong vision for where he’d like to be when college graduation arrives.

President of UVM Democrats student club, he has his sights on a Burlington City Council seat, first step, he hopes, in a career in public service that might one day lead to the governor’s office or U.S. Senate. At the core of Donnelly’s political ambition—supporting and shaping education and inclusion at a policy level.

A major in community and international development in Community Development and Applied Economics, Donnelly has found an ideal academic fit. “That department is what makes it for me at UVM,” he says and rattles off the names of professors who have influenced him—Dan Baker, Kelly Hamshaw, Jane Kolodinsky, Tom Desisto. “I am not only excited to go to class, I’m excited do my homework.

Every single example used in that program is about Vermont. I get the opportunity to apply that, make it real.”

OWEN EGAN

STUDENT FOCUS |

IAN THOMAS JANSEN-LONNQUIST '09

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| ABOUT TOWN

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Emily Speck ’17 and a circle of fellow students founded the UVM chapter of Camp Kesem and ran this summer’s inaugural program.

Refuge from Cancer STUDENT LIFE | When Emily Speck learned in eighth grade that her mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer, she focused on staying strong for her parents. Consequently, she never spoke about her own internal struggles throughout her mother’s treatment and recovery.

Speck ’17 shared her experience publicly for the first time this summer at a camp for children who lost a parent to cancer, or have one in treatment or remission, that she co-founded with Morgan Medeiros ’18 and Alex Cohen ’16. Her story helped campers open up about their own experiences during an empowerment ceremony at the first UVM-student-sponsored Camp Kesem in Tuftonboro, New Hampshire.

“I wish I had a Camp Kesem when I was going through that experience,” says Speck. “It was really hard to speak out loud about it, but it seemed to empower the kids to share their own stories. Their ability to be brave in that situation is a testament to their own strength, but also to the environment that we created at camp.”

Speck was part of a handful of

dedicated students, including Emily Torsney ’18, who worked tirelessly to bring a chapter of Camp Kesem—a nationwide community of college students dedicated to the cause—to UVM. Cohen, who heard about the camp from a friend, first discussed the idea with Speck while volunteering together at the UVM Children’s Hospital. “We saw a need but had no idea how much work it would take to get a chapter,” says Cohen, adding that Harvard, Dartmouth, Boston College, MIT, Yale, and Brown were the only New England schools with chapters.

But it wasn’t long before students from a broad range of majors including education, math, business, economics, nursing, biochemistry, and computer science joined the effort.

Some were motivated by the loss of a parent, although most just wanted to help children. “Being able to say that we have thirty students willing to put in so much time for a great cause shows just how great the UVM community is,” says Medeiros, a nursing major who served as camp co-director with Torsney.

LEFT, GLYNNIS FAWKES; ABOVE, LAUREN COZZENS; RIGHT, IAN THOMAS JANSEN-LONNQUIST '09

BUDDING BIOLOGISTS Although creativity, innovation, and the ability to “tinker” are essential qualities of the modern scientist, and an important part of the scientific thought process, they are typically underemphasized in the early undergraduate curriculum. A BioFabLab biology pilot course at UVM is challenging that model by uniting scientific study with the maker movement. The innovative effort, recently buoyed by a National Science Foundation grant, promises to draw a broader array of students to biology and other sciences.

Learn more from this video: go.uvm.edu/fablab

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ALUMNA EARNS FELLOWSHIP FOR NEW AMERICANS Alumna artist Estefania Puerta received a prestigious national fellowship. Of 1,775 applicants, Puerta was one of thirty to earn a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans—a decision made on the applicants' potential to make significant contributions to U.S. society, culture, or their academic field. The $90,000 fellowship supports Puerta’s current pursuit of a master of fine arts in painting and printmaking at the Yale University School of Art. Since graduating from UVM in 2010 with her degree in community and international development, Puerta has become a U.S. citizen, and she is committed to ensuring others are given the same encouragement and support she was given while living in the shadows. As she completes her studies at Yale, she hopes to deepen her critical approach to her art practice and create space for more immigrant Latina artists in the art world.

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‘Spirited Things’ at the Fleming ART | With an array of objects that are provocative, eclectic, beautiful, and, at their essence, sacred, the Spirited Things exhibition on display at the Fleming Museum this semester is the product of years of work and collaborative vision among Marsh-Professor-at-Large J. Lorand Matory, Fleming staff, and students in religion professor Vicki Brennan’s classes.

The pieces on display are largely from Matory’s “Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Collection,” assembled across decades, inspired by both his religious faith and scholarly focus. Matory, Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke University, connected with UVM via the Marsh program in 2013.

The new exhibition includes sacred objects from the Yoruba religion of West Africa, as well as Haitian Vodou, Cuban Santeria, Brazilian Candomble, and Caribbean Spiritism, faiths that emerged from the practices of enslaved Africans who blended their ancestral cultures with that of their captors.

“An academic museum really thrives on collaborations like this,” Fleming curator Andrea Rosen says. “It is true of any

collaboration—whether with a collector or a scholar or a living artist—that we as the museum get pushed to expand our comfort zone because of this meeting in the middle. Randy is a bit of a provocateur.

Understandably and laudably so, he wants to get visitors to think about the fact that these objects are not exotic, they are not foreign, they are us. The very complex nature of them and the nuanced relationships they represent, that’s true of objects in our own lives, maybe in ways we don’t realize.”

Students in religion professor Vicki Brennan’s classes initially studied Matory’s “Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Collection” online and began selecting objects that might be included in an exhibition.

Subsequent classes worked on documenting the displays and students this semester will survey viewer reactions.

Brennan says, “The student involvement in this project has been a great experience for them to learn more about how to apply the ideas and theories we talk about in class to real world contexts, such as the museum.”

Spirited Things runs through Dec. 15, 2017.

RIGHT: CHRIS DISSINGER

New Light on Broker of New Deal POLITICAL SCIENCE | Some fifty years in the making, John William McCormack: A Political Biography by Professor Garrison Nelson reveals stunning new facts about the life of a man considered the legislative architect of the New Deal and the Great Society. Nelson gives long overdue credit to a leading figure in the transformation of the twentieth-century Democratic Party—U.S. Speaker of the House, 19621970—for passing a social welfare agenda that included Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, immigration reform, and civil rights legislation.

But McCormack’s forty-three-year career as a Massachusetts representative might never have been had he not crafted a false family heritage. In the Boston of his times, the path to political power required one of two backgrounds: Yankee Boston or Irish Boston. The former demanded a Pilgrim or Puritan ancestor and a degree from Harvard. The latter called for an Irish-born father, a widowed mother, and younger siblings that you helped raise in poverty.

McCormack possessed neither of the Yankee requirements, and had no Irish ancestry. He did, however, grow up in extreme poverty in South Boston, and used that as a basis to fabricate his personal history when he ran for the Massachusetts House in 1920. Until Nelson’s new biography, the myth of John McCormack as Irish kid from Southie had endured for nearly a century.

OWEN STAYNER

Nelson traces his near-obsession with McCormack to an unexpected meeting with the Speaker in 1968 after stopping by his office to see if he'd answer some questions for his doctoral dissertation. “It was a wonderful hour for this twenty-sixyear-old new college instructor to enjoy a cigar with the seventy-six-year-old House Speaker in the U.S. Capitol,” Nelson says.

Previous attempts to write biographies on McCormack—the only post-1940 Speaker of the House without a biography until now—usually ended with the discovery of sanitized congressional papers, archived at Boston University, void of any pertinent personal information. Nelson was told early on by a political boss in Southie not to expect anyone to talk about their local hero and violate a code that says, “never write what you can speak; never speak what you can nod.”

Nelson caught a break when McCormack’s dying nephew gave him six boxes filled with family photographs, personal letters, news clippings, and gavels.

McCormack’s falsified heritage is just one aspect of the impactful political life that Nelson spins out across 910 pages. Far greater emphasis is devoted to exploring his subject’s skill at forging key political alliances to help his party pass legislation aiding the nation’s most vulnerable.

Nelson, the Elliott A. Brown Professor of Law, Politics, and Political Behavior at UVM, will retire at the end of this academic year.

HILBERG’S LEGACY FOCUS OF BERLIN CONFERENCE Professor Raul Hilberg’s place in Holocaust scholarship continues to endure long beyond his thirty-five-year career on the UVM faculty and death in 2007. An October conference in Berlin, Germany, brought together many of the world’s top historians and Holocaust scholars to consider Hilberg’s transformative work.

The intent of the academic gathering was “to provide an impetus by not only examining the pathways of this exceptional scientist from the academic outsider to the globally acknowledged doctrine of Holocaust research, but also examine his academic and personal networks as well as the history of his work.”

Hilberg was one of the first scholars to study the Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II. His exhaustive research and documentation informed his 1961 book, The Destruction of the European Jews, regarded as a milestone in Holocaust research.

UVM’s Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies was among the cosponsors of the conference.

UVM faculty continuing Hilberg’s legacy at the university and helping lead the discussion in Berlin included Jonathan Huener, Frank Nicosia, Susanna Schrafstetter, and Alan Steinweis.

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Saving the Herbarium PLANT BIOLOGY | When the roof of Torrey Hall caught fire the morning of August 3, UVM researchers feared that the 300,000 historic and rare plant specimens housed primarily on the top floor wouldn’t survive the blistering heat. Or, if by some chance they did, surely the gallons of water firefighters used to control and extinguish the fire would ruin the prized scientific collection, the third largest herbarium in New England, exceeded only by those at The Marble Court's Penelope keeps watch over drying Pringle Herbarium specimens.

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Harvard and Yale.

But a $470,000 grant from the National Science Foundation secured in 2014 was used to upgrade storage of the collection, from wooden cabinets to cabinets designed to protect against fire and water damage.

When the fire was out, a preliminary examination showed that the cabinets had done their job. The collection was safe. Only materials that had not been processed and were outside the new cabinets sustained damage.

Quick thinking and heroic work by the Burlington Fire Department were also key to the herbarium’s survival. Briefed on

the importance of the collection inside, firefighters arriving on the scene entered the burning building to cover the cabinets with tarps in an effort to further protect the collection.

The fire was ignited by soldering work under way as part of renovations on the 1863 building.

The herbarium contains specimens collected by botanists dating back to Fanny Allen, widow of Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen. It’s named for Cyrus Pringle, a native of Charlotte, Vermont, who traveled to the western frontier in the late 1800s to discover new species. By the end of his life, he had collected more than 500,000 specimens, 12 percent of which were entirely new to science.

The collection is critical for researchers studying plant diversity and systematics, or how living things evolve and change over time. “It’s a world-renowned resource,” says plant biologist Dave Barrington, curator of the Pringle Herbarium.

As Barrington dealt with salvaging and preserving the collection in the fire’s aftermath, he received help from many across campus, from Physical Plant to UVM Libraries to the Fleming Museum, where director Janie Cohen made the Marble Court available as a space to dry out the specimens.

“It’s amazing,” says Barrington. “It takes a village, and this is one hell of a village.”

TOP, JEREMY MATT; LEFT, DAVE BARRINGTON

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M E D I A BRIEFS |

Stealthy Story For an author, having The New York Times review your book is both thrilling and threatening. Consider Sarah Enderlin Healy’s state of mind when her agent texted that the anxiously awaited review was live.

Driving home from work, Healy ’99 waited until she stopped in the driveway to pull up the Times and scroll through the critic’s verdict.

First sentence: “Sarah Healy’s thoroughly surprising new novel…” Well, that’s a promising start.

Then, a couple of paragraphs down, this: “In an era of inflationary cheap praise, in which every run-of-the-mill thriller is advertised as some sort of Nobel-worthy combination of Shakespeare, Scott Turow and, inevitably, Gone Girl, The Sisters Chase is that rare thing, a slow burner that conceals its cunning and sneaks up on you unawares.”

As she finished reading the glowing review, Healy stood in her driveway and cried with happiness, satisfaction, and relief.

The Sisters Chase (Houghton Mifflin) is Healy’s third novel, following 2012’s Can I Get an Amen? and 2014’s House of Wonder.

From her own perspective, it is by far her best work. “I feel like this represents me as a matured writer, shows what I can do and where I’d like to continue to go,” she says.

Family, rich with intricate and intriguing dynamics, has been a consistent theme through all of Healy’s books.

As the title suggests, The Sisters Chase is rooted in Healy’s interest in writing about that particular familial relationship. The two sisters in the book have a fourteen-year age gap, similar to Healy and her two older sisters, Jen and Erin. “Growing up, they seemed omnipotent and amazing, and terrifying in some ways. But just all-powerful, and I worshipped them,” Healy says. “So, I wanted to explore that in fiction and was ruminating on it for a while.”

Rumination plus imagination led her to an alluring hook that keeps the pages turning. We won’t spoil it.

Also rooted in family, Healy’s impulse to write. When she was pregnant with her first

Kristina Jacobsen ’00, professor of ethnomusicology at the University of New Mexico, has published The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Dine Belonging (University of North Carolina Press). Via multiple first-person accounts from the vibrant Navajo country music scene, Jacobsen explores questions of Indigenous identity and performance.

child she felt a motivation to “start getting things down on paper.” Inspired by writers like David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, personal essay was where she started, written for her own amusement and shared within her family.

Healy’s sister Jen, with the wisdom of a long career in publishing, saw her talent and told her she should tackle a novel. Quietly, Sarah Healy took the challenge. The result was a will-never-again-see-the-light-of-day manuscript. Panned by both herself and sister Jen, Healy tucked it back in the desk drawer and persisted. Guided by a constant regard for her readers and the imperative to hold their interest, her next effort was published. And Healy feels she has improved with each book since: “I’ve learned to write books by writing books.”

For everyone with artistic dreams stymied by daily realities, Healy is an inspiration. She juggles full-time work as chief of sales and marketing for Commando, a Vermont-based women’s undergarment company. She and her husband, Dennis, a St. Michael’s College grad and graphic designer, have three kids, ages eleven, eight, and six.

Healy carves out her time to write late in the evening, in bed and under the covers with the glow of her laptop. Asked how she finds the energy and the discipline, Healy says, “I love writing. I love it. The hard part is kissing my kids good night and going into my room. But once I’m there, I really never mind it. Even if it isn’t going the way that I want it to, even if I’m struggling with a scene.

Those are always really pleasurable hours.”

Reverend Daniel Kanter ’89 is the author of Faith for the Unbeliever (Skinner House Books). Rev. Kanter is senior minister at First Unitarian Church of Dallas, Texas. His stories and reflections revolve around belief, trust, loyalty, and worldview to make faith more accessible to those who count themselves among the “spiritual but not religious.”

Robert Manning, professor emeritus in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, teams with his wife and stalwart hiking companion, Martha, for another guide for on-foot explorers, Walks of a Lifetime: Extraordinary Hikes from Around the World (Falcon). The roving Mannings, now home in Arizona post-retirement, recount hikes from Maine to New Zealand, Italy to Japan, thirty of the world’s great trails.

Bill Schubart ’68 has published his seventh work of fiction, Lila & Theron (Charles Michael Publishing). Readers of Schubart’s 2008 collection, The Lamoille Stories, will recognize the lead characters in the new novel set in twentieth-century rural America. Schubart, familiar to many as a Vermont Public Radio commentator, grew up in a northern Vermont French-Canadian family rich in stories.

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| C ATA M O U N T S P O R T S

Sound Minds, Sound Bodies Athletes unite as mental health advocates

BY | THOMAS WEAVER PHOTOGRAPH BY | SALLY MCCAY

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Catamount varsity athletes

Kelly Lennon ’18, swimming, and Trae Bell-Haynes ’18, basketball, have their own perspectives on the power of the mind to enhance or inhibit performance, both in competition and more broadly in their lives.

Lennon, an English major/psychology minor, is frank about struggling with undiagnosed clinical anxiety issues during her freshman and into her sophomore year. “It started as a swimming thing. I was getting in my own head and it was spill-

ing over into the rest of my life,” she says.

“Now that I look back at it, I was superanxious about really everything.” A talk with her physician was the beginning of addressing the problem, helping Lennon realize that she had an illness that could be addressed with counseling, medication, and mental wellness exercises.

As Bell-Haynes, a statistics major/economics minor, begins to talk about his own experience, Lennon shakes her head knowingly and says, “Trae is very go with the flow. He doesn’t get riled.”

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Bell-Haynes cracks a slight smile, acknowledging that’s generally his way off the court, but it was a different story in games his first two years in a Vermont uniform. Basketball, like many sports, is served by a short memory—a player who makes a turnover must forget about it by the time he next gets his hands on the ball. Bell-Haynes wasn’t that player.

“When I made a bad play in a game, I kind of got on myself. Then one bad play became two bad plays and two bad plays became three. And by three, I’m not playing, I’m sitting on the bench,” he says.

Mindfulness, undergirded by a meditation routine, has strengthened this aspect of Bell-Haynes’s game, helping him earn America East Player of the Year and Honorable Mention All-American last season.

In part due to their own experiences, Lennon and Bell-Haynes have taken the lead on Rally Around Mental Health, a UVM varsity athlete effort to promote mental health among their fellow athletes. One in four people struggle with some sort of mental health issue, with studentathletes being especially susceptible due to the pressures of performance at a high level. In a recent survey, 75 percent of Vermont student-athletes said a teammate or themselves struggled with mental health, while only 40 percent sought out a form of help.

Last year, the student athletes sponsored de-stress activities and a Rally Around Mental Health night at a men’s basketball game. Special warm-up shirts worn by the team were later sold to fans to further raise awareness and funds for the

program. As fall semester opened, Lennon and Bell-Haynes say they anticipate similar programs this year, hoping to have other teams designate a game as a Rally Around Mental Health event. And they’ll be looking to institutionalize the burgeoning program and pass its stewardship on to fellow athletes. Lennon and Bell-Haynes are quick to credit UVM Athletics staffer Cathy Rahill and sports psychologists Ari Shapiro-Miller and Kelly Thorne for their help in establishing Rally Around Mental Health.

Annie Valentine, UVM’s coordinator of mental health education and outreach, has been another key partner. In an NBC Boston news story on the program, Valentine said the peer-to-peer initiative adds to university-wide efforts to breakdown stigmas surrounding mental health challenges—“It starts to shift the culture.”

Bell-Haynes says, “I’m definitely seeing changes with my team. It is a lot more accepting and open-minded.”

For her part, Lennon says the swimming and diving squad welcomed a number of first-year students last year who struggled with the transition. “My team knows at this point that they can come to me and talk,” she says. “I think my biggest thing is reminding them that it’s OK to not be OK all of the time. No one expects you to be, and there are a lot of other people who are going through stuff. It doesn’t mean there is something ‘wrong’ with you, it just means maybe you need a little extra help that in the end is going to make you better as an athlete and as a person.”

VQ

HALL OF FAME, CLASS OF 2017 Three Catamount alumni and one storied coach joined the UVM Athletic Hall of Fame at the 49th annual HOF dinner on September 16 at the Davis Center.

Richard Ader ’63, basketball, averaged 10.8 points per game as a Catamount and earned second team All-Yankee Conference honors his junior year.

Corey Bronner ’07, hockey, helped lead the Cats to thirty-three wins during his years in green and gold. A two-time third team academic All-American, he was team MVP his senior year.

Craig Mygatt ’88, lacrosse, is the Vermont program’s all-time leading goal scorer, 148 through his career. As a freshman, he tallied a single-season record fifty goals.

Ed Kusiak served over three decade as UVM’s director of track and field before retiring in 2003. He earned America East Coach of the Year three times in a four-year span—1998, 2000, and 2001.

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| FA C U LT Y V O I C E

Solid Sound

Growing up in an Italian American World

As in many working-class

BY | JOHN GENNARI

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Italian American households, mine was one where loud voices and other sounds constantly ricocheted off the walls, a condition that made for a loving family life but worked against a reading habit. “Shut up, Johnny’s trying to read!” my mother would yell at the top of her ample lungs, adding another sonic layer to the mix. In the spring of 2015, a few months before her passing, I sat with my mother (Clara Dal Cortivo Gennari) for several hours one afternoon in the home where I grew up in Lenox, Massachusetts. We reposed in a tender, poignant silence that was punctured every few minutes by a series of shotgunlike non sequiturs that began to cohere into

a kind of spoken word performance: “Your cousin Richie called. I had to hang up on him.” “I like that Judge Judy. She’s fresh.” “I don’t care for meatballs. My mother never made meatballs.” “What do they mean by vegan?” And one I’d heard many times: “You know me. I don’t trust anybody.”

My wife once said, “I love the timbre of your mother’s voice, the way she leans hard on certain words.” Leans hard. Yes: a hard voice, a blunt and barbed voice, serrated, suspicious, unyielding, and yet—here’s the miracle—a voice bursting with curiosity, compassion, and empathy; above all, a hunger for connection. “Let me ask you something,” she’d say, or “You know what gets me?” or “You know what I’m saying?”

FAMILY PHOTO COURTESY OF JOHN GENNARI

(as in: “It’s not like the capicola I remember. You know what I’m saying?”). She’d grown up in Bergen County, New Jersey in one of those Italian families much like the one scholar Fred Gardaphé has memorably described from his childhood in Chicago – a family in which “only the contagiously sick were left alone.” It was a milieu akin to the one filmmaker Martin Scorsese remembered from his upbringing in Queens and Little Italy—a perpetual scene of “people crowding around each other in small rooms.” The Dal Cortivo kitchen table sat in the middle of a very small room less than an arm’s length from stove and sink. People piled on top of each other, gesticulating, touching, connecting. When anthropologist Thomas Belmonte observed in Italian Americans of the WWII generation “a warm and spontaneous relatedness to others,” “a suffused, tactile, almost erotic openness and frankness in interaction,” he might have had my mother’s people in mind as the tribal model.

My father, Remo Gennari, who passed in 2011, was socialized into a different style of acoustic Italianità before marrying my mother and folding into the Dal Cortivo soundscape. He was a man of precious few words, a man who communicated most powerfully in a companionable language of silence. His was a life-hymn sung largely in the key of solitary quietude. As a farm boy in the north of Italy, he awoke before dawn, clutched a scudella of hot coffee to his breast for warmth, ambled to the cow barn, bent his ear to the wind gently brushing the field grass, and contemplated the day’s chores. Late in life, hard at springtime work turning garden soil, alone in silence for most of his waking hours until nightfall, he’d look skyward to the moon to divine proper planting times for that season’s herbs, aromatics, root vegetables, beans, lettuces, and tomatoes.

The Gennari farm of my father’s boyhood was in Marola, a small village outside of Vicenza. In Italian folklore, the Vicenzan archetypically is a figure of austerity, reticence, sonic reserve. This is an image per-

fectly personified by my father—and flatly contradicted by some of the loudmouths in his own family. Dad could be a loudmouth too, alas, in his own way. This conspicuously quiet man could astonish with sudden and passionate vocal eruption. You’d be driving in the car, an hour or two since his last utterance, and...BOOM...a thunder clap of laughter or speech that pinned back your ears and rattled your bones. It was a farm field voice, a factory floor voice (after migrating from Italy in 1947 he worked as a welder in the power transformer division of General Electric in Pittsfield, Massachusetts), a voice not well modulated to intimate spaces. It was a voice of powerful conviction on the weather, say, or something from a Red Sox game the week before, or some peculiarity of traffic engineering or automobile design, or the low character of certain politicians.

The point I’m making is that I grew up in an Italian American world of keen and vivid soundfulness, a world whose reckoning demands what anthropologist James Clifford calls “the ethnographic ear.” Pellegrino D’Acierno calls Italy and Italian America “an ear-intense culture in which the voice itself is a sonic spectacle.”

I’m talking about soundful Italian bodies and spaces, animated, audible bodies and spaces, resonant at all volume levels, from fortissimo screaming across the dinner table to the sacramental pianissimo that breaks through the cacophony when time comes to savor the risotto. I’m talking so far about the private domestic sphere, but Italian American soundfulness in the public sphere is a subject of deep historical resonance. From organ grinders, fruit peddlers and crooners to political orators from Cicero to Cuomo, the Italian has long been a figure of acoustic power and fascination.

We all know acoustically fascinating Puerto Ricans, Greeks, Irish, Koreans, Australians, Swedes, Canadians, Oregonians, and even Vermonters. And we know that noisiness is a loaded signifier of racialized and ethnicized difference; voices marked as loud, rowdy, noisy, or boisterous, that is, are voices heard to be violating acoustic norms of respectable, properly assimilated middle-class whiteness. Scholar Dolores Castilles speaks of the ritual of the family sing-along in her Mexican American community-of-origin, of tradition-keeping grandparents pumping up the volume from loud to really loud and not infrequently running afoul of municipal noise ordinances. Such ordinances, of course, legislate codes of sonic propriety in ways that privilege the ear and taste culture of gated community elites; people heard as noisy are also adjudged as dressing too colorfully, wearing too much cologne, and persisting in the strange custom of growing vegetables in their front yards. In the elite/plebian dialectic of the Western tradition, as one moves up the economic and educational class ladder, one is expected to become quieter, just as one is expected to become cleaner and more orderly—that is, to exercise more control over one’s body, to master its sounds and smells. Of course, at every rung of the class ladder, in every society, you will find men and women possessed of every bit as much elegant sonic reserve—and as much hygenic mastery and sartorial aplomb—as the iconic English Gentleman. Such fluidity through and across class and cultural boundaries is an essential feature of Italian American sound. There’s the Frank Sinatra of the saloon, all goombah boister and bluster, and then there’s “The Voice,” the gold standard of vocal elegance and nobility.

VQ John Gennari, professor of English, is the author of Flavor and Soul: Italian America at its African American Edge, University of Chicago Press, 2017.

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| NEW KNOWLEDGE

With Discovery, Comes Naming Rights Four UVM undergrads and Prof, students team on spider species research BY | JOSHUA BROWN

Lily Sargeant ’17 was among the undergrads working with Professor Ingi Agnarsson.

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their professor have discovered fifteen new species of “smiley-faced” spiders—and named them after, among others, David Attenborough, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. You won’t find them in Washington, D.C., Hollywood, or Vermont—but on Caribbean islands and other southern spots you might now get a glimpse of Spintharus davidattenboroughi, S. barackobamai, S. michelleobamaae, and S. berniesandersi as well as S. davidbowiei and S. leonardodicaprioi.

“This was an undergraduate research project,” says Ingi Agnarsson, a spider expert and professor in the biology department who guided the students on the new study. “In naming these spiders, the students and I wanted to honor people who

stood up for both human rights and warned about climate change—leaders and artists who promoted sensible approaches for a better world.” Their study, published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, drew international media attention from the Washington Post to Time Magazine.

Until now, the beautiful yellow “smileyfaced spiders” in the genus Spintharus— named for a smiley face pattern on their abdomens—has been thought to have one widespread species “from northern North America down to northern Brazil,” Agnarsson says. However, when a research team from the Caribbean Biogeography Project (“CarBio”)—spearheaded by UVM’s Agnarsson and Greta Binford at Lewis & Clark College—collected spiders from Jamaica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the Lesser Antilles, Florida, JOSHUA BROWN

Spintharus berniesandersi is joined by S. davidattenboroughi, S. leonardodicaprioi, and other species named to honor champions of human rights and a healthy planet.

South Carolina, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Colombia—they discovered that what was thought to be one widespread species was actually many endemic species. Using CarBio genetic work, and the Vermont students’ painstaking photography and lab work, the team—with support from the National Science Foundation—was able to identify and formally describe fifteen new species. “And if we keep looking, we’re sure there are more,” Agnarsson says.

Each student who helped describe the spiders also got to name a few of them— and some were named for beloved family members. “But we all named the Bernie Sanders spider,” says Lily Sargeant ’16, one of the students who helped with the project, and who now works at UVM with Vermont Veteran Services. “Our time on this earth is limited,” she says. “But I think that ideas are not that way. It is my hope that through naming that spider after Bernie we can remember the ideas that he has at this pivotal point in the life of our nation.”

Ben Chomitz ’16, another of the student researchers, put it this way: “That spider species will be named after Bernie forever.”

For Chloe Van Patten ’16, her naming process goes back to what she calls a high school “obsession” with actor Leonardo DiCaprio. “I’m over my crush, but now that he’s involved in environmental issues, I love him even more. So I named a spider after him hoping that if he read our study,” says the recent UVM graduate now living in California, “he might go out to dinner with me and talk about climate change.”

The Caribbean region has long been ILLUSTRATION BY GLYNNIS FAWKES

known to scientists as a major global hotspot for biological diversity. The leading spider expert on the Spintharus genus in earlier decades, Herbert W. Levi (1921-2014), had concluded that differences he observed in these spiders across a wide swath of geography represented variation within one species. But newer molecular techniques deployed by the project’s leaders, Agnarsson and Binford, show otherwise. “These are cryptic species,” Agnarsson says. “As Dr. Levi’s work clearly showed, they’re hard to tell apart by looking at them.” But the DNA data are clear: these spiders have not been interbreeding—exchanging genes— for millions of years. “Thoughts about conservation change dramatically when you go from having a common, widespread species to an endemic on, say, Jamaica that has very specific conservation needs,” Agnarsson says.

“All of a sudden we have fifteen-fold increase in diversity in this particular group—just because we did a detailed study,” says Agnarsson. “That tells us something about biodiversity in general. The more we look, the more we discover.” Conservation biology, the team notes, fundamentally depends on good taxonomy, since preserving one widespread species is a radically different task than protecting the precise habitat of a genetically isolated, local species.

The UVM students got started on this project in Agnarsson’s field zoology class— collecting insects and spiders in Vermont and watching David Attenborough videos.

“Ingi shared with the class that Attenbor-

ough was one of his heroes and got him interested in arthropods,” says Sargeant, “and now Ingi is one of our heroes. He’s an amazing teacher who can make studying the natural world unbelievably riveting.”

Through the class, Agnarsson recruited undergrads who wanted to dig deeper into spider taxonomy. Austin Dziki ’15 worked with Agnarsson for several years, helping to uncover the complex story that was emerging from the DNA evidence—and then he and the other students spent long hours “looking at spider genitalia,” says Sargeant.

A 2015 paper co-authored by Dziki and Agnarsson started to tell the revised thirtymillion-year-long history of smiley-faced spiders—but the hard work of fully describing, and then formally naming, the species lay ahead. “Dissecting the genitalia and taking careful measurements can be one of the best ways to distinguish species,” Sargeant says. This microscope work was combined with photography in Agnarsson’s laboratory in UVM’s Marsh Life Science building: using a macro lens under bright lights, the students made “photo stacks” of up to fifty sliced images, combined into one composite photo that shows the whole spider in sharp focus.

Though the students’ lab work was often tedious and technical, they brought deeply personal and cultural perspectives to the naming of the spiders. “I’m a secondgeneration American and I’m black,” says Lily Sargeant. “It is through a diversity of perspectives that we achieve innovation in science and I appreciate how much the Obamas value diversity.” Perhaps the Obamas now value Spintharus barackobamai (the tenth organism named after the former president) and Spintharus michelleobamaae (the first organism named in her honor).

“Here’s the thing,” says UVM’s Ingi Agnarsson—an associate professor and cocurator of the university’s Vermont Natural History Museum, as well as a research associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History—“we need to understand and protect biodiversity in its many forms, and we felt compelled to recognize leaders that understand this.”

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S C R I P P S N AT I O N A L S P E L L I N G B E E

The UVM Professor In 1980, after two grueling days of competition, a fourteen-year-old boy from Denver named Jacques Bailly won the National Spelling Bee. His winning word: “elucubrate,” meaning to study or work hard at night.

“I was wearing white pants and I had a bowl haircut,” says Bailly, remembering the night of his championship. “And I worked very hard to prepare, about three hours a day, because of course, it’s not just spelling. It’s knowing the words, their history, their meaning. Words open doorways.”

That love of words, which Bailly describes as a “drifting snowball that keeps growing and growing,” eventually led to studying Ancient Greek and Latin.

Today, he’s a professor of classics at UVM, but you may know him better from his other gig as lead pronouncer of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the same bee he won thirty-seven years ago.

The bee is televised live each year on ESPN. Since Bailly assumed the role of lead pronouncer in 2003, he’s become a bit of a pop culture icon, even appearing as himself in the 2006 film Akeelah and the Bee. In recent years, the bee has started hiring comedy writers to compose many of its sentences; Bailly’s dry comedic delivery of these jokes, combined with his earnest, bespectacled smile and calm demeanor, has drawn even more attention his way. During this year’s bee, “I was personally trending on Twitter,” laughs Bailly. “I’m a national treasure.”

But spot him on campus, and you’d never guess he moonlights as a primetime TV star. “I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who have recognized me outside of D.C., when I’m at the spelling bee. There, everybody knows me. But look at me now,” says Bailly, sitting in Henderson’s Café in the Davis Center. “I mean, I have a Webster’s Dictionary cap on and a spelling bee t-shirt. But there’s paint all over my shorts.”

As Seen on TV By

andrea estey Photography by Will Kirk

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An unlikely pop culture icon, Professor Jacques Bailly has been lead pronouncer at the Scripps National Spelling Bee since 2003.

In fact, it takes most of his students at UVM some time to put it together. “Usually about halfway through the semester, I’ll get a question like, ‘I was looking up our course and I came across your Wikipedia page. Are you really the spelling bee pronouncer?’ They usually think it’s pretty cool, especially the etymology class,” Bailly says.

The lobby of Gaylord Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, just outside of D.C., feels a bit like a Las Vegas resort: grand, excessive, and flashy, with glittering chandeliers, polished floors, water features, and sweeping views of the Potomac River.

A spelling bee sounds quaint, but the Scripps Bee is not your elementary school gym kind of affair.

That, says Bailly, is one important piece of motivating, and rewarding, contestants for their hundreds of hours of preparation. “Going into this marble atrium, in a huge building, and knowing that it’s all about you, for you, it’s not the dingy linoleum hallway and the theater that could use a facelift. It’s all sparkly and perfect,” says Bailly. “I think that’s part of what’s really exciting for the kids.”

Another source of excitement for spellers? The chance to get an autograph from Bailly. Inside the bee, fans approach him at every turn. “At home,

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they’ve heard my voice all year because they have recordings of past bees so they can get the pronunciations correct,” says Bailly. And, of course, for fans who have watched the bee for years, Bailly is as recognizable as any TV announcer.

Past the convention center’s lobby and up a series of escalators is the “Hall of Champions,” a celebration of past winners and their words dating back to the first bee in 1925, including a massive banner depicting teenage Jacques Bailly, holding his trophy triumphantly overhead.

Beyond this cavernous hall is the ballroom, the place where bee magic happens. Spanning one side of the room is a massive, brightly lit stage, set with rows of chairs where spellers wait to be put to the test by Bailly and a panel of officials, who sit in a row facing the stage. In Bailly’s day, there were just one hundred contestants from around the United States.

In 2017, there were 275 spellers representing eleven different countries; Bailly says of those spellers, there are probably twenty-five who can spell just about anything.

No pressure.

Even in the early rounds of the competition, tensions run high. The contestants on stage shift in their seats, and the ballroom is filled with anxious family members and friends. Toward the front of the room, the younger brother of one contestant stands on a chair, muttering prayers under his breath with

eyes clamped shut and hands clasped. Just off-stage, in an area one mom calls the “sad couch,” an eliminated contestant and his family cling to each other in tears.

Some might wonder: is it too much pressure?

“When I teach classics, I always talk about this famous moment by Hesiod. He says there are two kinds of strife or competition. One is constructive, one is destructive. I think that we need to emphasize constructive competition, the kind where you’re in it to win, but you’re also in it to have other people challenge you, and it’s not a real challenge if you’re not wanting them to succeed, too. It’s a good lesson,” Bailly says.

It’s true that contestants root for one another. On stage, the bonds between them are evident. They exchange high-fives each time a speller gets a word correct. In the audience, eliminated spellers whisper to each other about syllable counts and Latin roots, the way you might expect children to whisper about playground drama. In all, the bee feels a bit like a brainy summer camp, a one-of-a-kind bubble that spellers are eager to return to, year after year. Here, they’re surrounded by their peers: the best and the brightest from around the world.

“It’s not important to me who wins or how they place. They’ve done all the studying we can get them to do. The learning has been done,” says Bailly. “I also think, you can win with grace or not, and you can go as far as you can go and do that with grace or not. It’s like, if you’re an entrepreneur and your first project fails, you have to get up and dust yourself off. You learn something. Getting up on stage in front of people, whether it’s people you know or it’s on national TV, it doesn’t seem to make a difference. That moment is inscribed in your memory, and handling that gracefully is something that’s inscribed in your soul.”

Recently, the media has focused on the number of highly successful Indian-American spellers in the bee. In fact, the last ten bees have been won by spellers of Indian descent, some of whom are firstgeneration. This drive and curiosity around language is something Bailly, a fellow first-generation American on his father’s side, can relate to. “Any

child who has another language hanging in the wings waiting to be used, it gives them a huge leg up,” says the classics professor. His father came to the United States from France in 1948, and he spent time as a child studying French and visiting his relatives overseas.

Bailly’s fifth grade teacher was the first to introduce him to the roots of words. That, says Bailly, turned on a whole network of thinking in his brain.

“Spelling is a gateway skill, and it opens the door to chemistry, to literary studies, to physics, to geography. It opens your mind to the fact that these concepts exist. Words become things that don’t scare you anymore.”

If you watch the spelling bee, you’ll probably hear many words you’ve never heard before. There’s something refreshing and exciting in the idea that there’s so much more to know about our world —from an Irish dance (rinkafadda) to nail fungus (onychomycosis) to a dress fabric (marocain, this year’s winning word).

As Professor Bailly points out, America is the only country in the world where you could really have a spelling bee, “because we have so many different mixed systems of spelling.” The bee serves as a reminder of this specialness. Language, at its core, is a reflection of all of its speakers, those past and present, an amalgamation of times and traditions, colorful and complicated. Encouraging people to expand their knowledge of language in a holistic way, says Bailly, is really what the bee is all about, not a trophy.

And, of course, the spelling bee also serves as a reminder that yes, there are probably eighth graders who are smarter than you.

VQ

1980, young Jacques Bailly takes the National Spelling Bee.

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UVM PEOPLE Karina Marshall-Goebel ’10

by Andrea Estey Photograph by Porter Gifford

TAKING FLIGHT

Why do so many astronauts return to Earth with blurred vision?

That’s the question Karina Marshall-Goebel ’10 aims to answer with her research on how long-term space travel impacts the human body, specifically our eyes.

While much has been done to understand other spaceflight side effects, the causes of vision issues have been elusive.

Marshall-Goebel is on a mission to change that. She’s focused on testing a hypothesis that microgravity, which enables us to float during spaceflight, may cause an increase in pressure around the brain. That pressure impacts eyes’ arteries, causing them to deform and vision to change.

This work has garnered the alumna international recognition, including a spot on the Forbes “30 Under 30 Science and Healthcare” list for 2017 in Europe. (She earned her master’s at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, and her doctorate at the University of Cologne in Germany.)

NEW FRONTIERS

“In high school, I found I enjoyed my science classes the most,” says Marshall-Goebel, who grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do after college. All I knew was that I loved science.”

The other thing she knew: “Being from the Midwest, I was craving an adventure, to experience a new part of the country.”

A guidance counselor recommended UVM, which turned out to be a perfect fit. “The proximity to great skiing didn’t hurt either,” Marshall-Goebel laughs.

She entered college with a commitment to get involved and dove in—orientation leader; orchestra (cello); crew team; TriBeta, the biological honors society; and, of course, hitting the slopes with the Ski & Snowboard Club.

A bio major/chem minor, Marshall-Goebel was on a pre-med path until things took a turn with a senior year comparative physiology class. “Studying the human body and how it functions was absolutely fascinating to me, and I knew immediately that I was hooked,” she says. “The freedom to take a variety of biology courses, from forensic biology to marine ecology, allowed me to discover what spoke to me the most and where my passion was.”

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NEXT STOP: MARS

Marshall-Goebel discovered space physiology as her “true calling” during her master’s work. “Understanding how the body works is one thing. Figuring out how the body adapts when you take away gravity is a whole different ballgame.” During an internship at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, she found her niche in eyesight.

Knowing why vision changes in space, and how we can prevent it, is not just key for a handful of astronauts on the International Space Station; it has huge implications for larger-scale human space travel, and, perhaps someday, the colonization of other planets. “I want to be part of the generation that pushes us to go to Mars, and makes it a reality,” Marshall-Goebel says.

Her work could also benefit Earthlings. In order to test her vision change hypothesis, Marshall-Goebel is using new, non-invasive technology that accurately measures pressure around the brain. If proven effective, this device could be useful for treating traumatic brain injury or glaucoma patients.

‘IN OUR BLOOD’

Currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, MarshallGoebel continues to research vision changes and test countermeasures. She’s also examining the influence that increased CO2 has on astronauts. “You can’t just open the window to get some fresh air up there!”

After helping to enable safe, long-term space travel, what’s next? “I hope to become a professor and pass on this knowledge to younger generations. And, of course, my ultimate goal is to fly in space,” Marshall-Goebel says.

“It’s in our blood, wanting to discover and explore new places. Just knowing that I can play a small role in that huge goal is really motivating.”

VQ

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A Out of the Fleming and onto the campus

ART Photography by Sally McCay

By Thomas Weaver

lumni across generations remember them as backdrop to their UVM years, part of the campus landscape sure as the red brick of Old Mill or the tall pines on the Green. The late professor Paul Aschenbach’s “Tree of Knowledge” in front of Bailey/Howe, the “Lamentations” statues striding through the locust tree grove on central campus, the “Kindred Spirits” cones on the Fleming Museum terrace.

But let’s come clean. Rattle off a list of public art pieces at UVM, and you need not pause to catch your breath.

President Tom Sullivan is changing that. He and his wife, Leslie Black Sullivan ’76, are art enthusiasts and serious collectors who met while serving on the board of the University of Minnesota’s Weisman Art Museum. In a higher education career that took him from Washington University in St. Louis to the University of Arizona to Minnesota prior to UVM, President Sullivan has gained a deep appreciation for the power of public art.

UNLOCKED, Christopher Curtis ’74 University Green Gift of Stephen and Petra Levin “Unlocked” is sited on the UVM Green, just steps away from the Williams Hall studio where the sculptor cut his first stone under the instruction of Professor Paul Aschenbach. Curtis counts the late professor among the most influential people in his life. His voice—“keep chugging, you’ll get there”—remains with Curtis as he takes on a new challenge or learns a new skill. One of Aschenbach’s hammers, passed along to Curtis by the professor’s family, is a prized possession. “A very personal tool I still use,” he says. “Of course, I think of him whenever I handle it.”

The artist is a native Vermonter, who has studied the geologic history of his home state. He counts “the discovery, selection, and recovery of the stone” as integral and enjoyable parts of his work process. “I take interest in the geological history of the stone I use as it helps contextualize humankind’s place in the natural world,” he says. “This is the core concept in my work.”

“Unlocked” is made of granite from Groton, Vermont, whiter than the famous Barre gray granite. Curtis says he sought “a classically shaped egg-like stone. Not exotic or flashy in figuring or shape. I knew the puzzle cutting was the essence and wanted to keep the focus on that.”

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FLUKES, Gordon Gund P ’91 ’93 Davis Center/Aiken Building Circle Gift of Gordon and Llura Gund Gordon Gund’s interest in sculpture traces to his childhood, attending Saturday morning art classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. He would study water color in college, become an avid photographer during four years in the U.S. Navy, and eventually find his way to sculpture when a friend introduced him to wood carving some thirty years ago. Gund increasingly turned his attention to art after retiring from a successful career in business and his family’s continuing philanthropic work, including support of UVM’s Gund Institute for Environment.

The sculptor, who is blind after losing his sight to retinitis pigmentosa in 1971, says, “While with my eyes I can’t see the shapes I create, I feel them over and over again with my hands and my mind, and the result is in my mind forever... It takes me more time and patience than most with sight and letting go is generally felt with more uncertainty. So, it is extremely satisfying to finish something that I have doubted along the way, woken up with in the middle of the night, spent a lot of time on and given a lot of love.”

The “Flukes” bronze at UVM is rooted in Gordon Gund’s experience helping to free pilot whales beached on Nantucket several years ago.

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SPARKLE PONY, Kat Clear ’01 Bailey/Howe Green, On loan from the artist Take a walk around Burlington and you’ll stumble across the diverse sculpture of UVM alumna artist Kat Clear—from a huge metal sewing machine and quilt suspended from a wall in the south atrium of the UVM Medical Center to quieter works such as a bike rack on lower Church Street. And, from the Davis Student Center to Foam Brewers on Lake Street, her signage and signature commercial work shows up all over town.

“Sparkle Pony,” installed near Bailey/Howe, is rooted in the sculptor’s love of “My Little Pony” as a child of the eighties. Clear calls the work a “kid’s dream in a grown-up world.”

That duality comes into play with the materials, a hide of artificial turf over a metal armature. “Turf is a great partner to metal because it holds up outdoors just as well, if not better,” Clear says. “Conceptually, the turf is super-alluring, the lush green, and reminds me of being barefoot in the grass on a lazy summer day.

But the reality is that turf is a bit itchy and scratchy, not as supple as real grass. Perhaps just like the fantasy of being able to jump into that television screen and hang out with my childhood ‘My Little Pony’ pals and suddenly realize I am not a kid anymore.”

Clear rattles off a list of the UVM artists/professors who influenced her—Bill Davison, Meg McDevitt, Kathleen Schneider, Frank Owen, Barbara Zucker, Ed Owre. “While they have almost all since retired, I am still in touch with some of them, which is truly a gift, in an artist’s or anyone’s life,” she says.

BUS BALL, Lars Fisk ’93 Hills/Marsh Life Science north entrance On loan from the artist Across the past twenty years, Lars Fisk has stretched the possibilities of sculptural spheres as a core element in his practice as an artist.

Parking lot ball. Subway ball. Storage locker ball.

Mister Softee ice cream truck ball, to name just a few. “Bus Ball”—complete with classic green vinyl seats inside, and tail lights that illuminate— complements the square lines of adjacent 1950sera Hills Building and sits near the just-opened residential complex on central campus.

Fisk’s career as an artist has included extensive stage set and festival design, working as art director with the UVM-born band Phish. His “Barn Ball,” featured on the cover of Phish’s 2002 CD “Round Room” is part of the Fleming Museum’s permanent collection, on display in the south lobby of the museum.

In a 2006 Vermont Quarterly article, Fisk considered how various ball projects have pushed him to tackle new materials and develop new skills. “I had to learn how to use metal. I had to learn how to sew vinyl. I had to learn how to make bricks out of mud so I could make my own curved bricks—and on and on and on from there. It was a lot of just winging it along the way, just learning as I went.”

“I see public art on a campus as a way to better understand and appreciate the value of the aesthetic. It’s much more democratic. We bring the art right to the people,” Sullivan says, adding that a student who has never visited the Fleming Museum might be inspired to step inside the galleries. “This is part of the educational and cultural experience at UVM.” Janie Cohen, longtime director of the university’s Fleming Museum, is President Sullivan’s partner on the project—identifying artists, works, and walking campus to scout just the right spot for a new piece. Some-

times that creates a certain academic resonance, the case with Gordon Gund’s bronze whale flukes in front of the Aiken Building, home of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and across Main Street from the Gund Institute for Environment.

Other works nudge a new orientation to campus.

Cohen smiles as she describes “Sparkle Pony,” a piece by alumna Kat Clear inspired by “My Little Pony,” a beloved part of many a Millenial childhood. Cohen likens the work to “simulated topiary.” A metal frame upholstered in artificial grass, “Sparkle” is built for that art-world FA L L 2 0 1 7 |

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ARETÉ BLU, Richard Erdman ’75 H’16 Davis Center, west entrance Gift of Richard and Madeleine Erdman Sculptor Richard Erdman has a long relationship with UVM, dating back to his undergraduate days when he worked with two legendary mentors—artist Paul Aschenbach, who helped him find his calling, and varsity ski coach Chip Lacasse, who helped develop him into a twotime All-American in alpine.

Post-graduation, apprenticeship with stone carvers in Carrara, Italy, would also be key to Erdman’s development as an artist. Today, his work is on display in museums, and corporate and private collections worldwide. His monumental sculpture “Passage” sits at the entrance to the Donald M. Kendall sculpture gardens at PepsiCo in Purchase, New York. Carved from a 450-ton block of travertine, the 25- by 16-foot “Passage” is the largest sculpture in the world carved from a single block of travertine.

Erdman says the gift of “Areté Blu” completes a full circle with his UVM experience, a symbol of what the university gave him as a student— “where individualism and risk-taking were encouraged, where education was not just an assimilation of facts, but the training of the mind to think and dream.” Describing the particular work, the sculptor says, “Its emotive and energetic stance beckons visitors to live actively, live dangerously, live passionately— and in its contiguous form, live in continuity.”

“Areté Blu” joins Erdman’s “Primavera,” a gift of the Class of 2010, situated outside Jeffords Hall. Erdman also recently gave the university two more pieces, “Confluence” and “Belladona,” that will go on display at a later date.

term “interaction.” To toddlers, whose campus childcare teachers have made the new sculpture a fieldtrip destination, that means climbing in the saddle.

Building the campus collection through donor gifts and works-on-loan, President Sullivan is focused on enhancement of public art among his priorities in the years ahead. “We’re taking this into a new realm,” he says. The president is pleased with the progress, noting how a work such as Chris Curtis’s “Unlocked” has created a new focal point on the Green. Often when he walks past, the president says, he finds students sitting near the sculpture talking, studying, or just taking a quiet moment—“It draws you in.”

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New York Times art critic Roberta Smith characterized public art as “a communal experience that is in some ways akin to movies or popular music in its accessibility.” And so it goes that each new piece of art installed on campus changes the communal experience of being a UVM student or alum just a bit.

Case in point: A graduation day photo of Michael Arnold ’17 in cap and gown, sitting proudly, and perfectly deadpan, on “Sparkle Pony” glanced across the Twitterverse. “Ride that Sparkle Pony into the sunset!” his friend Joe Craig wrote.

Michael may have been the first to grab this graduation day photo opp. He certainly won’t be the last. VQ

LAKE CHAMPLAIN

LAKE VIEW Crest the hill on Main Street and there sits Lake Champlain.

Welcome to Burlington.

Generations of UVM alumni remember that love at first sight and what it grew into across the years.

In this issue, we celebrate the lake with a look through the eyes of alumni, faculty, and students who know Lake Champlain as playground, workplace, laboratory, and passion.

By Joshua Brown, Sarah Tuff Dunn, Thomas Weaver Principal photography by Bear Cieri FA L L 2 0 1 7 |

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LAKE CHAMPLAIN

Boat captain has likely been scrawled on reams of “What I Want to Be When I Grow-Up” lists. Ferry boat captain on Lake Champlain? Not so much. It’s a rare vocation, deeply embedded with the landscape and history of the region, that crosses the radar of few.

But for Jerry Williams ’72 and Steve Pond ’73, a pair of locals drawn to the lake early in their lives, this profession essentially “found them.”

The pair of captains share a good deal in common.

Their long careers with Lake Champlain Transportation began as teenagers—Pond as a deckhand; Williams in the engine room as an “oiler.” They were UVM students during the same era—Williams earned his degree in business; Pond studied sociology before going all in with work on the lake after his junior year.

And there’s a core likeness in their characters— steady, unflappable, yes, even keel. The sort of person you want in the captain’s house of a 500-ton vessel full of vehicles and passengers crossing a deep, cold lake in a winter storm.

Pond is at the helm when Williams, who retired last year, joins him for a photo shoot and morning crossing of the lake from Burlington to Port Kent, New York.

They discuss the challenges of piloting a safe crossing,

THE CAPTAINS

Steve Pond, left, started work on the Lake Champlain ferries as deckhand; Jerry Williams, as an engine room oiler.

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the path of ice floes, the special trick of navigating heavy waves with a large log truck on board, stacked high and at risk of rolling over onto an adjacent Subaru.

“Maybe a couple of winters ago, it was blowing about sixty out of the south with ice in the lake,” Pond recalls. “You can do down into a wave and you chip off these chunks of ice that are the size of boulders and they wash on deck. You don’t really like those sliding around, smacking into cars.” Times like those, it’s the captain’s call to stay at dock.

The captains know what’s beneath the waves – from various shoals to one of Benedict Arnold’s sunken gunships (location top secret). And they know what likely isn’t down there. They can count on tourists’ questions about Champ. Their professional opinion: those mysterious ripples are more likely rogue wave than rogue reptile.

Both alums have a love for being on the water, at work or at play, that hasn’t been diminished by years of eleven-hour shifts. And they still aren’t immune to the splendor of Lake Champlain.

“What still takes my breath away sometimes is coming down College Street or Main from the top of the hill,” Williams says. “You see that metallic look down there. It’s beautiful.”

—TW

It’s 2:45 p.m. on Labor Day afternoon, with the remnants of Hurricane Harvey whipping across Lake Champlain, turning the sapphire-blue surface into a froth of whitecaps. An exhausted-looking man cleats his Laser to the dock at the Community Sailing Center, clearly beaten by the aggressive breeze. “Anybody want to sail?” he says, ironically.

“Yes!” says Caroline Patten with no trace of irony. As the coach of the UVM Sailing Team, she’s as game for the big gusts as the thirty-four athletes who’ve been prepping by smearing on sunscreen, gobbling up latelunch sandwiches, zipping up booties, and securing Helly Hansen gear to help keep the water at bay on this seventy-seven degree day.

On Lake Champlain four days a week from 2:45 until 6 p.m., traveling to four to six regattas on weekends and working out with a trainer two mornings a week, this team is as serious about sailing as Alabama is about football. What it lacks in varsity status, it more than makes up for in conviction, camaraderie, and showing how Catamounts can shine on these double-handed dinghies.

“Every single person on the team is highly competitive and wants to win,” says Lindsay Doyle ’19. “Eat,

BROAD REACH

“Some kids think it’s just a lake and don’t realize how hard it can blow.

It requires a tremendous amount of physical endurance as well as mental.”

Caroline Patten, UVM Sailing coach

sleep, homework and sail. Not too much time for anything else, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Team president Brittney Manning laughs when asked about the typical perception of sailing. “The expensive, ‘Let’s wear white linen and drink cocktails on a nice yacht’ kind of thing?” she says. “We find that comical because we know what we are doing is just as intense as any other sport.” The team does its own fundraising, and will soon be moving into Burlington’s new sailing center after years of working out of containers.

It’s not always this windy on the lake, of course.

Dead calm can reign, or rain can, or freezing sleet and snow. Two years ago, Manning was part of a crew that ventured out on February 2 to kick off the spring season, bailing ice out of the boats.

The payoff is not only national-class results, but also a remarkable sense of place for all members of the UVM Sailing Team. “Champlain is one of the absolute best venues in college sailing,” says Patten, explaining how training inside or outside of the breakwater can simulate a wide variety of conditions on lakes and oceans.

“For a big portion of our seasons, there are few other boats on the lake, so it feels like our own personal playground. We also get to see some pretty epic sunsets over the Adirondacks.”

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LAKE CHAMPLAIN

ADIRONDACKS BOUND In the late nineteenthcentury, as Northeast city dwellers began to travel north in search of solitude, the sublime, and the cure-all of bracing mountain air, the Adirondacks became a key destination, according to Dona Brown, professor of history and author of Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century.

In those days, Champlain was part of the journey, but likely not the destination.

Train or steamboat to Burlington, maybe an overnight, then across the lake to the allure of the High Peaks.

“The Adirondacks were not just a scenic destination, they were the focus of wilderness travel, healthrelated wilderness tours, not just for tuberculosis, but for psychological illness, neurasthenia, sleeplessness, overwork, stress,” Brown says. “The Adirondacks were touted as being a great cure for all of those—the anticivilization cure, breathe the balsam in the air, fish and hunt like your ancestors.”

Brown suggests that the lake and its Vermont shores may have been slow to develop as tourist destinations because the waterfront was still very much a working landscape in many places.

—TW

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As Pennie Beach ’67 reflects on the Vermont Legacy Achievement Award she recently learned Basin Harbor will receive from UVM’s Grossman School of Business, she jokes, “We’re the old guys on the block.”

Yankee humility aside, true enough. It would be tough to find a family business in Vermont with deeper roots and more closely tied to the Vermont landscape than Basin Harbor, a postcard-perfect lakeside resort in Vergennes whose ownership dates back across four generations to the 1880s.

It all begins with Great Aunt Ardelia, says Pennie Beach, over breakfast in the lodge dining room named for Ardelia herself. After years working in Iowa as a school administrator, Ardelia Beach staked her claim back in Vermont when she bought 200 acres of the original Basin Harbor property for $4,000 in an 1882 tax sale.

Four years later, she made good on her plan to return to Vermont, enlarge the windows in the lodge so “people could really see the lake,” and transform it into a resort.

Pennie Beach’s grandfather, Allen Penfield Beach, UVM Class of 1911, set the course for what Basin Harbor has become today—600 acres, an eighteen-hole golf course, marina, space for 400 guests in the lodge and individual cottages, a prime wedding locale. “A.P. was a very entrepreneurial guy, a polymath,

really,” Beach says. Her grandfather started work as a hired hand at Basin Harbor during his sophomore year of college, and the farm boy from down the road like what he found. “He used to tell people that he was tired of playing chambermaid to a cow: he’d much rather get into the people business,” Beach says.

When Aunt Ardelia passed away in 1909, A.P. convinced his parents to buy the property.

He would soon set plans into action with ingenious, simply built cottages, and a golf course carved out via horse-powered earth moving equipment.

Today, Pennie Beach oversees operations; her brother Bob runs the physical plant; they’ve shared management since taking over from their parents in 1990. In recent years, she’s had the pleasure of also working with her daughter, Sarah Morris, the fifth generation of Beaches on the management team. “Everyone should be as lucky,” Pennie says.

Asked how Basin Harbor has changed during her leadership years, Beach says what many legacy guests love about the place is that it doesn’t change. Yes, there are the twenty-first century necessities like WiFi. But, more importantly, when sitting in an Adirondack chair gazing across at Split Rock Mountain, there’s the sense the steamboat Ticonderoga might still come chugging up the lake.

—TW

family tradition

COURTESY BASIN HARBOR CLUB

wild trout return About two miles southwest of the Burlington breakwater, Ellen their first weeks of life, and, in the spring, leave their spawning Marsden leans over the stern of the RV Melosira, waiting for fish. reefs to go to deep water. “And then we never see them again,” Two reels take up the steel cable of an incoming trawling net and Marsden says, and—though she’s been investigating this mystery soon the professor is helping her technicians and students dump a for two decades—“we don’t know why.” squirming, liquid-silver mass of life onto a processing table on the At least that was the story until 2015. That year, Marsden and back of the research boat. others began to find wild trout in their net surveys, above twenty She’s hauled up several species of fish, some tiny Mysis shrimp, percent of the total catch. Last year, it was about a third. “So far this plus one sea lamprey, but much of the haul is trout—lake trout. year, we’re about fifty percent wild fish,” Marsden says—though “One, seven, five. Unclipped,” she calls out a few minutes later, she cautions that this rising statistic could be as much about measuring one of the trout along a ruler. She tosses it into a plas- where the Melosira is trawling as it is about fish populations. tic bag for freezing and later dissection. She’s been quizzing these Marsden is exploring several reasons for why lake trout, Salvestudents, enrolled in her Fisheries Biology & Techniques course, linus namaycush—a native species that disappeared from Lake about trout anatomy—but she’s conducting research at the same Champlain by 1900—has “stunningly, unexpectedly returned,” time. she says. Her favorite hypothesis now is that changes in the base And she’s very excited about what she’s found on this hot Sep- of the food web—particularly, rebounding populations of those tember afternoon. Of the seventeen lake trout the team caught in Mysis shrimp she held up with her fingernails to show her stuthis haul, not one had a clipped fin—meaning it didn’t come from dents—have given the trout a new start. “But we don’t know. a state fish hatchery. In other words, wild lake trout are starting That’s why we call it research,” she says. to reproduce again in Lake Champlain. “One hundred percent of “Why is the return of these fish important? “ asks Marsden, a these trout are wild,” she says with her distinctive grin and rem- professor of fisheries in the Rubenstein School of Environment nants of an English accent. and Natural Resources. “Because it’s a sign of recovery. If lake trout “Since 1972, the state has been stocking trout in can recover after forty-five years of trying, it’s possible to the lake. Eighty thousand a year for the past recover other species too, here in Champlain twenty years,” she tells her students. and in the Great Lakes. You take the presThese hatchery fish find mates and sure off, you take the insults off the “If lake trout can recover after forty-five food, they deposit eggs, and system—and the creatures will years of trying, it’s possible to recover other species too, the eggs hatch. The young come back.”

—JB here in Lake Champlain and in the Great Lakes.” fry find food too, survive Professor Ellen Marsden

JOSHUA BROWN

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CHANGING CLIMATE, CHANGING LAKE

What makes some parts of the Lake Champlain Basin resilient in the face of extreme weather events, increasingly common in a warming Vermont, while other parts fail to recover and rebound?

In 2016, a $20 million award from the National Science Foundation to Vermont EPSCoR provided funding to help answer that question, generating critical information for decisionmakers as they govern the region and develop policies that reach far into the future.

The five-year project supports research teams from UVM and colleges across the state that will collect data from sensors in streams, soil, and the lake and gather information on adjacent land use.

A computer model will then be created, integrating all three information sources. The model will be used to test management scenarios and identify strategies for maintaining infrastructure, environmental health, and drinking water quality in the event of intense storms.

A team of scientists from UVM’s College of Engineering & Mathematical Sciences and Rubenstein School flew drones with cameras over four rivers in central Vermont that dump sediment into Lake Champlain.

Their study offers watershed managers a new way, says Scott Hamshaw G’06, an engineer and post-doctoral researcher, “for reliably quantifying streambank erosion over relatively large areas more efficiently and with less resources than is available through current surveying methods.”

DO IT WITH DRONES

human, and economic health of the region.

These resources are often key to a wide array of lake research critical to the ecological,

Some research has pointed a finger at eroding streambanks, vilifying their washed-out soils as a major source of phosphorus pollution that triggers algae blooms in many lakes—including Champlain. But ongoing studies by Don Ross, in the Department of Plant & Soil Science, complicates that picture. In a 2015 study of Chittenden County streams—and a forthcoming study in the Missisquoi watershed—Ross shows that, indeed, eroding streambanks may increase the raw-total amount of phosphorus in the lake. But, unexpectedly, these soils, floating in the water, might soak up more phosphorus than they release—altering its form so that algae can’t use it as fertilizer.

Without more study, Ross worries that the efforts of regulators might decrease total phosphorus going into Lake Champlain, but, “there could be just as much bioavailable phosphorus coming in.”

WHY IS THE BEACH CLOSED?

the back door, the Melosira, UVM’s research vessel, takes faculty and students onto the broad lake.

for research and teaching in aquatic and watershed ecology. And, from a slip right outside

the Rubenstein Ecosystem Science Laboratory is UVM’s not-so-secret weapon

At the foot of College Street, on the shore of Lake Champlain,

LABORATORY

LAKE

SUMMER 2016 |

ONE WORLD, MANY LAKES

PRICE ON CLARITY

BANKS TOO GREEN TO FAIL “There’s a lot of talk about how much we spend on upgrading wastewater treatment plants,” says UVM geographer Beverley Wemple, “but what’s the value of planting trees and restoring wetlands?” The Vermont chapter of The Nature Conservancy is working with her, engineering prof Arne Bomblies, conservation expert Taylor Ricketts and other Fellows at UVM’s Gund Institute for Environment to explore which green infrastructure investments promise the most return for Lake Champlain. “Our model is looking at nature-based interventions along riparian zones to see what is going to work best—and where—for improving water conditions in the floodplain while protecting against flooding,” Wemple says, “and, ideally, capturing phosphorus too.”

Christine Vatovec, an interdisciplinary scientist with appointments in both the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and UVM College of Medicine, is leading efforts to study the presence and impact of prescription drugs—antibiotics to antidepressants—flushed down toilets and, potentially, eventually into Lake Champlain.

“There are 70,000 to 100,000 new chemicals in our environment that were not invented when wastewater treatment plants were designed a hundred years ago,” Vatovec says.

“It’s impossible to know yet what these chemicals mean for Lake Champlain—so we’re trying to figure that out.” Her research program is following the circular path in both directions—out into the ecosystem and back to human medical care. “The part I’m most passionate about,” she says, “how do we prevent overprescribing?”

WHAT’S IN THE WATER?

Everyone likes clear lake water, but what’s it worth? A 2016 study by UVM faculty and students found that Vermont lakeside communities would lose nearly $17 million in economic activity and two hundred full-time jobs—in July and August alone—for every one-meter decrease in water clarity. The study was the first to investigate the relationship between home prices, tourism, and Lake Champlain’s appearance.

Lake Champlain and Shelburne Pond are two of nearly two hundred lakes and ponds around the world that form GLEON, the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network.

The grassroots organization is building a web—from Antarctica to Brazil to Finland— of floating platforms and other sensors that gather long-term data about lakes’ changing conditions. Then they share that data in near-real time. Four UVM researchers have been participating in GLEON—UVM graduate Lisa Borre ’86 now helps lead GLEON’s efforts as a research specialist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. The researchers are hunting for signals of how slo-mo shifts in climate and land use—and sudden disturbances, like hurricanes—change the life and chemistry of lakes.

ON THE NETWORK

Jason Stockwell, associate professor and director of the Rubenstein Ecosystem Science Laboratory, will conduct research at France’s Freshwater Ecology Lab on Lake Geneva during the spring semester. Stockwell, a Fulbright Scholar, will partner with fellow international scientists to study storm impacts on twentyfive lakes in Europe, Asia, South America, and North America. “The research will enable us to put Lake Champlain in context, to see where we are on the spectrum of how storms impact lakes,” Stockwell says. “We’ll contribute to knowledge in this area, but also be able to take new insights from the work and apply them to Lake Champlain.”

SALLY MCCAY

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LAKE CHAMPLAIN

“Too important to be made into road gravel”

Near Quarry Road on Isle La Motte—the northernmost island in Lake Champlain—geologist Char Mehrtens crawls slowly over a gray wedge of bedrock.

Two fat raindrops splat down, making the limestone look black where it’s wet. Mehrtens doesn’t look up, her silver hair and hand lens just inches over the rock.

“Oh, here’s an excellent one,” she says, and traces her fingers over a pale scar that winds outward to form a spiral nearly as big as her hand. “This is the index fossil for these rocks,” she says, sitting up on her knees and smiling, “It’s Maclurides magnus. When you see this large snail, you know you’re in the Chazy Reef.”

The study of geology makes even the bedrock seem as gauzy as cotton candy. “The lake is not a permanent feature of the landscape,” says Mehrtens, gesturing west toward the shoreline hidden behind a row of cedars and an incoming bank of storm clouds. Over the last 20,000 years, Lake Champlain—“our little bathtub,” says Mehrtens— has shape-shifted from a 900-foot-deep pool of glacial meltwater, to the salty Champlain Sea swimming with beluga whales as far west as Ottawa, to its current form.

But these dramatic changes took no more than a “frame or two,” Mehrtens says, in the long film of Earth’s history. About 460 million years ago, where we sit, near the Canadian border, was a magnificent

CHAZY FOSSIL REEF

In 2009, portions of these Champlain Islands were designated National Natural Landmarks.

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reef under the shallow warm waters of the Chazy Sea, part of the ancient Iapetus Ocean—and located far south of the equator where Zimbabwe now stands.

This reef stretched for more than a thousand miles, from what is now Labrador to Tennessee, perhaps a bit like today’s Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Mehrtens, professor of geology at UVM since 1981, has been studying this fossilized reef for decades. “People often refer to this as the world’s oldest coral reef,” Mehrtens says, “but that’s not quite right—since coral had only begun to appear. The reef-building here was done by other creatures, like bryozoa and stromatoporoids,” whose skeletons of calcium carbonate piled up in mounds that slowed the incoming waves, and provided many niches and hidey-holes for a profusion of other sea species, like echinoderms and brachiopods, trilobites and cephalopods.

Merhtens wrote a scientific report, and led a multiyear effort, to petition the National Park Service to draw public attention to the remarkable reef. Her efforts paid off in 2009 when portions of three islands in Lake Champlain were dedicated as the Chazy Fossil Reef National Natural Landmark. “That’s probably the work that I’m most proud of,” she says. The oldest reef in the world—revealing a pivotal moment in the evolution of life, our first record of multiple organisms collectively building a structure that modified their environment—is, as Mehrtens says, “just too important to be made into road gravel.”

—JB JOSHUA BROWN

“NOCTURNE” When we go below, we almost expect to see the stars, mirrored by the surface so vividly at night, fixed in their places along the bottom.

The big fish—the elegant pike, avuncular channel cat, the lordly muskellunge—they graze the hillsides around and below us like cattle.

The little fish—shiners in a school, tessellated darters scattering like grace notes on a score so the silence appears to have secret music, appears even to have birds.

Are there seasons here?

Like storm clouds, the hulls of boats.

An occasional swimmer in flight.

Are dusk and dawn the same?

There are no pedestrians, no panhandlers, no streetlights.

No distant porchlight but the moon.

Small boats, moored along the bottom, appear homesick to those of us who love our homes. We listen for fishcalls, as if a pumpkinseed were a flugelhorn. But these corridors of mud are silent as catacombs.

daniel lusk

Lake Studies: Meditations on Lake Champlain

Published by Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, 2011 Poet Daniel Lusk is a senior lecturer emeritus in English.

ELLEN MARSDEN, BY R.O.V. (REMOTELY OPERATED VEHICLE)

LAKE CHAMPLAIN

As executive director of the Lake Champlain Committee, Lori Fisher ’81 guides multiple efforts that steward the well-being of this vast resource— from marshalling volunteers to monitor cyanobacteria (and dipping water samples herself) to establishing a forty-campsite paddlers’ trail to enhance lake access and foster appreciation.

“People care about what they get to play on and use,” Fisher says. With a watershed the size of New Jersey, spanning two states and two countries, home to 571,000 humans, Lake Champlain needs many caring partners taking personal action and pushing public policy.

Fisher and the lake are in a long-term relationship. An English major at UVM, she initially connected with the Lake Champlain Committee on a book project. Since then, Fisher figures she has held every position within the organization.

There was a break in there, a couple of years not long after college, when Fisher backpacked in Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. The latter, in particular, showed her the multiple negative impacts triggered by a scarcity of clean water. The experience deepened her resolve to protect what we have in Vermont.

“Flying back into Burlington and seeing the lake, there was this almost gravitational pull, this feeling I was home,” she says. “That has always stayed with me. I feel lucky to be able to work on a cause that is so fundamental to our quality of life in this region.”

—TW

THE ADVOCATE

“The lake is, directly and indirectly, so much a driver for our quality of life.

Water is so fundamental to our community health and the health of the ecosystem here.”

Lori Fisher, Executive Director, Lake Champlain Committee

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1.

Lake Champlain flows south.

True or False

10.

2.

Lake Champlain is part of the Atlantic Flyway, a major migratory corridor. Approximately how many birds travel up and down the lake each spring and fall? a) 10,000 b) 40,000 c) 100,000 d) 150,000

the

9.

During the War of 1812, a British squadron fired on Battery Park from the lake. During this era, UVM shut down and troops were housed on campus. Which building served as a barracks? a) Old Mill b) Chittenden-Buckham-Wills c) Royall Tyler Gymnasium d) None of the above

LAKE QUIZ

3.

Lake Champlain’s greatest depth equals: a) Half the height of Ira Allen bell tower b) The height of Ira Allen bell tower c) Twice the height of Ira Allen bell tower d) Twice the height of Ira Allen bell tower, plus a stack of fourteen Ira statues

BATTERY PARK TO BURBOT Test your knowledge of all things Lake Champlain

8.

The Abenaki believe that this tiny island in Lake Champlain is the physical manifestation of Ood-zee-hozo, the creator of the lake. It is commonly known as: a) Juniper Island b) Rock Dunder c) Hen Island d) Carleton’s Prize

7.

In square miles, Lake Champlain’s watershed is approximately the same size as: a) Connecticut b) Hawaii c) New Jersey d) Delaware

6.

The Battle of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain, Oct. 11, 1776, was one of the first naval battles of the American Revolutionary War. The American fleet was led by: a) Alexander Hamilton b) Benedict Arnold c) Marquis de Lafayette d) Ethan Allen

This celebrated author once said the two finest sunset views are Italy’s Bay of Naples and Lake Champlain from Battery Park: a) Mark Twain b) Rudyard Kipling c) Henry James d) Edith Wharton e) W. Somerset Maugham

4.

Ninety-three fish species are found in Lake Champlain. Among the species listed below, which is not found in Lake Champlain? a) Burbot b) Northern Hog Sucker c) Tessellated Darter d) Bluefin Tuna e) Slimy Sculpin

5.

If the average volume of water in Lake Champlain, 6.8 trillion gallons, were placed in one-gallon milk jugs (six inches wide), and those jugs were placed side-by-side, how many times would they circle the Earth at the Equator (24,901 miles)? a) 25,860 b) 15,615 c) 31,223 d) 8,964

Answer key is on page 62.

Thanks to the ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain and the Lake Champlain Basin Program for information used in creating this quiz.

| ALUMNI WEEKEND

Memory Lane Alumni Weekend 2017

As the hub of Alumni Weekend 2017, UVM

Alumni House was abuzz from morning till night October 6-8 as Catamounts descended upon campus to relive their UVM memories. “Zero-year” reunion celebrants from the class of 2017 joined alumni from every decade, including three representatives from the Class of 1947 back on campus for their 70th Reunion. Young and old alike enjoyed a fabulous array of fall activities including soccer games, Lake Champlain cruises, campus tours, the dedication of new headquarters for UVM Rescue, and 75-cent ice cream cones from the UVM Dairy Bar reboot at the Davis Center. Classmates celebrated at old haunts like What Ale’s You and Metronome and enjoyed old favorites like a special performance by Bootless and Unhorsed, a.k.a. the Irish Happy Hour Band, and late-night Kountry Kart Deli rise and shiner sandwiches. All told, thousands came back to join in the fun and bask in the Green and Gold glow.

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SALLY MCCAY, BRIAN JENKINS, ANDY DUBACK, UVM PARENT KRISTIN SHEA, SARA FENTON ‘08

FA L L 2 0 1 7 |

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| BACK ON CAMPUS

NATALIE DIBLASIO ’11 Natalie DiBlasio’s fast-track career in journalism began with her reluctant enrollment in a news-writing class taught by Chris Evans, adviser to the Vermont Cynic student newspaper. Reluctant because DiBlasio actually wanted to be in a different course, with a grant writing focus, that was fully enrolled.

But that Plan B moment set her path when DiBlasio took Evans’s bait of extra credit for publishing in the Cynic. Her first two articles, with focuses on Seasonal Affective Disorder lights in the Davis Center and a student safety incident in a residence hall, helped motivate institutional change. Writing the stories and their aftermath sparked two key revelations. “People in charge aren’t right about absolutely everything that they’re doing?” she deadpans. And DiBlasio saw the impact journalism could have in effecting change.

A journalist was born, and Evans had a future editor for the Cynic. “I turned into a machine for asking questions,” the alumna remembers from her student journalist years.

DiBlasio’s high-voltage energy and deeply rooted curiosity — “I want to know as much as I can about

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everything in the world” no less—has served her well in a career that began as a reporter at USA Today.

Earlier this year, she moved to WIRED, where she is head of social media, leading efforts to adapt the publication’s content to ever-emerging platforms and ever-broadening audiences.

DiBlasio returned to campus in mid-August to add her voice to the 2017 Honors College Faculty Seminar, “Journalism in a Post-Fact Age.” The issues, of course, are acutely relevant across disciplines at this point in history. And, as many at the university explore the possibility of enhancing journalism study options, particularly relevant to the academic evolution of UVM. If there’s one lesson that journalism-focused students and curriculum-focused faculty might take from DiBlasio’s comments, it’s that today’s and tomorrow’s journalists must be versatile, nimble, and poised for rapid change. At USA Today, DiBlasio’s standard production involved writing stories, tweeting, shooting and editing video, among other duties. Looking ahead to her return home to San Francisco from the Vermont trip, DiBlasio jokes that there will be four new social media platforms by the time she returns to the WIRED offices.

SALLY MCCAY

CLASS NOTES Life beyond graduation

UVM ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

GREEN &GOLD REUNION

October 5-7, 2018

Classes 1933 – 1964 alumni.uvm.edu/ reunion

33-40

Green & Gold Reunion October 5-7, 2018

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

41

Albert “Bert” Thayer ’73 writes that his father, Donald W. Thayer passed away in Winchester, Massachusetts, on February 2, 2017. He was a U.S. Army veteran, had the rank of Captain (Reserves) and served in both World War II and Korea. Patrica Nye shares, “My dad, Frank Nye, is now 99 and enjoying assisted living in a gorgeous facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Above his bed is a panoramic photo of UVM. He cherishes his association with UVM. Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

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

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After not a word for about nine years, I had a surprise phone call from my former "roomie", Mary Butler Bliss, of Taunton, Massachusetts. There is always hope some-

one will heed my pleas and communicate. Mary, a former very successful Latin teacher, noticed in my last column that I was now living with my son Mike.

She thought that it was quite a coincidence that she too was living with her son, Mike. Mary, always lots of fun, has not changed a bit. In spite of a few physical problems, she is undaunted! I had to contact Daan Zwick a few weeks ago since I needed some information about a member of our class. Daan is the "man to go to". He has an amazing memory.

Daan is living at Valley Manor in Rochester, New York, continuing his lifelong pursuit of knowledge, and taking in all the musical presentations at the Eastman School of Music. He misses his wife, Janis, but continues to be a valuable member of his community. I hope this column will encourage others to get in touch. A la prochaine!

Send your news to— June Hoffman Dorion 16 Elmwood Drive Rutland, VT 05701 junedorion@gmail.com

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Barbara Hall Howe celebrated her 94th birthday on July 4. She lives at the dairy farm her son Robert owns and would like to note her family of UVM alumni: Nancy Howe Rogers '77; Susan Howe Wood '76 and her husband, Steve Wood '74; and grandchildren Rachel Wood Cohen ’10, Abigail Wood ’12, and Lucy Howe ’13.

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

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

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Send your news to— Mrs. Harriet Bristol Saville 468 Church Road, #118 Colchester, VT 05446 hattiesaville@comcast.net

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Send your news to— Louise Jordan Harper 573 Northampton Street Holyoke, MA 01040 louisejordanharper@gmail.com

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

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Send your news to— Gladys Clark Severance 2179 Roosevelt Highway Colchester, VT 05446 severance@bsad.uvm.edu

50

In the Times Argus obituaries, I was sad to read about the death of our classmate Newell Curtis. When I wrote a condolence note to his wife, Jane Curtis, with a contribution for Heifer International, she wrote me a note, giving me permission to pass on what she wrote to me. My late husband, Charlie Ballantyne, FA L L 2 0 1 7 |

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| CLASS NOTES and I were volunteers for two months a year for thirteen years for what was then called the Heifer Project. Jane Curtis wrote that Newell had been one of what was then called the cowboys. He and a friend had accompanied a planeload of animals to Cochabama, Bolivia in 1964. He was so impressed about the good the organization did with the gift of the animals, that he continued to support the organization all of his life. Charlie and I, and now I, continue by raising money for Heifer International every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I get help from others in my church. We announce ahead of time that we will be accepting donations for Heifer International in honor of a family member or friend.

When we get a donation, we give a card that they can send to show they have given a gift in the recipient's honor. In the last few years we were able to send anywhere from more than three thousand dollars to five thousand dollars. If you want to find out the details of how to do something like this in your church, you are welcome to write and ask me about it. Also, please continue to send me any news about what you are doing these days as we all get older.

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

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Sylvia Heininger Holden, who lives in Burlington, called to tell me that Dagmar Mollekamp from Germany, who studied with us our senior year and was mentioned in this column recently, is a woman. Imagine my embarrassment when Dagmar herself wrote, “I thought it was funny to have me mentioned as ‘he.’” She also writes, “I enjoyed my 91st birthday, not exactly being strong but managing activities at a reduced rate with small trips within Germany.”

Dagmar sure was a good sport about my faux pas.

Jean Farr Semonite wrote that her husband, Bill Semonite passed away recently. She also shared, “Bill and I were so proud when our son Todd was promoted to a three star General. Todd and his wife are living in the Washington, D.C., area so the family including three great-grandchildren with another on the way can get together there. Last summer I was able to visit the longtime home in Bellows Falls, Vermont, that Bill and I shared for many years. Todd and his family now enjoy that same home part of the year and it made me happy to see the home is still in the family.” It was sad to learn from two of our classmates' husbands that their wives had passed recently. William Snyder wrote that Elouie Farnsworth Snyder died in January 2016 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Bill also wrote, “Elouie was a good Army wife for over 25 years and a wonderful mother for our three children. She was a loyal Vermonter and UVM graduate, despite never having had the opportunity to live in the state.” Bill mentioned that Elouie had kept up with Janet Putnam Spaulding, who had been her UVM roommate. He also said he enjoys receiving the Vermont Quarterly magazine. Edwin V. Post wrote that Betty Davison Post died in December 2016 from the consequences of ALS disease after 65 years of marriage.

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They married in September following graduation and then moved west to Washington for graduate school. Betty was one of the three home economics students in our class honored by membership in a national academic honor society. Later, Betty and Ed moved to the Denver area where they reared their two sons and a daughter. After retiring from real estate, Betty developed a keen interest in her ancestors and became an accomplished genealogist. She authored two books, Early Mill Families of Vermont and The Founding Families of Craftsbury, Vermont about her birthplace. Ed wrote, "In spite of living 'out west' for so many years, Betty and I maintained strong feelings for Vermont and were able to return occasionally, especially during foliage season.” Laura M. Smith writes, “Alan Smith and I have a new great-grandson just born in Atlanta. We are in a retirement community and still very active with local events and organizations.”

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

52

Stanley C. Faryniarz writes, “I would appreciate hearing from any members of the 1952 baseball team under Coach Ralph Lapointe.” Robert “Bob” H. Leavitt shares, “Sixty-five years ago I graduated (65 years? You mean I could retire!?) Someone once said, ‘Where have the years gone?’ Answer: this 87-year-old guy has no idea… but they have gone!” William Gretchell Robinson passed away in Hackettstown, New Jersey, on August 17, 2017.

He was a football player and a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity.

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

53

Larry Kellem writes, “With regret, I wish to inform UVM that Cynthia Swartz Kellem died on July 9, 2016 from lung cancer. Cynthia loved her time at UVM and it is also a fond memory for me as I visited often.” Arthur G. Sarlat shares that he is traveling

by RV as an octogenarian. He was in Alaska in 2015 and Niagara Falls in 2016. He has been through the Florida Everglades, Big Cypress Swamp, over to the West Coast and back to metro Denver/Aurora in 2017 with more to come.

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

54

Patricia Diego writes, “In midAugust, the 1954 class of home economics was represented by Nancy Spaulding Hitchcock, Ruth Pestle, Carolyn Davis Stone and me at our annual get-together which began in 1990 and, in later years, was joined

by UVM professor Marion Brown Thorpe ’38 who named us ‘We5.’ She has been sadly missed since her passing in 2016.” Last fall, a small group of Pi Phis met at the home of Cynthia Stafford Mac-

Donald in Montpelier, Vermont, for an old-fashioned sleepover. Traveling to Montpelier for the event was Lou Ewart Long of Orchard Park, New York; Nancy Burden Tapley of Groton, Connecticut; Martha “Marty” Marvin Kelley of Exeter, New Hampshire; and Nancy Buchheim Beauchamp from Rutland. Lots of laughs, memories and news mixed with good food made for a terrific visit. These Pi Phis, plus others from the class, have been getting together for the last 63 years!

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

55

Babette Nichols Cameron shares, “I had a lovely visit here in Oceanville with classmate Joanie Wislocki MacKenzie and her husband, Brett, in June. We walked on the beach and chatted about old times skiing at Stowe and a memorable bike trip one summer in Europe. Joanie is an accomplished artist whose oil paintings are displayed in parts of New England and also in D.C!” Send your news to— Jane Morrison Battles Apt. 125A, 500 East Lancaster Avenue Wayne, PA 19087 janebattles@yahoo.com Hal Lee Greenfader Apt. 1, 805 South Le Doux Road Los Angeles, CA 90035 halisco@att.net

56

Robert E. Benoit writes, “After 40 years of teaching, administration, and conducting environmental microbiology research at Virginia Tech, my wife and I moved to a great retirement community near campus. I will celebrate my 55th year of teaching when I lead a biomedical ethics course this fall. I am grateful to the many excellent faculty at UVM who were great teaching mentors. Friends at the Waterman coffee shop, the Billings Library, Agronomy Department, UVM Band, and the Owl House provided a great college experience.” Paul J. Kalis writes, “I just celebrated my 53rd anniversary with Marilyn in the Berkshires at Tanglewood. Beautiful music and cultural events. Luckily, we have eight grandchildren living near us with the oldest one heading for college. Would love to hear from classmates, particularly from my TEP brothers.” Nancy Valentine Gardner writes that she in now residing in Carlsbad, California, at La Costa Glen, a residential community where she is enjoying retirement, the Southern California area, her nearby family and playing lots of bridge. She writes, “A chance encounter in an elevator with a fellow resident who was wearing a UVM t-shirt brought me together with Joyce Shiner Dietz, also a graduate of the UVM School of Nursing, Class of 1956. We have shared memories of our years in Burlington at UVM, our subsequent careers in nursing, and have forged a special ongoing friendship. A photo from my 80th birthday party is posted on the Alumni Association Flickr

photo gallery.”

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

57

Laura A. Lovett shares, “I graduated 60 years ago, married Thomas F. Lovett ’58 and we have six children, 20 grandchildren, and soon to be 12 great-grandchildren. Our children and grandchildren have earned degrees from many schools: UVM, Brown University, Ithaca College, Providence College, Merrimack College, Assumption College, Boston College, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Tufts University, Plymouth College, and UNH. Many have earned their master's, and one a doctorate. We have been very blessed in our life and our family. None of us are wealthy monetarily, but wealthy in many other ways. I write this not in a prideful way, though I am proud, but in a testament to our faith in God's goodness to us.” Martin A. Danoff writes that he celebrated his 82nd birthday in September. He is still practicing law with the firm of Montgomery McCracken on Madison Avenue in New York City.

He was not able to attend his Reunion at UVM as his wife, Judge Susan Danoff, took him to Paris for his birthday. He sends his love to all his 1957 classmates. John O. Kenney died December 19, 2016.

He is survived by his wife, five children, and 10 grandchildren. John taught English, speech, and drama and directed plays for three years in Pitts-

ford, Vermont, and 40 years in Meriden, Connecticut. He was active in both his church and his community. Susan Wakefield Cochran writes, “I have continued to work with the League of Women Voters and I am working sporadically on a family history. I visited my sister, Ann Wakefield Lanzet ’61, in Burlington with my husband, Carter. We enjoyed visiting the beautiful historic Alumni House. I am privileged to spend time with family here including my 9-year-old granddaughter, Ava, as my daughter lives just twenty minutes away. She has five children, all on their own now, except Ava, who have made our lives very interesting. John, 19, is playing football with City College of San Francisco, so we may go out to see him. My son, Carter, Jr., and I went to view the solar eclipse, all the way to Beatrice, Nebraska. Then we traveled to Laramie, Wyoming to check out our small mountain property near there. We keep busy with attending the Annapolis Symphony and the National Opera. I sing in the Annapolis Chorale, partly so my family will go to the concerts and get a dose of culture. We would be glad to see classmates who come to the Washington area. I was sorry to learn that John Burgess '57, who was president of the UVM Student Association, died, as well a former boyfriend, Neal Kopp '57. Two good people.”

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

58

Bill Treene is sad to report that Mike Turianski, a member of Delta Psi, passed away on June 16, 2017. Mike was living in Richmond, Virginia. Stephen S. Rozen writes, “I did a teaching mission to Guatemala with University of Connecticut dental students in June.

I also took all my family for my 80th to Grand Cayman and dove four times to 100 feet. Not bad for 80.

I am getting a Florida dental license to give oral surgery for a charity clinic in Naples. Can't stop working!” Carol Conner Frei shares, “We are looking forward to the graduation in May of a grandson from UVM.” Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

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Sad news about Ed Thorn ’60, of Daytona Shores, Florida, who died August 17 after a long illness. Ed was a close friend who roomed across the hall from me at the Sigma Nu house. A well-polished Deerfield boy, he was a rough-and-tumble type of guy who enjoyed going on “dimey runs” along College Street on Saturday afternoons. We double-dated, drove his car over the frozen ice in the middle of the winter where we swilled beers and laughed with the gals.

In the springtime, he had a motorbike that he drove up the steps at Redstone. Okay then, but not now.

After graduation, we hooked up several times in New York City and places in Jersey. More recently,

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200 WAKE ROBIN DRIV E, SHEL BURN E, V ERMO N T

| CLASS NOTES Judy and I visited Ed and Linda at Daytona Shores, where we reminisced over more beers, not really knowing where to start. What a life! A few days ago, my wife Judy and I returned from an unforgettable three-week riverboat cruise on the Danube. Started in Prague, then Nuremberg where we boarded the boat. We visited a lot of towns and some notable cities, such as Passau, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, and finally Bucharest. The Balkans range from the rich and beautiful to some states that are poor, backward, and where corruption dominates. It was the trip of a lifetime!

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

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Michael Freedman writes, “I am living with my wife, Iris Steinert Freedman '62, in our vacation house on White Meadow Lake, New Jersey. We have two daughters and six grandsons, one of whom, Jacob Sacher, is a student at UVM. Iris and I continue to travel extensively. We are leaving for a three-week tour of Great Britain in September. We often visit Rori and David Kanter ’59, friends since UVM.” Send your news to— UVM Alumni Association 411 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05401 alumni.uvm.edu/classnotes

61

Kay Frances Mingolla Wardrope writes, “While trying to beat the heat in Florida, I roamed around New England and had lunch with Carol Willard ’60, met up with Jim Whitney ’65 and of course my sister, Mary Ann Whitney ’63. I am thinking of moving back to Vermont permanently.” Mimi Portnoy DavisNeches reported in June that she was delighted to hear from her UVM roommate, Mimi Blumenthal Sochor, and that they planned to meet soon for dinner in Los Angeles with their husbands (both named Bob!). Truman Grandey recommends Weight Watchers cruises to the Caribbean, as he and Hannah took one and were successful in losing some weight. Caroline Braun Leone emailed: “I just got my new Quarterly; great surprise to find in the class of 1965 column, Rose Levy Beranbaum ’65, my favorite cookbook author; her Cake Bible has 'my' cheesecake recipe that everyone wants and her Christmas Cookie Book has 'David's Dream Bars' that are always on my Christmas table. Really is a small world.” Liz Elkavich and Bill Wester recently celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary with family and friends in Nashville. I’m sad to report the passing of classmate Tom Amidon in June. Tom was president of the UVM Alumni Association in the late ’90s and was an early promoter of the concept of an Alumni House, which had several false starts, but has finally been successful with the purchase, renovation, and additions to the Delta Psi House.

At UVM, Tom was on the football team (remember when?) and the ski team. He was a member of the Delta Psi fraternity. He lived in Stowe, Vermont, where he practiced law.

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

Send your news to— Steve Berry 8 Oakmount Circle, Lexington, MA 02420 steveberrydhs@gmail.com Beth Spenciner Rosenthal writes, “I retired in 2014 as a professor at the City University of New York where I taught for over 20 years, received numerous NIH research awards, published approximately three dozen research articles and made over 50 research presentations. My post-retirement years have focused on some old and some new endeavors.

Among the new endeavors was teaching incarcerated individuals at a New York State prison. This was, in many ways, the most interesting and rewarding of all the courses I’ve ever taught! Other new endeavors include: taking classes at Columbia University (I live close by) and SUNY’s Fashion Institute of Technology; and going to more off-Broadway plays. On a personal note, life with my soul mate (now husband) of 30 years is incomparable. Whatever we are doing—traveling, conducting research or watching grandchildren—I feel mighty blessed!”

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

This year, I managed to get into my old uniform as keynote speaker at the National Cemetery in Culpeper, Virginia. My two sons are doing well and I have one grandson to dote on. Hello to old Sigma Epsilon brothers, Kake Walk partners, and bygone fans.” Roger L. Brown shares, “I continue to live very actively in Brattleboro, Vermont, where I grew up. I enjoy the small town warmth of this community. I provide pulpit supply to churches in the region, and offer individual spiritual direction. I continue as part of the leadership of The Institute for Religion in the Age of Science and participated again this summer in their week-long conference on Star Island. For the fourth time, I participated in the amazing ‘contact’ peacebuilding program in June at the School for International Training. I'm active in Centre Congregational Church, and serve on boards in local organizations. Alumni are welcome to be in touch through my email: roglb43@gmail.com” As for me, Duane ’63 and I did have lunch with Bob Pasco ’63 and Norman Bohn this summer. Though we do see Norman more during summer, we don’t always have Bob too. We had a great time catching up.

Wishing you all well until next time.

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

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Edward Rabinowitz shares, “I am still practicing psychiatry at the School of Visual Arts in New York City as their first and only psychiatrist as well as painting seascapes of Acadia National Park which are shown periodically in NJWS and a gallery in Rockland, Maine. It was a spectacular summer for my family and me. My twin grandsons turned 16; they are smart, athletic, and very handsome six-footers. My daughter, Karen, remarried and we enjoyed a lovely ceremony and reception in my backyard on the Navesink River. Daughter Kelly and I celebrated my birthday with a cruise and numerous excursions in Alaska—the one state I had not visited. In between these family celebrations, I also celebrated personal endeavors winning several international Latin ballroom competitions in California, Florida, New Jersey, and New York. I hope that my classmates are also enjoying interesting, diverse life styles. Live every minute in the moment and keep moving!

Keep in touch.”

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

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Jeffrey S. Graham writes, “We drove this year from San Francisco, California to Old Saybrook, Connecticut, and then back to Poughkeepsie, New York. The United States is a wonderful and beautiful country. Driving is a great way to go.” O.H. Perry Cabot writes, “I am retired now for 25 years from a long U.S. Army career as a China foreign area officer and strategic intelligence instructor. For the last 16 years I have put my UVM math major to good use in a non-profit dedicated to studying local county development plans.

Howard Cyr is celebrating his 10th anniversary of living in the Rehoboth Beach, Delaware area after living and working in the Washington, D.C. area for 37 years.

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

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Jan Rood Buker shares, “I graduated and taught school for four years.

Then we were self-employed until we retired about eight years ago. Love to travel, both around our country and abroad. But where did the time go? There's still lots to see and do!” Dr. Laurence “Larry” H. Miller received the Ronald Shellow Award for exemplary leadership from the Assembly of the American Psychiatric Association at its annual meeting in May in San Diego. Dr. Miller served 17 years in the assembly as representative from Arkansas for 11 years and then as chair of the Area 5 Council (16 southern states) for six years, a position from which he retired due to term limits.

He continues to serve on the Council of Healthcare Systems and Financing as chair of the Committee on Psychiatric Reimbursement. He and his wife, Anne Knopping Miller, celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary on September 3, 2017 with a twoweek cruise of the Baltic Sea countries. My husband, Ken McGuckin, and I spent a few days of vacation in the beginning of August with our classmate and my sorority sister, Nancy Castellanos Miller, and her husband, Chris (Dartmouth 1966.) They showed us a wonderful time around their hometown of Saratoga, California, near the Santa Cruz Mountains in addition to day trips to San Francisco and Monterey.

Send your news to—

Kathleen Nunan McGuckin 416 San Nicolas Way, St. Augustine, FL 32080 kkmcguckin@prodigy.net

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William Swinburne writes, “We are welcoming into this life our third grandchild who was born August 8 to our oldest daughter, Rebecca, and her husband, Russell. I continue to work as a psychologist in Keene, New Hampshire, and my wife and I enjoy our summers in Maine.”

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

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50th Reunion October 5-7, 2018

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

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

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James M. Betts MD’73 is continuing to practice pediatric surgery at Children's Hospital Oakland. He writes, “I have been involved with west coast canvassing for philanthropy in UVM’s comprehensive campaign – Move Mountains. We are nearing our $500 million goal! Looking forward to my 45th UVM College of Medicine Reunion in 2018, and our 50th undergrad gathering in 2019. Wishing everyone in both classes well.”

Send your news to— Mary Moninger-Elia 1 Templeton Street, West Haven, CT 06516 maryeliawh@gmail.com

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

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Having missed the deadline for the last Vermont Quarterly issue, I want to apologize, and once again offer the position of class secretary to Owen Jenkins. Stay tuned for the Winter VQ to see if Owen accepts the invitation. Tim Scott wrote after receiving the winter VQ to say, “I just read the article on WE (Wellness Environment). I am very impressed! This is a truly positive approach. I guess as people get older they are more naturally inclined toward mindfulness, but being exposed to it institutionally at age 18 should be life altering. Bravo UVM!” Tim became a grandfather in January. He is still working at the U.S. Department of Labor, and is working on larger and larger cases. His extracurricular activities include lots of biking, the Jacksonville Symphony, and doing some writing. Tim is going back to France for a week in September. He also reports that his niece, Raven

C ATAMOUNT NATION Claudia Serwer ’67 WORK: Three-decade career as a diplomat, economist, and negotiator with the

U.S. Foreign Service. Most of her years abroad were in Latin America—Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela. Now retired, Serwer is on the UVM Foundation Board of Directors and the International Advisory Board of the Johns Hopkins Center for Innovative Medicine HOME: New York, New York.

UVM DAYS: A theater major/Spanish minor, Serwer worked behind-the-scenes with lighting and staging for student productions and Lane Series events. Like many of her era, she has a soft spot for the UVM Dairy Bar and had a stop at its new incarnation on the agenda for her return at Homecoming 2017.

IN HER WORDS: “I’m pretty good at working with people who are in trouble, and I didn’t know that until I got there,” Serwer says, discussing her first Foreign Service role as a consulate officer in Tijuana, Mexico. “You really have to think on your feet.

It may be four in the morning and you are a little groggy. But you just kind of snap into a different mode, use common sense and the connections you’ve built, and make it work. I loved it.”

Read more: go.uvm.edu/serwer

Scott ’16, graduated from UVM a year ago. Bruce Ferguson and I were in touch about the bench he dedicated to his friend and Delta Psi brother, Chip Dake, who died in 1997. Bruce wrote, “I think of Chip and how his life was cut short, unfulfilled. Anyone seeing the bench should feel the same way, and that is its purpose. Also according to Bruce, “Tom Dunham ’70 pulled a bunch of old Delts together for a reunion at his house in Cape Elizabeth in June.

From his class, the following will brothers gathered: Bart Frisbie, Dick (Mule) Mullany, Clark (Romer) Eaton, George (Troll) Kuntz, George (Geek) Kallechey, and Neil Mackey. I asked Bob Welch, Dick Peisch and Doug Wells to stay with Paula and me for the weekend. I arranged golf game with six of these guys (and spouses) at Portland Country Club.

It was a great time!” When I saw Bruce and his wife, Paula, at their home in Cumberland Foreside on July 21, they showed me pictures of the entire crew—it

is clear that these folks still know how to kick back and enjoy life! Bruce also mentioned that Bill Davis would be in the Portland area soon after we met so they will reconnect. We also had a laugh about Gretchen Whitney which prompted me to text her to verify a recollection Bruce had—you can ask Gretchen and/or Bruce when you see them next.

Gretchen told me she had just been in Vermont, visiting with her sister, Martha, and did some sailing on Lake Champlain. Gretchen added, “Nancy Blasberg and I spent the previous week painting on Monhegan Island off Rockport, Maine.” Edward "Ted" Austin Lindsay died August 7, 2017 from a sudden cardiac event at his home in Millbrook, New York. Ted earned his UVM bachelor’s in the history of religion and later went on to study nursing and worked for years as a registered nurse. Later in his career, Ted cared for hundreds of campers and students at Camp Treetops in Lake Placid and at the Millbrook FA L L 2 0 1 7 |

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| CLASS NOTES School. Two things about your class secretary: I have a third grandson, Alden, born to my youngest son, Richard and his wife, December 26, 2016—the little guy is another “light” in my life. Richard W. and I went to Greece in September for a walking trip to the Vikos Gorge and Corfu—and we fit in a visit to Delphi. Please send me your stories or any hearsay you might have. Cheers from Vermont.

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

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Paula Bitsack Reeder writes, “I was elected Bay Area Association of Realtors ‘Realtor of the Year for 2016/2017.’

I would welcome the opportunity to help fellow UVMers with property searches and purchases on Maryland's Eastern Shore, the other land of pleasant living!”

Send your news to— Debbie Koslow Stern 198 Bluebird Drive, Colchester, VT 05446 debra.stern@uvm.edu

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It’s hard to believe that next year will be 45 years since we graduated and nearly half a century since we entered UVM, but the memories are still fresh.

David W Suitor writes, “In 2017 we are celebrating the 100th year of Camp Timanous, a boys camp in Raymond, Maine, that has been run by my family since 1941 and by Linda and me since 1991.

Almost 400 alumni returned to camp in August for a weekend of reconnecting, nostalgia and fun reliving their boyhood experiences at camp. The camp boasts campers from 27 states and 10 foreign countries and a staff that averages over 14 years apiece at camp. Linda and I live in Brunswick in the winter where I am an assistant squash coach at Bowdoin College and teach a geography course at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Southern Maine in Portland.” Sharon Bown Caswell shares, “I am the CEO of PonyUp Technologies in Dallas, Texas. I just signed a major distribution agreement with Henry Schein Animal Health that will put our VetCheq product in the hands of equine veterinarians throughout the U.S. and around the world.” Tom Legan wants to let all of his ol' UVM roomies know that after 40 years of practicing periodontics and dental implantology, an illness forced him to retire. Miraculously, he survived major surgery at Stanford University Medical Center and is enjoying his time off on his 150-acre Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyards and Tree Farm, tackling all kinds of DIY home improvements and ranch maintenance. He writes, "The pinot noir farmed here is outstanding and is crafted into a fine wine by Arnot-Roberts of Healdsburg, California, just north of the Golden Gate. Try a bottle!” He said it seems like just yesterday when he walked over to the Gutterson field house on Homecoming Weekend of freshman year to see Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company. “Later Gene Beaudoin and I and the rest of the Concert Bureau brought in James Taylor, George Carlin (who I got a chance to

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spend a half hour with chatting in the men's locker room right before he took stage), Leslie West and Mountain, J. Geils, and more...(someone please remind me who I'm missing)... and who can forget the best show ever: Chicago down the hill in that civic auditorium where we were all standing on the tops of our chairs, clutching together, shoulder to shoulder. It was magical! Hello to Gene, Glenn, Michael, Woody, Dave and Tom. Hope all is well with you and hope you enjoyed my sharing the memories!” Christopher Corbett continues with his research on nonprofit governance and regulation, with a recent publication. He authored "Ethics and Accountability" in the Springer Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy and Governance published in 2017 (Springer International Publishing). He credits his many unique UVM experiences, both in the classroom and on Austin 3rd, for honing his keen appreciation for the importance of ethics and accountability in both work and personal life. Sandal Root Cate and her husband, Paul Cate, both graduates of the wildlife and forestry programs, attended the grand opening of the visitor's center at Dead Creek Wildlife Area in Addison, Vermont, in late September. The indoor exhibit center was dedicated to the work of Professor Robert Fuller who passed away in January, 2017. He influenced many wildlife majors who went on to work in Vermont and across the country in conservation work. Sandal is coordinating a one-time contribution in Professor Fuller's memory to the new visitor center. If you wish to donate, please contact her at sandal@sover.net.

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

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Ruth Ayer Lamoureux writes that on Saturday, June 24, 2017, she was installed as the VFW Auxiliary Department of Washington senior vice president. This is one step away from the department presidency which will occur next June in Bremerton, Washington. Ruth says she and her husband moved to Washington because the trees and mountains remind them of Vermont without the bitter winters. Cathleen Doane-Wilson and her husband, Sam, have moved to Lewes, Delaware, where they plan to retire. Cathleen is still a practicing OB/GYN physician. She met me for dinner in July while I was visiting friends in Bethany Beach, Delaware.

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

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Richard Kuehne, age 76, passed away on August 7, 2017 from Alzheimer's.

Richard taught and coached in Roseville Area Schools for over 35 years. Before that Rich was a 1964 Grand Rapids Bruins standout goalie, and 1965 math teacher at the Grand Rapids High School. Condolences to: Rich@Kuehne1.com Gary

Moreau writes that he retired from teaching at the A.D. Lawton School in Essex Junction after 41 years of teaching music. He and wife, Lynn, hope to spend a little more time with granddaughter, Emma Lynn, and perhaps travel to warmer climates to visit family and friends. UVM's education served him well in his profession. He continues to perform throughout Vermont. Gary M. Schulman shares that he and his wife, Carole, have left Miami Beach and moved two hours north to Sailfish Point in Stuart, Florida.

They have been retired since 2011, travel extensively, have taken up golf and enjoy their summer home in Jamestown, Rhode Island. Chico Lager and Bill Dillon won the McAndrew Member/Guest Golf Tournament at the Burlington Country Club in a shoot-out over their close buddy and Chikago member, Bert Anderson, and his son Nate. Not to be outdone, Missy Dever, who recently retired and has been working on her golf game, won the Laird Member/Member Tournament at the same club. In another retirement, Pat Bray McGarry was honored for over 35 years of service as a nurse with the Visiting Nurse Association of Chittenden and Grand Isle Counties. Meanwhile, Bob Weiler competed in the 100-mile mountain Bike Race Across the Sky in Leadville, Colorado. The bikers ride up to 12,424 feet in this grueling ride. Bob put up a great time and was cheered on by his wife, Wendy Gould Weiler and daughter, Katie Weiler '13. Way to go, Bob! Send your news to— Dina Dwyer Child 102 N. Jefferson Rd., South Burlington, VT 05403 dinachild@aol.com

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Joan L. Witter writes, “We Pi Phi's had a reunion in Marion this October and sisters flew in from all over the country. We were so excited to all get together!” Debbie Palmer Tetreault writes, “I retired in January 2017 after 40.5 years as a nurse educator at Hartford Hospital. I am thoroughly enjoying retirement and am planning a cruise to Hawaii in October 2017. I am also visiting Burlington with my UVM friends in May 2018 for our annual weekend trip.” Sue Kathleen Fowler-Finn shares, “I so enjoyed the Red Sox game, with friends and husband, through UVM alumni events this summer! Met some UVMers (some are so young!) at the reception. I enjoy reading the Quarterly and all the wonderful things people are passionate about, from beer to maple syrup to medicine to the environment. I read a great article on the Gund clan and realized that I had two of their grandchildren as a students years ago! We love getting together with Cathy Chandler Block and husband and Marcia Maynard and husband, and I love my bi-yearly hikes just with Marcia. Hope to get up to Vermont this fall and see UVM, and the sculpture park at Stowe. We still live in Medford, Massachusetts, near Boston, the longest that I have lived anywhere in my life. It is close to the beach (I love to boogie board), skiing, bike trails, Boston, and my work in Newton.” Andrea Casey writes, “We have retired to Bend in Central Oregon in the eastern Cascades. I'm teaching skiing during the winter at Mount Bachelor. We are hiking and exploring the beautiful coast.” Dave Landry writes, “After

40 years, I assume the statute of limitations has expired and it’s time to come clean on the great streaking incident at Harris/Millis circa fall of 1975.

Here is my recollection of the Harris/Millis-Living/ Learning Streak. Mark S. (full names will not be used to protect the guilty) returned to our Living/ Learning Center Suite 286A one evening and said some of the guys at Harris/Millis announced they were going to streak tonight and they are looking for re-enforcement. After a pep talk from Mark S. we were in. I remember Mark, Eddie, Rich, Wally, myself, and, I think, Chip shedding our clothes, donning towels, and trying to sneak out of the back of the Living/Learning Center. Unfortunately, the girls in the next suite spied us as we slinked to the back exit. We would pay for this lack of stealth.... later. We dropped our towels in the bushes, sprinted around the I-89 side of the dorms and met up with the Harris/Millis guys. From the Gutterson corner of the Harris/Millis building someone peered down the main walkway and said, ‘there really are a lot of people out there!’ There was a moment of hesitation standing out there naked in a brisk fall wind. One of the Harris/Millis guys said, ‘let’s do this.’ Someone had a railroad flare, lit it, and handed it to Mark, who started sprinting around the corner of Harris/Millis to the front walkway at a pace worthy of Usain Bolt. We followed to screams of the students, flashbulbs, and then the glare of TV camera lights.

The sprint was a blur, the group broke up, and the Living Learning crew headed back to get our towels. The towels were gone and the back door we had jammed open, was shut and locked! The only way in was thru the lobby snack bar. It was uncomfortably well lit as we sprinted to ‘OMG's’ and catcalls (from the girls). We got back to our suite and, of course...our door was locked. We cowered and pleaded for our towels through a partially closed girl's suite door with the girls... you know who you are…Diane, Cindy, Melissa, Margaret, Lydia and Mary Ann. We got the towels back and I think there was a towel failure at that point on someone who will go unnamed. Locking our suite door behind us, we thought the caper was over...wrong. Wally got a call from his mother the next morning, ‘Did you see the front page of the Burlington Free Press this morning?" Wally had not. "Well there is someone on front page of the Free Press streaking and wearing a ski hat identical to the one I just gave you!’... busted. Good thing the rest of us had parents out of town. And, that is how I remember that chilly night.”

After 40 years, Bruce Abbott writes, “I have never written in before because I have lost touch with all UVM classmates, but wanted to finally make contact after all these years. With kids grown and out of the house, my wife and I have retired from pediatric practice here in Spokane, Washington, last year.

I continue to teach at the University of Washington School of Medicine on the Spokane campus. I have wandered since leaving Vermont in 1976, earning a master’s in zoology at University of Alberta, and M.D. at University of Colorado, followed by a pediatric residency at University of Utah and finally 25 years of pediatric practice in Spokane. We have purchased a small travel van and hope to make our way to Vermont for the fall colors once I retire from SHARI HALIK

PLANNED GIVING

A Gift for Grad Students... and the Environment As a student services specialist for the graduate program in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, Carolyn Goodwin Kueffner ’84 has been a guiding force for students from application to graduation for the last eleven years. “It’s an honor to work closely with these incredibly smart, dedicated students who are doing such vital work to help ensure the health of our state and planet,” she says.

Part of her role is assisting the Rubenstein faculty gift committee with awarding student grants from philanthropic gifts. It was Carolyn’s involvement with this process that inspired the idea of naming the Rubenstein School Graduate Program as a beneficiary to her own 401k, creating a designated bequest to fund the Goodwin Kueffner Graduate Program Fund. This endowment will offer grants to Rubenstein graduate students to advance their professional development and leadership skills.

A transplant from the deep South, Carolyn’s bond with Vermont is now more than thirty years strong. “Something about the lovely small towns, lush green landscape, and mountains of Vermont resonates deeply with me,” which fueled her desire to support the work of students researching the local environment.

“I love the idea that these funds will provide a continuing legacy of special grants to assist these remarkable environmental leaders in continuing their essential work into the future.”

Carolyn was pleased to learn that bequests of this sort are not subject to taxes in the way they would be if passed on to individuals, so the full amount can be used to accomplish her vision for the gift. “I have been surprised at how much joy making this gift has provided and how easy it has been to complete,” she says.

For information on including the University of Vermont in your estate plan, 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

FA L L 2 0 1 7 |

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| CLASS NOTES teaching.” In early July, Dennis and Mary Ellen Keresey welcomed Gary Wright, Jeff DeLuca, Herb and Jane Muther, Jeff and Cathy Stein, and Pete and Barb Beekman for a weekend at their home on the Connecticut shore. It was great enjoying walks on the beach, swimming, a corn hole tournament won by the team of Herb Muther and Mary Ellen Keresey, and, of course, lots of great food and drink. We are looking forward to another Sigma Nu Reunion in early February for a home hockey weekend and continuing to celebrate the good work being funded through the Sigma Nu Athletic Fund.

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

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Kathi Burdett Roesler writes, “My husband, Bob, and I have become Florida residents. I retired recently after 40 years as an operating room nurse. Still using my art degree by doing house portraits on plates. Five children, five grandchildren. Life is busy and good.” Laurel Raines co-founded Dig Studio in 2012, a landscape architecture, urban design and planning firm in Denver, Colorado. She writes, “After over 30 years of partnering in firms of all sizes, having our own firm again has been rewarding and fun!” Lynn St. Amour reports, “Having retired from the Internet Society, a large global non-profit after 13 years as president and CEO, I was recently re-appointed by the United Nations Secretary General to the position of chair of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group of the Internet Governance Forum, so no retirement at the moment. The IGF brings stakeholders together to advance discussions on public policy issues relating to the internet and its impacts. After spending nearly 30 years in Europe, I moved back to Boston and am slowly reconnecting. Nice to be back.”

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

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40th Reunion October 5-7, 2018

If you are interested in planning your upcoming reunion, email alumni@uvm.edu. Marjorie A. Cohen writes, “It is hard to believe how fast the time has flown by. I have been living in Colorado since 1979 and am still in contact with my friends, Sue Spies and Libbie Manahan, and see a few on Facebook, but not enough. I miss Vermont, and New England. I am currently still working providing mental health services to people in the military. My old roommate, Wendy Wolfe, was in Denver and it was great to see her.” Mandy Cohen Lees shares, “I just got back from Turks and Caicos!

Wonderful way to unwind! Speaking of winding down, I intend to retire from Wake County Human Services in June. That will be 21 years of service with Child Protective Services. I hope to work a few hours a week doing private practice with substance abusing individuals. If anyone from UVM

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is in the area, give me a call/text and let's get together!”

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

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A group of 1979 physical therapy grads including: Sandy Meyer Wilcox, Paula Jenkins Larose, Linda Potash Marchese, Liz Macini Millard, Lisa Fernandez and Jenny Yonker Lind gathered at the home of Mary Tautkus Winslow in Newbury, New Hampshire in August 2016. Jenny recaps, “We went zip lining at Mount Sunapee Adventure Park, hiked up Mount Kearsage, cooled off in Lake Sunapee, and took in a play at The New London Barn Playhouse. We enjoyed lunch at a vineyard and continued our appetizers on the deck of Mary's beautifully wooded home. Thanks to Mary and Matt for the delicious meals and Matt’s special BBQ sauce!

Caught up on everyone's life and laughed the entire trip. This year we are headed to Sun Valley where Lisa will be our hostess! Never a dull moment when we all get together!” Greg Boardman writes, “I will be retiring from Stanford University this fall and moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Looking forward to meeting other UVM alums in the area.” Another action-packed summer weekend at the Long Island home of Chuck and Mary Kay McGuire Conte was enjoyed by fellow Pi Phis, Mary Kay, Susan Thomas Englander, Eileen Sheehan McCann, Anne Trask Forcier, Mardie Trask Sorenson ’81 and me, Beth Nutter Gamache. Joining in on the fun celebration of friendship and a special birthday year were John Englander, Peter McCann ’78, Larry Forcier, and Chuck Conte.

Send your news to— Beth Gamache 58 Grey Meadow Drive, Burlington, VT 05401 bethgamache@burlingtontelecom.net

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Michael Charney writes, “After practicing rheumatology for 25 years at the Denver Arthritis Clinic, I have retired to spend time with loved ones, be a musician, traveler, artist, chef, gardener, kabbalist, and smell the roses. I have not been in Burlington for decades, hope to stop by soon!” Robert A. Monniere shares, “I am delighted to announce I am leaving federal service and returning to Vermont to raise young Nubian goats. How about that for a stressfree retirement!” Peter Miller Davis writes that five classmates: Chris Mikell, Charles Chub Whitten, Tim Kohler, Pete and Caryn Davis embarked on a backcountry skiing expedition in northern Iceland this past April. The five Catamounts explored the mountains outside of Dalvik, above the 66th parallel, in the Arctic Circle for four days. All four days were spent using climbing skins and backcountry equipment. Mitchel L. Moore writes, “I have decided to retire after 31 years of teaching secondary science in Vermont. Thank you to the fifthyear certificate program that UVM offered me in 1984/85. Looking forward to new careers.” Monty Lovejoy writes, “I joined the Alumni Association

Board of Directors last year. I am also chairing the Alumni Awards Committee, so please nominate deserving alumni doing great work. I joined a new environmental engineering and consulting firm in 2016, Ramboll Environ!”.

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

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Rabbi Michael Cohen and Judy Livingston presented a program called “Can We Talk? Bridging the Political Divide: a Community Conversation on How to Make This Happen” in Bennington, Vermont, this summer.

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

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Teri Gotts Barenborg just released six books, STEAM Design Challenges, with three colleagues. They were drawn together by a common desire to create a more interactive learning environment in their classrooms. Together, they made their dreams a reality with the formation of Steam Dreamers LLC, through which they began creating student-centered, problem-solving lessons. The Steam Dreamers are exhilarated to bring this collection of crosscurricular design challenge lessons to students everywhere, providing teachers and students with real-world scenarios that are driven by core learning standards and enriched through the inclusion of literacy and the arts. The books are available as e-books or print copies, and can be ordered on the Creative Teaching Press website, www.creativeteaching.com. The STEAM Dreamers also have a unique website that supports each lesson online with background information, videos and pictures for teachers or homeschoolers to access. Edward C. Ketyer recently retired from his pediatric practice in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after 26 years, but continues to write his popular blog: The PediaBlog. He is a medical consultant for the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project, helping residents cope with health concerns in the Marcellus Shale Gas Patch, and a board member for Physicians for Social Responsibility-Pennsylvania. He is proud to be a UVM alum, where his passion for environmental health was sparked, kindled, and nurtured. Stuart T. Close writes that he is proud of his daughter, Greta Close, who is part of the UVM class of 2021 and will be playing on the the women's hockey team. Go Cats Go! He also says ‘hi’ to all Air Bears and friends. Rosalind M. Cross writes, “I had been out of touch with UVM until my former economics professor,Tim Bates, asked for my assistance to create an endowed chair in financial history in the economics department at UVM. For the last four years (and for the forseable future) I have hosted or co-hosted with other alums (Jamie Fagan, Ellen Berkowitz '87, Gerry DiFiore '81, Greg Dooman) a Flashback Money and Banking lecture on The Next Financial Crisis. We have held lectures in New York City, its suburbs, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Burlington. The lectures are free and fundraising follows. There is now the Mark J. Zwynenburg

’81 Professorship in Financial History which Professor Jane E. Knodell was appointed to as the inaugural Green and Gold Professor. It has been a lot of fun reconnecting with UVM friends and traveling to the lectures. which are very interesting and stimulate good discussions. If you would like to join the team, please reach out to me at RosalindMCross@ aol.com. We need all the help we can get!”

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

She and her husband, John, reside in McLean, Virginia, with sons Cameron (20) and Colin (16).

Send your news to— Abby Goldberg Kelley kelleyabbyvt@gmail.com

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Larry Miller tells us that he, Brad Butz, Tom Lowell ’82, and Tony Albano ’82 gathered at the home of Michael Donovan ’82 in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley for a fun summer weekend of eating, drinking, hiking, music, and high jinks. “Some of us hadn’t seen each other in decades and haven’t matured one bit. Always great to see old friends!”

As I, your secretary, write this, my husband Jim and I have just returned from two weeks in Europe. Jim was golfing in Scotland with his golfing buddies and hit the highlights, Turnberry, Troon, a couple more that I don't remember, Saint Andrews-Old Course and the Jubilee course. He made a birdie on the 18th hole on the Old Course! I spent the week in Norway with my sister and her family on their sheep farm, on an island. After our separate week, Jim and I met in Edinburgh and spent a week sightseeing.

It was a fabulous time! It is good to be home! I am still teaching Pilates and live and love my job and my fellow instructors. Jim is getting ready to retire within the next year! Caryn is ABD (All But Document) on her DMA; just her paper and final recital.

She has been performing with several small opera companies in the Pittsburgh area and will play the lead in Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS Pinafore this fall with the Pittsburgh Savoyard. Mitch, her boyfriend is at the same place with his DMA and is now a full time professor at a university in Pennsylvania. Colleen, our vet, is at a new practice in our area and loves her new job! She switched to small animals from swine and is happy with that decision.

Send your news to— Lisa Greenwood Crozier lcrozier@triad.rr.com

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Mary Sue L. Howlett shares, “I loved being back at UVM for Commencement 2017. My daughter, Abigail ’17, graduated from the College of Nursing and Health Sciences. She was a nursing major, so I was able to pin her with my UVM nursing pin in Ira Allen, 33 years after I was pinned there. We enjoyed RiRa’s, Sweetwaters, and a stroll down to the lake on a beautiful May morning.” Andrea B. Van Liew writes, “I work for the Center for Crime Victim Services in Waterbury, Vermont. I am the director of the Community Engagement and Training Department. We are currently recruiting for the Vermont Victim Assitance Academy.” Martha Marrapese shared that she recently became a partner in the environmental practice at Wiley Rein, LLP in Washington, D.C. where she counsels companies on the legal requirements for chemicals in their products.

Kelly McDonald jasna-vt@hotmail.com Shelley Carpenter Spillane scspillane@aol.com Juliet S. Milar-Ragaishis says, “This fall, my oldest child is applying to college and UVM is on the short list. I’m excited for him to start his journey! I am a small business owner: I dress and style professional men in custom clothing from J. Hilburn. I didn’t learn fashion at UVM, but I did learn relationship building.”

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

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Susan Doherty writes, “I am living in Hull, Massachusetts, with my husband. I have four sons: Max (23), Owen (21), PJ (19), and Griffin (16). PJ will be a sophomore this year at UVM! It’s been so much fun to visit him and reconnect with Burlington. My roommates and I visited campus in fall of 2016 to attend Alumni Weekend and go to the beer fest! Both were so much fun.” Scott Abrahamson shared that he received a master’s in botany from the University of New Hampshire in 1992 and, in the same year, a law degree from UNH (then Franklin Pierce Law Center).

He lives just across the water from UVM in Westport, New York. He works for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, focusing on litigation and enforcement of state and federal environmental laws.

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

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Katherine McFaun Williams reports, “The Williams family enjoyed a trip to Thailand in July. Steve ’83, Kate ’87, Connor ’15 and Meghan ’18 met in Koh Tao where Connor is a dive master. Highlights: Long-awaited family time, incredible food, people, plus scuba and snorkleing in the Gulf of Thailand and exploration of the palaces and temples of Bangkok. Reef conservation, recyling, and beach clean ups are efforts supported by Big Blue Diving, the company Connor works with. Action and education to improve the ocean’s environment are global. Proud UVM alumna and mom.” Daniel A. Seff writes that he became a member of the Burlington, Vermont, law firm, Murphy Sullivan Kronk, where he works with many UVM alums. Daniel’s practice encompasses a wide variety of civil ligitation matters. Maryanne Knight shares, “I was promoted to the position of information technology manager for the City of Santa Barbara, California, one year ago. I’ve had the pleasure of serving this beautiful city for over

18 years, starting as a help desk technician in 1999.”

Michelle Courville Feiner writes, “After spending 17 years with the BFA Fairfax community as the school social worker, I have just moved on to Johnson State College (soon to be renamed Northern Vermont University–Johnson) as the coordinator of disability services. I have also just published my first book. It is entitled Laugh Before You Cry and is a parenting book for foster and adoptive families. On a personal note Bill (Harold William Feiner '87) and I celebrate 30 years of marriage this September and we are thoroughly enjoying and spoiling our twoyear-old grandson.”

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

88

Marleigh Pelton McNealus shares, “I am pleased to report that my daughter, Julie, will be attending UVM in the fall. Go Cats Go!” Sarah Beth Newman writes, “I am currently serving as the director of public health at the National Park Service, where I combine my passion for health, community planning, and environmental sustainability. We function like an internal health department to protect and promote health in 300 million visitors to parks.”

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

89

Marren “Mary” Sanders shares, “My promotion application was granted.

I am now professor of law (with tenure).” Daniel C. Kanter published Faith for the Unbeliever with Skinner House Books. In it, he explores how faith can be found beyond belief! Phillip C. Camp is a transplant surgeon in Boston. He continues as director of transplantation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, medical director at New England Donor Services, and was promoted to chief of Aerospace Medicine at 158th Fighter Wing this year. The last of his three children are out of the house, youngest is a sophomore at UVM! He and his wife, Mary ’87, are looking to start a wellness clinic in the Virgin Islands and find a better life. Patrick Houle writes, “Such great memories of Vermont and all of the professors there. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for the great tutelage at UVM!” Dierdre L. Tozer-Hayes moved back to the United States with her wife, Fiona, and twin daughters, Cole and Seeley, after 26 years living and working in England. It was great to see Lewis and Kim Parker, Mike Rheam and Jen Sparks in beautiful Jackson Hole this past summer. Seeing old UVM friends makes any trip more memorable!

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

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David R. Babbitz and Eileen Smith Babbitz ’89 are proud and excited their son, Zac, has chosen to carry on the family tradition as a Catamount in the class of 2021. Samantha Allison chairs the board of an amazing non-profit, Inner Explorer. Started FA L L 2 0 1 7 |

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| CLASS NOTES just five years ago, Inner Explorer provides daily mindfulness programs in more than 7,000 Pre-K12th grade classrooms, and reaches more than 180,000 children across 45 states. Evaluations of the program have found that students achieve 7-15% higher grades and have 60% fewer behavioral problems. School climate is improved and teacher stress is reduced by 43%! The individual stories of the kids and the impact of this program are amazing. If you want to access the program for your own kids or you’re an educator or know one, check out a free trial at InnerExplorer.org.

Peggy Doherty DeLong shares, “I am celebrating 15 years in private practice as a clinical and forensic psychologist. I recently started a jewelry business, Peggy’s Midnight Creations, where the science of psychology meets the art of jewelry design. I incorporate research in psychology into my bracelet designs. Custom orders are my favorite, and I have enjoyed reconnecting with people from various stages of my life by designing custom bracelets for life’s challenges, relationships, and occasions. My bracelets can now be purchased at 12 stores in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, and I’m adding more!” Tim J. Messier completed his 25th year of employment at Lamoille Union High School in Hyde Park, Vermont, last June. During that time frame, the veteran teacher/coach and now the athletic director, has been recognized as Teacher of the Year, Coach of the Year, and led the Girls’ Varsity Basketball team to three Division II State Championships. In 2016, Tim was inducted into the Vermont State Basketball Coaches’ Association Hall of Fame. Tim remains a proud UVM alum and wishes all of his fellow UVM grads the absolute best! Go Cats Go!” Send your news to— Tessa Donohoe Fontaine tfontaine@brandywine.org

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Debbie C. Howarth graduated from Boston University’s School of Education having earned a Doctorate in Education in 2017. David J. Kelly shares, “Karen Majeski Kelly ’90 and I want to wish our oldest, JD, the best of luck in his senior year at UVM! Looking forward to his graduation in May 2018!”

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

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Charles Harris is living in Houston, Texas, and is a partner with Stoneworth Financial, a boutique investment bank focusing on mergers and acquisitions.

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

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25th Reunion October 5-7, 2018

If you are interested in planning your upcoming reunion, email alumni@uvm.edu. Jeff McNulty reports, “Newport, Rhode Island, served as the host

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city for an impressive gathering of UVM Alumni for Saint Patrick’s Day weekend. Seventeen members of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity joined together in support of our brother, Mike Pizzo ’93, who recently lost his wife, Erin, to a brain tumor. The lively crew spent the weekend with Mike enjoying the sites of Newport, attending the annual Saint Patrick’s Day parade, and cheering on the UVM men’s basketball team as they clinched the America East Championship. The tribute weekend was attended by Bill Kimes ’94, Todd Jenkins ’94, Scott Halsey ’94, Tim West ’94, Jeff McNulty ’94, Gary Tennenbaum, Doug Tesler, Jim Gallagher ’92, Andrew Gerardi ’92, John Maloney, ’92, and Mark Heyman ’92. There is already talk of a follow-up event next year in Vermont!” Ron Hirschberg writes, “ I co-founded a new business with fellow friend and musician Chuck Clough 15 months ago. It’s a music podcast called Above the Basement. We meet with Boston and New England artists and others that connect in some way to New England. Please see site below for more details. We published a recent episode from the Thoreau Library at Walden Woods, with Don Henley of The Eagles, discussing the impact of Thoreau on environment, art, science, and social justice. abovethebasement.com” Send your news to— Gretchen Haffermehl Brainard gretchenbrainard@gmail.com

94

Dana Kent Edwards has been named the president of the Intermountain Ski Areas Association, which represents resorts in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, and New Mexico. Edwards, who is the first woman ever appointed to the position, is health and safety manager at Park City Mountain Resort, Utah.

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

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Send your news to— Valeri Susan Pappas vpappas@davisandceriani.com Send your news to— Jill Cohen Gent jcgent@roadrunner.com Michelle Richards Peters mpeters@eagleeyes.biz

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James Baden recently completed his first Ironman distance race.

Heather Isham Baden will be doing her fourth Ironman later this year. They both look forward to hosting UVM’s Triathlon Club Team in September.

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

98 99

Send news to— Ben Stockman bestockman@gmail.com Paul J. McLoughlin II (HESA, M.Ed. ’99) was appointed vice president and dean of the College at Colgate

University.

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

00

Kimberly Kilcourse Hunter writes, “My husband and I and our five-yearold twins live in the Bay Area, south of San Francisco. We enjoy exploring the mountains, beaches, and creeks.”

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

01

Class of 2001! It has been awhile and I hope everyone is doing well!

Jason P. McKeen is currently living and teaching in Vermont and will be beginning a 10th year teaching physical education and health. He is happily married with two wonderful children, Keira (8) and Kipten (6). Kristen Eggert Gray and her husband, Bryan, welcomed their daughter, Harper Rose Gray, on February 14, 2017. Kirsten and Bryan were married on April 2, 2016 in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. and they currently reside in the Glover Park neighborhood in D.C. Andreas Moborg wrote in that his family was fortunate to have a visit from the Wilde family (Sarah Laidlaw and Martin). They visited Revelstoke, British Columbia, and their kids had a blast playing together! Erica MacConnell and her husband, Chris Vessey, welcomed their second son, Cam. I had the privilege of meeting him on the Cape and he is adorable! Aimee Bode Konevich and her husband, Mike, welcomed their second child, a beautiful baby girl named Sophia. They are still living on the North Shore of Boston. Brett Robbins got married to his wife, Jessica, in San Diego in June 2016. Groomsmen included Matthew Tremblay and Brett Martucci '02. Kate Dwyer was in attendance. Brett adds “After more than a decade in SoCal, we've moved to Boulder, Colorado and our first child, Elijah Spencer, arrived on Mother's Day!” Katherine F. Shoss joined The Bulfinch Companies as vice president, director of marketing. She brings nearly 15 years of experience in marketing and brand engagement. And, I moved out to Nantucket full time in August 2016. I am working at Fisher Real Estate on island doing both sales and rentals. I also launched a sea-inspired lifestyle brand called A Salty Soul (ASaltySoul.com) so it was an exciting year! A percent of profits goes to organizations that provide kids access to salty activities and I was thrilled that in the first year we were able to team up with the Boys & Girls Club on island to provide surf lessons. I hope you will all check it out and drop a line if you are ever on island! Please keep sending in updates!

Send your news to— Erin Wilson ewilson41@gmail.com

02

Greetings to the Class of 2002! Olivia L. Dubreuil writes, “I am currently on a one-year mission in Timbuktu working for the United Nations mission in Mali (MINUSMA) as a judicial affairs officer.” David O. Brand married Kathleen Slavish on October 1, 2016 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My dear friend and old college roommate, Jessica Powers Ernest wrote in to let us know that she and her husband, Jon Ernest ’01, are still loving Chicago. She works in oncology clinical research for a pharmaceutical company while trying to keep up with two wild (and incredibly cute) toddlers. Jon is working in real estate near his hometown of Lake Forest. Ben Battles wanted to share that Vermont Attorney General T.J. Donovan recently appointed him solicitor general. The solicitor general is the chief appellate lawyer for the State of Vermont and represents the State in litigation before the Vermont Supreme Court, the federal courts of appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

He lives in Waterbury with his wife Krista Bera Battles and their three-year-old son, Harlan. Anthony Egizi was married at Morse Farm Maple Sugarworks in Montpelier to Jessica Cosmo. It was a beautiful outdoor wedding on a quintessential Vermont summer day. They currently reside in Berlin, Vermont.

Anthony works for Vermont Agency of Transporta-

tion and Jessica is a teacher in Chelsea, Vermont.

They had their first child last September, Emilia Marie Egizi. Thank you to everyone who wrote in, keep those submissions coming!

Send your news to— Jennifer Khouri Godin jenniferkhouri@yahoo.com

03

Devann M. Pinkham Steele and Kevin Steele welcomed their second son, William Kenneth Steele, on July 8, 2017! Nicholas and Heather Hawkes Wolfe share that Esther Emeline Wolfe was born on July 15, 2017.

She joins older sisters, Norah and Helen.

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

04

Sarah Glawe Casanovas and her husband, Joe, welcomed their second child in June. Ruby Charlotte joins her big sister, Eliza.

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

05

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

06

Will Alexander shares, I have a new middle grade novel out called A Properly Unhaunted Place. More details are on my website here: willalex.net/unhaunted. Will won the National Book Award in 2012. Summer Egan Sachen and her husband welcomed their third baby girl, Keira Jane, on December 28. All three girls are doing well!

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

07

Hillary Depman Tayson re-opened a new, larger version of her coffee shop, Coffee Coffee, on August 11, 2017.

She runs it with her mother Betsy Branon Depman '77. Their shop is located in Bel Air, Maryland, just north of Baltimore (and convenient to travelers on I-95!). Stop by if you are in the area! Anjali Mahoney writes, “We recently moved back to my hometown: Manhattan Beach, California where we will be starting a new chapter. I will be working as the regional medical director for Altamed in Orange County.

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

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Greg Huse ’94 WORK: Urban forester at Arlington National

Cemetery, caring for more than 8,700 trees across 624 hallowed acres. Huse has been the “tree guy” at the national cemetery for the past year. Prior to that, he was the Smithsonian’s arborist, where he cared for 1,850 trees in their gardens and museum grounds.

HOME: Columbia, Maryland UVM DAYS: A forestry major, Huse took

his studies deeper with the student chapter of the Society of American Foresters. Key faculty mentors included Carl Newton, Peter Hannah, and John Shane. Study abroad in Australia and a pair of internships were also essential to his experience.

IN HIS WORDS: “We consider the trees

living memorials. In a way, just by being on the grounds and growing, they’re honoring those that are buried here.”

Read more: go.uvm.edu/huse

WILL KIRK

C ATAMOUNT NATION

FA L L 2 0 1 7 |

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| CLASS NOTES

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C ATAMOUNT NATION

10th Reunion October 5-7, 2018

If you are interested in planning your upcoming reunion, email alumni@uvm.edu. Whitney Keating Noël writes, “We proudly welcomed the birth of our son, Blakely Alexander Noël, on April 12, 2017 at the UVM Medical Center. He has already taken a road trip to Maine and gone fishing on Lake Champlain!” Lindsay Buzzell and David Turner '05 were married in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, on June 17, 2017. Lindsay is a human resources manager at Skanska USA in Boston, Massachusetts, and David is a design coordinator at Stantec in Boston. Lindsay and David currently reside in Quincy, Massachusetts. Allison Roy and Erik Carlson are excited to announce their engagement! After meeting in L/L in 2004, they stuck together after UVM and have made numerous places their home, including New Zealand, New York, Colorado, and California.

With so many locations to choose from, the couple is planning to hold their wedding in their favorite state: Vermont.

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

09

Erica Bruno writes, “I recently got a promotion to dealer relations manager at the start up company I am now at: AutomotiveMastermind. In this role, I manage 30 dealerships in the New England area. We are a cutting edge technology company whose technology is analyzing behavior analytics.” Aubrey L. Edson Carpenter received her doctorate in clinical psychology from Boston University in September 2017.

She will complete a postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital starting this fall.

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

10

Samuél J. Lopez-Barrantes has been in Paris since 2010. He published his debut novel, Slim & The Beast, in 2015, and has finished his latest manuscript, a historical fiction set in Nazi-occupied Lodz, Poland. In December, 2017, Samuél will enroll at the Vermont College of Fine Arts for an MFA in creative writing.

Pete Elliott completed his master's in exercise science in May and just accepted a position as head athletic trainer for the Erie Bayhawks (the Atlanta Hawks G-League Team). He and wife, Jules Liebster '12, will be moving to Erie this fall. Wesley Spence writes, “Congratulations to Seth Nichols and Monika Raithel on their marriage in Lisbon, Portugal on August 5! Love, Your UVM crew.” Ted Dobbin writes, “Congratulations to Eamonn Berry and Gretchen Zehner on their Vermont wedding. Best wishes for a long and happy future together as my all-time favorite UVM couple! #HowToMakeaGB, Isham Family Farm, Williston, Vermont, August 5, 2017.” Patrick Sullivan recently completed his studies in medicine at the Clarkson University Physician Assistant Pro-

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C ATAMOUNT NATION Randa Karambelas ’01 WORK: Actor, producer, and writer, Karambelas has her own production Company,

Little Spoon, Big Spoon, with a focus on socially conscious artistic ventures that support related non-profits.

HOME: New York, New York.

UVM DAYS: A theater major, Karambelas was greatly influenced by Professor Jeff Modereger, his set design vision for the Vietnam War drama “A Piece of My Heart,” and lessons on the emotional power of the medium. Things came full circle this fall when Karambelas produced and acted in the play with Modereger as set designer and several fellow alumni on the production team.

IN HER WORDS: “Jeff (Modereger) taught me that art can heal. As an artist, I have learned that if art doesn’t move you, mark you, or change you in some way, then you are doing it wrong.”

Read more: go.uvm.edu/karambelas

gram. He is now a board-certified P.A. working for Saint Lawrence Health System's Canton-Potsdam Hospital in Saint Lawrence County, New York. He specializes in endocrinology while also maintaining a clinical practice in the primary care setting. Lastly, I was sworn in as an attorney in the State of Vermont in July. I work in the area of criminal law in White River Junction, Vermont.

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

11

Chelsea Biegler and Sam Mass married August 12, 2017. Sam works as a butcher, and this December, Chelsea will finish her studies at Vanderbilt University as a certified nurse midwife.

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

12

Allison Keller and Nate Palmer married on the fall equinox this year, September 23, 2017, in Grafton, Vermont.

The couple met sophmore year and have since moved from Vermont, to San Francisco, to Boston. The wedding party and guests will include many fellow Catamounts. William Vitagliano writes, “I am excited to announce my engagement to my partner, Gary Sopko. We met when I moved to San Francisco over two years ago. The wedding will take place at San Francisco City Hall in October 2017. Invitees include several UVM alumni. In addition, I was recently named the associate university registrar and director of the Degree Audit & Graduation Center at the University of San Francisco.” Alex Fogel writes, “Come September, I’ll be taking over as regional programs manager in New York City for Global Glimpse, a nonprofit organization which aims to make international travel opportunities accessible to high school students of all socioeconomic backgrounds. Since graduating in 2012, I lived in Spain for three years teaching Eng-

SOMIE PAK

lish in public schools. During that time I was fortunate to travel throughout most of Europe, as well as see Russia and Morocco. More recently, I’ve spent almost four months backpacking in Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. Traveling has been so incredibly beneficial to me, giving me confidence in myself and allowing me to see everything through a more positive lens, and I think that’s the case for most people who have the opportunity to travel. I’m thrilled to be able to combine my passions of travel and education and work to extend the opportunity to travel to high school students like the ones I’ve worked with who couldn’t otherwise afford to leave the country (and their comfort zone).”

Send your news to— Patrick Dowd patrickdowd2012@gmail.com

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5th Reunion October 5-7, 2018

If you are interested in planning your upcoming reunion, email alumni@uvm.edu. Gillian Victor shares that Kate Hawes graduated from New England Law! “Way to go, Katie!”Gina Bouchard and Megan Long '12 got married in Charlestown, Rhode Island, this June. Several other fellow Catamounts were there including bridal party members, Hope Simpson '12, and Jessica Gavell Broker '12. The ceremony was officiated by Parker Holloway '12. UVM and Burlington will always

hold a special place in Megan and Gina Bouchard's story! These two fell in love in the SGA club desks and have fond memories of studying late in the Cyber Café. Kathryn Martin has been living in Wyoming since graduation, instructing backpacking and climbing courses for NOLS. This fall she will begin a physician’s assistant master's program at Stanford. Katharine Brine Nason and Josh Nason were married Saturday, June 17 on Martha’s Vineyard. After being neighbors for many years, they met their senior year at UVM in 2012. The wedding party was made up of several UVM alumni, including Kathryn Niemiroski as maid of honor, Kevin Osantowski '12 as best man, Alice Robinson, and Chris Mangieri.

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

14

Michael Lawliss was recently promoted to legislative correspondent in Senator Bernie Sanders' Washington, D.C., office. He also started his master’s in public administration at George Washington University this fall. Jillian R. Krieg and Peter Maxwell Krieg eloped and married on June 27, 2017 in Torridon, Scotland. Arline Weaver is living in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a special education aide at Buckman School in Southeast Portland and is pursuing a master’s in special ed at Portland State University. Her roommates include Katherine Coombs,

currently a program coordinator at CLEAResult, an energy efficiency company, where she is working to save energy in Oregon's residential sector. She's also been working hard with Alex Morton '15 to launch a UVM alumni affinity group in Portland, Oregon! Katherine and Arline are in touch with fellow UVM friend and Portlandia citizen Lara Nargozian, studying naturopathic and Chinese medicine at the National University of Natural Medicine.

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

15

Baxter Miatke started a new job in May 2017 as an environmental engineer with Amec Foster Wheeler in beautiful Portland, Maine, where every day is a vacation! Cheers to engineers! Katey M. Gray writes, “This fall I will be starting an independent study graduate program at Johnson State College!

My focus will be on literacy at the elementary level.”

Carly B. Jensen shares, “I returned to Nantucket and spent a year working as the special events coordinator for the Town of Nantucket. I recently started to work as the development and program coordinator for the Community Foundation for Nantucket and am thrilled to be putting my skills from UVM and from working as a student assistant in the Annual Giving Office to use!” Amber Schneider writes, “I didn't enjoy school until I found my way to UVM. The campus, community, and professors inspired me to

Are you or a loved one experiencing a mental health crisis?

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THERE ARE MANY APPROACHES TO WELL-BEING

17 C ATAMOUNT NATION Jason Maulucci ’17 WORK: Staff member in Office of Vermont Governor Phil Scott.

HOME: Burlington, Vermont.

UVM DAYS: A political science major, Maulucci re-started the university’s College

Republicans Club and served two terms as Student Government Association president. During his senior year, he balanced school with work on Phil Scott’s winning run for governor.

IN HIS WORDS: “A lot of students have contacted me basically saying, ‘UVM is my top choice and I love Burlington, but I’m wondering if I’ll fit in because I'm a Republican.’ I tell them, ‘Absolutely you will.’ Most of my friends don’t share my political beliefs, but they are still my best friends who I would do anything for and they would do anything for me. UVM is a very accepting place.”

Addie Gamliel writes, “I started law school at George Mason's Scalia Law School this fall! So excited to begin my journey in the legal field.” Sarah A. Evans writes, I recently accepted a job as a teacher at the Bridge School in Middlebury, Vermont! I'm very excited for my first full-time teaching opportunity. Kelton Troy Bogasky shares, “I moved to Memphis, Tennessee, to work for Pi Kappa Alpha as a chapter consultant. I will be working with 30 Pike Chapters in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Arkansas this upcoming semester.” Lindsay M. Kelsey moved to Oahu. Jenny Lowell shares, “I started my job as social justice specialist for Hillel at Virginia Tech, and I love it here! People are incredibly nice, and also all so excited to hear that there are positions for social justice coordination on college campuses, because they know the world needs that type of work right now. The networking opportunities down here are endless, and so are the mountain views and greenupon-green forests!” Jen Powers writes, “I hope everyone is doing well and they are on their own path to achieving greatness!”

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

Read more: go.uvm.edu/maulucci ANSWERS TO QUIZ ON PAGE 43

be the best student I could be and continue my education further than I ever thought possible!” Georgia R. Troutman writes, “I am going to grad school to pursue a master’s in healthcare economics at the London School of Economics.

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

16

Jacob T. Bachman writes, “In recent weeks I have made the biggest decision of my young adult life. After spending a year working hard for Boyden Valley Winery & Spirits, based out of Cambridge, Vermont, I have made a huge move down to Saint John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I am now the general manager of North Shore Deli located at Mongoose Junction in Cruz Bay, Saint John. It has been my dream since I was a child to adventure, explore and make drastic changes in my day-to-day lifestyle. What better way than moving thousands of miles away to a true American paradise! I hope you are well, Class of 2015 and Class of 2016. I miss Burlington immensely. Go

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Cats!” (Editor's Note: I proofread Jacob's note just as Irma was bearing down on the Virgin Islands. After checking in with him post-storm, I'm happy to share the following update: "All is well after riding out both hurricanes Irma and Maria in St. John, USVI. The hurricanes absolutely devastated the entirety of the Virgin Islands. I never thought that I would experience two category five hurricanes, let alone two in a two-week timespan. The experience and the aftermath forever changed my life. It’s an experience that I wouldn’t trade for the world. I made it back stateside safely, and am heading back to St. John to put in my time and help revive the island and the restaurant I managed as best I can. Vermont, I’ll see you again soon!”) Ayla Walker writes, “I recently accepted a position at RTI International in Waltham, Massachusetts, after moving to Boston.”

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

1. False. Lake Champlain flows from Whitehall, New York north almost across the U.S./Canadian border to its outlet at the Richelieu River in Quebec. From there, the water joins the St. Lawrence River, which eventually drains into the Atlantic Ocean at the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

2. b) Benedict Arnold 3. d) The waters of Lake Champlain reach their greatest depth (400 feet) in the area between Charlotte, Vermont and Essex, New York.

4. d) Bluefin Tuna 5. a) 25,860 6. b) Rudyard Kipling 7. c) New Jersey New Jersey’s area in square miles: 8,721. Lake Champlain Watershed’s: 8,234.

8. b) Rock Dunder 9. d) None of the above The soldiers were housed in UVM’s original building, the College Edifice, later destroyed by fire in 1824. The Edifice was on roughly the same site as Old Mill.

10. b) 40,000 Got them all correct? Let me know: Thomas.Weaver@ uvm.edu

ANDY DUBACK

| IN MEMORIAM 1938 Ruth White Whitcomb 1939 Janet Sheltus Duggan 1940 Mary Clare Naramore 1941 Ruth Davis Newton

Donald W. Thayer 1942 Louise Rugg Groner 1943 Philip J. Chesarone

Robert C. Doherty, MD'47 1945 Vesta Stevens Downer

Eunice Marie Simmons, MD'49 1946 Phyllis Hardy Atherton 1947 Phyllis Towne Gladdi

Barbara McGeever Madden 1948 Doris Holmberg Riley 1949 Wilma Murphy Dempsey

Donald Monroe Wheatley 1950 Joseph J. Basil

William Frederick O'Brien 1951 Elizabeth Davison Post

Bill Semonite

Elouie Farnsworth Snyder 1952 Andrew E. Doe

Ladon G. Johnson

William Gretchell Robinson 1953 Robert M. Davidson

Cynthia Swartz Kellem

Edward J. Kerle G'53

O. Chadwick Loveland

Wilfred John Sheehan 1954 Howard Allston Bouve, Jr.

Arthur S. Pare

Manuel Saenz, Jr.

Donald G. Schoenbrun 1955 Barbara Appleton Leighton

Stanley C. Rossier

Robert Walpole Wynne

1956

1957

1958

1959

1961

1962

1963

1964

1965

1966

1967

1968

1969

Jean Lennox Keati Gerry T. O'Halloran Donald Michael Zarou John O. Kenney Edward W. Newell Minor Sadler Harris, Jr. Albert T. Maxson David M. Noyes Michael J. Turianski Robert E. Brown Alexander D. Gibson, Jr. James Alfred Lawson Nancy Parks Musselwhite Helen Fogg Rucker Doreen McNamee Sacco Thomas Jeffrey Amidon Kenneth E. Hyatt, Jr. Theodore A. Giebutowski Michael James Lovejoy James B. Conant Charity Greenwood Henderson Robert W. Pierce Toini Kalinen Skorpen Paul L. Hazard George Franklin Peterson, G'72 Richard G. Leach Deborah Matthews Tillou Linda Riggs Abbott Jerold H. Goldberg Ruth Russell Seward Kenneth R. Spalter Mikell A. Beckley Henry Holt Uihlein, Jr. Alice Kasprzycki Fedick Gerard J. Grenon Constance Moore Beliveau Paul T. Galusha

1973 1974 1975

1976 1977 1978 1979

1980

1981 1984 1985 1986

1989 1990

1992 1997 1998 1999 2004 2011 2013

Randall James Bevins Nancy Rebecca Young Douglas Robert Walker G'75, '03 Darcie B. Wentworth Richard Kuehne William B. Wessel Lynn Saunders Burkett Mary Elizabeth Beach G'77, '92 Minot Allen Frye Richard Allen Leshane Steve Richard Scholtz Edward Austin Lindsay Nancy Ford Maratta G'80 Nora Sewell Nowakoski George Richard Poirier Kathryn Johnson Boyle Lawrence Arthur Soodak E. Anne Corley Jean Perronne Grout G'86 Dixie Paradee Hubbard Kimberly Sue Varnal Michael J. Shinay G'89 Susan Villa Busch G'90 Robert Arliton Everett, Jr. Eric Jacques Choiniere Christopher J. Labounty Jennifer Lynne Morey Ross Joseph Comaratta Twila Williamson Stuart Alexander Jackson Whitney Jade Washuta

| UVM COMMUNITY Walter “Ted” Brenneman,

professor emeritus of religion, died on August 19, 2017. He was a thirty-year veteran of the UVM faculty, from 1969 to 1999. Professor Brenneman taught a wide range of courses throughout his time in the department. His years of scholarship explored religious symbols and the theoretical underpinnings of the comparative study of religion.

Dr. William Graham, professor

emeritus of medicine, died on June 29, 2017. Dr. Graham joined the UVM medical faculty in 1971. In addition to his clinical work, he researched the effects of altitude on patients with severe lung disease.

He went on to study silicosis and dust

exposure in the Vermont granite industry.

In retirement, he applied his expertise to medical-legal work in silicosis.

Ken Gross, professor emeritus of

mathematics, passed away on September 10, 2017. Professor Gross, recruited to UVM in 1987 as chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, was a transformative leader, creating a mathematics PhD program, co-founding the Vermont State Mathematics Coalition and the Vermont High School Summer Mathematics Institute. On a national scale, Gross’s Vermont Mathematics Initiative has become a model for improving education in K12.

Martin E. Kuehne, professor emeritus of chemistry, died on August 4, 2017.

Professor Kuehne’s work at UVM began in 1961 and continued with research long after his transition to emeritus status in 2003. He achieved international renown for his indole alkaloid syntheses in pursuit of cancer chemotherapeutic agents.

Leslie Morrissey, professor emerita

of natural resources, died on September 2, 2017. She was an associate professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources from 1995 to 2013. During her years at UVM, Professor Morrissey was instrumental in building a geospatial technologies program.

FA L L 2 0 1 7 |

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| EXTRA CREDIT

DAIRY BAR REVIVAL A declarative sentence sure to strike joy in the hearts of alumni: UVM ice cream is back. The Davis Center is home to a new incarnation of the fabled UVM Dairy Bar, which operated on campus from 1950 to the mid-1990s.

2017, a deeply green-and-gold supply chain starts with milk from the student-run CREAM herd.

St. Albans Cooperative Creamery processes that milk, then Wilcox Ice Cream in Arlington, Vermont, makes eight flavors from original UVM recipes. (Howard Wilcox ’66, “Ice Cream Master” at Wilcox, first honed his skills crafting the sweet stuff as an undergrad.) And that light, sublime taste in the Proctor Maple flavor? Of course, from UVM’s sugarbush/research center at the foot of Mt. Mansfield.

But if something still doesn’t feel quite right as you take that first lick, head down the hall to Chikago Landing, overlooking the Davis Center atrium. There, soda fountain stools, relics of the original Dairy Bar, surround a table.

Take a seat. Maybe spin. Bring it full circle.

64 |

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

ANDY DUBACK

C E L E B R AT I N G E XC E L L E N C E I N O U R CO M M U N I T Y

UVM Foundation & UVM Alumni Association Awards

OUTSTANDING YOUNG ALUMNI AWARD Emily Meltzer ’12 and Philip Bruno ’12

ALUMNI ACHIEVEMENT AWARD David Ely ’67 and J. Paul Molloy ’61

DISTINGUISHED SERVICE AWARD Lawrence M. Roth ’67 Deborah H. McAneny ’81

UVM FOUNDATION LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN PHILANTHROPY AWARD Steven and Beverly Rubenstein Charitable Foundation, Inc. NOMINATE TODAY FOR THE 2018 AWARDS With more than 110,000 UVM alumni worldwide, we’re relying on you, our community, to help us identify the outstanding members among us. Help us shine the spotlight in 2018 by nominating a deserving alum or faculty member today.

GEORGE V. KIDDER OUTSTANDING FACULTY AWARD Dr. Lewis First

Nominate by the end of 2017, for all 2018 award winners. Visit alumni.uvm.edu/awards for more information on nominating a fellow Catamount!

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VERMONT QUARTERLY

86 South Williams Street Burlington VT 05401

A SELECTION OF OUR FAVORITE LAKE PHOTOS (INSTAGRAM.COM/UNIVERSITYOFVERMONT). LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM: @IANMCHALE ‘17 AMPH ‘18, @UPGRAM G’18, ALEX SWETLAND ‘20 @UVMSAILING, @VERMONTBYERIN ‘20, @BRIANJENKINSPHOTO, @BRYCEOLSON ‘19, @UNIVERSITYOFVERMONT, @SHANE_O_NEILLL, TONI JENKINS

PERMIT NO. 143