VERMONT AMERICANS EST NEW

VERMONT
THE UNIVERSITY OF
Q U A R T E R LY
THE
N E WES T
1
Vietnamese, Sudanese, Iraqi, Bhutanese, Somalian,
Bosnian, Congolese… refugee resettlement is enriching
the culture of Vermont and UVM
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
AMERICANS
KATHY GIUSTI ’80
•
KIDDER WINNER LUIS VIVANCO
•
NCAA SKIING CHAMPIONS
VQ
SUMMER | 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
VQ
PRESIDENT’S PERSPECTIVE
THE GREEN
New professor Pramodita Sharma puts focus
on family business; Tapping trees, not just
for maples anymore; Brent Reader ’13 and
other students earn top scholarships;
Commencement 2012; and more.
CATAMOUNT SPORTS
Vermont skiers capture a national
championship in dominant style.
2
4
STUDENT VOICE
AN IMPATIENT PATIENT
14
16
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
Refugee resettlement is changing the face
of Burlington, creating a rich international
community right at UVM’s doorstep.
BY THOMAS WEAVER
WISDOM ON TWO WHEELS
36
Luis Vivanco, winner of the Alumni Association’s
Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award, inspires students
from the front of the class or the seat of a bike.
BY JOSHUA BROWN
18
ALUMNI CONNECTION
Two recent naming gifts have helped to push
the Alumni House renovation project forward.
CLASS NOTES
BY JOSHUA BROWN
THE NEWEST AMERICANS
32
20
EXTRA CREDIT
Campus colors for the home
41
46
64
CAMPUS CENTERPIECE: The fountain on the Green was fully restored
to its original design this spring, complete with a cherub on top.
See uvm.edu/vq for a video on the new/old fountain.
Cover photograph of Bijoux Bahati ’12 by Bear Cieri
SUMMER 2008
#
As Chagas disease slowly migrates north,
scientists study its movement and what it
might mean.
Faced with her own cancer diagnosis, Kathy
Giusti ’80 set to work creating the innovative
Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation.
BY RICK GREEN ’82
BY FRANCES CANNON ’13
NEW KNOWLEDGE
30
BY THOMAS WEAVER
BY AMANDA WAITE ’02 G’04
Nomadic childhood years inspire a different,
deeper definition of home.
FRIENDSHIP IN FILM
Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert
Richardson and Professor Emeritus Frank
Manchel reconnect years after being
student and teacher.
#
P R E S I D E N T’ S
2
University of Vermont community.
As your new president, I will
champion at every opportunity the
principles and values that underlie
the rich history of this unique land
grant, public research university. Our
priorities will be:
1) to promote financial access and affordability for
our students by ensuring that our tuition remains reasonable and competitive, while being mindful of any
debt that our students may incur as they complete their
studies within four years;
2) to ensure that the University has a rich curriculum
that balances a first-rate educational experience for all
of our students from the theoretical to the practical application of new discoveries and ideas;
3) to support a research infrastructure and facilities
that will enable our great faculty and researchers to discover and transmit new knowledge for the betterment
of society and resolution of difficult societal problems;
and finally,
4) to promote economic development and to support workforce needs throughout Vermont, working
closely with political and business leaders to ensure that
the University of Vermont is the economic engine of the
state. We also will embrace the internationalization and
diversification of the University, while at the same time
encouraging administrative efficiencies in every task,
so that the resources of the University will be aligned
closely with UVM’s highest priorities and goals. No university or institution can advance excellence unless it
continues to make wise and important investments that
are strategically consistent with its mission and goals.
Cost-cutting alone will not bring innovation, creativity,
and imagination. There must be important new investments that will take us to an even greater level and intensity in promoting innovation, research, and excellence
in teaching and learning. The result will be a greater academic distinctiveness and reputation.
In closing, let me extend my appreciation to all members of the UVM community for this marvelous opportunity to join you as your twenty-sixth president and
colleague. We are excited to move to Vermont and to
share with each of you our vision and enthusiasm for the
very bright future ahead for the University of Vermont.
—Tom Sullivan
SALLY MCCAY
VQ
EDITOR
Thomas Weaver
ART DIRECTOR
Elise Whittemore-Hill
CLASS NOTES EDITOR
Kathleen Laramee ’00
JULY 2012
VQEXTRAuvm.edu/vq
Many of you (49,261 to be precise) received an email in May with links
to the inaugural edition of VQ Extra, new stories added to uvm.edu/vq
between print issues. If you didn’t get that email and would like to be
notified of new online content in the future, and/or if you’d prefer to
no longer receive the print edition, but instead receive email notice of
when it’s available online, let us know at [email protected].
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Joshua Brown, Frances Cannon ’13,
Lee Ann Cox, Rick Green ’82,
Jay Goyette, Jon Reidel G’06,
Amanda Waite’02, G’04, Jeff Wakefield
PHOTOGRAPHY
Joshua Brown, Kailee Brickner-McDonald,
Bear Cieri, Will Kirk, Sally McCay,
Ryan Pfluger, Natalie Stultz, Brett Wilhelm
ILLUSTRATION
Frances Cannon ’13
ADVERTISING SALES
Theresa Miller
Vermont Quarterly
86 South Williams Street
Burlington, VT 05401
(802) 656-1100, [email protected]
JESSICA GREER MORRIS ’90
Landing on Newsweek’s list of “150 Fearless
Women” was quite an honor this spring for
alumna Jessica Morris. We catch up with her in
a conversation that touches on college days;
her career emcompassing theatre, public
health, and public relations; and, of course, the
Project Girl Performance Collective that drew
Newsweek’s notice.
ADDRESS CHANGES
Alumni and Donor Relations
411 Main Street
Burlington, VT 05401
(802) 656-9662, [email protected]
DC3
Washington, D.C., is home
base to many UVM alumni. VQ
CLASS NOTES
caught up with three of them
Alumni Relations
(802) 656-2010
[email protected]
who are making their mark in
the nation’s capital in their own
CORRESPONDENCE
Editor, Vermont Quarterly
86 South Williams Street
Burlington, VT 05401
(802) 656-2005
[email protected]
VERMONT QUARTERLY
publishes March 1,
July 1, November 1.
ways—Annalee Ash ’76 as an
advocate for children’s rights in the District; Ed
Pagano ’85 as President Obama’s deputy director
of legislative affairs; and Catlin O’Neill ’99 as chief
of staff for Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
PRINTED IN VERMONT
Issue No. 63, July 2012
VERMONT QUARTERLY
The University of Vermont
86 South Williams Street
Burlington, VT 05401
VERMONT QUARTERLY ONLINE
uvm.edu/vq
VERMONT QUARTERLY BLOG
vermontquarterly.wordpress.com
@uvmvermont
www.facebook.com/universityofvermont
www.youtube.com/universityofvermont
OLIVIA’S ORGANICS
Unless you were a classmate of Mark DeMichaelis
’87 you might be more familiar with his daughter
Olivia. Well, her cartoon identity, that is, where
she’s the smiling little girl on the Olivia’s Organics
line of salad greens. DeMichaelis has guided the
Boston-based family produce enterprise to new
heights and leadership as a socially conscious
business.
FA L L 2 0 1 1
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
I
am delighted to join the University
of Vermont as your next president.
I want to extend my appreciation
to former President Dan Fogel for
his visionary leadership over nearly a
decade, and to interim President John
Bramley for his exceptional stewardship of the University during the last year. Because of the vision of these
two individuals and their loyalty to UVM, the University that I join is very strong and positioned positively
for great advances at the present and in the future.
I also want to extend my deep appreciation to Robert
Cioffi ’90, chair of the Board of Trustees and chair of the
Presidential Search Committee, for his dedicated leadership to the University throughout his many years of service, and especially during the presidential search and
the transition period. Chair Cioffi and the entire Board
of Trustees, as well as the Presidential Search Committee, have contributed an enormous amount of their time
and dedication to the University.
As I noted in my introductory remarks during the announcement of my selection at a campus gathering on
February 22, I am very excited both personally and professionally about this tremendous opportunity to join
the University of Vermont community. My wife, Leslie,
an alumna of the Class of 1977, joins me in that enthusiasm as well. I noted on that occasion that the University
is at a very important juncture in its history, and that it
has enormous potential for advancing its culture of excellence. Its foundation is strong and its aspirations and
expectations are high. I look forward to all of the opportunities to work closely with faculty, staff, students, and
alumni, as we, together, move forward in maintaining
and enhancing an outstanding University.
My own goals for the University, I believe shared by
many, are: to increase the quality and experience in the
teaching and learning environment of the University that
will advance each student’s total academic, cultural, and
social experience; to expand important breakthrough
research, and scholarly and creative accomplishments of
the faculty; and to continue to engage and promote the
civic life and outreach throughout Vermont and beyond.
I am confident that through a strong partnership
with the political leadership of the state, all the citizens
of Vermont and the generations of Vermonters to come
will benefit by the accomplishments of those within our
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
PERSPECTIVE
GREEN
They’re not actually going to
make much of the sap into
syrup; just enough to make
sure it tastes good. What they
really want is data on how
much sap—and sugar—birch
trees produce.
“We want to see whether
there is enough sugar produced by birches here in
Vermont, using modern tools
THE
GATHERING NEWS & VIEWS OF LIFE AT THE UNIVERSITY
Abby van den Berg, UVM
researcher and alumna, is
exploring the viability of
tapping birches to diversify
Vermont’s syrup production.
Branching out with birch sap
4
sticking out of the side of
a tree. Then the chest-high
tubes run gently downhill,
pulling sap, under vacuum
pressure, to collecting tanks.
Everything here looks like a
modern maple sugarbush.
Except the trees. They’re
not maples. They’re birches.
“It’s odd, isn’t it?” she says.
Up a long dirt driveway,
off Route Seven, in Leicester,
Vermont, Kevin New and his
cousin have converted an old
goat barn into a sugarhouse.
“As you can see, we don’t
win awards for the looks of
our shack,” he says, laughing,
“but we have won awards for
our maple syrup.” A sweet
steam rises off the evaporator
pan and he runs a skimmer
through boiling sap. Along
one wall he’s tacked a pair of
blue ribbons from the Addison County Fair. Against the
back window, stand two neat
rows of mason jars filled with
rich reddish syrup.
Except the syrup isn’t
maple syrup. It’s birch syrup.
These may be the only two
JOSHUA BROWN (2)
BOTTOM: SALLY MCCAY
[BUSINESS]
FAMILY TIES
N
o wise person would
ever work for a salary.”
Those were Pramodita
Sharma’s grandfather’s
words of warning when she
told him of her decision to
pursue a career in education.
To her grandfather, being
one’s own boss and staying in
their family business in north-
ern India were the keys to a
good life.
It was a life Sharma was
used to. Starting in grade five,
she helped with accounting at
her father’s automotive dealerships. At the age of fifteen,
when her father passed away,
she continued accounting
work with extended family, selling “anything with
wheels.”
Although she left the family
business to pursue a passion
for education and research,
family business has not left
Sharma. Today, she’s a leading scholar on the topic, a
research spark begun in her
childhood but reignited in
grad school at the University
of Calgary.
“I was working on a project
with a million-dollar grant
marked solely for family
business,” recalls Sharma,
who came to UVM last year
from the John Molson School
of Business at Concordia
University in Montreal. “I
was told to do a literature
The arrival of Professor
Pramodita Sharma has
sharpened UVM’s focus
on family business.
PRODUCING A
BLOCKBUSTER
One of the film world’s top
producers, partnering on
projects with the likes of directors Spike Lee, Robert Altman, and Alejandro González
Iñárritu on critically acclaimed
works across the past twentyfive years, alumnus Jon Kilik’s
story is well known to VQ
readers.
This spring Kilik ’78
added something new to his
oeuvre—box office smash,
record-breaking blockbuster.
The Hunger Games opened
with the strongest weekend
of ticket sales ever for a spring
release and has continued to
draw large audiences.
While the film is a bit of a
departure for Kilik, it’s also
consistent with the thoughtprovoking sense of social
conscience that unites his
work. Also true to form, Kilik
returned to UVM again for
several benefit screenings
that directed some of that
box office bonanza to UVM
Film and Television Studies;
a post-screening Q and A
with his mentor, Professor
Emeritus Frank Manchel; and
on-campus discussions with
students.
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
O
n a snowy slope in
Underhill Center,
just down the road
from UVM’s Proctor Maple Research
Center, Professor Abby van
den Berg ’99 ducks under
some pale blue tubing that
runs through the forest.
“Here are some of our
trees,” she says with a hint of
a smile.
It’s conventional plastic
tubing used in the maple
syrup business. Each stretch
is connected to a black spout
places in Vermont where
birch sap is being made into
syrup.
If Abby van den Berg’s new
research project in Underhill
comes back with promising
results, she expects to see
those numbers changing.
In March, van den Berg
and her colleagues at the
Proctor Center, Tim Perkins
and Marc Isselhardt, and her
work-study student, Teague
Henkle ’14, tapped forty
birch trees in five research
plots at the Proctor Center.
It’s an experiment funded
by the Northeastern States
Research Cooperative.
and techniques—like vacuum
and reverse osmosis—to
make a profitable addition to
an established maple operation,” she says.
But to do that economic
analysis, van den Berg first
needs to figure out some
birch basics.
“We don’t know a lot
about birch here in the
Northeast,” she says, “How
long is the season? How
much sap do different size
trees make? How much sugar
will they yield? How many
trees and taps would you
need to be profitable?”
If you’re thinking this
might be a tasty new alternative for your pancakes, hold
that thought. Birch syrup is a
decidedly different product
in taste—fruity, tangy, even
spicy; cost—Alaskan birch
syrup goes for $78 per quart;
and use—in gourmet sauces
and glazes, generally.
For all of the reasons above,
van den Berg, an assistant
professor in UVM’s Plant
Biology Department, doesn’t
see birch syrup replacing
maple. Instead she’d like to
know if it can be produced
just as the maple season is
wrapping up, adding to producers’ bottom line.
“Birch trees are already
present in a lot of sugarbushes,” van den Berg says.
Ambitious sugarmakers could
follow up their six or eight
weeks of maple syrup making
with two or three weeks of
birch. And that would have
ecological benefits too. “If
birch become a species of
value,” she says, “producers are more likely to want
to keep them and thus keep
more diversity in our forests.”
5
THEGREEN
w
r
u
v
’RUV’S
NATIONAL TITLE
WRUV listeners
tuned in for nearly
152 days of music
for three days in
March, a level of
commitment that
won UVM’s station
a national championship for college
radio.
Student-run
WRUV competed
against sixty-three
other stations
in Soundtap
review, and I started reading
these articles and I thought,
‘They’re talking about my
family.’ It was after so many
years that I found the literature that actually spoke to me,
that was actually more reality
to me than anything else that
I had studied.”
It was a fledgling field at
the time, but over the years
Sharma has helped define
it. Her book Entrepreneurial
Family Firms (2010, Prentice Hall) is one of the most
widely used college textbooks
and has been translated into
Mandarin and Greek. She’s
also editor of the journal Family Business Review and serves
as director for the only global
applied research initiative
on family business studies,
Successful Trans-generational
Entrepreneurship Practices at
Babson College, a group with
forty-one partner institutions
in thirty-five countries.
At UVM, Sharma has
quickly begun collaborations
with fellow faculty to sharpen
the family business focus at
the university. A first-ever
global family enterprise case
competition for students is
in the works for next January.
Other initiatives spearheaded
by Sharma include the “UVM
Family Business Awards”
and the “UVM Pitch Competition,” both scheduled
for Homecoming Weekend,
October 5-7. The awards,
organized by the Family Business Initiative, will recognize
UVM alumni and Vermontbased businesses that have
demonstrated a commitment
to creating sustainable business
through leadership and innovation. The Entrepreneurial
Club is organizing the Pitch
Madness, a
bracket-style event
2012 COMMENCEMENT
patterned after the
The Class of 2012 enjoyed sunny skies,
NCAA basketball
a beautiful setting on the Green, and
tourney.
a surprise appearance by a rapping
Spongebob Squarepants and Patrick
In something
Star at their commencement ceremony.
of a final-round
The latter came courtesy of alumna
buzzer beater,
Cyma Zarghami, president of Nickel-
UVM listeners
9
0.
1
odeon television network.
logged more than
Prior to bringing on the actors Tom
3,645 hours—just
Kennedy and Bill Fagerbakke, who
6
voice the two cartoon characters so
more than Carn-
many of the students grew up watch-
egie Mellon.
ing, Zarghami told the new grads
F
M
that, as Nickelodeon’s longtime prime
demographic, she knew their millennial
generation well.
She credited them with being
tech-savvy, hardworking, socially and
environmentally conscious. “You are a
SPOTLIGHT ON STUDENT RESEARCH
On April 19, a record 365 students—205 undergraduates and 160 graduate students—made
oral presentations or showed posters at UVM’s sixth-annual Student Research Conference.
Sixty-four academic programs from all ten of UVM’s colleges and schools were represented.
SALLY MCCAY
with a lot of heart.”
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
twenty-three hours
SALLY MCCAY
7
generation well-positioned for what’s
ahead,” Zarghami said. “Authenticity is
your trademark. You are a generation
STUDENT FOCUS
Competition, made possible
by a $100,000 donation by
David ’86 and Jessica Arnoff.
Students in the competition
will create and present an
overall business plan that is
comprehensive, realistic, and
has potential value.
As Professor Pramodita
Sharma continues to delve
into what makes family businesses thrive or fail and share
those lessons with UVM
students, her own memories
are never far away. “I often
relate my research to some of
the things I remember growing up,” she says. “I still find it
fascinating.”
E
ven the smallest task seemed insurmountable to Brent Reader ’13
when he returned home from a tour in Iraq as an Army combat
medic. He continually fended off images from the war, including
the trauma of trying to save the life of a close friend shot by a sniper
while the two stood talking. Reader, a junior social work major, spent
twelve months in Ar Ramadi, considered the most dangerous city in
the world at the time, and saw everything from ambushes to roadside
bombs to firefights.
Reader says it took years to get his own issues under control and
that he didn’t always connect with counselors who hadn’t served and
didn’t understand what he was going through. This helped fuel his
desire to help other veterans, some of whom were coming to his house
in Swanton, Vermont, just to talk or ask questions about accessing
veteran services. His wife, Misty, half-jokingly started calling their
residence “the home for wayward soldiers” and encouraged him to go
back to school.
“There’s a saying, ‘physician, heal thyself,’ that really spoke to me,”
says Reader, who credits his father, a Vietnam War veteran and educa-
[PSYCHIATRY]
INSIDE THE TEEN MIND
tor, for helping him deal with his post-war struggles. “The best way for
me to do that is to help others. I had started to address my own issues
and I wanted to help other veterans, but I wasn’t sure how to do that
outside of the military. That’s when I decided to go back to UVM for
social work.”
Before the war, before marrying and having children, Reader
originally enrolled at UVM after graduating high school in 1996, but
struggled in the classroom before being dismissed from the university
in 1998. “I didn’t take college seriously, didn’t appreciate it,” he says of
his first attempt. “I let it slip through my fingers.” After leaving school
BOOM YEAR
FOR SCHOLARS
In addition to Brent Reader’s
Truman Scholarship, a number of UVM students have
received national recognition in prestigious academic
competitions this year.
Students or recent graduates have won five Fulbright
he worked at IBM and Ben & Jerry’s before feeling a duty to join his fel-
Scholarships, a Goldwater
low Vermonters in Iraq.
Scholarship, a Udall Scholar-
Reader has been a very different student on his second time
ship, a Boren Scholarship,
through UVM—one with a purpose. His goal to help his fellow veter-
five Gilman Scholarships,
ans, coupled with work this member of the Abenaki Nation (he is one
and four Critical Language
of a half-dozen speakers of Western Abenaki) has done within that
Scholarships. UVM also
community, helped to earn Reader distinction this spring as one of
only sixty-five Truman Scholars nationwide. He is just the third UVM recipient of the Truman, which honors students focused on public service
and provides financial support for furthering their educations.
“Whenever someone says that soldiers who are coming home from
will blame the VA for being too slow in delivering services or the mili-
ship finalists, two students
given honorable mention
recognition in the Goldwater
Scholarship competition,
two other students who
were finalists in the Boren
Scholarship competition,
tary for not mitigating PTSD symptoms, but the truth is that it’s more
and four alternates and two
complex than that and involves numerous reasons. I don’t want to
other Fulbright finalists, in
point blame; I just want to fix the problem through good public policy.”
addition to the five winners.
SALLY MCCAY
strong evidence that some
teenagers are at higher risk for
drug and alcohol experimentation—simply because their
brains work differently, making them more impulsive.
Their findings are presented in the journal Nature
Neuroscience, published
online in April.
This discovery helps answer
a long-standing chicken-oregg question about whether
certain brain patterns come
before drug use—or are
caused by it.
“The differences in these
networks seem to precede
drug use,” says Garavan,
Whelan’s colleague in UVM’s
psychiatry department, who
also served as the principal
investigator of the Irish component of a large European
research project, called
IMAGEN, that gathered the
data about the teens in the
new study.
In a key finding, diminished activity in a network
involving the “orbitofrontal
cortex” is associated with
experimentation with alcohol, cigarettes, and illegal
drugs in early adolescence.
“These networks are not
working as well for some kids
as for others,” says Whelan,
making them more impulsive.
Faced with a choice about
smoking or drinking, the
fourteen-year-old with a less
functional impulse-regulating
network will be more likely
to say, “‘Yeah, gimme, gimme,
gimme!’” says Garavan, “and
this other kid is saying, ‘No,
I’m not going to do that.’”
Testing for lower function in
this and other brain networks
could, perhaps, be used by
researchers someday as “a risk
factor or biomarker for potential drug use,” Garavan says.
Understanding brain networks that put some teenagers at higher risk for starting
to use alcohol and drugs
could have large implications for public health. Death
among teenagers in the
industrialized world is largely
caused by preventable or
self-inflicted accidents that
are often launched by impulsive risky behaviors—and
alcohol and drug use often is
a root of these behaviors.
Additionally, “addiction
in the Western world is our
number-one health problem,”
says Garavan. “Think about
alcohol, cigarettes, or harder
drugs and all the consequences that has in society for
people’s health.”
[STUDENT LIFE]
KEEPING IT REAL
WITH CAMPUS DINING
U
VM is the fifth school
in the nation, and the
first large university
east of California,
to sign on to a program
launched last fall called the
Real Food Campus Commitment. UVM students were
instrumental in advocating for the university’s
participation.
By signing the commit-
SUMMER 2012
war are falling apart, then the blame game starts,” Reader says. “Some
had two Truman Scholar-
T
hat teenagers push
against boundaries—
and sometimes take
risks—is as predictable
as the sunrise. It happens in
all cultures and even across all
mammal species: adolescence
is a time to test limits and
develop independence.
But why do some teenagers
start smoking or experimenting with drugs—while others
don’t?
In the largest imaging study
of the human brain ever
conducted—involving 1,896
fourteen-year-olds—scientists have discovered a number of previously unknown
networks that go a long way
toward an answer.
Robert Whelan and Hugh
Garavan of the University of
Vermont, along with a large
group of international colleagues, report that differences
in these networks provide
THEGREEN
9
THEGREEN
ment, UVM pledges to serve
20 percent “real food” at all its
campus food outlets by 2020.
Real food is defined as that
which is locally grown, fair
trade, of low environmental
impact, and/or humanely
produced.
Currently 12 percent of
UVM’s menu falls within
those categories. UVM is
confident it will exceed the
20 percent threshold before
2020.
“The current global food
system has produced cheap
food but is not sustainable,”
said John Bramley, UVM
interim president, at a March
signing ceremony. “It relies
heavily on petroleum and
large energy inputs and has
contributed to societal health
challenges such as diabetes
and obesity. We need to
develop regionally based
systems that protect our soils
and water, are more energy
efficient, and contribute positively to public health.”
The Real Food Campus
Commitment was developed
by Real Food Challenge,
a national, student-driven
campaign to create a more
just and sustainable food
system. According to David
Schwartz, campaign director,
UVM’s decision to participate
is significant because of the
‘‘
impact it will have on other
large schools. Unlike smaller
schools, who typically do
their own purchasing, UVM
subcontracts its dining program to a large food service
provider, Sodexo.
“It’s a huge motivator
for other big schools,” said
Schwartz. “When they look
at UVM, they’re not just seeing a peer institution; they’re
seeing one that works with a
large food service company.
If UVM and Sodexo can do
it, they can, too.”
[STUDENT LIFE]
SERVICE IS IN THE HOUSE
G
rowing up on a dairy
farm in Vermont’s
Northeast Kingdom,
sophomore Elizabeth
Remick began developing
her passions from the ground
up. Fostering an appreciation
for local foods by tending the
garden and cooking; an interest in health from her mother,
a nutritionist; a commitment
to community service as an
officer in the local chapter of
the National Honor Society
and youth mentor. When she
came to UVM as an animal
science major, finding fellowship that kept her true to her
values was essential.
“I liked the idea of programmed housing where I
could do service and have
friends that did service with
me,” says Remick. “That was
appealing.”
The Dewey House for Civic
Engagement, the university’s
fifth and newest residential
NATALIE STULTZ
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
[ QUOTE UNQUOTE ]
10
Whereas, debate is a defining characteristic of Vermont at the
dinner table, in the classroom, during a traditional town meeting,
and in the legislative chamber of the state house in Montpelier…
—From a spring joint resolution of the Vermont State Legislature honoring the university’s
Lawrence Debate Union. Look for a story on UVM debate in the fall issue of VQ.
Community service unites
undergrads at the Dewey
House for Civic Engagement
residential learning
community.
learning community, was an
ideal fit, drawing students
who are deeply committed to
working collaboratively for
social justice—they agree to
a minimum (though most do
many more) of sixty hours
of service—whether they
choose to fight hunger or
homelessness, promote farms
or families. The requirement
for Community Service
Scholars (which includes
Remick) is eighty hours
in exchange for a $3,000
scholarship renewable for
four years. But these spots
are competitive. About 150
applications came in for the
coming fall’s eight slots.
In her first year Remick
jumped into cooking for
Campus Kitchens, which
provides healthful meals for
the Winooski Teen Center and
the Chittenden Emergency
Food Shelf. This year she has
continued to log time there in
addition to her second-year
individual leadership project
working with the Northeast
Organic Farm Association
(NOFA). Wrapping up her
end-of-semester presentation
for advisors and peers, Remick
reflected, as she’s been trained
to do, on the real-world
obstacles to her case for eating
local foods—from the in-themoment, out-of-your-pocket
cost to the understanding that
it means thinking about what
KAILEE BRICKNER-MCDONALD
you eat all the time. “But for
me,” she concludes, “It’s part
of my moral code.”
Such analysis is what makes
John Sama ’84 G’91, director
of the Living/Learning Center as well as all residential
learning communities, believe
that Dewey House may be the
strongest in terms of impact
on students’ identities. “The
students there have to be
introspective and do a lot of
reflection,” he says.“ “Probably more than in any of the
other communities, this topic
is tied to who students are as
people and as citizens.”
[VERMONT]
TAKING A BROADER
ECONOMIC VIEW
S
ince World War II,
policy-makers and their
economic advisors
worldwide have measured economic progress by
the Gross Domestic Product,
or GDP, which tracks the
volume of commercial trans-
actions: the purchase and sale
of stuff.
“And that’s what we’ve
gotten—more stuff,” says
Jon Erickson, professor and
managing director of UVM’s
Gund Institute. “But is having
more stuff the only purpose
of the economy? Is it even the
main purpose?”
Erickson doesn’t think it
is—or should be—anymore.
“GDP accounting grew
out of the Great Depression
and became the dominant
planning tool for post-war
expansion,” he says. “But
today economists and policymakers alike are questioning
the utility of such a narrow
metric of progress, looking
for more comprehensive measures that reflect the environmental and social realities of
our time.”
Vermont lawmakers agree,
and this spring they continued the state’s progressive
tradition by creating a law, the
first of its kind in the United
WHITE HOUSE
HONOR FOR ALUMNA
Jan Blittersdorf ‘84,
president and CEO
of NRG Systems, a
Vermont-based manufacturer of wind energy
assessment equipment,
was recognized as a
“Champion of Change”
for renewable energy
at the White House on
April 19.
The award
recognizes “ordinary
Americans…doing
extraordinary things in
their communities to
out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the
rest of the world.”
Blittersdorf became
CEO of NRG Systems in
2004 after serving as
vice president and CFO.
In 2010, she became
sole owner of NRG
Systems, one of only
a few independent,
women-owned companies in the wind energy
industry.
11
States, that will establish the
Vermont Genuine Progress
Indicator, a broader economic
measure.
The law calls on state
government to work with the
Gund Institute to craft the
metric that “will assist state
government in decision-making by providing an additional
basis for budgetary decisions,
including outcomes-based
budgeting; by measuring
progress in the application of
policy and programs; and by
serving as a tool to identify
public policy priorities,
including other measures
such as human rights.”
“It makes sense that Vermont, with its commitment
to environmental protection
and social justice, would be in
the forefront of a movement
to redefine progress,” says
Erickson.
“The point of the economy isn’t to crank through
resources as quickly as
possible,” says Gund Fellow
Eric Zencey, who will be
coordinating the GPI initia-
tive. “The point is to build
sustainable well-being for our
communities.”
GPI studies and happiness
surveys point to a growing
disconnect between GDP
and our standard of living.
“GDP assumes that if we’re
all working eighty hours a
week, farming our children
out to daycare, and living
high-consumption lifestyles,
that’s a good thing for the
economy,” says Erickson,
“but that might not be
such a good thing for our
well-being.”
“GPI subtracts things that
should be costs—but in GDP
PRESIDENTIAL VISIT
12
SALLY MCCAY (2)
JUSTRELEASED
Porch perspectives
B
efore the days of automobiles, air conditioning, television and radio, there was the front porch. No dust
kicked up by traffic, a cool breeze on a hot day, and the
entertainment of neighbors and strangers passing by
made the porch a haven for neighborhood dwellers of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
“The porch was this kind of extended
threshold,” says Thomas Visser, associate
professor of history and director of the
Historic Preservation Program. “It was
neither inside nor outside, but it was a
place to meet and greet strangers. It was
a place to socialize informally.” That time
period is what Visser calls the “golden
age” of the porch, a structure, he says, that
serves as a virtual stage for human interaction. “It’s a prop, if you will. Without the
porch, it often would be very difficult for
that social engagement to happen.”
Visser traces the story of the porch—
and verandas, colonnades, porticoes and
piazzas—their styles, attributes, and functions in his latest book, Porches of North
America. He’s spent the past ten years
researching the topic and writing more
than a few lines of the book, it’s worth noting, on the porch of his Burlington home.
Visser’s fondness for porches stems
from childhood memories of summers
spent eating and even sleeping on the
screened-in, southeastern-facing, corner
porch of his parents’ New Hampshire
home. “It was just one of the most enjoyable parts of the house and one of the
most enjoyable aspects of summer life.”
But the academic connection is tied
not to the ease of porch life, but to the
challenges they present to historians and
preservationists. “Porches are somewhat
difficult to describe for a number of reasons,” Visser explains. “One is that the
architectural vocabulary of porches—the
types of trim, the stylistic clues—is not
always congruent with the style of the rest
of the house. From a preservation point of
view, that itself raises questions. Was this
porch part of the
original house?
Was this porch
added? What can
we learn from
that difference between the style of the
porch and the style of the house?” These
difficulties, he says, have perhaps caused
historians to devote less time and place
less significance on unraveling porches’
unique histories. Porches of North America
fills that void.
The book discusses the rise, decline
and resurgence of porches, covers their
history dating back to Native American
structures and ancient Greece, and contains a glossary of types of porches and
their popularity over time. Historic photos throughout the pages, many of which
are from UVM Libraries’ Special Collections, show porches in use through the
decades.
As for where porches stand today, Visser
says he feels there’s a resurgence brewing.
Front porches suffered in the 1950s and
’60s when privacy became more of an
issue and “the social life of families tended
to move from the front of the house to
the back of the house.” However, Visser
notes that climate change and energy
conservation are strong motivators for
reconsidering the usefulness of a shaded,
outdoor space—not just the open decks
and patios that were popularized through
the 1970s. “The porch is actually a very
effective way to have a comfortable space
for living without relying on artificial air
conditioning,” he says. “I think from that
point of view, perhaps there’s a future for
porches.”
—Amanda Waite ’02 G’04
[ BRIEFS ]
Changing Schools from the Inside Out:
Small Wins in Hard Times
Robert Larson
Rowman & Littlefield Education
Professor Emeritus Robert Larson
presents research and case studies
that critique the current climate of
top-down management of U.S. public
schools. One reviewer called it “a powerful antidote to the heavy-handed,
top-down corporate model of schooling being dished out in Washington.”
Alternatively, Larson advocates smallscale, incremental changes to improve
schools at a time when resources are
scarce. The foundational ideas for the
book, he notes, originated from Center
for Research on Vermont seminars.
Now in its third edition, the book has
earned a “highly recommended” stamp
from the American Library Association.
Advancing Nonprofit Stewardship
Through Self-Regulation:
Translating Principles into Practice
Christopher Corbett ’73
Kumarian Press
Alumnus Christopher Corbett offers
guidance for how nonprofits can
implement the thirty-three principles
recommended by Independent
Sector, the major trade organization
for nonprofits in the United States.
The principles were issued in 2007
after a call by senators Grassley and
Baucus for more accountability in
the nonprofit world. Corbett, whose
work focuses on applying community
psychology principles to the nonprofit
sector, shows organizations the steps
to take to increase transparency and
strengthen governance and ethical
standards.
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
Nearly four thousand people stood shoulder-to-shoulder in UVM’s Athletic Campus
Multipurpose Facility to see and hear President Barack Obama on March 30. The president’s
appearance in Vermont, for campaign fundraisers, was the first presidential visit to the state
since President Clinton in 1995 and the first to UVM since President Gerald Ford in 1974.
are counted as benefits—like
air pollution, water pollution,
land degradation,” says Erickson, “and it adds in things that
GDP doesn’t count because
they’re not part of the formal
economy—like household
work and volunteer time.”
Zencey led a graduate
class at the Gund Institute
last fall that updated a 2003
Gund research project, the
first state-level GPI study in
the nation. The class drew
on widely available data and
networked with state legislators, agencies, and Vermont
nonprofits to estimate
twenty-six GPI variables that
adjust Gross State Product
(the state-level equivalent to
GDP) for economic, social,
and environmental costs and
benefits to consumption.
The GPI bill was introduced into this year’s
legislative session by state
Sen. Anthony Pollina of
Washington County, and
several co-sponsors. “The
GPI accounts for the quality
of peoples’ lives, not just the
commotion of money in the
economy,” says Pollina. “We
should strive for an economy
that produces widely shared
prosperity in a way that builds
strong families, strengthens
communities, and protects
the environment.”
The new bill directs the
secretary of administration to
work with the Gund Institute to review and formalize
a Vermont GPI, with broad
participation from state agencies, nonprofits, and community organizations.
BOOKS & MEDIA
THEGREEN
13
SPORTS
CATAMOUNT
Kate Ryley’s championship in the giant slalom and Amy
Glen’s photo finish win over Dartmouth’s Sophie Caldwell
helped power the Cats to an NCAA record margin of victory.
T H E G R E E N & G O L D : W I N , LOSE, O R D R AW
Beasts of the east
Vermont skiers dominate for sixth NCAA crown
14
Catamounts captured for the second time
in two years. Reichelt, director of skiing
and head alpine coach, credits a depth of
talent on the team for its successful season, including those who qualified for the
NCAA championships but, because of
the limit of twelve athletes per team, did
not make the trip to Bozeman, Montana.
“Everyone skied to their potential and
strength,” Reichelt says of the team’s performance, adding that the Catamounts
also performed exceedingly well in events
that historically have not been as strong.
“So many things have to come together
to have a great championship,” adds Patrick Weaver, UVM’s head Nordic coach.
“Alpine has to stand; Nordic has to stay
healthy; we all have to hit the wax. I wasn’t
at all surprised at how all the athletes performed—they’re all great athletes. I was
just excited and happy for them that it all
came together so well.”
This year’s win is the sixth in the
program’s history, following past UVM
national championships in 1994, 1992,
1990, 1989, and 1980.
BRETT WILHELM (2)
her sophomore year.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Ryley says of her
win. “I knew I had a lot of time to make up
on the second run, and I knew the course
was going to get rough. I had to go for it
but ski smart at the same time.” She is the
first Catamount to win an individual title
in the slalom since Gibson LaFountaine
won back-to-back championships in
1993 and 1994. Ryley, a business major
with a concentration of entrepreneurship
and marketing, is the third UVM skier to
win a slalom title at the NCAAs on the
women’s side.
Glen’s win ended with a thrilling
photo finish when she crossed the line
less than two inches ahead of rapidly closing Dartmouth skier Sophie Caldwell.
The time between the photo finish and
the delivery of the results was tense for
anyone watching. But the athlete, modest about her successes both on the snow
and in the classroom, says she was content no matter the results. “I knew that
whether Sophie or I had gotten it, I’d
given it my best effort, which was my real
goal,” Glen says. “Whether I was second
or first wasn’t going to change how I felt
about my race.”
Coach Pat Weaver added, “Amy has
been extremely consistent over the past
two years. She’s a hard worker both on the
trails and in the classroom, loves to race,
and always want to improve herself. In
my mind, with her work ethic and determination it was bound to happen, and I
couldn’t be happier that it happened during her last college race.”
Glen closed out her final semester at
UVM as a national champion in skiing and
graduating summa cum laude as a biology
major and animal science minor. “UVM
was a place where I was excited about both
the ski team and the academics they had
to offer,” she says of her decision to enroll
four years ago. As for what will come next,
“there’s almost surely more school” on the
agenda down the road. But in the meantime her plan is to “stay in the East and give
skiing a shot full-time this next year.”
ONLINE
UVMATHLETICS.COM
FOR SPORTS NEWS
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
N
ot only did the UVM ski team win
the 2012 NCAA Skiing Championships, they outpaced the competition with two record-breaking
numbers—an overall score of 832 points
and a 162-point margin over second
place Utah. “You dream about things falling together like they did,” says coach Bill
Reichelt. “We really had as perfect a week
as you can possibly imagine.”
The national victory came on the heels
of winning the Eastern Intercollegiate Ski
Association Championship, a title the
by Amanda Waite ’02 G’04
Leading the Cats to victory were two
women who captured the titles in their
individual events, one alpine, one Nordic.
Sophomore Kate Ryley, from Toronto,
won the women’s slalom with a two-run
total time of 1:35.17 (17-tenths of a second faster than teammate Kristina RiisJohannessen.) And senior Amy Glen,
from Anchorage, was winner of the women’s 15K classic race.
Ryley’s win came under trying circumstances. “Kate shattered her hand
earlier this year,” Reichelt says. “She had
three operations and was unable to train
slalom for about two months.” On top
of that season setback, Ryley, who was
named women’s collegiate alpine skier of
the year by Ski Racing Magazine in 2011,
also heard some very difficult news the
morning of the slalom at nationals: close
friend and former teammate from Canada Nik Zoricic had died in a skiercross
competition accident in Switzerland.
Despite these challenging conditions,
Ryley turned in two runs down the
course that earned her a national title
15
STUDENTVOICE
The fire before sight
My drawings blindly follow the will of brush and pen.
I begin with a loop and allow the loop to sag or spin
or double-up on itself, and it turns into a face, a chair,
a railroad cutting through a tunnel or a town, a ladder
leading to an attic. Today my pen outlined a plume
of black smoke which breathed heavy out the windows
of a two-story building which fell as a dying bird would,
tumbling through blank space, softly buoyed by an
upward wind.
My sister arrives at the party wearing a sequin dress
wrapped tight around her breasts like the skin
of a black adder. She pulls me into the corner.
I have bad news. Mom’s house burned down.
I picture mother clutching the neighbor’s sleeve,
sobbing wild or roughly silent in the company of
strangers
as the second floor is swallowed red.
She is miles away from her husband, her daughters.
16
by Frances Cannon ’13
A
s soon as we enter the room at the Fairbanks
Inn, Mom kicks her shoes onto the carpet and
flings herself on the bed, bouncing through
bouts of giggles as if this bed is any different
than all the others, as if this room is some unimaginable
luxury, as if she hadn’t just spent the last thirty-six hours
sobbing over the loss of her house. I kneel by the window
and begin to peel wet photographs from an album that
I saved from the remains of the fire. The room soon fills
with the smell of smoke from the photos, our hair, our
clothing. “It reminds me of a campfire, like we’re roasting sausages and marshmallows for dinner,” Mom says
as she changes into a bathrobe provided by the hotel.
I arrange my photos individually on the carpet so
that they may dry. The rows accumulate until the entire
area of the floor glistens with flat, colorless faces. Here, a
photo of my uncle as a child flipping from a snowy ledge,
his skis scraping the tree-line. Here, a photo of my first
love, standing with her nose in a book on the sidewalk in
wintertime Seattle. Here, a photo of my father, four feet
tall, grinning in his fishing waders on a bridge.
FRANCES CANNON ’13
Mom has inadvertently trained us to hoard soaps and
towels from these excursions. I must have spent half my
childhood pattering through lobbies barefoot carrying
Styrofoam plates of stale English muffins that would last
us through the day until our next road stop. Whenever
she gets the chance, she stuffs the empty spaces of her
purse, her coat-pockets, and her suitcase with packets
of instant coffee, creamers, and apples from the bowl at
the desk. Despite the redundancy of these accumulated
nights, she prances about with the same pony-like glee
in complimentary slippers from one Days Inn to the
next Motel 8, and we always return home with more
miniature bottles of lotion than our bathroom cabinets
can withstand. This time, however, the items from this
rented room will be her only possessions, aside from her
car, a few sodden photos, and the clothes that were on
her back as she watched a lifetime of accumulated memorabilia flame against the Vermont hills.
I climb into bed and nuzzle my mother’s freshly
soaped neck. Before we slip into our separate realms
of sleep, I wait for her to cry. She hasn’t yet broken this
oddly cheerful air, whereas she usually sobs at any little sadness. My sister flings her socks across the room
and says, “we’ll live lighter, like Buddhists. We’ll be less
materialistic. This is really a good thing, if you think
about it.” Mom nods and pulls us both into a hug. “What
an adventure, it’s like a sleepover!” She used the same
words the Christmas of 1997 in the hotel Circus Circus,
Las Vegas, and again at the Comfort Inn, Niagara Falls,
on our road trip to Maine, and at the Ho-Hum Motel,
Wyoming before she moved to Montana. She always
manages to find novelty in this sort of repetition.
Something about this evening, despite the unfortunate circumstances, feels comfortably familiar. I know
these sheets so well: the stiff linen pulled painfully tight
around the mattress, the hay-tinted polyester throw blanket that inevitably slips onto the floor in the middle of
the night, the pillows that collapse into two dimensions
upon impact, the hum of the radiator by the window that
lulls me into a daze, the forced intimacy of limited space. I
know this false moon glow of the streetlamp through the
thin curtain. In so many ways, I feel more at home here
than I did in the house that has been reduced to ash.
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
I see my books burning. The colored smoke
that curls a chemical blue from my photos,
my film, my paintings, my block-prints. Each line
of my two dozen journals, hand-bound, illustrated,
licked black and blown into the crisp constellations
of this February evening. Memories of Italy,
of bygone lovers and dogs and homes, of broken limbs
and flourless chocolate tortes. The pages pumped
into the raspberry bushes behind my mother’s house
by the white fist of the fireman’s hose, the fragile
carbon flakes settling on the pond where the peepers
rattle and croak their confusion through the night.
Home again
Light streams through an open cavity in the roof,
through the second and first floors, through to where
I stand in the basement, crunching charcoal with my
winter boots. I paw through boxes of wet papers in partial darkness as the sheriff snaps photos of the damage.
Shreds of insulation hang jagged from the ceiling. Icicles
dangle like teeth from the charred attic rafters where the
fireman’s hose traveled the night before. My sister dusts a
powdered wall from her guitar. It strums hollow smoke.
Eventually, I stop counting objects claimed by the fire—
oil paintings, jewelry, my entire library—and begin compiling the objects salvaged by the forty-three firemen: an
envelope of baby teeth, my clarinet, a sketchbook from
my trip to Italy.
For dinner, we munch on buns from the Red Cross
and pry open a tin of pecans that Mom rescued from the
singed kitchen. “Slightly toasted, but otherwise edible.”
We all grin at this curious feast. I am relieved that none
of us are crying, but the possibility lurks below the inexplicably sweet and fragile surface of the evening. Soon,
we are taking turns in the tub. When it’s my turn, Mom
taps on the door and pokes her head in to ask if I need
anything. “Not really, no.” She comes in anyway and sits
on the toilet with the seat down, smiling, silent. She did
this at the house sometimes, just to be with me.
On the kitchen counter, evidence of Mom’s breakfast
before the fire: half a banana, now a black fossil. In the
sink, dishes she will never have to wash, tinted sepia. A
pork shoulder roasted from inside the fridge. Our family mannequin, Monique, guards the top of the eroded
stair, her singed head a monument in a plane of ash.
Despite the fireman’s warnings, I carefully climb what is
left of the stairs into what was once my bedroom. The
hollow bed-frame hugs blackened space, not even a wisp
of fried mattress or sheet.
I towel off after emerging from the tub and notice the
basket of shampoo on the sink counter. My hand reaches
out instinctively for the basket. I am struck motionless for a moment by a sense of déjà vu, that this simple
action represents the culmination of hundreds of nights
spent resting in roadside hotels during cross-country
road-trips or during moments of transition between the
dozens of towns that we have occupied over the years.
17
NEWKNOWLEDGE
The World Bank estimates that
Chagas causes 23,000 deaths
each year. Yet it is one of world’s
most neglected tropical diseases,
mostly affecting the rural poor,
and little studied compared to
other major diseases.
by Joshua Brown
Creeping northward
Biologists study possible rise of Chagas disease in United States
by Joshua Brown
18
This hypothesis has been contested for decades, but if Darwin
“great wingless black bug,” he wrote in his diary. “It is most disgusting to feel soft
had experienced this bug attack in
the United States, no one would
wingless insects, about an inch long, crawling over one’s body,” Darwin wrote,
have made such a speculation,
“before sucking they are quite thin, but afterwards round & bloated with blood.”
since Chagas disease is almost
unheard of in the nation.
That could change, new research shows.
In all likelihood, Darwin’s nighttime visitor was a
Lori Stevens, a biologist at the University of Vermont,
member of Reduviid family of insects—the so-called
kissing bugs because of their habit of biting people and her colleagues, found that 38 percent of the kissing
around the mouth while they sleep.
bugs they collected in Arizona and California contained
From this attack, some infectious disease experts human blood.
have speculated, the famed naturalist might have conThis upends the previous understanding of insect
tracted Chagas disease, a parasite-borne illness carried experts and doctors that the eleven species of kissing
by kissing bugs, that today afflicts millions of people in bugs that occur in the United States don’t regularly feed
Central and South America. Darwin’s bite may have led, on people.
“This finding was totally unexpected,” says Dr. Steultimately, to his death from heart problems.
JOSHUA BROWN
pared to other major diseases.
It’s not fully clear why Chagas disease hasn’t established itself in the United States. “There are two leading theories,” Klotz says. One is that housing stock in
Central America is different than in the
United States. There, thatched roofs, stick
and mud construction and dirt floors provide good habitat for local kissing bug
species. In contrast, U.S. houses tend to
have concrete basements, screened doors
and windows, and tighter construction.
The other reason may have to with
the bathroom behavior of different species of kissing bugs. “We like to joke the
bugs have better manners in the U.S.,” says
Dorn. The primary method of transmitting the disease
is through the insect’s feces. The species that have made
Chagas endemic to Central and South America tend to
defecate while they are having their blood meal.
This fecal matter can then enter the bite wound or
mucus membranes easily, transmitting T. cruzi parasite to the bloodstream. In contrast, North American
species “tend to feed, leave the host, and then defecate
later,” says Dorn, lowering the risk of transmission.
But could those more-dangerous kissing bug species
move north as the climate warms?
“Absolutely,” says Dorn.
“We know the bugs are already across the bottom
two-thirds of the U.S., so the bugs are here, the parasites
are here. Very likely with climate change they will shift
farther north and the range of some species will extend,”
she says.
This problem may be compounded by increasing
numbers of houses in the U.S. being built in remote
areas—such as the mountainous areas around southwest cities like Tucson and San Diego — “places inhabited by packrats, for example, that are the natural hosts
of these bugs,” says Klotz.
“The bugs are attracted by the lights at night,” Klotz
says. “They’ll crawl under a door and once they are
there, they are such incredible parasitical bugs—they’ll
come find you or your pets.”
But prevention is fairly easy, Stevens says. “If you’re
camping, make sure you close in spaces at night,” she
says. “In Vermont, it’s not such a big deal, but in Arizona, if you sleep with the windows open, you need to
put screens in. If you take precautions to keep the bugs
out, you can prevent getting the infection quite easily,”
she says.
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
In the spring of 1835, Charles Darwin was bitten in Argentina by a
phen Klotz, head of the infectious diseases department
at the University of Arizona medical school and a coauthor on the study.
And more than 50 percent of the bugs the research
team collected also carried Trypanosoma
cruzi, the parasite that causes Chagas disease.
Their study was reported in the March 14
online edition of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
“The basic message is that the bug is out
there, and it’s feeding on humans, and carries the parasite,” says Stevens, “so there may
be greater potential for humans to have the
disease in the United States than previously
thought.”
So far, little of that potential has been realized. Only
seven cases of Chagas disease transmitted by kissing
bugs have been documented in the United States.
“We think the actual transmission is higher than the
seven cases we have identified,” says Patricia Dorn, an
expert on Chagas disease at Loyola University and coauthor on the new study, “but, even with these findings,
we think the transmission of Chagas—of the T. cruzi
parasite—is still very low in the U.S.”
But with a warming climate that rate might rise.
Dorn and Klotz both emphasize that risk of severe
allergic reactions to the bug’s saliva is currently a greater
problem than contracting Chagas disease. The team
hopes their new work, funded by the National Science
Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, will
“raise awareness among physicians and health care workers,” Dorn says, about the risks of both allergic reactions
and Chagas disease from kissing bugs.
“Chagas is a cryptic disease. It doesn’t announce
itself,” say’s UVM’s Lori Stevens. The parasite can trigger an acute phase of the disease that may have no symptoms or may include fever, swelling of one eye, swelling
around the bite, and general ill feelings. In other words,
it can look like many other minor illnesses.
Then the disease often goes into remission, only to
appear years later as much more serious illness, including life-threatening digestive and heart problems.
Some eight to ten million people in Mexico, Central
America, and South America have Chagas disease—
making it the “most serious infectious parasitical disease in the Americas,” Stevens says. The World Bank
estimates that Chagas causes 23,000 deaths each year.
Yet it is one of world’s most neglected tropical diseases,
mostly affecting the rural poor, and little studied com-
19
U
THE
NEWEST
AMERICANS
Refugee resettlement enriches
the culture of Vermont and UVM
I
20
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by Thomas Weaver
photography by Bear Cieri
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
In the heart of Burlington’s Old North End,
a neighborhood that in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries was home to many
French Canadians who had migrated south
for work in the mills, stands St. Joseph’s
School. It isn’t difficult to deduce the language that
once flowed as freely as English on these densely
packed streets. “École Nazareth,” the original name
when the school opened in 1929, is chiseled in stone
over the entrance.
Today, a side door at the school has a new sign in
new languages, readily offering a sense of the latest
generation of new Americans who are making this
neighborhood home. “Enter here,” translated into
Swahili, Somalian, and a handful of other languages,
greets visitors at the Association of Africans Living in
Vermont, which recently moved into new headquarters in a section of the old school.
Walk around the neighborhood and signs of
change are abundant. Mom and Pop places like JR’s
Corner Store, The Shopping Bag (home of Vermont’s best burger, the Scibec Sizzler), and Dion’s
Locksmith still dot North Street. But you’ll also find
Himalayan Food Market, Brixton Halaal, Farah’s
Place, and Mawuhi African Market. Somali women
and girls draped in flowing, vibrant dresses—who at
first startled the eye like red tulips in February—are
now a familiar part of the streetscape here.
21
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22
A
WHO ARE THESE GIRLS?
Ask around campus about connections to the
Vermont refugee community and you’ll soon
find yourself in Pablo Bose’s office on the first
floor of Old Mill. The assistant professor of
geography has a casual affability. Wearing a sweatshirt
and a stiff-brimmed Vancouver Canucks cap, he looks
graph from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in her
Burlington High School American Literature class, and
the embarrassment when she reads the word “nigger”
rather than glossing over it with “the n-word,” as all the
other students seem to know to do.
In her writing and in conversation, Bahati displays a
keen sense of her own identity. She talks of misconceptions that lead some to see refugees as “empty vessels” devoid of experience or, perhaps, with memories
of only misery when they resettle in a new homeland.
Bahati’s narrative captures her own more bitter than
sweet moment of leaving good friends and community behind in the Tanzanian refugee camp to enter an
unknown world where her race clearly stamped her as
“the other.”
Susan Comerford, her academic advisor, says coming to know Bahati has been a mutual learning experience, bringing the social work professor full circle to
her own years working in refugee camps.
“Keeping in touch with my culture is part of me. I’m
obligated to carry that with me,” Bahati says. “Otherwise, it’s like losing the self in the process of acculturating. So, this is home for me. The idea of separating
who I was from who I’m becoming, it wouldn’t make
sense to me. So it is my goal to try to embrace both
and see myself as not only one or the other, but both
together.”
The abstraction of this duality is made nicely
concrete by two of Bahati’s favorite diversions—West
African dance and snowboarding.
Her study of social work is driven by wanting to help
others with the dramatic life transitions she has gracefully negotiated herself. “The idea of helping people
and meeting them where they are in the process of
a bit like the graduate student he was not so long ago.
A native of India, raised in Canada, and now at home in
the United States, Bose has lived the transnationalism
that is at the heart of his scholarly work.
Before coming to Vermont in 2007 through UVM’s
Henderson Fellowship Program, an effort to build faculty diversity, Bose worked at the Centre for Refugee
Studies at York University in Toronto. At first, he wondered where he would find his community focus in
Vermont.
But he soon found that the refugee population was
not only here, but was intriguingly diverse in its mix.
Many resettlement areas have a particular concentra-
BIJOUX BAHATI ’12
As new UVM graduate Bijoux Bahati describes
trying to figure life out, really,” she says. “Caring for
the challenges of her personal journey—from
people.”
the Democratic Republic of Congo to four years
At commencement, Bahati was one of two gradu-
in a refugee camp in Tanzania to arriving in Burlington with her parents and siblings in
ates awarded the Elmer Nicholson Achievement Prize,
2004—she often returns to learning English.
recognizing the success of the students’ UVM years
Fluent in Swahili and Kibembe (a dialect native to the northern Congo), and profi-
and the expectation that they will make major
cient with some French, adding a fourth language would pose a formidable barrier to
contributions in their fields of interest. Her next step
academic, social, and work life, she says.
toward that is graduate school for a master’s in social
In an insightful autoethnography that Bahati wrote as her McNair Scholars project
work. Accepted into the program at the University of
at UVM, she describes the particular challenges of adapting to a new culture and
Illinois, Bahati has deferred enrollment for a year with
learning a new language simultaneous with the myriad personal issues faced by any
the hope of grounding her undergraduate experience
adolescent. With special poignancy, she describes the terror of reading aloud a para-
through work in the Burlington refugee community.
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
While every state in the nation has a
refugee resettlement program, the small
population and relative homogeneity of
Vermont make the new Americans stand
out more than in, say, Atlanta or Seattle.
Nearly six thousand refugees have resettled in Vermont
since 1989, largely in the urban/suburban core of Chittenden County, with the help of the Vermont Refugee
Resettlement Program.
From the program’s headquarters in Colchester,
Executive Director Judy Scott G’96 shares the definition of refugee as established by the Geneva Convention: “A person who cannot return to their homeland
for fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political belief, or membership in a social group.”
Refugee camps are basically “human warehouses,”
Scott continues and notes the sobering statistic that
less than one percent of the world’s refugees will ever
be placed in another country.
The population that has resettled in Vermont across
the past twenty-three years is built of people from
more than thirty countries. There are more than one
hundred refugees each from Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, Sudan, Russia, Iraq, and Burma. The greatest concentrations have come in waves—Vietnamese (1,056),
Bosnians (1,710), Somalians (573), and Bhutanese
(787).
A familiar line in the story of many: “The first time
I saw snow was when our plane landed in Vermont.”
As the state’s population profile grows more diverse,
Beverly Colston, director of UVM’s ALANA Student
Center, puts that change in a broader context. “It is a
mix of the established Vermonters with this influx of
fresh new Vermonters that’s going to make things the
best they can be,” she says. “That’s American energy.
It’s not complacent; it’s ambitious; it’s desirous of
growth and change. Folks come and they seek a new
life, and they have the courage to throw themselves
into the unknown to do that.”
23
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“I want teachers who say,
‘Wow, my classroom is twelve languages strong.’”
says, “That’s part of the riches people from
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
these populations bring to the university, such
24
tion of nationalities, Bose explains. Iraqis in Dearborn,
Michigan; Bhutanese in Erie, Pennsylvania; Burmese
in Albany, New York. Vermont stands out for the broad
mix of countries and cultures represented in the population. “It’s created these unique sorts of both opportunities and tensions,” Bose says. “It’s taken me a long time
to build up a relationship and some level of trust with
the refugee communities. But it’s been a really good—
really, really, really good—experience for me.”
Bose’s community-based research—completed, inprogress, or in planning—explores issues such as transportation, food, and fostering small business start-ups,
among others. He’s seeking funding for a study that
could have national application as a more systematic
way to measure resettlement success in the United
States, a metric that is sorely lacking, Bose says. Typically, employment is the only measure, but a more valid
accounting would look at transportation, housing,
healthcare, employment, and education.
A number of faculty members in the College of Education and Social Services are also directly involved
with the community via their blended research and
teaching pursuits. Alan Tinkler, assistant professor of
education, stresses the wisdom of building on community resources instead of necessarily creating new ones.
“In the service-learning ethos, learning should be a true
community need,” Tinkler says. “It shouldn’t be the university barreling down the hill. We’ve tried to be very
mindful of the needs of the community.”
With support from a Learn and Serve America Grant,
Tinkler has added a service component to his course
exploring academic literacies across content areas. His
students work in tutoring relationships with local youth
at Burlington’s King Street Center, the O’Brien Community Center in Winooski, Burlington High School, and
Winooski High School. Many of the students served by
the centers and the schools are new Americans and English learners.
This spring, as controversy played out across the pages
of the local paper regarding diversity in the Burlington
schools, test scores, and English
language learners, the headlines
gave immediate relevance to the
work of Tinkler and his students as
they aid English learners and study
the literacy practices that can best
help them be successful.
Tinkler and his College of Education and Social Services colleague Jennifer Hurley both note
that the strengths of new American
students and their families should
be focused upon as much as the
needs. Hurley, an assistant professor in early childhood special
education, says her interest in connecting her research and teaching
with the transnational population
in the local schools was piqued
by the diversity in her son’s preschool classroom and, also, simply
the changing scene she saw on the
street: “There are these girls waiting for the bus in these
beautiful dresses. Who are these girls? What are they
doing? What’s that about?”
Hurley has earned a federal grant to help UVM educate a new generation of early childhood special educators (for which there is a great need) who will have the
increasingly essential experience of working in culturally and linguistically diverse communities.
She is passionate about the work and tears wells up
as she says, “I want teachers who say, ‘Wow, my classroom is twelve languages strong.’ I get really mad when I
hear teachers complain that they have to deal with these
kids who are English language learners. That makes our
schools stronger. It’s not something that teachers have to
‘deal with’—it’s something that makes our kids stronger.”
Across the university, faculty have been proactive and
innovative in seeing community needs and meshing it
with their research. Psychology’s Karen Fondacaro has
a can-do attitude and such vision. Tuipate’s vision for a pan-African approach comes directly
out of his experience in the wars there.”
Beyond pan-African, AALV has grown to
serve more than three thousand people, a
resource for the new American community
regardless of country or continent of origin.
Mubiay continues to help guide AALV in his role
on the board of directors.
Mubiay credits his mother and grandmother
for inspiring him to human rights work, particularly in regard to women and children. “They
taught me how to be good people, how to do
good things, and how to help people. That is
what they were doing; they were all the time
taking care of people,” he says.
Mubiay’s own American higher education
journey began at Community College of Vermont with an associate’s degree, continued at
Johnson State College for his bachelor’s, and he
added a master’s in social work from UVM. In his
TUIPATE MUBIAY G’08
Though he came to the United States as an
student advising role at CCV, which educates
immigrant from the Democratic Republic of
many new Americans, he’s dedicated to helping
Congo in 1994, not via refugee resettlement,
others take similar steps.
Tuipate Mubiay knows well the refugee’s trial of adapting to a new language and a
“Not only do I understand their culture, but I
new land. In his two current jobs, one as an academic advisor for Community Col-
understand the circumstances in which they’ve
lege of Vermont; the other as diversity coordinator for the HowardCenter social ser-
lived for years,” Mubiay says. “They have been
vices agency, he helps students transition to a new home and helps the community
resilient all these years and determined now to
become a more inclusive place.
go to college and to have a higher education to
Another role, founder of the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, provides illustration of his commitment to bringing people together. Telling the story of AALV’s
change their lives.”
Meeting with Mubiay, these students see his
inception, Mubiay relates that he was talking with Congolese friends at a birthday
diplomas on the wall, honors from professional
party when the idea was raised:
associations, and an outstanding alumnus
“I see the Vietnamese have an association; Bosnians have an association; why
award from Johnson State. “I talk to them about
can’t we have an association?” I said. My friends said, “We can have a Congolese
hard work, hard work and creating relationships
association.” I said, “No, let’s not think about the Congo only. We have to think about
in the community,” Mubiay says. “But I cannot
Africa. So we will create an Africa association.” They said, “No, just Congolese.” And I
tell them it will be easy; that would be a lie. I
said, “No, Africa association. We have to think big.”
tell my students that you have to work three or
“And, finally, I won,” he adds with a smile.
four times more to prove that you are a good
UVM social work faculty member Susan Comerford, mentor and friend to Mubiay,
student.”
worked with her graduate students to establish a clinic
to assist refugees coping with post-traumatic stress
disorder and other mental health issues. The College
of Medicine’s Dr. Andrea Green directs the Pediatric
Immigrant Clinic at Fletcher Allen Health Care. Environmental Program faculty member Kit Anderson ’76
G’81 has connected her students and classes in ethnobotany with the New Farms for New Americans project
in Burlington’s Intervale. Education’s Cynthia Reyes
and her students have worked with refugee children in
Winooski’s highly diverse schools to explore their personal identities through digital storytelling. (See uvm.
edu/vq for links to additional stories on several of these
initiatives.)
Pablo Bose notes the need to make sure such interest
remains a good thing—to, in essence, avoid that “university barreling down the hill” scenario described by Alan
Tinkler. Refugee communities may not always wish to be
singled out or answer a barrage of surveys. To avoid that,
Bose is working within the university to establish systems
to coordinate new research and share existing work.
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
T
26
A LUSH LEARNING ENVIRONMENT
The Congolese cook in her Old North End
kitchen couldn’t have found a more receptive
guest. “It’s bofrut!” Caroline Casey ’12 exclaimed,
thrilled to see the fried bread served in many African countries.
A junior-year semester in Ghana seeded Casey’s love
of bofrut, and a senior-year internship with the Vermont
Refugee Resettlement Program put her in that warm
Burlington kitchen last winter. She’s driven the process
of creating a cookbook of recipes from the refugee community that will eventually be sold as a VRRP fundraiser.
“Right before I came over here, I was at a Sudanese
woman’s house making okra stew,” Casey says, sitting
down for an interview in March. “The whole thing has
been incredible. I walk into these homes that don’t have
two cents to rub together, and they welcome me, feed
me ridiculous amounts of food, tell me their stories.”
The experience has shifted thoughts Casey had about
working abroad; she is now more drawn to the diversity found at home. Asked if she had any concept of this
transnational presence in Burlington before the cookbook project, she fixes a level stare. “I had no idea of how
many people there were or the diversity,” she says. “I’ve
cooked with people from ten or twelve different countries—Bhutanese, Burmese, Sudanese, Somalian, Iraqi,
Bosnian, Vietnamese, Congolese…
“It’s been a huge eye-opening experience for me to
see these people who have been
in the most heinous situations,
living in refugee camps for eighteen years,” Casey says. “They
are so happy and consider themselves so lucky to be here. It has
put a lot in perspective for me.”
As Casey graduates and considers what’s next, she can look
to other recent grads who have
taken undergraduate experience
connecting with local refugee
populations and turned it into
their next step. Pablo Bose’s
former student Katy Jones ’10
oversees placement for six field
offices of the U.S. Committee
on Refugees and Immigrants.
Grace Henley ’10, who worked
with Kit Anderson on a senior
thesis involving Burlington’s
New Farms for New Americans,
is working as refugee agriculture
coordinator for the International Rescue Committee in Salt
Lake City. And Class of 2012
grad Robyn Suarez’s experience tutoring hearing-impaired
members of the local refugee community meshes with
Fulbright support she earned to spend the next year
teaching in Malaysia.
In addition to the experience some UVM students
are gaining working directly in the community, building the number of transnational students enrolled at the
university promises to significantly deepen the classroom experience for all.
Susan Comerford, associate dean of the College of
Education and Social Services and a professor of social
work, notes that balancing such diverse perspectives in
the classroom can be a challenge. “I think our job as faculty is to create as much ambiguity in the classroom as
we can and then wallow around in it together,” Comerford says. “Really, that’s what complexity is. We live in
a very complex world. Multiple perspectives are almost
later, Karabegovic’s father joined his family in
Berlin. Facing mandatory military service, which
would have forced him to fight neighbors and
family, or execution, he made an escape across
the border. “To this day, I know the story but don’t
know all of the details,” his daughter says. “Certain
details he leaves out for protection of other
people and himself.”
Adna Karabegovic was nine years old in 1998
when the family arrived in Vermont. Old enough,
she says, that her parents were frank about what
it would take to create their future in the United
States. “Our parents always treated us like adults;
they would never lie to us,” she says. “When you
pack up all your stuff and you move to a foreign
country with nothing, there’s nothing to hide. It’s
one of the things that differentiated me.”
Karabegovic’s sister, Dzeneta ’08, explored the
refugee experience through a Fulbright grant last
year, contrasting Swedish governmental support
of refugee communities versus the way programs
are structured in the United States. She’s spent
the past year studying for a master’s degree
in international diplomacy at the University of
Chicago.
At UVM and in Burlington, Adna Karabegovic
has been open to sharing her family’s past and
the personal perspective it can add to understanding global culture, history, and politics. But
ADNA KARABEGOVIC ’11
Adna Karabegovic ’11 didn’t view her col-
with the edge of one who has clearly heard a
lege years as a liberation from home or a
few too many naïve questions in her lifetime, she
voyage of self-discovery. Such romanticism
makes it clear there are limits.
shrinks in the face of the young woman’s
“Sometimes it is a little rude if people ask you
self-assured, pragmatic outlook. UVM made sense—close to home, financial help came
automatically where you’re from just because
via a scholarship as the first generation in her family to attend college in the United
your name is something different,” she says.
States, and she could continue the Church Street Marketplace internship she landed as a
“I think there’s a way to ask somebody where
senior at Burlington High School that has led to a full-time job in marketing.
they’re from and not be as direct. For example,
As Karabegovic talks over coffee in Burlington’s New Moon Café, the hard realities
when I say I’m from Bosnia, don’t ask me if I’ve
that have shaped her unfold. “In 1992, my mother and my sister and I left Bosnia to go to
seen somebody get shot. When I say I’m Muslim,
Germany,” she says. “At that point, people were saying it would only be for three months
don’t ask me why I don’t wear a head-covering. I
or so. Nobody really wanted to believe that there would be such a thing as ethnic cleans-
think doing some research about something or
ing, that there would be such warfare.”
someone before asking them questions would
The Karabegovics, a Muslim family, had left their homeland for good. Two months
probably be better.”
U
“We need to listen. What has to happen? How do we tell the story
that college is a possibility for students? How do we do a better job
of helping these students meet the challenge of the college
admissions process, which can be difficult for anyone?”
AKOL AGUEK ’05 G’11
A ceiling-to-floor Sudanese flag hangs on one
wall of Akol Aguek’s UVM office. Also on display,
two diplomas from primary and high schools
in Kenyan refugee camps and two from the
University of Vermont, a bachelor’s and an MBA.
For the prospective students who meet with the
trite now. There are multiple micro-perspectives all the
time. And what you really want, I think, in a lush learning environment is that everybody who comes into the
room leaves with a perspective that has been deepened
by every other person in that room.”
28
UVM admissions officer, they tell the story of an
educational journey, just one part of the harrowing, courageous, and, ultimately, hopeful odyssey
of Aguek’s life.
He was one of the Sudanese “Lost Boys,” a generation of young men displaced by brutality and
civil war in their homeland. Profiled as a student
in Vermont Quarterly in 2004, Aguek described
the experience of being one of thousands fleeing
across forest, desert, and river. Raising his voice
and enunciating each syllable with care, he said:
“You are running for your life!”
When Aguek came to Burlington, part of an
asylum effort that brought 3,800 Sudanese to the
United States in 2001, continuing his education
was top priority. Aguek’s host, George Ewins ’55,
encouraged him to look no further than his own
alma mater.
After a year working in the stockroom at the
local Sears store, Aguek enrolled and, a freshman
Student Assistance Corporation and does the same with younger audiences at
at age twenty-five, moved into the Living and
Edmunds Middle School in Burlington.
Learning Center. “I got involved, I enjoyed every
“Over the long run I may eventually go back to Sudan,” Aguek says. “Not that I
bit of student life, I loved what I wanted to do,” he
would pack all of my belongings and leave—I will always have my roots in Vermont.
says.
I feel that sitting on the sidelines and seeing the government of South Sudan dys-
UVM has long remained a home for Aguek. Not
functional is not a good thing. I think going back and making a difference in terms
long after graduation he began work in the admis-
of providing opportunities for needy people, education, healthcare, infrastructure,
sions office and is currently an assistant director
economic opportunities might be one of the areas I may be involved in.”
focused, in part, on transfer student issues. His
The next step in his life will move him a step closer to that vision. Aguek, his
wife, Martha Thiei Machar ’11, is also an alum and
wife, and their five-year-old son Deng will move to Boston in the fall, where he
added a master’s in accounting to the family col-
will pursue a master’s in international affairs and social policy at Harvard’s John F.
lection of UVM degrees in May.
Kennedy School of Government. As he looks to the future, Aguek’s gratitude for
From the time he arrived on U.S. soil, helping his
this admirable life he has built from a rare opportunity shines forth as he describes
homeland and fellow refugees has been a priority
that day in the Kakuma Refugee Camp when he looked on the bulletin board and
for Aguek. Portions of those first precious pay-
saw his name on a fateful list.
checks from Sears Roebuck Corp. were sent back
“The first question they ask is, ‘We want you to come to the United States, are
to support Sudanese still in the refugee camps. In
you interested?’ And I say, ‘Of course!’” Aguek recalls with a laugh. “So when I had
his duties at UVM he has worked with new refu-
the opportunity to become a U.S. citizen, I said, ‘I have to become a U.S. citizen
gees on college preparation through the Vermont
because it was America that said come. It was America that chose me.’”
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
I
WE NEED TO LISTEN
It could be better. When asked about the
strengths of UVM’s student recruitment ties to
the new American community, that sentiment
is a familiar refrain from faculty, new American
alumni, and administrators across the campus.
Chris Lucier, vice president for enrollment management, says this dual need and opportunity has been
consistently voiced in recent planning processes. “As
we talked about internationalization a year ago the one
thing that came up over and over again among faculty
and staff was, ‘What are we doing with our new American population?’” Lucier says.
Lucier and colleagues are working to create new initiatives and build upon existing ones, such as a joint
UVM/Community College of Vermont effort that
reaches out through an after-school program at Burlington High School to foster college aspiration and preparation among various student populations, refugees
among them.
Another key step will be better connecting with various refugee groups through elders in those communities. “We need to listen,” Lucier says. “What has to happen? How do we tell the story that college is a possibility
for students? How do we do a better job of helping these
students meet the challenge of the college admissions
process, which can be difficult for anyone?”
Down the line, Lucier envisions the potential of
enhanced scholarship support, an admissions staffer
dedicated to new American recruitment, a pathways
program that could help recent immigrants build their
English skills before full admission to the university.
Lucier is partnering with the College of Education
and Social Services’ Jen Hurley and Susan Comerford
as they chart UVM’s course on these possible new
initiatives.
It’s difficult to imagine one better qualified to help
craft this process than Comerford, who began work in
a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border just two
weeks after her graduation from college. Her passion
for human rights and refugee issues would lead to years
of on-the-ground experience throughout Asia, often in
dangerous circumstances, and advocacy in Washington, D.C. Looking back, she says, “It was one of those
experiences where you’re incredibly excited and scared
to death at the same moment. When those two come
together, you know that it’s something you can’t afford
not to do.”
During her fourteen years on the UVM faculty, Comerford has worked closely with the Vermont Refugee
Resettlement Program and has striven to build bridges
for mutual learning among students, faculty, and the
VRRP staff.
She’s also been a mentor to new American students
such as Bijoux Bahati ’12 and Tuipate Mubiay G’08
during their years on campus and beyond. She recalls
a particular class in which Mubiay and two other students whose first language was not English presented
final projects. After the presentations, Comerford had
an impulse to ask each of the new American students to
stand up and deliver five minutes of their report in their
native language.
“It was stunning. It was a chill-producing situation
for me and the entire class,” Comerford says. “We make
these silent judgments about other people based on
their competency in English. When the other students
heard them in their mother tongue and saw what they
were capable of doing, it changed everything. We need
those shockers in our system to get us outside, to put a
little crack in the little egg of how we see the world—and
to start having a conversation right there.”
VQ
29
ROBERT RICHARDSON | FRANK MANCHEL
Friendship in film
T
VQ
EXTRA
30
Lordy! Even so, those classes were inspirational. He’s
the most intelligent person I’ve met in the film world, in
terms of teaching—as brilliant as Quentin Tarantino and
Marty Scorsese.”
Sitting down for coffee in the Davis Center, basking
in the glow of a late afternoon sun and the recent Super
Bowl victory by his beloved New York Giants, Manchel
laughs at Richardson’s memory. The retired professor
recalls that when students would ask him about his reputation for being stingy with an A grade, he would say: “A+
is for God; A is for me; B+ is good enough for the rest of
you.”
Richardson took all the classes he could with Manchel, though he admits he audited some to spare himself
the lash of the professor’s red pen. A seminar on war films
was among the courses in which he learned with Manchel; some twelve years later, Richardson’s breakthrough
as a major motion picture cinematographer would come
on a war film, Oliver Stone’s Salvador. The genre has been
central to Richardson’s work, including Stone’s Platoon
and Born on the Fourth of July, and Quentin Tarantino’s
Inglourious Basterds, among others.
Richardson ultimately left UVM for a deeper education in hands-on filmmaking than the university could
provide. He transferred to the Rhode Island School of
Design for his undergraduate work and later earned a
master of fine arts from the American Film Institute
Conservatory.
REEL LIVES
Inspiring students to careers in film was familiar ground
for Manchel during his long tenure on the UVM faculty.
Among the most notable: screenwriter David Franzoni
’71, best-known for Gladiator and other sweeping historical dramas; and producer Jon Kilk ’78, who initially built
his career through collaborations with director Spike Lee,
has added names such as Julian Schnabel, Jim Jarmusch,
Robert Altman, and Alejandro González Iñárritu to the
SALLY MCCAY
Robert Richardson’s
Academy Award
nominations for
cinematography:
Platoon, 1986
Born on the Fourth of July, 1989
Snow Falling on Cedars, 1999
Inglourious Basterds, 2009
Academy Awards:
JFK, 1991
The Aviator, 2004
Hugo, 2012
list of leading directors he’s partnered with, and just produced his first blockbuster with The Hunger Games.
Kilik and Franzoni have largely remained close with
Manchel through the years. With Richardson, it was a different story. Manchel had no idea of his influence on the
cinematographer until he read Green’s article in the Free
Press some thirty years after Richardson had left UVM.
But he and his former student would soon reconnect and
have stayed in touch since with emails back and forth at
least once a week, though they hadn’t met in person or
talked on the phone over the past eight years.
That changed in February when Richardson and
Manchel talked film for seventy minutes on the phone,
a wide-ranging conversation excerpted in Vermont Quarterly online. Calling the VQ office from a longtime family
home base on Cape Cod, Richardson spoke to the role
the running e-dialogue with his old professor has had in
his life. “I don’t have an ongoing email relationship with
many people in the business. Frank is rather unusual for
me,” Richardson says. “So the aspects of what I share with
him are a wonderful balance between personal and professional. We can communicate about anything in the
industry. This is a strong comfort zone.”
Their running email dialogue is usually about film, of
course, often Richardson’s current and future projects.
BRIGITTE LACOMBE
While his work has earned three Academy Awards, seven
nominations, and the admiration of his former professor,
it doesn’t mean that feisty professor is necessarily inclined
to approve of all of his films.
Manchel had a deep disregard for Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and he let Richardson know it. The cinematographer tried to bring him around, sending positive
reviews and the commentary of others. Though Manchel
stands his ground, Richardson hasn’t given up on convincing him of the movie’s worth.
Manchel recounts their exchange about Eat, Pray,
Love, an atypical Richardson project, which he took on
out of a desire to do something different.
“He asked me what I thought,” Manchel says. “I wrote,
‘The opening shot was so beautiful… it’s a shame it
couldn’t have been a documentary.’”
Richardson’s quick reply: “I get your point.”
No such worries with Hugo, a film beloved by Manchel
and many, many others. As Richardson accepted the 2012
Academy Award for his cinematography at the Kodak
Theatre in Los Angeles, Frank Manchel was on the other
side of the continent in a setting that was less glamorous,
maybe, but more comfortable—a seat on the couch in
front of the TV applauding a student once lost, a friend
later found.
VQ
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
uvm.edu/vq
he relationship between Academy Award winning
cinematographer Robert Richardson, who is a former UVM student, and Frank Manchel, professor
emeritus of English and film, is seemingly not the
stuff of a Hollywood screenplay. No embrace on the
stage at graduation (there was no UVM graduation,
in fact, for Richardson), no annual dinners to talk over the
old days, yet the two have a late-blooming bond that has
opened across time and distance.
Richardson, who won an Academy Award (his third)
this year for his work on Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, enrolled
at UVM in 1973 and would spend a couple of years on
campus before leaving for another school. While the university can’t claim him as a graduate, the transformation
that set his path in life did take place here. It began with
watching Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh
Seal at a film society screening on campus.
Richardson was transfi xed, entering
into a “zone” where everything beyond
what was taking place on the screen fell
away. “I think Bergman taught me how
to look through an eyepiece,” Richardson recalls. “I think he taught me how
to live inside of an eyepiece as if you
are living in the zone. And I mean zone
for an
almost as akin to Jordan getting into the
interview
zone in basketball or anyone when they
with Robert
find that special place.”
Richardson
Struck to the core by the legendary
and Professor
director’s artistry, the previously unfoFrank Manchel
cused undergrad quickly beat a path to
film courses, which led directly to Professor Frank Manchel’s classroom.
“Frank Manchel forced me into places I never would
have walked and opened the door to extraordinary
things,” Richardson told journalist Susan Green in an
interview for the Burlington Free Press in 2004. “But he
was very tough on me. His grading on my papers? Oh,
by Thomas Weaver
31
B
Facing a rare cancer, alumna Kathy Giusti created a new research model
By just about any odds,
Kathy Giusti shouldn’t be here.
Once, she was a rising pharmaceutical company
executive who understood both the science and the
business side of her industry. Married with a daughter and a home in comfortable Lake Forest, Illinois,
a sparkling future awaited the thirty-seven-year-old
Giusti, a University of Vermont premed grad with a
Harvard MBA.
It wasn’t merely cancer her physician was reluctant to tell her about on that painful day back in
1996, as she sped home along a Chicago expressway. It was multiple myeloma, an obscure blood
cancer and little researched disease that mostly
afflicted older men, often African Americans. It was
nearly always fatal.
One day she was headed for the corner office,
the next day none of that mattered.
So it is both surreal and unbelievable to sit, fifteen
years later, with Giusti at her Multiple Myeloma
Research Foundation office in Norwalk, Connecticut. Fighting to stay alive, she has transformed the
way new cancer-fighting drugs come to market by
bringing an aggressive investor’s approach to funding research.
“We are hugely impatient because we are just
a phone call or email away from thousands of
patients who have run out of options,’’ says Giusti,
an athletic-looking fifty-three-year-old. “How are
we going to solve that next obstacle? How are we
going to execute faster and better? I don’t think that
urgency ever goes away.”
Compact and vibrant, the woman with a fatal
diagnosis exudes a burning intensity about the
future. The opportunity of what’s still to come
gushes forth, like fresh water.
She recounts the improbable story that has made
her a national news story and one of Time magazine’s
one hundred most influential people in the world.
32
by Rick Green ’82
The MMRF and accompanying Multiple Myeloma
Research Consortium, both founded by Giusti, have served
as a greenhouse incubator, raising an eye-popping $175
million in funding and pushing myeloma breakthroughs
by tying industry and research together. Setting funding
benchmarks, promoting collaboration, and targeting specific research has helped to lead to more than doubling the
life expectancy for myeloma patients as new drugs have
come to market faster.
A cell phone call from her daughter Nicole, who is finishing her early admission applications to college, interrupts the conversation. The call ends and Giusti thinks, out
loud: “Will I be there to help set up Nicole’s dorm room?
Will she be there, even, when a college acceptance letter
arrives at her New Canaan, Connecticut, home for Nicole
or her younger brother David?
“It is one thing to be diagnosed with cancer. It was
another thing to be diagnosed with an uncommon cancer that had absolutely no awareness, no funding, and no
hope,’’ Giusti says. “Even when they called and said I had
cancer, in the back of my mind I’m thinking it’s not a bad
one.”
“But then when I did the research,’’ Giusti recalls, retelling her unlikely narrative. “I remember calling my sister, and I’m a pretty positive person. I said, ‘I can’t find one
ounce of hope with this disease.’”
photography by Ryan Pfluger/AUGUST
AnImpatient
Patient
T
The prognosis was three or maybe four years. Back in 1996,
this wasn’t a cancer where families and friends signed up to
run for the cure. There weren’t celebrities and NFL players
clad in cheery pink or hundreds of millions of dollars in
research. Almost nobody fought for this cure.
In Kathy Giusti’s mind, this was a disease without a
brand and a business plan. She changed all that. In the
process, over fifteen years, Giusti and the foundation she
started have created a new model: treat cancer research
like a business, make people work together, and demand
results.
“She has brought awareness to a disease that simply
wasn’t there before she got involved,” says Todd Golub,
an oncologist and a professor at Harvard and the DanaFarber Cancer Institute. Her leadership “makes a lot of
things happen.”
Myeloma, or multiple myeloma as it is called when it
appears in more than one location, is a fatal blood cancer that develops and grows in bone marrow. Malignant
myeloma cells, transformed from plasma cells, take over,
exploding in number. They crowd out other cells that
produce other, vital, antibodies. When Giusti was diagnosed, to live three years was a gift. A cure was irrelevant.
The cancer always returned.
agenda among researchers.
“My whole frame of mind was to see if I could live out
those three years. Maybe I would get it to four years so
that Nicole would make it to kindergarten and she would
remember that she had a mom,’’ Giusti says. “I was motivated to see if I could squeak out another six months or
nine months by funding research.”
“It just became step-by-step looking at the research.
Nobody was doing anything in this area at all. There was
no money. The researchers have to follow the money trail.
You can’t be a researcher and go into diseases that have no
money because you won’t get any grant funding.”
A breakthrough came when researchers in the late
1990s discovered that Thalidomide, a sedative with a
controversial history, was a promising drug for myeloma
patients.
“People became interested in myeloma. It said to us
maybe we should shift from a foundation focused on
transplants and immune therapy … to a focus on novel
drugs. That is completely our focus now,’’ Giusti says. “So
that’s when we became more like a virtual biotech company. We built our own clinical network, so we could say,
‘hey, any new drug out there that wants to be tested in
myeloma let’s bring them to our clinical network and let’s
34
For Giusti, the immediate concern was her family
and her wish to have a second child. By the summer of
1997, she had left her job and given birth, thanks to invitro fertilization, to a healthy boy. Giusti moved from
Illinois to Fairfield County, Connecticut, where both
her identical twin sister, Karen Andrews ’80, and husband’s parents lived.
Giusti and her sister, also a UVM grad with a degree in
biology, soon hatched an ambitious plan to raise money
to fund myeloma research. Working closely with Karen,
a lawyer with contacts in the media industry, the two
sisters’ first fundraiser in Greenwich in October 1997
hit the jackpot. They brought in more than $450,000,
using the money to fund an initial round of research and
to form the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation.
Andrews, a senior executive with Hachette Book Group
USA, remains an MMRF board member.
With her business background, Guisti realized
before too long that new drugs wouldn’t be developed
unless there was more collaboration and a common
get the drug tested faster.’”
In essence, Giusti’s initiative speeds up the entire process, with its targeted funding and consortium of research
centers that work together. The consortium now has fifteen academic institutions that publish their work jointly.
“We decide who do we need to bring together. How
much funding needs to go to this area? What new drugs
look good? Then we just build all that out,” she says.
“You are not funding a disease anymore. You are funding
innovation.”
They are involved with thirty-one different drugs in
nineteen different trials. With its own tissue bank—and
its own $40 million, one-thousand-patient study—Giusti’s foundation and consortium are increasingly driving the direction of myeloma research. Nearly half of all
myeloma patients are on the foundation’s database.
“Having accountability in research is a very good
thing and it’s possible we haven’t had enough of that in
biomedical research. Being businesslike is a good thing,’’
says Golub, the Harvard oncologist who led the MMRF-
D
Decades ago, before motherhood and cancer and everything changed for better and for worse, Giusti was
another UVM premed aiming for medical school. She
sailed through her years in Burlington, graduating magna
cum laude in 1980 and never looking back.
“I learned a great deal and did unbelievably well,’’
Giusti recalls of her time in Vermont during the late 1970s
when she waited tables at What’s Your Beef and What
Ales You while plotting a medical career. “It gave me a
certain amount of confidence in my scientific skills. There
wasn’t a time at UVM that I ever questioned my major.”
But it was her decision not to go to medical school and
instead follow a business path through Harvard and then
the pharmaceutical industry that set the stage for Giusti’s
striking success after her fatal diagnosis.
The dearth of science was her first impression as she
looked at the woeful state of myeloma research fifteen
years ago.
“Back in 1996 people weren’t sitting there and taking
on the science. They were doing more like support groups
or brochures, more of the touchy feely. We went right to
the science. That was the beginning of being different. ’’
“We are the group that has become known for
designing, building, executing, refining and funding collaborative models. We decide who we think should be
part of the model and how we incentivize them—with
the endgame being extending the lives of patients,’’ she
says. “It is our first and foremost incentive. It governs
everything we do.”
Her gift, an aggressive business mind, and her curse,
a fatal cancer, have changed the future for myeloma
research, says Frank Douglas, a physician and MMRF
board member whose career has stretched from the
research lab to the executive boardroom.
“She is driven. She is a patient. She sees the possibilities,’’ Douglas explains. “She listens carefully and she is
not afraid to be on the cutting edge. Most people are not
willing to take risks.”
Giusti, who had a successful transplant in 2006 using
stem cells donated by her twin sister Karen, remains
healthy and excited about the prospect of personalized
COURTESY OF THE MMRF
medicine, where myeloma research Kathy Giusti ’80 and
can provide the basis for treatment Karen Giusti Andrews ’80,
based on a patient’s DNA.
co-founders of the
“Our ability to accelerate it and Multiple Myeloma
get it done quickly is going to be Research Foundation
the driver towards learning so much
more about this disease,’’ Giusti says.
“I really do believe a cure is possible.”
Indeed, the work funded by the MMRF has dramatically changed the prognosis since the day in 1996 when
her doctor told her she had myeloma.
“We sit down and say based on all the new things going
on in science and based on where myeloma is today, what
is our next three-year priority? We don’t want to miss any
major scientific opportunities.”
Four promising drugs have been approved by the FDA.
Myeloma patients are living seven years and longer. There
are eight more drugs in clinical trial, most of them tested
through the clinical framework set up by the MMRF and
MMRC. Mapping of the myeloma genome, funded by
the MMRF, will likely lead to new breakthroughs.
In the midst of all this, Kathy Giusti is still here, beating the odds.
“Always in the back of my mind is the thought that
I need to get another stem cell transplant. I could get
incredibly sick. I could relapse tomorrow,’’ she admits. “At
the end of the day. I am a woman who just wants to see my
children grow.”
Giusti remains that doomed, hopeful mother, a cancer patient in remission on a mission. This is what drives
her—and what is helping to change the way cancer will
be cured.
VQ
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
...treat cancer research like a business, make people work together, and demand results.
funded sequencing of the myeloma genome.
There are significant risks, Golub admits. “It’s possible
to take that business-like approach too far and squeeze
out innovation and flexibility by being too rigid in one’s
thinking about deliverables and so on,” Golub notes.
“Kathy has been aware of that potential.”
35
2012 UVM Alumni Association Kidder Teaching Award
Professor Luis Vivanco
Wisdom on
two wheels
And other perspective-shifting lessons from an anthropologist
by Joshua Brown
The
students look astonished. It is the first day of summer
school. More accurately, it is the first minute in their
Global and Regional Studies course, “Bicycles, Globalization and Sustainability,” and they’re sitting around a classroom table on the fifth
floor of Williams Hall.
The professor, dressed in sandals, shorts, and a floppy-collared checked shirt, just
strode into class. He radiates an easy-going cheerfulness, and, except for a few silver
strands in his hair and a certain scholarly furrowing around the eyes, you might think
he was an undergraduate.
“I’m Luis Vivanco,” he said, smiling, identifying the course, counting heads, and
arranging a few papers. And then he announced, “the best way to start off a summer
class is with some smoothies,”—and walked back out the door.
Now the students are frozen, half-grinning. For an instant, only their eyes move,
looking back and forth to each other, and then toward the door. From outside the
classroom they can hear Vivanco announce: “I’ll say just one thing: these smoothies
don’t have an aftertaste of coal or petroleum.” What to do? They get up and follow
their professor.
In the dimly lit landing, near Vivanco’s office in the Anthropology Department,
stands a strange bicycle. It looks like a cross between a mountain bike, a tandem, a
rickshaw, and a kitchen appliance.
From between the handlebars protrudes a double-piped chrome horn worthy
of a Mac truck. In the middle, a tall seatpost holds an old-fashioned-looking leather
saddle plus an additional set of handlebars for a passenger. From the rear, as if the bike
has been stretched, a long aluminum rack extends, supporting a pair of huge saddlebags. On top of the rack, a geared plastic housing connects to the rear wheel. In the
housing sits a blender, filled with bananas and strawberries.
36
photos by Sally McCay
In all of his courses, Luis Vivanco
seeks to instill in his students
a “deeper appreciation of the
fundamental plurality of the
human condition.”
Vivanco pours apple juice into the blender and asks
one of the students to hold the lid closed. Then he gets
on the bike and starts pedaling. The rear wheel, raised
slightly off the ground by an outsized kickstand, starts
spinning, the blender starts whirring, the fruit liquefies into a pink mash, and, soon, Vivanco is handing out
cups of bike-blended smoothie to his—still somewhat
astonished—students.
38
O
n the fifth floor of Williams, Vivanco’s students
are considering the social—and literal—construction of his bicycle.
“This bike is an interesting design that obviously
is uncommon in this country,” he says, after Erica
Bareuther ’13 has had a chance to pedal it for a second
round of smoothies. “It’s called a cargo bike.”
Vivanco’s model is called the Big Dummy, made by
the hip Minneapolis-based manufacturer, Surly. Base
retail: about $2,200. Fully tricked out, as Vivanco’s edi- provide “another choice,” Vivanco says.
Therefore, bikes provide a lens on a whole host of
tion is, it’s north of $4k. He had to write a four-page
proposal to his wife, Peggy, to explain why the family deadly serious, adult topics, Vivanco tells his students as
they gather in a half circle around him and his bike, like
needed this extremely expensive rig.
But in another light, the Big Dummy is a bargain. the obesity crisis, climate change, neighborhood cohe“Now, we’re a one-car family,” he explains to his stu- sion, affordable transportation, urban sprawl, peak oil,
dents. And he uses the bike to take his kids to school, and safe streets.
Or, rather, they might be part of a not-so-deadly
drop off his trash on Pine Street and to, as per the proposal, take his wife out on dates. “It’s our family SUB,” alternative vision of how we organize roads, patterns
of transport and consumption, and our very lives—an
he says, laughing.
Even more important—and unsettling, perhaps—in alternative to the approaching “carmageddon” of gridthe context of this class is how this type of bike fits in a lock and pollution, Vivanco says, drawing on the scathglobal narrative. “Believe it or not,”
he says, “this bike models itself
on the design that the Viet Cong “Bikes challenge the dominance of the automobile
used during the Vietnam War to
and the industries that uphold it.”
move material up and down the
Ho Chi Minh Trail. They were
called long-tailed bicycles. During the war, they would ing social criticism of Ivan Illich.
“People are making choices about how they get
drape people who were wounded over these things.” And
the Big Dummy is a cousin to “boda boda” taxi bikes that around and I want you to think about these,” he tells
his students. “These are all structured by very powerful
ferry people across the Uganda/Kenya border.
In other words, there are many narratives, a plural- forces from capitalism to the media. That is what this
ity of facts, Vivanco would say, around what a bike—or course starts introducing you to: What are those forces
any cultural object—means and what it does that may that are shaping our mobility choices? In what ways do
upset received ideas. “I got this bike blender thing after- bike social movements challenge the status quo to make
market,” he says—and the only fuel it needs is a rider changes in the ways we think about streets? Is the bicywho ate breakfast. With the Big Dummy, “we’re try- cle really “green” and, if so, in what ways?”
These questions nest within Vivanco’s larger interests
ing, through our example, to show that there are other
ways to think about getting around, other ways to enjoy in environmental anthropology. He studied environa smoothie that don’t require a plug in the wall, other mental movements in Costa Rica for his PhD dissertaways to think about what a bike is,” Vivanco says. He’s tion, which led to two books, Green Encounters and an
edited volume on adventure, Tarzan was an Ecotourist.
making the familiar strange.
“I remember I was doing field work in Monte Verde,”
One of the standard narratives in the United States
is that bikes are for kids, cars are for adults; that bikes he says, resting his hand on his bike, as his students sip
are static, cars are evolving. “But why is that?” Vivanco smoothies from cups. “I would be hanging around ecoasks. His cargo bike is just one example of the many tourists and I’d often ask them: Why are you here? What
bikes that the students will study in his class including are you looking for? This is what anthropologists do: liselectric bikes and high-tech “velo” bikes that can attain ten and ask questions.”
And with this deep practice, “Luis is very good at
speeds that would allow them to travel on highways—if
recognizing the legitimacy in what students are saying,”
they were allowed.
And this is the point: Vivanco wants his students to Jens Pharr ’12 says. “Even if the student isn’t really fluent
think beyond the bike itself to the patterns and forces in the language of academia, he hears you.”
behind it. “Bikes challenge the dominance of the autoLuis Vivanco and his students finish their smoothmobile and the industries that uphold it,” he wrote on ies and head back into the classroom to get the dishis course syllabus. Americans spend almost twenty cussion started, and to get going on a deep stack of
hours a week in their cars, he notes, and about eighty reading. He wants them to know more than they do
percent of that time doing short-haul errands like get- now when they head out in a few days for a class field
ting groceries, half of which are under three miles. Bikes trip—on their bikes.
VQ
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
A
nthropologists are “merchants of astonishment,” wrote the great theorist Clifford Geertz,
and Vivanco places himself in that lineage. And his capacity as a teacher, with casual good humor, to both astonish and gently prod his students to see the world, and
themselves, as surprising—to make the familiar strange,
he says—goes a long way toward explaining why he was
chosen for the university’s highest teaching honor.
In May, at commencement, Vivanco received the
George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award, presented each year by the UVM Alumni Association. Dozens of Vivanco’s former students and colleagues wrote
letters of nomination, praising him, like Megan Johnson
’09, for his “infectious inquisitive nature” and “unwavering support” of students in the classroom—and beyond.
Many recalled class meals and desserts at his home,
his leadership on study-abroad semesters in Oaxaca,
Mexico; his support of student activist efforts including
a recent campaign to ban bottled water on campus; and
his role as advisor to BUG, a new student bike group
that launched a successful bike-sharing program.
“Ever tried to go speak with Luis Vivanco during his
office hours?” wrote Mickey Hardt ’11. “Students sit and
wait for multiple hours,” to speak with him, he recalled,
drawn by Vivanco’s patient, incisive guidance.
Carey Dunfey ’10, remembers coming to Vivanco
“utterly confused about my topic and the path,” and leaving, hours later, “with a pound or so of his books in my
bag,” she noted. “He made me want to write.”
Laura Hale ’07 recalled a “devastating C,” on her first
paper in her first-year first-semester Integrated Social
Sciences Class. “I had always received A grades in high
school and Luis’s standards were far higher,” she wrote.
Four years later, she won an award for the outstanding
senior in Vivanco’s department.
As a cultural anthropologist and, now, director of
UVM’s fast-growing Global and Regional Studies program, Vivanco has taught many classes since he arrived
on campus in 1997, including ones on the media, Latin
America and the Caribbean, environmental issues in
global context, Latinos in the United States, one called
the “Fourth World: (Re)imagining Indigenous Cultures”—and, over the last three years, ones on mobility
and the global place of bicycles.
In all these courses, Vivanco seeks to have his students
develop a “deeper appreciation of the fundamental plurality of the human condition,” he says, drawing on Geertz.
Not just confronting “inconvenient facts,” as Max Weber
described the role of useful teachers, Vivanco urges his
students to wrestle with constellations of differing facts
that, peeled open, reveal deeper structures that shape
human economies, power relations, and beliefs.
“There are facts in the world,” Vivanco tells his students, “And depending on who you are, you’re going to
produce different kinds of facts.”
This realization rocked Josh MacLeod ’04, who is
now pursuing a doctorate at Brown University in anthropology. “Initially a biology major, by chance I took an
anthropology course with Dr. Vivanco,” he wrote. “The
disruption this course caused in my life was quick and
decisive; the next semester it was out with genetics and
in with the social construction of reality.”
39
ALUMNI
CONNECTION
Come
home
this fall
IN THIS ISSUE
Alumni House gifts
Remembering
Thomas Votta ’89
REUNION YEARS
Calendar
’37
’42
’47
’52
’57
’62
’67
’72
’77
’82
’87
’92
’97
’02
’07
’12
Judy Vinson ’75
REMINISCE, RECONNECT,
AND REDISCOVER
Class Notes
In Memoriam
Reunion & Homecoming weekend
is October 5-7, 2012. We invite all
members of the university community to celebrate the UVM Alumni
Association’s signature weekend.
Interact and connect with current
students, rekindle memories with
classmates, and join us on campus
for an unforgettable weekend.
42
43
43
44
46
61
TRAVEL AND LODGING
During the fall foliage season, hotel
rooms are often difficult to find in
the Burlington area. Please book
your accommodations early, as many
locations sell out quickly. Special
lodging discounts and details are
available at www.alumni.uvm.edu.
October 5-7, 2012
REUNION
HOMECOMING
www.alumni.uvm.edu
SUMMER 2012
COMMENCEMENT 1983
Before the ceremony returned to the Green,
generations of grads walked at Centennial Field.
UVM PHOTOGRAPHY
40
41
CONNECTION
Naming Gifts for
UVM Alumni House Project
T
cated Tuesday, April 17, 2012, and those who
knew Livak say that for him, the real excitement of the day would have been the fact that
it was the first time in fifteen years that the
University of Vermont track & field program
has been able to host an outdoor meet.
Among the speakers at the event was Frank
Livak’s son Mark, who said of his dad, “He
would be tickled to have this facility not only
for the university to use it for competition and
training, but the larger community as well.”
Livak, a standout cross-country runner during his student years, left a substantial bequest
in his will to support track & field, a gift that
largely made the new $2.5 million facility possible. During his lifetime, he made many other
major gifts to the university, including named
spaces in the Dudley H. Davis Center and
scholarships named to honor his late mother,
Helen, and Mildred, his wife of thirty-nine
years. Frank Livak died April 8, 2009, in Fort
Mill, South Carolina. He was ninety.
Robert Corran, associate vice president and
director of athletics, gave thanks to all the
members of the Livak family and the other
major donors in attendance, including Jim
’70 and Linda ’72 McDonald and Jean Post
Lamphere ’53, “who played such a key role and
helped us to bring this to a very successful
conclusion.”
It was a mixed outcome for the first outdoor
meet at UVM in fifteen years. The women
bested Middlebury 306.50 to 181.50, while the
men fell to the Panthers 262 to 225.
Remembering
Thomas J. Votta ’89
B
rilliant . . . inspiring . . . passionate
. . . a pioneer in the field of pollution prevention and environmental management. These are terms
that surface time and again when the
family, friends, and former colleagues
of Thomas J. Votta, UVM Class of 1989,
describe him and his contributions to
the field to which he devoted himself.
After his death of leukemia in February, 2009, Votta’s friends and family,
including his lifetime partner, Charles
Walker, decided to establish a graduate
fellowship in Votta’s name. The idea was
first proposed to the university by one
of his professional colleagues, Jill Kauffman Johnson, who recruited Walker;
Tom’s college friend Paul Ligon ’90;
Jack Hills, family friend and fundraising consultant; Tom’s brother, Dennis
Votta; and his nephew, Geoff Votta.
Together, they worked with the university to establish the Thomas J. Votta
Fund for the Environment.
Many of these close friends and
more, the majority of Votta’s large family, as well as a sizable contingent of students and faculty from the Rubenstein
School of Environment and Natural
Resources, were on campus March
29 for a panel discussion, part of the
Rubenstein School’s “Education for
Rutland, Vermont, July 31
Welcome reception for President
Tom Sullivan and Leslie Black
Sullivan ’77 hosted by the
University of Vermont Alumni
Association. Rutland Country Club,
5:30-7 p.m. Free. RSVP by July 20
to [email protected].
Julie Nash, the first Thomas J. Votta Scholar
Sustainability” series, in celebration of
Tom Votta’s life and work.
There was another reason for celebration, as well. Dean Mary Watzin
announced that the scholarship fund
established in Votta’s name has now
passed the $100,000 mark needed to
become part of the university’s endowment and is still growing. Cynthia Forehand, associate dean of the Graduate
College, introduced the first Thomas J.
Votta Scholar, Julie Nash. Votta Scholars are graduate students who, like the
man the scholarship is named for, wish
to make a difference in solving environmental problems using environmental
best practices.
Speakers for the event were Tom
Votta friends and colleagues Jill Kauffman Johnson and Paul Ligon ’90. Both
speakers worked with Tom Votta in various professional capacities over the years
and spoke of his leadership in developing practices that help large companies
dramatically reduce the volume of toxic
chemicals and solid waste entering the
environment and doing so in ways that
make sound economic sense.
SALLY MCCAY, OPPOSITE LEFT, TOP; BRIAN JENKINS, LEFT
New York, New York, August 8
Join fellow alumni under the stars
for an evening of fun, fellowship,
appetizers, and cocktails. Hotel
Indigo, 127 W 28th Street.
Reception 6-9 p.m. Tickets $10.
Flushing, New York, August 28
U.S. Open, Billie Jean King National
Tennis Center. Reception 5-7 p.m.;
Tournament 7-10 p.m.
Burlington, October 5-7
Reunion & Homecoming Weekend. All alumni are invited back to
campus to be a part of the UVM
Alumni Association’s signature
weekend with special events being
planned for reunion classes. For
more information and registration,
alumni.uvm.edu/reunion.
Burlington, October 5
“Honoring the Past, Inspiring
Our Future: Celebrating 40 Years
of Title IX” with Dr. Bernice Sandler,
the “godmother” of Title IX.
Dudley H. Davis Center, Grand
Maple Ballroom. Reception
4:30-5:30 p.m. Free.
Burlington, October 6
40th Celebration of Title IX with
Olympic gold medalist Barbara Ann
Cochran ’78, Dudley H. Davis Center,
Silver Maple Ballroom.
11:30 a.m.-12:30. Free.
Burlington, October 6
Delta Psi annual meeting. Location
TBD. 3 p.m. Visit thedeltapsi.com
for more information.
alumni.
uvm.edu
for details & registration
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
Frank H. Livak Track & Field Facility was dedi-
OCT
UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT FOUNDATION
Grasse Mount
411 Main Street, Burlington VT 05401
(802) 656-2010
Website: uvmfoundation.org
Frank Livak would be very proud. The new
Glen Echo, Maryland, July 15
Annual children’s theater
performance, “If You Buy a Moose
a Muffin,” includes lunch and ride
on the historic Glen Echo carousel.
9:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Tickets $18,
children one and under, free.
AUG
he University of Vermont Foundation has received two new gifts
to its ongoing Alumni House
renovation project. Both donors
have chosen to remain anonymous and
honor others who have played important roles in their lives.
One provides for naming one of the
signature rooms that once served as
the music room in the former private
residence, built in 1892 for businessman Edward Wells. It will be named
the George Hard Room after the UVM
alumnus, class of 1955, who taught
the donor to play the piano. Hard was
a member of the Delta Psi fraternity,
which owned the future Alumni House
from 1924 until 2003. He could often
be heard tickling the ivories in the old
house well into the evenings during his
student days. Hard died in 1998 at age
sixty-four.
Another commitment, from a former Delta Psi brother, will
name the “Delt Bar” in one of the large gathering spaces on the
first floor to honor the fraternity’s long history in the house.
The Alumni House project is a renovation of a home at 61
Summit Street in Burlington’s Hill Section, to serve as a “home
away from home” for UVM alumni and a base of operations for
the UVM Alumni Association and UVM Foundation.
“We couldn’t be more grateful to these donors for their generosity,” said Richard Bundy, president and CEO of the University
of Vermont Foundation. “Alumni House will be a place where
our graduates can celebrate their lifelong relationship with the
university, and these gifts symbolize how important those relationships can be.”
42
C A L E N DA R
NEW TRACK & FIELD FACILITY
NAMED FOR FRANK H. LIVAK ’41
JULY
U V M F O U N D AT I O N
ALUMNI
43
PLANNED GIVING
P R O F I L E S I N G I VI NG
A challenge
to nursing alums
W
44
Vinson has been retired from the nursing profession
for more than a decade now, but she says she has always
used her nursing education in other aspects of her life
and career. “It really prepared me for nursing but in a lot
of ways it gave me skills for life. And I use them every
day still, even though I’m not nursing.”
Her UVM experience and her love of the nursing
profession are what prompted her to include a $100,000
estate provision to establish an endowed scholarship in
nursing for a Vermont student with financial need.
“It’s a great profession, and that’s one of the reasons
I want to support it,” she says. “And I want to challenge
other nursing school alumni to consider setting up an
endowment.” Not everyone is in a position to make an
outright gift, she points out, but anyone can include
UVM in their estate plan. “It’s a really simple process,
and can be set up exactly how you want—whatever is
meaningful to you.”
UVM FOUNDATION / GIFT PLANNING
411 Main Street, Burlington, Vermont 05401
Voice: (802) 656-9535 Toll-free voice: (888) 458-8691
Website: uvmfoundation.org/giftplanning
Email: [email protected]
IRA ALLEN SOCIETY
History in the making
The Ira Allen Society represents the pinnacle of
philanthropy to the University of Vermont. Just
as UVM founder Ira Allen shaped the institution’s
earliest legacies, today’s Ira Allen Society members
continue to mold the University of Vermont.
The new Ira Allen Society recognizes UVM’s most
committed donors for lifetime giving of $100,000,
with special recognition for donors of $1 million.
Annual members will be acknowledged for gifts of
$2,500 or more.
Read more about the
new Ira Allen Society at
uvmfoundation.org/iraallen
IRA ALLEN SOCIETY
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
hen Judy Vinson graduated from
the UVM School of Nursing in
1975, natural childbirth was still
a relatively new idea just beginning to find its way into formal academic instruction in nursing. Having established an interest in
working in labor and delivery as a student, she was drawn
to the new way of thinking about patient care in childbirth, moving away from intervention in the birth of the
baby with drugs and forceps, and toward a more holistic
approach that emphasizes patient education and support.
It’s an attitude she carried with her throughout her
nursing career. She delights in the fact that today’s College of Nursing & Health Sciences uses phrases on its
website like “students graduate as qualified agents of
health and change” and describes nursing as “a holistic
and humanistic discipline.”
“I really like that,” Vinson says.” I think ‘change’ is a
really key word in medicine today. We’re always learning
more, we’re always learning better ways of doing things,
even if that means undoing some of the things that we’ve
done with patients traditionally or rethinking things and
just going back to a natural way of doing things rather
than to intervene.”
45
VQ
ONLINE
uvm.edu/vq
Alumni Gallery
LIFE BEYOND GRADUATION
‘‘
Pat: Although not a classmate, I felt that your injunction in the latest Vermont
Quarterly was so stern that I just had to drop you a note! I’m glad to hear you are
well and that other long-time friends like Lin Palin are as well. He plays more golf in
a week than I do in a year! Hearing of the passing of Marie Condon, with whom I
served in the legislature, confirms the inexorable passage of time. I’m grateful for all
that the Class of ’49 has done to enrich our state through the years. Best wishes to all.
—from former Vermont governor James Douglas,
a Middlebury grad
33
Send your news to—
UVM Alumni Relations
411 Main Street
Burlington, VT 05401
[email protected]
46
35
Send your news to—
Ray W. Collins, Jr., M.D.
15 South Street
Middlebury, VT 05753
37
39
40
38
41
Send your news to—
UVM Alumni Relations
411 Main Street
Burlington, VT 05401
[email protected]
Send your news to—
UVM Alumni Relations
411 Main Street
Burlington, VT 05401
[email protected]
Send your news to—
Mary Shakespeare Minckler
100 Wake Robin Drive
Shelburne, VT 05482
Send your news to—
Mary Nelson Tanner
209 Heron Point
501 East Campus Avenue
Chestertown, MD 21620
Mike Levin was invited to
speak at an upper level seminar at the Woodrow Wilson
School at Princeton on February 23,
2012. After sixty-seven years of marriage Doris Durfee, wife of Harold
Allen Durfee, aged ninety-one, of
Hilton Head Island, South Carolina,
wrote that he passed away October 15, 2011, at the Preston Health
Center. He is survived by sons Peter
Durfee and his partner, Peter Manson, of Slingerlands, New York; and
Gary Durfee of Bluffton, South Carolina, and Inky. After graduating
from the University of Vermont,
Harold graduated from Yale Divinity School and Columbia University/
Union Theological Seminary where
he earned his Ph.D. Among Harold’s
many accomplishments and awards,
he was the author and co-editor of
several books and numerous academic articles. He was the chairman
of the Philosophical Department
of Park College, Parkville, Missouri;
president of the Missouri Philosophi-
43
Our classmate and my
dear friend, Harry Twitchell, sent me a note today
to announce that he was married
in Christ Church, Greenwich, Connecticut, on March 3, 2012. Her
name is Betty and she is wonderful.
That is all I know, at this point. We
all wish them both the best. Bravo
to both Betty and Harry for making such a life-affirming decision.
They both love to travel so, hopefully, I will have more news at a later
date of their adventures. At Christmas I had heard from Harry telling
me of a Twitchell family reunion in
Barre in 2011. He also related the
story of events of his ninetieth birthday in 2011 which were highlighted
by a trip in a plane over the snowcapped peaks of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon, a gift from his sons.
At the time I thought: “How will
Harry top this?” Well, he has! Joe
44
Send your news to—
UVM Alumni Relations
411 Main Street
Burlington, VT 05401
[email protected]
45
Send your news to—
UVM Alumni Relations
411 Main Street
Burlington, VT 05401
[email protected]
★
★
40
YE A R S O F
IX
TITLE
46
If you are looking for news
of the class of 1946, you will
only find it if someone sends
me some. True, most of us are no
longer hopping around the country,
being president of the local women’s
club or leading a Girl Scout troop,
but we do have those great-grandchildren. So get busy and send your
news for the next column. My activity is spending time at the balance
clinic, hoping I can make myself walk
better. I see Dorothy Frazier Carpenter ’47 doing the same thing. So
what are you doing to make things
better?
Send your news to—
Harriet Bristol Saville
203 Deer Lane #4
Colchester, VT 05446
[email protected]
47
65TH REUNION
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
alumni.uvm.edu/reunion
Send your news to—
Louise Jordan Harper
15 Ward Avenue
South Deerfield, MA 01373
48
Send your news to—
UVM Alumni Relations
411 Main Street
Burlington, VT 05401
[email protected]
49
Last issue I asked for contributions to class notes by
e-mail, snail mail, phone or
a visit. Here’s a comment I received
from former Governor James Douglas “Pat: Although not a classmate,
I felt that your injunction in the latest Vermont Quarterly was so stern
that I just had to drop you a note!
If you were a female studentathlete at the University of
Vermont prior to May of 1978,
please contact the Victory Club
at [email protected].
We look forward to celebrating
forty years of Title IX with
you during
REUNION/HOMECOMING
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
I’m glad to hear you are well and
that other long-time friends like Lin
Palin are as well. He plays more golf
in a week than I do in a year! Hearing of the passing of Marie Condon,
with whom I served in the legislature, confirms the inexorable passage of time. I’m grateful for all that
the Class of ’49 has done to enrich
our state through the years. Best
wishes to all.” Larry Dale said, “I
always read but neglect to contribute to class notes.” After graduation
he moved to Washington with his
bride, Shirley Hill, of Montpelier, to
work for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory as an analyst of magnetic signatures of Navy ships and development of Navy warheads and fuses. In
1960 he, his wife, and two daughters
moved to Colorado Springs where
he went with NORAD as a research
analyst working with ground radars
and satellite early warning systems at Ent Air Force base, now the
home of the Olympic Training Center. Besides his hobbies of photography, skiing, and ham radio, he
always maintained interest in aviation, is still active in the local Experimental Aircraft Association and
owns a hangar at Meadow Lake Airport, having piloted and owned
quite a few planes over the years.
He says, “A stroke in 2001 greatly
inhibited my mobility but I eventually moved from a wheelchair to a
walker to a cane, and at age eightyeight I’m quite a sight flying down
the hallways on my scooter at MacKenzie Place, my assisted living facility.” When I forwarded information
in the previous class notes I made a
mistake in reference to Larry Dale’s
family. His grandfather was Porter
Dale, a governor and senator; his
father was Timothy Dale, commis-
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
34
Send your news to—
UVM Alumni Relations
411 Main Street
Burlington, VT 05401
[email protected]
36
Send your news to—
UVM Alumni Relations
411 Main Street
Burlington, VT 05401
[email protected]
’’
42
70TH REUNION
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
alumni.uvm.edu/reunion
Send your news to—
Gwendolyn Marshia Brown
60 Slim Brown Road
Milton, VT 05468
Alpert, M.D., sent me a very upbeat
letter complete with pictures which
revealed that he is as handsome as
ever. He has finally retired and is living in Savannah, Georgia, with his
lovely wife. He also mentioned how
much he has always enjoyed fishing. He called it his “defusing influence.” I thought that was interesting to pass on. Rosemary Warren
‘44, writes that her husband, Bob, of
sixty-three years passed in July 2011.
I was very happy to hear from Rosemary since we both majored in classical studies. There were not many
of us. She has some health issues,
but assures me that she is well taken
care of and happy. Our class extends
to her and her family our sincere
condolences. At Christmas time I
had great messages from Mary Butler Bliss, Chet McCabe, Sig Wysolmerski, and Patricia Pike Hallock. As
Janet Dike Rood had written to me
before, she is living at Wake Robin
in Shelburne and is very involved in
activities there with her husband,
Fred. She is encouraging everyone to
write memoirs and has some great
hints to get started if you are interested. She has written hers with
great passion and success. If you are
interested, get in touch with Janet.
Another update on Mary Butler
Bliss....she is irrepressible. On March
17, 2012, she called me. Since I was
not at home, she left a very warm
message which ended with Mary
singing “When Irish Eyes are Smiling”
in her inimitable Irish brogue. Concluding this column on a sad note,
we have lost another member of our
class. The son of Palla Lois Stickney
Hazen advised that his Mom died in
February, 2012. Our sympathy goes
out to all of her family and friends.
Send your news to—
June Hoffman Dorion
8 Lewis Lane
Fair Haven, VT 05743
[email protected]
C E L E B R AT E
ALUMNI
PHOTOS
CLASS
NOTES
cal Association and chairman of the
Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University in Washington, D.C. for thirty-three years,
where he was named Scholar of the
Year. He also founded and organized
a seminar in European Philosophical Studies, which traveled to Oxford
University, the Sorbonne in Paris,
and the University of Heidelberg in
Germany. He received a fellowship
at Harvard University where he was
a visiting scholar. Since 1943 he was
an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church of Hilton Head. Grace
Meeken Hutchins reported that two
of her daughters have recently been
promoted to new positions. Holly
Hutchins Goodrich ’71 is now director of curriculum of the Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, school system and
her sister, Meg Hutchins Broderick,
is professor of culinary arts at Southern Maine Community College.
Send your news to—
Maywood Metcalf Kenney
44 Birch Road
Andover, MA 01810
[email protected]
47
48
they developed a close relationship.
Dinners in the dining room started
with singing the Doxology. She says,
“Two foods stand out in my memory: the wonderful meatloaf Priscilla
made and the once-a-week dreaded
prune whip, which I have never
made since.” She listed the house
rules we all remember: 1. No males
above the first floor; 2. Dress up for
dinner Wednesday night; 3. Sign out
and in all evenings; 4. In by 9:30 p.m.
except one 10:30 p.m. and one 11:15
p.m. which could be exchanged
for midnight on a Saturday; 5. Our
rooms left unlocked and inspected
by the housemother. I will add a couple of others—skirts, not slacks, to
be worn unless the temperature was
below zero (or was it 32 degrees?)
and freshman beanies to be worn
the first few weeks of school. Ruth
still keeps in touch with some of her
dorm-mates including Jean Hurlbert Smith who was a working farmer’s wife and lives in New Haven and
Norma Stevenson who was a dietitian and lives in Tennessee. Ruth
added, “She sends me pecans, and I
reciprocate with maple syrup.”
Send your news to—
Arline (Pat) Brush Hunt
236 Coche Brook Crossing
West Charleston, VT 05872
[email protected]
50
We received notice of the
death of Edward E. Brownell
from his daughter, Karen
Leimann. Ed had enlisted in the
U.S. Navy soon after the attack on
Pearl Harbor. While serving aboard
a minesweeper, he participated in
the Anzio invasion and the invasion
of southern France. He was transferred to the submarine service in
the Pacific theater and was preparing for the invasion of Japan when
the war ended. After his discharge
he enrolled at UVM and became a
member of the Sigma Nu Fraternity.
During this time he fell in love and
married Marjorie in September 1948.
She died last February. He received
his BS degree in business administration. The two moved to New Jersey, where he worked with Western
Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. Their
two children were born and raised
there, in Plainfield, New Jersey. After
twenty-six years there, Ed was trans-
C E L E B R AT E
sioner of institutions; and his brother
was Dr. Porter Dale ’44. Burt Sisco
’50 pointed out the mistake. I should
have known better as the Dale family was from Island Pond where we
lived for thirteen years. I’m sad to
tell you of the death of my brotherin-law, Major Mitchell J. Hunt, 93,
at his home in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. He was born in Derby Line,
Vermont, growing up in the international community on the Canadian
border and graduating from Derby
Academy in 1936. He studied at Bay
Path Business College before going
into the Air Force in April 1941 and
serving in the United States and in
France. In 1946 he enrolled in UVM
along with his brothers and their
wives, Amelia LaRose Hunt and
Lyman Hunt, Pat Brush Hunt and
Paul Hunt, and where he met his
first wife, Marjorie Nelson Hunt ’47.
Their grandfather Jerry Hunt and
many others in the family were UVM
graduates. At UVM, Mitch founded
the Reserve Officers Association, was
a member of Sigma Phi fraternity,
and was editor of Burlington’s Panorama Magazine and editor of the
316-page Vermont Vacation Guide.
He received a BA degree in 1949
at UVM and an MA degree in public administration from Wayne University. For thirty-three years he did
government research in Pennsylvania and continued in the Air Force
Reserves. Survivors include his second wife Karen Mickus Hunt; son
Philip, a lawyer in Maine; son Robert in New Hampshire; and daughter
Sarah Hobart ’82, associate director of admissions at UVM; and their
families. A teacher in the Northeast
Kingdom during her working years,
Ruth Mason Allard writes that her
husband, Dean, died in 1998 and
she remarried Arthur Lord ’52 in
2007, a friend she had known for
fifty years. They recently attended
a writing class at the St. Johnsbury
Senior Center that was facilitated
by Reeve Lindbergh, a teacher and
writer who lives in that area and was
the daughter of the famous pilot,
Charles Lindbergh. Ruth chose as
her subject her good years at Saunders Hall. She wanted to live in a
co-op house where students prepared their own meals, rotating
shifts, and with only twenty-five girls
★
★
40
YE A R S O F
IX
TITLE
ferred to Little Rock, Arkansas. While
in Arkansas, he earned his master’s
degree in organizational management from the University of Arkansas. Ed died in January of this year at
the age of 91. Doris Fafunwa wrote
that her husband, Baba Titi (Babs)
died last October when his heart
gave out. Until then had been active
in chairing meetings, checking the
Foucos Educational System, tending to extended family matters, supporting his Islamic jamaat, writing
articles, studying or participating
in social functions. Doris writes that
the family will keep alive some of
the projects that were most important to her husband and that the
Fafunwa Educational Foundation
hosted the annual program and a
memorial in his name.
Send your news to—
Hedi Ballantyne
20 Kent Street
Montpelier, VT 05602
[email protected]
51
Send your news to—
UVM Alumni Relations
411 Main Street
Burlington, VT 05401
[email protected]
52
60TH REUNION
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
alumni.uvm.edu/reunion
Send your news to—
UVM Alumni Relations
411 Main Street
Burlington, VT 05401
[email protected]
53
Our class enjoyed sports at
UVM, and we fared pretty
well in everything except
football. That sport never returned to
If you were a female studentathlete at the University of
Vermont prior to May of 1978,
please contact the Victory Club
at [email protected].
We look forward to celebrating
forty years of Title IX with
you during
REUNION/HOMECOMING
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
UVM, but look at what our athletes
are doing nowadays. We take pride
in the young Catamount teams who
won the 2012 NCAA skiing National
Championships after previously capturing the Eastern Intercollegiates.
Two record-breaking numbers by
UVM woman skiers were a special
part of that, too. Congratulations,
all. Then there was the NCAA basketball tournament. Again the UVM
team showed its mettle. After learning about the first round win against
Lamar, alums were treated with a
nationally televised battle of UVM
against North Carolina in the second
round. What fun it was to tune in on
that match from here in California,
even though UVM lost. Looking forward to the antics of our aging classmates, I hope to hear from you soon.
Please include “UVM” in the subject
line of your emails, or, better yet,
send a written note via snail mail for
the next issue.
Send your news to—
Nancy Hoyt Burnett
729 Stendhal Lane
Cupertino, CA 95014
[email protected]
54
A celebration of life will
be held at a later time for
George H. Price, Jr., 79, who
died Sunday, February, 19, 2012 at
Gifford Memorial Hospital in Randolph. He was born in Stamford,
Connecticut, on May 19, 1932, son of
George H. Price Sr. and Elsie Krauter.
Survivors include his wife, Cynthia, whom he married on June 14,
1975; son, Timothy Price of Addison;
daughters, Stephanie Kilbride of Ferrisburg and Deborah Angier of Panton; and step-sons, Michael Tasetano
of Savannah, Georgia, and Paul Tasetano of Barre. He is also survived by
six grandchildren.
Send your news to—
Kathryn Dimick Wendling
Apt. 1, 34 Pleasant Street
Woodstock, VT 05091
[email protected]
55
Sad news first. Morty
Gewirtz passed away last
August 13 in Southampton,
New York. “Snud”, as he was affectionately called, was a real estate
developer, investor, and philanthropist. He started the SoFO museum
of natural history and was a great
supporter of the Rogers Memorial Library. We’re also sorry to have
to report the death of classmate
Earl Steinman, who passed away
on March 18 of this year. Earl was
a handsome, multi-faceted guy
and a member of Phi Sigma Delta
fraternity. His singing talent was
topped only by his skills on the basketball court. Earl was inducted
into the UVM Athletic Hall of Fame
three years ago. Barry Stone ’56
was his sponsor. Barry had a relatively decent shooting eye him-
self. (Remember the days of the
two-handed set shot?) Dan Burack
announced that a third generation
of Buracks is attending UVM; second generation son Adam ’85, and
now granddaughter Abby, class of
2016. The whole gang is expected to
attend Homecoming. Steve Klein’s
daughter, Lauren ’71 is being married in June. In order to pay for the
event, Steve says he’ll need to go
back to work. He wonders if he can
still apply to medical school. Elaine
Rohlin Wittenstein writes that she
currently winters in Naples, Florida,
though her permanent residence is
in Chicago. She travels extensively
and stays in touch with Vi Menke,
in Long Beach, California, and Ros
Harper, who lives in New York.
Elaine reports that she got an e-mail
from Curt Burrell, who is a member
of the Cook County, Oregon, Sheriff ’s
Search and Rescue Unit. He works
with abandoned horses and deals
with claims regarding the depreciation of livestock by wolves. And
finally, Mark Rosenblatt declares
that rumors of him being preg-
nant are totally false. If there were
any truth to it, he says he’d carry the
baby to term, and have her attend
UVM. Nancy Brown Bunting writes,
“Following a chat with Elaine Wittenstein Rohlin ’55 I thought a brief
accounting was due. Since our very
successful 50th Reunion I have lost
my husband, Frank, but continue to
live in Brandon, Vermont, as does
Dick Wood ’55. I see Nancy Scott
Ferraro ’55, Arlington, Vermont, and
correspond with fellow Alpha Chis
Donna Newhall Larrow ’56, Sue
Van Wagner Leavit ’54 and Ellen
Hind Shell-Blevins ’54 as well as
Babette Nichols Cameron ’55 and
Harriet Nicholson Suo ’54. A trip
to the Southwest and frequent trips
to Maine to visit my sons, including
Charles ’81, add to the joys of living
in this beautiful state.”
Send your news to—
Jane Morrison Battles
Apt. 125A
500 East Lancaster Avenue
Wayne, PA 19087
[email protected]
Hal Greenfader
805 S. Le Doux Rd.
Los Angeles, CA 90035
[email protected]
56
Send your news to—
Jane Stickney
32 Hickory Hill Road
Williston, VT 05495
[email protected]
57
55TH REUNION
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
alumni.uvm.edu/reunion
Gayla Halbrecht has been hearing
about the UVM Reunion in October
of 2012 and wishes so much that
she could attend. However, on those
dates she will be in Israel visiting
her sister, Jessica Fischer. They will
attend the centennial convention
of Hadassah. Gayla’s husband died
recently and she, her two children,
and five grandchildren continue to
mourn his loss. Friends and family in
Gayla’s North Carolina triangle keep
her very busy. Think Reunion, October 5-7, 2012! In other news, I have
Green Living
At Wake Robin, residents have designed and built three
miles of walking trails. Each Spring, we make maple syrup
in the community sugar house and each Fall, we harvest
honey from our bee hives. We compost, plant gardens, and
work with staff to follow earth-friendly practices, conserve
energy and use locally grown foods.
Live the life you choose—in our vibrant community that
shares your “green” ideals. We’re happy to tell you more.
Visit our website or give us a call today to schedule a tour.
Open Houses are held monthly. Individual tours available
upon request. Please call for more information.
802.264.5100 / wakerobin.com
Shelburne, Ver mo n t
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
CLASS NOTES
49
decided to step down as class secretary to let someone else take a crack
at it. If you are interested in this
position, contact the alumni office
at [email protected] for more information.
Send your news to—
Marilyn Falby Stetson
P.O. Box 281
Bristol, VT 05443
[email protected]
58
50
59
Alan D. Overton, of Essex
Junction, passed away on
February 22, 2012. A former
member of the UVM Board of Trustees, president of the Alumni Association and recipient of the university’s Distinguished Alumni Award,
Al leaves an impressive legacy of
service to UVM. (Ed. Read more on
page 62.)
Send your news to—
60
Send your news to—
Paul F. Heald
Foulsham Farms Real Estate
P.O. Box 2205
South Burlington, VT 05407
[email protected]
61
Madeleine Brecher says she:
“Just loved being back in
Vermont for the 50th, seeing old acquaintances and wondering why I didn’t know many of the
lovely people I met when I was on
campus fifty years ago. In Naples,
Florida, right now and spent a wonderful day yesterday with Louise
and Shelly Weiner. George and I
did a fabulous cruise in January on
a 100-passenger ship to celebrate
our 45th anniversary. We head to the
Baltics and St. Petersburg in May and
are looking forward to that too.” Fran
Grossman reports, “I have retired
to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where I am overly involved in
the community. I did not have time
for community activities when I was
the director of guidance of a large
high school, but now I am doing
community work on steroids. I am
chairperson of the Jewish Center
of Outer Banks, on my home owners association, work for the Community Foundation, and help to pay
your social security with a part-time
job in the summer. I do inspections
for a rental company. Fun! I’m leaving shortly for a trip to Europe. I was
really sorry that I couldn’t attend the
50th Reunion, but coming from Los
Angeles, California, last June was
just not possible. I was hoping to
get a copy of the Memory Book, but
that hasn’t yet happened, so I don’t
know who attended (of the people
I knew) and how it all went. I’m sure
it was fantastic and a lot of fun!” And
from Mimi Portnoy Davis-Neches:
“ I’m still in private practice, working
as a marriage and family therapist
(psychotherapist) in Burbank, California, where I see adults, couples,
teens and families, dealing with a
wide variety of emotional and interpersonal difficulties and disorders.
Lexington, MA 02420
[email protected]
62
50TH REUNION
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
alumni.uvm.edu/reunion
Jonathan J. Stern was born February 24, 1942, in the Bronx and died
peacefully surrounded by his family
on Wednesday, November 9, 2011, in
Boca Raton, Florida. Jon was firmly
rooted in the world around us—in
his work, his friendships, his community, and his family, bringing integrity, passion, and love to each. Following graduation from UVM, Jon
served in the Air Force Reserve. In
business, Jon was one of health and
beauty care industry’s most principled leaders. He built the Keystone
Organization into the preeminent
sales agency in the Eastern U.S. In
2000, he successfully merged the
company into Crossmark and then
retired once the transition was complete. Anyone who had the pleasure of knowing Jon recognized
him for his exceptional compassion, natural leadership, and unparalleled work ethic. Jon was an avid
Yankee fan, a golf enthusiast, a Sinatra devotee, and a lover of nature
and art. He lived with his family in
Upper Saddle River for over twenty
years, and was the loving husband
of Sandi, proud and devoted father
to his three children, Jennifer, Daniel,
and Brian, and the adoring grandfather of Zach and Rachel. Jon was
taken from us all too soon in life
after battling pancreatic cancer. As
Jon always said, “Life is for the living,”
and we will live our lives honoring
his memory with deep affection and
admiration. Jon, you are loved and
will always be missed. Joan Manley LaClair died August 19, 2011,
after a long, courageous battle with
cancer. She was a long time Rowayton, Connecticut, resident and best
known as the owner and founder
of the Joan LaClair Swim School
Inc., which began in her backyard
in 1966. During the next forty years,
her small backyard swim lesson program grew into a successful business. She inspired many and taught
over 10,000 individuals to swim at
all levels. Her broad teaching experience ranged from water babies to
synchronized swimming, lifeguard
training, CPR, first aid, and competi-
tive swimming at the regional, state,
national, and Olympic levels. Joan
traveled the country to share her
expertise and philosophy through
speaking engagements and clinics
and was featured on cable TV and
several magazines and newspapers.
Her video, “Swimming FUNdamentals,” was designed to aid both the
parent and instructor in developing
comfort in the water and a strong
foundation for the beginning swimmer. She helped establish a swim
school in Ochos Rios, Jamaica. She
believed “that the greatest good
that we can do for others is not just
to share our riches with them, but
to reveal theirs to themselves.” Joan
graduated with a bachelor’s in agriculture and home economics, was a
member of Pi Beta Phi sorority, and
President of Omicron Nu. She is survived by her three children and their
families. She shared her great love
of the water and sailing with her
friends and family right up until the
last days of life.
Send your news to—
Patricia Hoskiewicz Allen
14 Stony Brook Drive
Rexford, NY 12148
[email protected]
63
Send your news to—
Toni Citarella Mullins
210 Conover Lane
Red Bank, NJ 07701
[email protected]
64
What crazy weather we have
had these past few months.
Our class seems to not be a
very newsy group. Harold Frost sent
a couple of items. In May of 2012,
he will have the second anniversary of his new scientific consulting firm, Frosty’s Physics, LLC, which
is a Vermont business he owns and
leads. Projects include: drafting for
the National Academy of Engineering of a memorial tribute to be published by the National Academies
Press later this year for one of its
members, Wesley Nyborg, whose in
memoriam notice appeared in the
Vermont Quarterly spring issue; framing and announcement to the scientific community of a new medical
ultrasound bio effects mechanism
with potential benefit for the next
generation of diagnostic ultrasound
imaging systems; and discovery and
validation through mathematical
analysis of a new major image contrast mechanism for MRIs which can
potentially transform their use in the
future. Harold also has done work
in the advocacy area for better business models in Vermont. Dewey M.
Caron returns to UVM this summer
as co-chair and presenter at the Eastern Apicultural Society Annual conference held on UVM campus August
13-17. It was last on campus in 1980
when Dewey also was program
chair. Dewey invites all Vermont beekeepers to attend and participate.
Dewey is now living in Portland, Oregon; officially retiring from the University of Delaware in 2009. I am
looking forward to our summer on
Lake Champlain. Wishing you all funfilled and relaxing months ahead.
Send your news to—
Susan Barber
1 Oak Hill Road
P.O. Box 63
Harvard, MA 01451
[email protected]
65
Send your news to—
Colleen Denny Hertel
10 Norwood Street
Winchester, MA 01890
[email protected]
66
Stephan Schulte writes
“After relocating to London from Manhattan some
twenty years ago and recently getting my UK citizenship, I was finally
able to live out my life-long ambition and re-locate to France. My
partner, Jane Rossiter-Smith, and I
are now living in Beaulieu-sur-Mer
on La Cote d’Azur between Nice and
Monaco and enjoying the fantastic views of the Mediterranean and
the balmy weather. If any of my old
friends should read this and be in
the neighborhood, I hope they’ll
look me up!” Carol Jenne Pound is
celebrating her twentieth year with
the Phoenix Convention and Visitors’
Bureau. She and her husband, Peter,
made a lengthy trip to western Australia to visit Peter’s family for a few
weeks and found it a thrill to actually
stand on the spot where the Indian
and Southern Oceans meet. Four
of us from our class, Claire Berka
Willis, Marcia Ely Bechtold, Ken
McGuckin and I along with Chip
Bechtold ’65 and Frank Willis ’64
attended the Frozen Fenway hockey
tournament in January to watch
★
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40
YE A R S O F
IX
TITLE
UVM play outdoors. It was so warm
we did not wear our coats, but the
ice held up nicely even if our team
did not. After the game, we all traveled to Orleans, Massachusetts, to
spend more time together at the
Bechtold’s home on Cape Cod. Anne
Appleton Weller visited us in March
in lovely old St. Augustine, Florida,
where we are now spending winters.
She is fully retired and still living in
Columbia, Missouri. Also in March,
my husband, Ken McGuckin, and I
spent time in Vero Beach with Judy
Claypoole Stewart and her husband, Jack Stewart ’65, while they
were vacationing in the warm south.
April found us hosting Claire Berka
Willis and her husband, Frank Willis ‘64, for a stopover visit on their
way to and from Vero Beach for their
vacation. Classmates, please send
me some news! I would like to hear
from some of you phantoms so that I
can increase our class notes section.
Happy trails to all.
Send your news to—
Kathleen Nunan McGuckin
P.O. Box 2100 PMB 137
Montpelier, VT 05601
[email protected]
67
45TH REUNION
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
alumni.uvm.edu/reunion
Send your news to—
Jane Kleinberg Carroll
44 Halsey Street, Unit 3
Providence, RI 02906
[email protected]
68
George McWeeney, Jr. wrote
in to share that “Danny Martin was inducted into the
Connecticut Football Officials Hall of
Fame yesterday at the Foxon Coun-
If you were a female studentathlete at the University of
Vermont prior to May of 1978,
please contact the Victory Club
at [email protected].
We look forward to celebrating
forty years of Title IX with
you during
REUNION/HOMECOMING
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
try House. They had over 280 people in attendance (eleven inductees).
Danny gave an outstanding and
moving acceptance speech including remarks about the championship team of 1962. It was a great day.
Send your news to—
Diane Duley Glew
64 Woodland Park Drive
Haverhill, MA 01830
[email protected]
69
Send your news to—
Mary Moninger-Elia
1 Templeton Street
West Haven, CT 06516
[email protected]
70
Send your news to—
Doug Arnold
3311 Oak Knoll Drive
Pepper Pike, OH 44124
[email protected]
71
Hello from Burlington! There
has been a paucity of class
notes coming my way, but
the quality is terrific. Just after our
40th Reunion, Annie Viets departed
the U.S. and is living in Saudi Arabia, working at the Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University in Khobar
as an associate professor of business.
She reports that she will be back in
the summer for a couple of months.
She wrote: “Have a great spring and
I’ll see you then. M’asalama, Annie”.
And someone I haven’t heard from
for such a long time, Mary Jane
Leach, says: “Sorry to have missed
the Reunion. I had a busy fall with
performances in interesting spaces:
the Porsche factory in Milan, a commune in Padua, a castle in Belgium,
and an old railway machine shop in
Germany, as well as the usual assortment of “normal” concert spaces.
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
Edward Lewis passed away
in Burlington, Vermont, on
December 23, 2011. He lived
with his wife in Franklin, Vermont.
Alan Young, after graduating in
mechanical engineering, moved to
California, where houses that sold
for $10,000 in 1958 are now $1.8
million. He says, “No one here thinks
global warming isn’t here”—rainfall
has been only 20 percent of normal.
Praising California’s environmental care, he adds, “I think that there
is [generally] so little understanding of technology that most people
think it’s the ice cubes that keep the
refrigerator cold.” My Theta group
is planning a September trip to a
“Road Scholar” (what was Elderhostel) week in northern New Mexico
(Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Taos).
We hope to meet up with Ruth Hansen Holmes, who lives in Santa Fe.
Anybody else out there we should
look up? Who has been to a Road
Scholar program? Did you like it?
In response to an earlier query, no
poems arrived. Ah, well. I send out
these questions into the great void.
Feel sorry for me and write. Don’t
forget that next year is our 55th
reunion.
Send your news to—
Libby Kidder Michael
65 Victoria Street, Unit 27
Manchester, NH 03104
[email protected]
Henry Shaw, Jr.
112 Pebble Creek Road
Columbia, SC 29223
[email protected]
I also teach Systematic Training for
Effective Parenting to parents of children one to eleven years old, and to
interns and therapists wanting to
get certified to teach their own parenting classes. One of the delights of
my practice this past year is that my
husband, Bob, who is also a licensed
therapist, uses part of my office
suite at various times of the week.
It’s both fun and interesting to have
two “shrinks” in one family! Luckily, we live close to my daughter, Hilary, (a former actress and now a second grade teacher) and her husband
and son, my six-year-old grandson,
Colby. My son, Gary, (who manages
a silk-screening operation) lives in
Tacoma, Washington, with his wife
and daughter, my almost thirteenyear-old granddaughter, Isabella. We
just had a rare visit from Gary and
his family, which also includes his
adopted son, Jacob (his wife’s son
from a former marriage), and Jacob’s
girlfriend, Megan. So it turned into
a terrific and lively reunion. Two
years ago, Bob and I took a wonderful cruise on the Wind Spirit (a
small, combination sailing and cruise
ship) to the Greek Islands and Turkey. We’re looking forward to doing
some more traveling in the next year
despite both of our busy practices.
I’d love to hear from any Vermonters
who happen to pass through or visit
L.A. I’m reachable at (818) 848-3022.”
Robert (Bob) Ronan, Jr. reports that
he retired nine years ago to Surfside Beach, South Carolina, from
Shelburne, Vermont. He is enjoying traveling and lots of volunteering—Brookgreen Gardens, Mobile
Meals, Surfside Beach Library and
on the HOA board in the community in which he lives. He could not
make the 50th Reunion but tries to
get back to Vermont for two to four
weeks each year. And class scribe
Steve Berry, reports another successful year of skiing, which included
Montana (Big Sky) during a visit to
his daughter, Alison Berry ’95 and
her family in Bozeman, a week in
Kitzbuhel, Austria, a week at various areas around Salt Lake City, and
twenty-eight days in Stowe, Vermont—but who’s counting. Send
your news to Steve at the address
below.
Send your news to—
Steve Berry
8 Oakmount Circle
C E L E B R AT E
CLASS NOTES
51
I’ve had quite a few performances in
Italy lately, including the premiere
of a piano concerto in Lecce. I also
made some animations (videos) to
go with some of my older pieces –
all now on YouTube”. Mary Jane has
to be the only bona-fide “composer”
in the Class of ’71, yes? I also heard
from Pat Vana following our 40th
Reunion. She enjoyed connecting
with everyone and at the time of her
email was preparing for some winter
travel. And, Martha Baker Forgiano
’72, said that she and Joe Forgiano
were in Florida trying to envision
what retirement will be like. Daughter, Rebecca ’06, is planning a 2013
Vermont wedding! Finally, my twin
grandsons, Daniel and Dima, turned
two years old in April. It doesn’t
seem possible! Please keep in touch.
Class notes are most interesting
when folks email or call me anytime.
Send your news to—
Sarah Wilbur Sprayregen
145 Cliff Street
Burlington, VT 05401
[email protected]
52
73
Pam Johnson Kovacs contacted me about the death of
one of our classmates, Max
Arbo, who passed away in October. Max was married to Pam’s sister, Teena Johnson Arbo ’75. Pam
says, “They met our junior year and
married in January 1974. They lived
in Bethany, Connecticut, have two
daughters, two grandchildren and
had thirty-eight wonderful years
together. He had retired two months
after a very successful career in the
computer industry and was making a go at one more startup business at the time of his death. Max
never lost his love for motorcycles,
and upon retirement, rode his BMW
to Atlanta to visit our classmate and
close friend, Eric Brenner.” RIP. At
the start of the year, I joined several
other Tri-Delta alums for a birthday
reunion, cruising from Miami to Key
West and Cozumel, Mexico, and celebrating the fact that we had made
it (or will soon) to age 60. Robin
Bossi Moore, Sally Cummings ’72,
and I were newbie cruisers, but we
quickly learned the ropes from Emily
Schnaper Manders ’74 and Margo
David DiIeso ’74. We got off to a
great start by almost winning the
trivia contest; we definitely had the
edge because the questions were
about events we had lived through
while they were ancient history to
the other teams. Near victory was
elusive, though, as we then finished
a disappointing fifth out of five in
The Amazing Cozumel Race. We took
twice as long as the other teams to
figure out the clues, but at least we
didn’t get lost. We had a great time,
and we ran into Holly Hanau Koncz
’74 and her husband on the boat.
After the cruise, Sally and I spent a
few more days in sunny West Palm
Beach, Florida, where Margo recently
moved from Massachusetts. Emily
returned home to her family in Massachusetts and Robin to Wallingford,
VQEXTRA
online
74
In January, I sailed with
Margo David DiIeso, Robin
Bossi Moore ’73, Deborah
Mesce ’73 and Sally Cummings ’72
on a short cruise to Key West and
Cozumel, Mexico. We called this our
DDD “O” cruise since we were all +
sixty years old and sisters from TriDelta Sorority. See a photo by visiting alumni.uvm.edu and clicking
on the Flickr photo stream. (Read
more about the trip in Deborah’s
’73 column.) Bob Small died February 3, 2012, while riding his bike in
the Garden of the Gods in Colorado
Springs, Colorado. Helen Rosenberg
has been employed in the City of
New Haven, Connecticut’s Office of
Economic Development since 1989,
and works with city engineer Dick
Miller ’68, parks director Bob Levine
’73, and city emergency management coordinator Maggie Targove
’73. Occasionally there are inadvertent UVM reunions in the lobby of
City Hall. Keep sending in your news.
We want to hear what is going on in
your life since your UVM days. I hope
to see some of you at the Red Sox
games this summer.
Send your news to—
Emily Schnaper Manders
104 Walnut Street
Framingham, MA 01702
[email protected]
75
I received a note from Mel
Connley ’73. He and his
wife, Gay Harrington Connley, have been living in Huntington Beach, California, where Gay
has been a teacher and Mel is a CLU.
Gay keeps in touch with some of
her Theta sisters, including Susan
Brooks. Mel and Gay have a son and
a daughter and two granddaughters.
Mel has fond memories of the legendary Hawaiian parties that were
held at Sigma Nu. I see on Susie
Robinson Barr’s (another Theta)
Facebook page that her daughter,
Meghan, is very involved with the
Skyliners Synchronized Skating Club.
Susie’s son, John, plays hockey at
Middlebury College. Eva Posner has
ANNALEE ASH ’76
“I was never political
in college and have
never done anything
like this before.
But my life was
changing when I
was arrested for
civil disobedience
on Constitution
Avenue…”
—Annalee Ash on
her advocacy for
children’s rights in
Washington, D.C.
read more at
uvm.edu/vq
joined Bellmarc Realty as a licensed
real estate agent in New York City,
working in both sales and rentals. I
bumped into Becky Pardee Davis
at a doctor’s office and she and several of her Pi Phi sisters, including, Jane Haslun Schwab, Rhonda
Lucasey Rowe, Laurie Burdett Stuart, Pat Rubalcaba, Karen Critchlow
Davis and Nancy Haslun Wall, Sarah
Jewett Gossler, Jane Libby Nesbitt, had just returned from the UVM
hockey game at Fenway Park. Check
out their picture in the Flickr gallery at alumni.uvm.edu. Our youngest son, Peter will graduate from St.
Lawrence University in May. We are
renting Pete Beekman’s ’76 house
in Canton, New York, for the festivities. After the St. Lawrence hockey
season ended Peter got called to
play for the Wheeling Nailers of the
ECHL. Peter Lenes ’09 was a teammate. In a game against the Chicago
Express, Peter Child scored the only
goal for Wheeling against goalie Rob
Madore ’12. I welcome any news
that you folks would like to have
included in this column. Just email
me. Thanks.
Send your news to—
Dina Dwyer Child
1263 Spear Street
South Burlington, VT 05401
[email protected]
76
Bob Melcher, political science, and his wife, Susan,
recently opened a Senior
Care office for Visiting Angels in Fairfield, Connecticut. After years of
advertising and marketing successfully for others, he wanted to build
a business he could own, while also
making other people’s lives better.
Bob also manages and maintains a
University of Vermont alumni, student former employee and parent
group on LinkedIn (LinkedIn.com),
which now has over 8,000 members,
with 99.9% being current or future
alumni. He checks every request to
make sure the group remains limited
to UVMers and is always excited to
see fellow alumni who also earned
MBAs in international management
from Thunderbird, in Arizona. Bob
says he knew over 300 people on
campus, but that in the last decade
he has only been able to locate and
communicate with three. Where are
the rest of you? You can reach Bob
at [email protected].
Jan D’Angelo recently joined AdamWorks in Denver as vice president
for business development. AdamWorks is an engineering design and
production company in the carbon
composite industry. Of note is their
production of the Dream Chaser
spaceship, a contender for replacing
the NASA shuttle as the government
shifts the Earth-orbit programs to
private industry.
Send your news to—
Pete Beekman
2 Elm Street
Canton, NY 13617
[email protected]
77
35TH REUNION
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
alumni.uvm.edu/reunion
In February 2012, the District Board
of Trustees of Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, unanimously awarded Robert
M. Kershner, M.D.,M.S.,F.A.C.S. continuing faculty contract, the equivalent of tenure as a full professor.
Dr. Kershner, who is a board-certified ophthalmologist, has taught
at Palm Beach State College for five
years, first as an adjunct professor
and then as a professor of anatomy,
physiology, and microbiology. This
year he was designated as the chairman of the new department of ophthalmic medical technology and is
responsible for the building of the
department and the development
of a two-year associate in science
degree program in ophthalmic medical technology that will train and
certify ophthalmic assistants, technicians, and technologists. Over the
past month or so, as the date for our
35th Reunion approaches, my inbox
has experienced some fun activity.
First up was a wonderfully informative note from Bruce Greenbaum.
He had just met in Los Angeles with
Howard Lincoln ’81 and Charley
Thompson, of the UVM Foundation.
Bruce has lived in Los Angeles since
the early 80’s, married twenty-six
years to Teri, two sons and a daughter, all entering adulthood. Bruce is
on the board of directors for snowboard company, Arbor Collective,
and has “crossed over to the dark
side,” snowboarding more than skiing. He was off to Scottsdale to
play in a golf tournament with Rob
Kornfeld ’76 and Eddie Soll ’76.
★
★
40
YE A R S O F
IX
TITLE
He took in Whistler last winter with
Rob, David Stump and Mike Iaria
for several days of skiing and boarding. Rob is a PI attorney and Mike
is a criminal attorney, both in Seattle. Bruce said, “It was pretty awesome to sit around in the hot tub
with a Molson golden ale in hand for
old time’s sake, and catch up on the
past thirty-five years.” Lisa Ringey
Ventriss, recently ensconced on the
UVM Board of Trustees, is beating
the bushes to get our old Wright Hall
crew to the fall Reunion. As it turns
out, a bunch of us are planning to
get together in June at the home
of Gregg Marston. Jamie Conway, Dave Donahue, John McDonald ’78, Jeff Macartney, Chris Gikas
Griffin, Donna Vershay, Paul Donovan, Dotty Stutt, Jeff Berry, Sam
and Edie Goethals are all on the witness list, and there’s even a rumor
that Doug Roawden might show up.
We do this in June instead of October, because we dread the search for
accommodations and box lunches.
My last blatant self-promotion of
Diary of a Small Fish (first person
to respond gets a free copy of the
novel) garnered exactly one reply,
but it was a beauty. Chris Groves,
thinking he was too late to get in
on the deal, offered to trade me a
copy of the novel for a “Blondterror
Striper Plug.” I misread the email at
first, thinking that he was involved
in the adult entertainment business.
But no, he misremembered me as a
fishing enthusiast, and this was one
of his own handmade lures. He also
makes “needlefish, poppers, metal
lipped swimmers, spooks, trollers, bottle casting plugs, and handcarved swimmers.” Sounds dark.
Remarkably, I happened to remember Chris (increasingly rare) because
If you were a female studentathlete at the University of
Vermont prior to May of 1978,
please contact the Victory Club
at [email protected].
We look forward to celebrating
forty years of Title IX with
you during
REUNION/HOMECOMING
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
of his Frisbee prowess, and he
remembered meeting me at freshman orientation! And, in the small
world department, he reminded me
that he was friendly with Jerry Weil,
and the two of them had gone to
Berkshire with a member of my fiftysomething cover band, The Gratefuls. He also lives in the next town.
Small world, eh? I am now playing
Words With Friends with George and
Carol Fjeld. They’re regularly cleaning my clock. Final word: A nice fella
named Frank Watson contacted me.
He’s organizing the 40th Anniversary
of UVM’s APEX Program, begun in
1973. APEX, the “American Primary
Experience” program was created for
junior level education majors that
centered on experience in K-6 public school classrooms at a high level.
The program involved students for a
two-year period. Over a span of thirteen years (1973-86) over 275 students were graduated from the program. Frank has asked me to put the
word out to ’77 class members who
participated in the program. He’s
opened a Facebook page for those
interested: APEXUVM40. So who’s
coming to Burlington in October?
Give us a shout!
Send your news to—
Pete Morin
41 Border Street
Scituate, MA 02066
[email protected]
www.facebook.com/pete.morin2
www.petemorin.wordpress.com
78
Our classmate Ted Tiger has
been named a “2012 Five
Star Wealth Manager.” Ted
owns Tiger Investment Services, LLC
in Winthrop, Massachusetts, a comprehensive financial services firm
committed to helping its custom-
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
72
40TH REUNION
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
alumni.uvm.edu/reunion
Our 40th Reunion is coming in October. Come back to Burlington and
enjoy the beautiful fall foliage and
reconnect with UVM, old friends, and
classmates. If you haven’t been back
lately, you will want to see how the
campus has evolved and changed
since the days when Billings was the
student center. Reunion Weekend
is October 5-7, 2012. I hope to see
you there! Mike Friel BA ’72, MS ’84
and Sharon Wagner-Friel BA ’72,
MA ’86 are finishing their second
year working at the American Community School in Beirut, Lebanon.
After retiring from the Vermont public school system, they chose to pursue an “adventia before dementia”
by working and living in the Middle
East. Their two daughters, Kate ’02
and Brittany ’05, are also educators,
both of whom work at E.L. Haynes
Charter School in Washington D.C.
Sharon has resumed working as a
classroom teacher while Mike has
gone from principal to assistant principal. They have enjoyed visiting Jordan, Syria, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and
Kenya. While they enjoyed the experience of living and working in the
Middle East, they returned to Vermont in June 2012.
Send your news to—
Debbie Koslow Stern
198 Bluebird Drive
Colchester, Vermont 05446
[email protected]
Connecticut, and her husband, Paul.
Send me some news, please!
Send your news to—
Deborah Mesce
2227 Observatory Place NW
Washington, DC 20007
[email protected]
C E L E B R AT E
CLASS NOTES
53
CLASS NOTES
ers improve their long-term financial
success. The elite designation “Five
Star Wealth Manager” is based on
ten objective criteria associated with
providing quality services to clients
such as credentials, experience, and
assets under management, among
other factors. Wealth managers,
broadly defined, are those individuals who help us manage our financial world and/or implement aspects
of our financial strategies. Some
common examples of wealth managers are financial advisors, financial
planners, investment advisors, tax
advisors, and estate planning attorneys. Ted has been working in the
Boston investment community since
1986, and lives in Winthrop with his
wife, Katie, and their two cats. Feel
free to drop Ted a note: [email protected]
Send your news to—
Audrey Ziss Bath
10567 West Landmark Court
Boise, ID 83704
[email protected]
facebook.com/audrey.bath
54
80
Send your news to—
MaryBeth Pinard-Brace
P.O. Box 655
Shelburne, VT 05482
MaryBethPinard_Brace@alumni.
uvm.edu
81
Tim Braden was recently
elected Mayor of Montville
Township, New Jersey. Money
Magazine currently ranks Montville #1 in New Jersey and #17 in the
U.S. on their list of “best places to
live.” Tim is the president of a family-owned construction business. He
and his wife, Linda, are the proud
parents of three children. Wendy
82
30TH REUNION
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
alumni.uvm.edu/reunion
Thank you 1982’s for the great
response to my desperate plea for
news! It’s our 30th Reunion this
year—yikes! Better get back to Burlington while we can still climb Camel’s Hump! Carol Delaney reports
she’s still working at UVM in a federal sustainable grant program as
the farmer grant specialist for Northeast SARE (Sustainable Agriculture
Research and Education) and has
finished a book, a guide to starting
a commercial goat dairy. She also is
still basking in the lap of luxury and
will attend the next International
Goat Conference in Las Palmas, Gran
Canaria, in September 2012 to continue her education and knowledge
in this subject. She consults and
gives workshops in this area, apart
from her full-time job at UVM. I think
I was in the Canary Islands once and
the hotel employees there chased
you around with a beach towel to
make sure you didn’t get too much
sand between your toes! Brian Hosmer sends his greetings from T-Town
(Tulsa), where spring has sprung,
the music scene is humming, we’re
down to the wire for the spring
semester, and Woody @ 100 was a
great success. Brian organized the
Tulsa symposium, and (among other
things) got to ‘hang’ with Arlo Guthrie. Pretty cool. Karen Ginter writes:
“Hi John! OK, our class is pretty lame
with news, so I’ll cough some up. I
got together with a couple of classmates last summer, Sue Farrar and
Sheila Igoe ’83. We did some camping, hiking, attended the local music
festival, and played in the sun in my
wonderful town of Sandpoint, Idaho.
Also got together with Sue Farrar
and Michelle LaChance ’83 for our
second-annual Thanksgiving celebration in Portland, Oregon. I am
a therapist at a therapeutic boarding school for adolescents, married for twenty-five years this year,
and have a 15 (almost 16) year old
daughter. And I’m a step-grandma
of two!! Also we’re hosting a foreign
exchange student from Spain this
year. OK, enough about me. Thanks,
I miss UVM and those wonderful
days of youth and freedom.” Hey
Karen, they are still here—it’s all in
the mind! Frank Watson reached out
with a requests from Cheraw, South
Carolina, for some help: In 2013 the
American Primary Experience Program (APEX), a part of the College of
Education at UVM will celebrate its
40th anniversary. We are currently
searching for students that graduated from the program in 1982. Any
help that you can give us to find students would be appreciated. They
can contact me at watson3295@
roadrunner.com or the FaceBook
group page APEXUVM40. Annunziata “Nancy” Daniele Hoffman
passed away on July 18, 2011. Hope
to see you all in October.
Send your news to—
John Scambos
20 Cantitoe Street
Katonah, NY 10536
[email protected]
83
Send your news to—
Sharon Morrissey Young
444 Broadview Avenue
Highland Park, Il 60035
[email protected]
84
Andy Cook has been regularly serving for over a year
and a half as a temporary
judge in family law departments
in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, while still maintaining
his own family law private practice
of over sixteen years in the Bankers
Hill area of San Diego. So far, Andy
has served in the downtown (Stanley Mosk), Burbank, Compton, Long
Beach, Norwalk, San Pedro, Santa
Monica, and Torrance branches of
the L.A. court. Andy is also approaching his tenth anniversary as a California Certified Family Law Specialist.
Andy is a 1993 graduate of California
Western School of Law in San Diego.
He is married to Marcia Gezelter
CLASS NOTES
VQEXTRA
online
Cook. The Cooks have two daughters: Lilah, 13; and Jennifer, 10.
Send your news to—
Laurie Olander Angle
12 Weidel Drive
Pennington, NJ 08534
VQEXTRA
online
Abby Goldberg Kelley
303 Oakhill Road
Shelburne, VT 05482
[email protected]
Kelly McDonald
10 Lapointe Street
Winooski, VT 05404
[email protected]
ED PAGANO ’85
“When the President of
the United States asks
you to work for him,
you answer the call.”
—Ed Pagano
on his new role as
President Barack
Obama’s deputy
director of
legislative affairs
read more at
uvm.edu/vq
Shelley Carpenter Spillane
336 Tamarack Shores
Shelburne, VT 05482
[email protected]
85
Mark Rodgers writes that
he has been elected to the
Board of Directors of AgriMark, Inc., the farmer owned cooperative that makes award-winning
Cabot Cheese. Mark’s Andersonville
Dairy is supplying milk to Andy and
Mateo Kehler at the Cellars at Jasper Hill, where their Harbison cheese
just won best of class at the World
Cheese Championship. Mark also
met with Tim Abbott ’87, owner of
St. Jacob’s ABC, to discuss genetics
and reminisce about the twenty-plus
years since graduation. In May, Mark
will see his son Tyler ’12 graduate
from UVM and join his sister Megan
’11 as second-generation UVM
alumni! Colonel Tom Luna, MD,
MPH, writes me that he has retired
from the U.S. Air Force and is now
in private practice in occupational
medicine and aerospace medicine.
Tom’s last Air Force position was as
director of graduate medical education and associate dean at the USAF
School of Aerospace Medicine. Tom
hopes to move his family to either
Burlington, Vermont, or Portland,
Maine, in late summer or early fall
2012. Lastly, in 2013 the American
Primary Experience Program (APEX),
a part of the College of Education at
UVM, will celebrate its 40th anniversary. Anyone who graduated in 1985
can contact [email protected] or the FaceBook group page
APEXUVM40.
Send your news to—
MARK
DEMICHAELIS ’87
“When we steered into
2008, we were in the
midst of the biggest
expansion in our
company’s history.
And, sure enough,
everything kind of
came unglued all at
once that fall.”
—Mark DeMichaelis,
CEO of Olivia’s
Organics, on how
his family business
met and weathered
the economic
downturn
read more at
uvm.edu/vq
Barbara Roth
140 West 58th Street, #2B
New York, NY 10019
[email protected]
86
Nancy Colligan Hesby writes
“Hello! I was recently promoted from vice president of
marketing to senior vice president
of marketing for Bedford Orthodontics in Bedford, Massachusetts. My
undergraduate habit of stacking my
classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays
so I could ski on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays is still paying rich
dividends. I recently joined a night
NASTAR giant slalom race league at
Wachusetts Mountain in Princeton,
Massachusetts. Lucky for me, I am
on a team with UVM alums Ernie
Lyford ’78 and captained by the
ultra competitive skier and terrific
coach, Clark Burrows ’68. I wonder
what other alums are racing under
the lights at the Chu?”
Send your news to—
Lawrence Gorkun
141 Brigham Road
St. Albans, VT 05478
[email protected]
87
25TH REUNION
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
alumni.uvm.edu/reunion
Michael McCarthy, photographer,
is represented by Galerie Duboys in
Paris, France. He exhibited in the
two-person exhibition Human Forms
in the gallery district of Paris from
March 15 to May 5, 2012.
Send your news to–
Sarah Reynolds
2 Edgewood Lane
Bronxville, NY 10708
[email protected]
88
I recently had fun exchanging emails with Bill Lawrence, Todd Parent,
Michael Fox, and Elizabeth Horman. We had a lot of laughs reminiscing. Dr. James D. Henningsen
was recently selected as the next
president for the College of Central
Florida in Ocala, Florida. He will be
leading the nineteenth largest college enrolling over 18,000 students
annually in the Florida College System. Matthew J. McGinniss PhD
FACMG G’88 is now executive director, molecular genetics at Genoptix Medical Laboratory, a Novartis
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
79
Rich Cohen just moved to
the Coolidge Corner area of
Brookline, Massachusetts,
after thirty years in the country. He
is loving city life, walking to everything and activity all around. He
is still competing in triathlons and
marathons for fun and working in
high-tech, almost thirty-two years
with the same company. He is looking forward to his daughter Emily’s,
graduation from UVM this May. After
that: two down, one more to go!
CW Wealth Advisors, a wealth management and investment advisory
firm serving high-net-worth clients
recently announced that Cynthia G.
Koury has joined the firm as a partner. She is responsible for focusing
on the endowment and foundation
lines of business. She will also manage investment activity and foster
existing and new high-net-worth client relationships. Sandy Meyer Wilcox shares that she recently joined in
a mini-reunion of Class of ’79 physical therapists in the Washington, D.C.
area. Hosted by Liz Maccini Millard
and joined by Mary Tautkus Winslow, Paula Jenkins Larose, Jenny
Yonkers Carey, and Linda Potash
Marchese, the ladies gathered for
a weekend of fun, food, and festivities. Liz is currently a power financier for a D.C.-area banking association. Mary is working in acute rehab
PT in the Newbury, New Hampshire,
area, Paula works in PT in Franklin County, Vermont; Jenny works
in outpatient PT in Virginia Beach;
Linda is working in the orthopedic
outpatient field of PT in New Jersey;
and Sandy, who has lived all over
the country since UVM days, is currently working as an early intervention and school-based pediatric PT
in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area.
At the end of the weekend they
vowed not to let another thirty-two
years go by without another reunion
and are hoping to get a larger group
together next time, possibly in Burlington. Sandy looks forward to hearing from anyone interested in their
next mini-reunion. Frank Watson
writes that in 2013 the American Primary Experience Program(APEX), a
part of the College of Education at
UVM will celebrate its 40th anniversary. He is searching for students
that graduated from the program in
1979. Please contact Frank directly
at [email protected] or
via the Facebook group page APEXUVM40. Looking forward to receiving news from you whether it be a
mini-reunion or other noteworthy
news. Hope to hear from many more
of you for our next issue.
Send your news to—
Beth Nutter Gamache
58 Grey Meadow Drive
Burlington, VT 05401
bethgamache@burlington
telecom.net
Wilton, a chemistry major and charter member of the TOWERR women’s
student leadership organization during her UVM days, is making a run
for the state treasurer’s office in Vermont. Wendy is currently city treasurer in Rutland, where she has been
a resident for twenty-three years.
She has also served Vermont in the
role of state senator in the past.
Send your news to—
UVM Alumni Relations
411 Main Street
Burlington, VT 05401
[email protected]
55
CLASS NOTES
VQEXTRA
online
Company located in Carlsbad, California.
Send your news to—
Cathy Selinka Levison
18 Kean Road
Short Hills, NJ 07078
[email protected]
89
Send your news to—
Kate Barker Swindell
2681 Southwest Upper
Drive Place
Portland, OR 97201
[email protected]
JESSICA
MORRIS ’90
“It’s very humbling,
and in some ways
it seems kind of
ridiculous that I’m
with Oprah and Lady
Gaga and Hillary
Clinton and so many
women who have
basically trailblazed
a road for us.”
— Jess Morris
on being named to
Newsweek’s list of
“150 Fearless Women
read more at
56
91
Shaunda Kennedy Wenger’s
children’s book, Little Red
Riding Hood, Into the Forest
Again, received the 2011 KART Kids
Book List Award. Of the book, Kirkus
Reviews wrote, “Wenger’s tale is
filled with catchy rhymes that impart
a rhythm to the story.”
Send your news to—
Karen Heller Lightman
2796 Fernwald Road
Pittsburgh, PA 15217
[email protected]
92
20TH REUNION
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
alumni.uvm.edu/reunion
The American Pet Products Association (APPA) is pleased to announce
93
94
Send your news to—
Gretchen Haffermehl
Brainard
Ghaff[email protected]
Hi everyone and happy summer! I’d like to congratulate Cathy Holahan Murphy and her husband, Chris, as they
recently welcomed their second son,
Rider James Murphy, on November
11, 2011! John Carbon has a pretty
impressive update. He writes: “My
wife, Anneliese, and I live in Bel Air,
Maryland, and we did have some
excitement about a year ago! I work
for the Department of Army as a
civilian in human resources. I volunteered to go to Japan to assist the
family members of service members in Japan with the voluntary
departure process after the disaster because the other director of the
office needed to depart the country. I received recognition from General George W. Casey, Jr., the Chief of
Staff of the Army (at the time). The
write up I received from my Com-
mand (the Civilian Human Resources
Agency) in a certificate of appreciation follows: ‘As the Camp Zama Civilian Personnel Advisory Center Acting
Director from April 4–June 5 2011,
John displayed excellent dedication and devotion to duty. John volunteered to take on this role shortly
after the earthquake, tsunami, and
nuclear disasters, when most civilian
employees would have attempted
to avoid having to be assigned to
any position in Japan. He performed
his duties as a leader in an outstanding manner under the most stressful and demanding conditions and
helped contribute immeasurably to
the overall mission accomplishments.
It took long hard hours of work
and considerable sacrifice to correlate the myriad of details necessary
to ensure the success of the Camp
Zama Advisory Center. John’s dedication to duty reflects great credit to
himself, CHR, and the United States
Army.’ Since then things have been
pretty quiet. My wife is an avid runner, just recently completing the Caesar Rodney half marathon in Wilmington, Delaware. We’re both preparing
for the Army Ten Miler in October
2012. I hope everyone is doing well
in Vermont!” Beth McDermott writes:
“When Strangefolk played in Burlington’s basements, bars, and backyards,
Erik Glockler, Reid Genauer, Luke
Smith, and Jon Trafton (and behind
the scenes, Andre Gardner) gave rise
to an enduring sense of optimism
and connection for which many of us
UVMers continue to be grateful. This
gratitude was never more evident
than at their recent round of sold out
reunion shows, where fans including
Phil Grant, Maura Mahoney Guyer,
Eric Hynes, Damon Kinzie ’92, Jim
Kirk ’96, Erin Gurry Koch, Sean
Macy, Christine Mahoney ’99, Neale
Mahoney ’07, Sarah Mahoney ’96,
Tom McClutchey, Carey Smith Rose
’93, Chris Rose ’92, Chris Ward, Jeremy Watson, Denyce Wicht, myself,
and legions of others celebrated the
music and the many friendships it
helped to create. We will remain.”
Martha Sweeney Rainville writes: “I
graduated from the New York Chiropractic College in Seneca Falls, New
York, in July 2011 with my Doctorate of Chiropractic degree. Rainville
Chiropractic opened in Swanton, Vermont in April, our website is rainvillechiropractic.com. I also returned to
dental hygiene part-time and I am
working for the Middlebury Dental
Group. Kelly Delyannis writes “My
husband, Harry, and I welcomed our
fourth child, Theodore Harry, on June
28; who joins his brother, Leonidas,
and sisters, Maria and Zoe. There is
never a dull moment in the Delyannis’ house!” Jay Shindler writes “I just
celebrated the fifth year anniversary
of my shop and catering company
Catering Chocolate, cateringchocolate.com. All classmates please stop
in to say hello and have some chocolate when you are in Chicago. We’re
on Facebook too.” See a picture of
Jay and his shop at alumni.uvm.edu/
flickr. Jen Hathaway Strong went
with her husband, Dan Strong, and
kids to the Vermont/Carolina NCAA
Basketball tournament game in
Greensboro, North Carolina, and had
a blast. She has been working as a
physical therapist for a local school
system for six years and is still living
in North Carolina. Lynn Parker has
been studying Spanish for lactation
and nutrition in Latin America for the
last four months, and is curriculum
consultant for AEC Language Institute in Costa Rica, and will be starting
a new job as breastfeeding consultant for Washington WIC. Brian Snow,
CFA, and his wife Wendy Guo Snow,
P.E., graduates of UVM’s civil engineering program, married in ’96, and
have a nine-year-old boy. He writes
“after living in Hoboken for a decade,
and completing our master’s degrees,
we got tired of the city life (not really,
we love Hoboken!) and moved to the
leafy town of Ridgewood, New Jersey.” Brian works as a credit ratings
analyst with Standard & Poor’s, and
Wendy is the lead structural engineer for The RBA Group. Carol-Ann
Barody Dooley writes: “I gave birth to
my first daughter, Madeline, on January 16, 2012! It’s been awesome and
I’m thrilled to be a mom. I’m currently
the managing director of a mail-order
diabetes supply company and pharmacy. It’s quite the challenge but I’m
enjoying that too. I’m still in Orlando,
Florida, enjoying the sun with my
husband, Blaine, and looking forward
to a trip back to campus next year or
so.” Bill Hayner writes: “my wife, Jill,
and I are expecting our second baby
in September. We are still living out
in Seattle (eleven years now) with
our three-year-old daughter, Kailey.”
Katie Westhelle writes: “I had a new
baby, Desiree Skye Dahlgren, on February 15, 2012, with husband Craig
Dahlgren. She joins older sister and
brother, Mercedes and Connor, at our
home in Fayston, Vermont.” Adam
Frehm is a leading Vermont wedding
and lifestyle photographer specializing in artistic photography of people
and events. His studio, LoveBuzz Studio, is located near Burlington, Vermont. You may check out his beautiful work at www.lovebuzzphoto.com.
Heather Krans of The Stein Law Firm,
PLLC, is the new chair of the New
Hampshire Bar Association’s Family Law Section. Heather’s practice
includes family law, complex litigation, and appellate law, and she has
again been noted as a rising star in
SuperLawyers.
Send your news to—
Cyndi Bohlin Abbott
114 Morse Road
Sudbury, MA 01776
[email protected]
95
Send your news to—
Valeri Pappas
1350 17th Street
Suite 400
Denver, CO 80202
[email protected]
96
Anna Mod G ‘96 in historic
preservation announces the
publication of Building Modern Houston. Founded in 1836, Houston is now the country’s fourthlargest city. In the early twentieth
century, Houston’s economy shifted
from agriculture to oil, fueling the
city’s explosive growth in the following decades. Houston grabbed
the reins and saw a building boom
in commercial, residential, and civic
architecture that redefined the city
and skyline. Modernism was a new
and fresh architectural expression
and the perfect complement to the
city’s can-do entrepreneurial spirit.
Building Modern Houston tells the
story of Houston’s architecture during its transformation from a Bayou
City to Space City. Anna grew up in
Houston. She is currently a historic
preservation specialist at SWCA Environmental Consultants in Houston.
She is published in Cite and Texas
Architect magazines and is a contributing author of Buildings of Texas,
vol. I, part of the national series
Buildings of the United States published by the Society of Architectural
Historians. She currently teaches a
historic preservation course at Prairie View A&M.
Send your news to—
Jill Cohen Gent
31760 Creekside Dr.
Pepper Pike, OH 44124
[email protected]
Michelle Richards Peters
332 Northwest 74th Street
Seattle, WA 98117
[email protected]
97
15TH REUNION
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
alumni.uvm.edu/reunion
Our 15th Reunion is coming up this
fall, October 5-7. We hope you can
join us for what is sure to be a great
time! Timothy Davis and his wife,
Sarah Chimini Davis, Boston College
’02, welcomed their first child, Reagan Elizabeth Davis on November
2, 2011 at 5:48 p.m. weighing eight
pounds, two ounces. Tim is planning
on making it up for the Reunion and
is looking forward to late night at
Al’s Frys! Congratulations to Andrew
Bernstein and his wife, Michelle,
who welcomed a son, Benjamin, on
November 21, 2012. Andrew reports
that everyone is doing well!
Send your news to—
Elizabeth Carstensen Genung
[email protected]
98
Greetings to all! I got a
great response from the
last notes section, thanks to
all that checked in. For those that
responded and haven’t heard from
me, rest assured I will get to you.
There was one error in the last column that I want to note: Rob Peterson (erroneously printed as Rob
Molson) is the man doing all that
good work in the Northwest Vermont State Parks. Sorry about
that Rob, I assure you Molson Ice
(remember that stuff?) played no
role in that editing snafu. Now on to
the new profiles. Since 2001, Brian
Byrnes has lived in Buenos Aires,
Argentina, where he works as a foreign correspondent. He spent the
last four years covering South America for CNN, reporting on stories like
the 8.8 earthquake in Chile, Bolivia’s
lithium industry, mass-transit solutions in Brazil, World Cup madness
in Uruguay, and endless economic
volatility in Argentina. Brian recently
started reporting for CCTV America,
a new international television network based in Washington and Beijing. Brian and his wife, Macarena,
have two sons, Bautista, four, and
Bastian, eighteen months. He still
follows Vermont news closely, and
keeps in touch with lots of UVM
friends. Brian encourages UVMers
to get in touch if they are in Buenos Aires to share a steak and a nice
bottle of Malbec. www.brianbyrnes.
com. Erin Breese moved to North
Carolina about five years ago after
grad school in Miami and several
run-ins with rough hurricanes. Her
interest in undergraduate admissions (she’s at UNC Chapel Hill now),
all started at UVM where she gave
campus tours. She loves working in
higher education and hopes to work
internationally in administration at
the university or secondary school
level. Her best memories of UVM
are with friends on Green Street and
Mansfield Ave, or gorging on crazyhot, free wings at RJ’s. She says she’s
missing her CUPPS cup, if you have
any info please get in touch with
her. Jay Nash graduated from UVM
with a B.S. in civil and environmental engineering but headed straight
to New York City with a guitar and
a duffle bag. After a year there, he
joined UVMers Eric Cole, Mike Bessette, Pam Sunshine, Nick Adams,
and Mike Hudasco in the backcountry powder of the Tetons, where he
met his wife Rebecca Bierly. Next
stop was Los Angeles to make a guitar demo recording, where he fell
in love with the palm trees, surfing, and the vibrant community of
musicians there. Nine years and ten
records later, he and his wife pulled
up the stakes and headed back East,
where they welcomed Mackenzie
Elizabeth Nash into the world. This
January, they purchased a 215-yearold farmhouse near Woodstock, Vermont. Jay built a studio in this old
house where he writes and records.
His ninth studio album, ‘Diamonds
and Blood’ came out in March last
year. He reports it’s good to be back
in Vermont. www.jaynash.com. Danielle Peters Spicer and her husband
welcomed their third child, Jasmine,
into the world last year. Her older
brothers, Zack and Jacob, love being
big brothers to her. Danielle was
privileged to serve recently as the
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
uvm.edu/vq
90
Jessica Greer Morris, executive director of Project Girl
Performance Collective was
included when Newsweek magazine
announced its “150 Fearless Women”
who “shake up the world.” The list recognizes women who are “making
their voices heard” by “starting revolutions, opening schools, and fostering
a brave new generation.” Project Girl
creates a safe space for girls to write
and perform their own work. They
use theater as a means to empower
young women to become brave,
confident, socially conscious leaders. Their human-rights-based curriculum helps young women explore
their own challenging circumstances,
as well as those of their peers around
the world. Congratulations, Jessica!
Send your news to—
Tessa Donohoe Fontaine
108 Pickering Lane
Nottingham, PA 19362
[email protected]
that Gordie Spater, president of
Kurgo, will serve on the APPA Board
for the 2012–2013 term. Breaking
into the pet industry with his brother
in 2003, Gordie Spater co-founded
Kurgo, manufacturer of pet travel
and safety products. His passion for
pets, travel, and the outdoors led
Kurgo to the expansion from their
initial product, the Backseat Barrier,
to dozens of products for the car,
plane, and outdoors for pets. After
beginning his career in advertising,
Spater helped start two other companies, Pharmaneer, an importer of
durable medical equipment where
he was VP of sales and marketing,
and MyTeam.com, where he served
as director of business development.
He is a cum laude graduate from the
University of Vermont and went on
to obtain his MBA from the Harvard
Business School. Gregory Clendenning has co-authored a book titled
Condos in the Woods: The Growth of
Seasonal and Retirement Homes in
Northern Wisconsin which was published by the University of Wisconsin
Press this May.
Send your news to—
Lisa Kanter
10116 Colebrook Avenue
Potomac, MD 20854
[email protected]
57
VQEXTRA
online
CATLIN O’NEILL ’99
“It took over my life,
but it was probably
the greatest learning
experience of my life,
because for the first
time I understood
how hard I could
really work.”
—Catlin O’Neill, chief
of staff for Rep. Nancy
Pelosi, on her growth
during Bill Richardson’s
first gubernatorial
campaign in New
Mexico
read more at
58
99
Hello 99ers! Some heartwarming news from Bethany Desautel Brown in Grand
Rapids, Michigan: two years ago
Bethany and Matt welcomed their
fourth child, a healthy baby boy, Jett
Matthew Brown. As Jett was diagnosed as profoundly deaf at only
two weeks old, on the day of his first
birthday (April 2011) Jett successfully underwent bilateral cochlear
implant surgery. Total miracle. Now
at age two, one year after his surgery,
Jett’s hearing is testing in the normal
range and he continues to develop
remarkable speech and language.
He gets a lot of instruction from big
sisters, Macey, Coco, and Georgie! A
00
Katie Amadon recently
became the director of Poker
Hill School. Katie came to
Poker Hill School from The Lund
Family Center where she served as
the children’s treatment coordinator for four years. As the coordinator,
she developed and ran an extensive
program for families and children
including parenting classes; family
education; child and parent assessment; and referrals to community
services. Before beginning her work
at Lund Center, Katie taught in preschool programs in several different settings in Vermont, Washington
D.C., and East Africa. Her undergraduate degree is in early childhood
education and her master’s degree
in social work is from Wheelock College.
Send your news to—
Sara Kinnamon Fritsch
4401 Southwest Hamilton Terrace
Portland, OR 97239
[email protected]
01
Greetings class of ’01! I was
very excited to get a few
emails with updates for this
issue, thanks for reaching out. In
baby news, Sarah Nathan Sullivan
and Sean Sullivan welcomed a baby
boy, Charlie, on Labor Day. And Amy
Daniels Gendron and Lucas Gendron welcomed their second son,
Ira Joseph, on February 22, 2012. He
joins his two-year-old big brother,
Cyrus. They live in Calais, Vermont.
Ben Keeler writes: “I earned my master’s of education last May from Harvard and am now living in Somerville, Massachusetts working from
home as an education consultant
doing curriculum development and
research for two education companies in the area. Prior to all that, I
was a teacher for eight years in private schools both in Washington,
D.C. and abroad in the United Arab
Emirates.” And from Alex Stevens, “In
January of 2012 I received a master’s
of arts in marriage and family ther-
apy from Fairfield University in Connecticut. I am a full-time research
assistant for a marketing research
firm and also an adjunct marriage
and family therapist at the Stamford
Counseling Center, working towards
licensure. When not working, you
can find me on my yoga mat!” Sarah
Duffany moved to Denver in March
to start her MBA with a concentration in marketing at the University of
Denver. Sarah is excited to be back
in school and exploring a new city,
so if you live there, get in touch! And
rumor has it Mr. Josh Hansen is no
longer on the market, ladies! Josh
recently got engaged and hopefully he will write a note soon to fill
us in! Kathryn Vanderminden has
her own business in Vermont, Village
Roots Catering (www.villagerootsvt.
com) in Pawlet. She was named a
“Rising Star” in Vermont Business
Magazine, congrats Kathryn! She
also has two kids, so quite the busy
woman! On my end, I ran the Boston
Marathon yesterday in eighty-eightdegree weather. It took awhile but
it was an amazing experience and I
raised close to $7,000 for the DanaFarber Cancer Institute. Jared and
Sarah Brennan Schuler met me at
mile ten with a cold Gatorade, ice
and other supplies; I was very appreciative to say the least. And I will
be making the switch within Bose
Corporation from the in-house ad
agency to the marketing department of the headphone division
which will be an exciting change.
Thanks for the updates, please keep
them coming and I hope you all
have a fantastic summer!
Send your news to—
Erin Wilson
10 Worcester Square, #1
Boston, MA 02118
[email protected]
02
10TH REUNION
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
alumni.uvm.edu/reunion
Benjamin Sawa ’02 married Jill
Boyd at his family farmhouse in East
Alstead, New Hampshire, on June
25, 2011. UVM alumni in attendence included Kim DeMayo, Erik
Forbes, Matt Gibney, Julie Herbert (Janow), Bill Jeffrey, Kara Jeffrey (von Stade), Lindsay Levine,
Sofi Kurtz (Rubinstein), Matt Rossi,
Rick Schwartzbard, Rachel Smith
(Colella), and Greg Smith. The couple reside in Winchester, Massachusetts.
Send your news to—
Jennifer Khouri Godin
[email protected]
03
04
Send your news to—
Cara Linehan Esch
caramurphylinehan
@gmail.com
Hi class of 2004! I hope
everyone is having a great
summer! I would like to
apologize to Drew Jack and Debbie Daniel for not posting all of the
wonderful UVM alums who attended
their wedding at Donner Lake. They
were: Abby Casabona, Shira Melen,
Courtney Ryan, Jillian Goldstein,
Dave Sadr, Chris Larson, Justin Pauletti, Shaun Hyland, Jordan Coleman, Ben Finn, Keith Thompson,
Rob Stacey, Rob Spaul, and Nick
Goulette. Lena Darnall Merrell was
married in Mexico on February 2,
2012, to Nelson Merrell. He is a commercial fisherman and she is registered dental hygienist in Juneau,
Alaska. Lena went back to school
at Vermont Tech and graduated in
2010. On March 3, I had the pleasure
of attending the marriage of Elizabeth Brunst Kellett and Jeremy Kellett in New London, New Hampshire. The reception was held in a
beautiful, rustic, lakeside lodge. UVM
guests included: Jim Eddy and Jennifer Cassertello Eddy, Kara Egasti
Dooley and Chad Dooley along
with baby Emma Dooley, Korinne
Moore ’03, and Rebekah Stuwe
Baril ’03. Jessica Rosenfeld and
Chuck Vicente were two fools in love
on April 1, 2012! Jim Eddy and Jennifer Cassertello Eddy, Cailin Rarey,
Kara Egasti Dooley, Korinne Moore
’03, Janine White ’03, Heather Pearson Edmundson ’03, and I enjoyed
the ceremony and reception at the
Radnor Valley Country Club in Villanova, Pennsylvania. It was a fun
filled weekend of laughter and love!
Danielle Frechette wrote in to bring
us up to date on her life since UVM.
She says “In December 2010 I completed my master’s degree in marine
science at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories/San Jose State University
(California). For my thesis research,
entitled “Impacts of avian predation on central California salmonids,”
I received one of two Outstanding
Thesis Awards conferred by San Jose
State University to graduating master’s students for the academic year
2010-2011. I am currently working
with the NOAA Southwest Fisheries
Science Center in Santa Cruz, California, where I help conduct research
related to monitoring and ecology of
threatened and endangered salmon
species.” Roy Tuscany wrote in with
this inspirational story: “In 2004,
Waterbury, Vermont, native Roy Tuscany, graduated from the University of Vermont with a bachelor’s of
science degree in mechanical engineering and a minor in mathematics. As an aspiring professional skier,
Roy moved to the town of Truckee,
California in the Lake Tahoe basin. As
a ski coach at Sugar Bowl Academy,
Roy was on his way to greatness.
Then life took a different turn. ‘On
April 29, 2006, I suffered a devastating spinal cord injury while training
in Mammoth Mountain, California,
rendering my lower body paralyzed
immediately after the accident.
After having high hopes of becoming a world-class professional skier,
I then had to relearn everything in
my life from the ground up. A truly
life-altering experience, I eventually
began making great progress. With
the help of strong personalities, positivity, and high fives all around me,
I stepped into skis and loaded the
lift at Sugar Bowl for the first time
in March of 2008. The encouragement and positivity I received during
my recovery inspired me to start a
foundation to help others with similar experiences.’ The High Fives NonProfit Foundation based in Truckee
became an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit on January 19, 2010. Founded
by Roy Tuscany, the Tahoe-based
organization is dedicated to raising
money and awareness for athletes
who have suffered a life altering
injury while pursuing their dream in
the winter action sports community.”
Check it out at www.highfivesfoundation.org. If you have any news that
you would like to share please contact me with your updates!
Send your news to—
Kelly Kisiday
39 Shepherd Street #22
Brighton, MA 02135
[email protected]
VQ
ONLINE
uvm.edu/vq
Alumni Gallery
05
David Alexander has published his second book Buzz
Into Action. Melissa Donovan and Kevin Gilbert were recently
engaged in Boston, Massachusetts.
Melissa writes “I’m currently working towards a PhD in genetics, and
we’re planning to get married in the
summer of 2013 after I graduate.
From there, I’ll be moving to Philly,
where Kevin lives and works as the
associate director of annual giving
at St. Joseph’s Prep School. Jill Fraga
has recently joined Geri Reilly Real
Estate as realtor and buyer’s agent.
She joins fellow UVM graduates, Geri
Reilly ’79, Michael Simoneau ’73,
Carolyn Weaver ’85, G’87 and Bryce
Gilmer ’99.
Send your news to—
Kristin Dobbs
1330 Connecticut Avenue
Washington, DC 20015
[email protected]
06
Greetings class of 2006! Congratulations to Monica Jaferian and Colby Benjamin
who were married on June 11, 2011
at the Mountain Top Inn in Chittenden, Vermont. Lindsay Richardson ’08 served as the maid of honor.
Other UVM alumni in attendance
included Allison Buza-Holmes ’05,
Kian Holmes ’04, Carlee Moldenhauer Brandom ’05, Eric Brandom
’07, Erin Burke ’05, Hillary Taglienti
’05, Travis Smith ’04, Whitney WestPoss ’05, Jill Fraga ’05, Melissa Dieman Hathaway, Mike Hathaway,
Deb Levesque Devaney, Stephanie Frawley Pyne, Curt Benjamin,
Doug Benjamin and Ellie Benjamin. The UVM Women’s Swim Team
co-coaches, Gerry and Jen Cournoyer, were also in attendance. Colby
and Monica currently reside in Middlebury, Vermont, where Monica is employed as the associate
school nurse at Middlebury Union
High School and serves as the head
coach of the Middlebury Aquatic
Club while Colby is the co-direc-
tor of Addison Central Teens. Please
continue to send updates. We love
hearing about your new adventures,
employment, and life milestones.
Enjoy your summer!
Send your news to—
Katherine Kasarjian Murphy
1203 Morning Dove Trail
Copperas Cove, TX 76522
[email protected]
07
5TH REUNION
OCTOBER 5–7, 2012
alumni.uvm.edu/reunion
Liisa Reimann ’07, an avid dragon
boater, has been training with an
elite team in Montreal. Two years
of grueling, six-days-a-week training have paid off and she has made
the roster for the 2012 Club Crew
World Championships in Hong Kong
in July. Her team is the Montreal
Senior Women, a crew that trains
at the twenty-two Dragons club on
the Lachine Canal. (Senior is the category name for 40+ which is unfortunate as it has connotations of
senior citizens which we are most
definitely not. You should see how
ripped our girls are.) They’re heading
down to Myrtle Beach in April for a
week-long training camp, and then
begin their competition season (as
warm up to Hong Kong) in late May.
She is one of two Americans on the
team—her training partner, Gisela
Veve, and she travel to Canada twice
a week year round to pursue this
dream and maintain a blog of their
exploits and training at www.hungrydragons.blogspot.com. As if all
that wasn’t exciting enough, she also
got engaged (to her former, and first
Canadian, coach) and is presently
faced with the delicious dilemma of
figuring out which country to live
in. Samuel P. Madden ’07 is currently living in New York, New York,
and studying entertainment law at
Fordham University School of Law in
Manhattan. He also plays piano frequently around New York City with
his band Roctopus.
Send your news to—
Samuel Madden
64 Frederick Place
Mount Vernon, NY 10552
[email protected]
08
Brad Miller sent in a great
photo of a bunch of ’08ers
gathering in the Catskills
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
uvm.edu/vq
president of the Boston Section of
the American Society of Civil Engineers from 2010–2011. It’s been a
whirlwind adjusting to working full
time as a civil engineer in the great
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
while raising three kids, but it keeps
life exciting. A long-time skier, Danielle has fond memories of her UVM
gym class on the slopes of Stowe
Mountain. Walter DeNino ’98, M.D.
’10, studied nutritional sciences at
UVM. After graduation, he became
a member of the U.S. National Triathlon Team and lived in the Olympic Training Center in Colorado
Springs, Colorado. He left the sport
of triathlon in 2001 and went back
to school at Columbia University in
New York City, then back to Burlington for medical school in 2006. While
a medical student, Walter started an
online triathlon training and sports
nutrition service, Trismarter.com,
which he successfully sold at the
end of medical school. Currently he’s
a resident in cardiac surgery at the
Medical University of South Carolina.
He and his wife, Laura, married last
September in beautiful Charleston,
South Carolina. They love their new
home in the south but haven’t ruled
out a return to the north upon completion of his training. I’m keeping
track of the states we log as I write
this column so I welcome all of you
in the far reaches of the country to
check in. I’m looking at you Hawaii
and Alaska. Have a great summer!
Send your news to–
Ben Stockman
[email protected]
busy, but blessed year. Thank you for
sharing Bethany! Please keep sending your updates, it is always great to
hear from all of you.
Send your news to—
Sarah Pitlak Tiber
4104 Woodbridge Road
Peabody, MA 01960
[email protected]
ALUMNI
PHOTOS
CLASS NOTES
59
CLASS NOTES
in March. Check it out in the Flickr
album at alumni.uvm.edu. Annalise Cohen has been living in Burlington, Vermont, for the past two
years. Annalise has been dabbling
in many different career fields and
proudly works for the Howard Center, a local non-profit based in South
Burlington and occasionally at A Single Pebble. “Burlington is wonderful, beautiful, and thriving as ever,”
she writes. Annalise shares that she
is “happy to have been able to experience Burlington as not only an
undergraduate, but a contributing
part of this extraordinary community.” On December 28, 2011, Maggie Taylor was married to David
Steakley ’07 in Concord, Massachusetts. A number of UVM alumni were
in attendance. The couple now lives
in Berkeley, California, where Maggie is working towards a master’s in
public policy and David is pursuing a
PhD in molecular and cell biology.
Send your news to—
Elizabeth Bearese
[email protected]
Emma Grady
[email protected]
09
Shannon Bradley married
Seann Cram in Waitsfield, Vermont, over Memorial Day
2012. Erica Bruno was recently promoted to district service and parts
manager for District H with the Chicago region of Toyota Motor Sales
USA. District H covers western Wisconsin and part of eastern Minnesota. After graduating from UVM, Lily
Lovinger moved to New York City
where she took a position in performing arts administration. Having been
involved in UVM’s dance program led
by Paul Besaw, Lily has had an interest in the arts for many years. She
interned with the Mark Morris Dance
Group and then American Ballet Theatre in special events. Lily had not
considered event planning as a career
path until taking part in her internships. She had a great deal of event
planning experience during college
through Program Board and Class
Council, but always thought of it as
more of an extracurricular activity.
Since the fall of 2010, Lily has worked
as special events coordinator at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
where she helps plan intimate dinners for donors and elaborate galas to
celebrate different performance seasons. Lily explains, “I’m very grateful
for the opportunities I’ve had, and I
am looking forward to learning more
and seeing where this career path
takes me.” We have many Catamount
weddings on the way! Colin Penn
and Rachel Dolgin got engaged on
December 19 in Denver, Colorado,
where they currently reside. Congratulations to both of them! Trevor Billings and Kristen Rocca will be getting married at UVM’s own Ira Allen
Chapel in July 2012. UVM attendees
will include Nicole Lafko ’12, Lyndsie
Hammond ’11, Chris Garafola ‘10,
Jen Ballou, Clayton Boyd, Blaine
Cully, Max Ernst, Sam Gehris, and
Katie McGrain. Congratulations to
Trevor and Kristen!
Send your news to—
David Volain
[email protected]
10
Timothy Smalley-Wall writes
“I started a new tech company www.ybuy.com. We are
the Netflix of gadgets: a new subscription e-commerce company
that lets members try-before-youbuy. We just launched and are taking off fast!”
Send your news to—
Daron Raleigh
[email protected]
11
Chris Davis is living and
working in Carpinteria,
California. He is working
for a start-up medical company
called ValenTx as an R&D engineer.
Amanda Fox is an AmeriCorps member with the Vermont Housing and
Conservation Board. She serves as
the Green Programs coordinator
for Youth and Teens at Northgate
Apartments, a low-income housing complex in the New North End
of Burlington. As the Green Programs coordinator, she is in charge
of on-site environmental programs
with the youth and teens living in
the complex, educating them about
energy awareness, composting,
recycling, and other aspects of green
living. Cat Hyman was accepted to
Teach for America as a 2012 MiamiDade corps member. Bob Just
writes, “Since graduating in May, I
have been busy out at Western Illinois University pursuing my master’s
degree in college student personnel.
Last semester, I helped create a campaign to ‘make the world a better
place.’ The project, #MyWordsMatter, aims to raise awareness about
language and its impact on building inclusive environments. The mission of the campaign is to have people think about their words, choose
them intentionally, and to act when
they hear others using words in a
derogatory or inappropriate manner.
I am looking to begin my thesis next
semester on bystander intervention
and the phenomenon of the security
one needs to become an interventionist in their everyday lives. I am
excited to continue working to help
develop the #MyWordsMatter campaign and begin doing some consulting work in the future around
topics like this.” Chelsea Levine is
currently living in Boston and working as a recruiter for the Institute
for Study Abroad-Butler University.
Joe Ruggles is a youth counselor at
Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation
Center and is moving to Boston in
August. Maximillian Scholl is teaching English in Beijing through the
United States Chinese Culture Center. Ben Trottier III is currently living in Boston finishing his first year
at Tufts University School of Dental
Medicine. After graduation in 2015,
he plans to return to the Burlington
area and practice dentistry. AmeriCares, a nonprofit global health
and disaster relief organization, has
hired Sarah Anders to the position
of communications associate. In this
role, Sarah carries out messaging
and publicity, helps produce publications, including newsletters, brochures, calendars and reports, and
assists the communications staff
handling all external relations for
organization. Previously, she worked
for the University of Vermont Writing Center and was president of the
UVM Lawrence Debate Union.
Send your news to—
Troy McNamara
[email protected]
IN MEMORIAM
[ALUMNI LEADER]
60
guished record of service to UVM, died on February 22. A
native of Northampton, Massachusetts, Overton met his wife
and life partner, Ann Maher Overton ’59, in his first week at
UVM. This May, Ann also passed away.
After law school at the University of Michigan and three
years at Sheppard Air Force Base in Kansas with the Air Force
Judge Advocate Corps, the Overtons returned to Vermont,
settling in Essex Junction. Al practiced law as the couple raised
their three children: Alan, Jr. ’84, Daniel ’86, and Jennifer.
Al Overton’s decades of service to UVM began with the
role of vice president for his graduating class and numerous
other student leadership positions. As a leader in the Vermont
community, he continued his service in many ways—national
chair of the UVM Development Fund, president of the Alumni Association, founder and co-chair of the Catamount Club,
and a member of the University Board of Trustees for six years.
The university honored Alan Overton with the Distinguished Alumni Award in 1989.
Gloria Bashaw Humphreys ’47, of
Seminole, Iowa, October 22, 2011.
Joanne Stevens Riley ’47, of Williston, Vermont, January 11, 2012.
Walter G. Brown ’48,
of Shrewsbury, Massachussetts,
September 26, 2011.
George Peter Cunavelis ’48, of Burlington, Vermont, January 21, 2012.
Mary H. Joslyn ’48, of Burlington,
Vermont, February 22, 2012.
Dorothy Monell Lacasse ’48, of
Williston, Vermont, January 4, 2012.
John Richard Bergen G’49, of Berlin,
Massachussetts, January 21, 2012.
Richard Reiss Whalen ’49,
of South Burlington, Vermont,
December 20, 2011.
Donald Fitzgerald G’50, of Ashfield,
Massachussetts, December 10, 2011.
Barbara Ryan Branon ’50, of Fairfield, Vermont, January 16, 2012.
Edward E. Brownell ’50, of Salisbury,
Maryland, January 24, 2012.
Clarence M. Desorcie ’50, of St.
Albans, Vermont, January 4, 2012.
Glenn Mills Fay, Sr. ’51, G’60,
of Vergennes, Vermont,
December 13, 2011.
John R. Crowe ’51, of Stratford,
Connecticut, February 1, 2012.
Jerrold S. Dix ’51, of Lancaster,
Pennsylvania, November 19, 2011.
Paul Edward Goulet ’51, of Island
Pond, Vermont, December 13, 2011.
Mary Shepardson Granger ’52,
G’77, of South Burlington, Vermont,
January 27, 2012.
David Conrad Willey ’52, of Essex
Junction, Vermont, March 17, 2012.
Robert L. Kynoch ’53, of Bonita
Springs, Florida, November 18, 2011.
Susan Dart Howell ’54, of Merritt
Island, Florida, November 30, 2011.
Richard Lapidus ’54, of Miami,
Florida, February 18, 2012.
Norma Bodette Menish ’54, of Herkimer, New York, January 30, 2012.
Charles R. Westphal, Jr. ’56,
of Painted Post, New York,
February 6, 2012.
Gordon Charles Smith ’57, G’63,
of Flemington, Nevada, February 4,
2012.
Edward P. Lewis, Sr. G’58, of Franklin, Vermont, December 23, 2011.
Eleanor Erb Cornell ’58, of Glenmont, New York, January 6, 2012.
Alan D. Overton ’59,
of Essex Junction, Vermont,
February 22, 2012.
IN MEMORIAM
Kenneth Anthony Klem ’59,
of Waterbury, Connecticut,
March 12, 2012.
Charles Peter Wilde ’59, of Guilford,
Vermont, November 12, 2011.
Richard M. Narkewicz M.D.’60, of
Fort Myers, Florida,
February 21, 2012.
Kenneth Paul St. Germain ’60,
G’71, of Burlington, Vermont,
January 18, 2012.
Anthony F. Wasilkowski ’61,
M.D. ‘67, of Niskayuna, New York,
December 22, 2011.
Janet Carpenter O’Keefe ’61,
of Brattleboro, Vermont,
March 15, 2012.
Clarence E. Bunker, M.D.’62,
of Essex Junction, Vermont,
February 15, 2012.
Charles R. Edgar ’62, of Killington,
Vermont, December 14, 2011.
Leon R. Seguin ’62, of Island Pond,
Vermont, January 7, 2012.
Jonathan J. Stern ’62, of Boca Raton,
Florida, November 9, 2011.
John W. Sturzenberger ’63,
M.D. ’67, of Augusta, Maine,
March 22, 2012.
David Roger Nelson ’63,
of Pendleton, South Carolina,
February 7, 2012.
Anne Rowell Tenney ’63, of Stratford, Connecticut, January 30, 2012.
Nedra Jewett Orvis ’64, of Barre,
Vermont, February 19, 2012.
Phillip W. Spaulding ’64, of Lewiston, Maine, January 22, 2012.
Gerald C. Bailey ’65, of West Burke,
Vermont, March 14, 2012.
Audrey Scofield Furgal ’65, of Lee,
Massachussetts, January 14, 2012.
Stephen J. Watson ’65, of Hockessin,
Delaware, December 28, 2011.
Alice M. Thayer ’67, of South Burlington, Vermont, January 12, 2012.
Philip Fabian Sheridan G’68,
of Henderson, Texas, November
10, 2011.
Patricia Decesaris Byrne ’68, of West
Newbury, Massachussetts,
September 2, 2011.
Richard Michael Diemer ’68, of Mt.
Laurel, New Jersey, February 2, 2012.
Michael N. Stanton ’68, of Colchester, Vermont, December 15, 2011.
Alice Fisher Bassett ’71, of Shelburne, Vermont, December 28, 2011.
John Rand Dyke, Jr. ’71, of St.
Albans, Vermont, March 19, 2012.
Barbara Ann Levine ’72 ’75,
of Chestnut Hill, Massachussetts,
June 29, 2011.
Michael James Kennedy ’72,
of St. Johnsbury, Vermont,
January 18, 2012.
Stephen Alan Kallio ’73, of Rutland,
Vermont, December 19, 2011.
Reginald Arthur Cross, Jr. G’74,
of Burlington, Vermont,
January 24, 2012.
Ernest Louis Levesque Jr. G’74, of
Berlin, Vermont, December 14, 2011.
Leo E. Martineau ’74, of Colchester,
Vermont, December 23, 2011.
Robert B. Small ’74, of Colorado
Springs, Colorado, February 3, 2012.
George B. Halperin G’76,
of West Lebanon, New Hampshire,
December 7, 2011.
Christopher Jon Raleigh ’77, of Las
Vegas, Nevada, January 15, 2012.
Andrea Zeeman Deane ’80, of Haddam, Connecticut, February 2, 2012.
Mary Thomson Russell ’80,
of West Hartford, Connecticut,
March 21, 2012.
J. Richard Christiansen G’81, of
Moline, Illinois, January 11, 2012.
Jennifer Caldwell ’81, of Wolfeboro,
New Hampshire, December 27, 2011.
Lisa Carol Roll ’81, of Randolph Center, Vermont, December 7, 2011.
Hasse Kopen Halley G’82, ’92,
of Woodstock, Vermont,
October 1, 2011.
John Frank Hubstenberger G’82,
of Jonesboro, Arizona, February 17,
2012.
Howard Noyes Leighton G’82, of
Underhill, Vermont, December 23,
2011.
Leslie Amirault ’82, of Underhill,
Vermont, June 3, 2011.
Charles Alex McAvoy ’83,
of Sudbury, Massachussetts,
August 17, 2011.
Lois Y. Schuster ’84, of Essex Junction, Vermont, December 18, 2011.
Linda Crockett Baldor ’85, of Richmond, Vermont, January 12, 2012.
Amy MacDuffie Hill ’94, of Portland,
Maine, January 16, 2012.
Donny Isaac Levy ’98, of Baldwinsville, New York, February 18, 2012.
Karen Ann Quill ’07, of Westfield,
Massachussetts, April 11, 2011.
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
Alan Overton ’59, an alumnus with a long and distin-
Barbara Pease Chader ’30, of Bomoseen, Vermont, November 12, 2010.
Arthur L. Wardwell ’30, of West
Newton, Massachussetts, January
26, 2012.
Sophie Levin Danziger ’33,
of Newtonville, Massachussetts,
February 25, 2012.
Evelyn Eaton Getz ’37, G’48, of
Goshen, New York, March 13, 2012.
Abbie Howe Mitchell ’37, of
Randolph, Vermont, January 9, 2012.
Christine Brown Perry ’37, of Burlington, Vermont, February 26, 2012.
Iva Robertson Williams ’37, of
Grand Isle, Vermont, March 12, 2012.
Rebecca Kibby Calder ’38, of Randolph, Vermont, February 23, 2012.
Fred G. Coombs ’38, of New London,
New Hampshire, February 4, 2012.
Marion Hill Powell ’38, of Shelburne, Vermont, January 31, 2012.
Albert Basil Jerard ’39, of Brattleboro, Vermont, March 6, 2012.
Lucille Bristol Jerard ’39, of Brattleboro, Vermont, March 25, 2012.
Robert M. Young ’39, of Enosburg
Falls, Vermont, March 11, 2012.
Harry W. Noyes ’41, G’52,
of North Bennington, Vermont,
February 4, 2012.
Agnes Conley Dowling ’41,
of Winchester, Massachussetts,
January 23, 2012.
Muriel Barber Manning ’41,
of Hinesburg, Vermont,
December 12, 2011.
Kathryn M. Silliman ’41, of Burlington, Vermont, December 2, 2011.
Shirley Gray Stevenson ’41, of Princeton, New Jersey, June 16, 2011.
William Tyler Chapin ’43, of Liverpool, New York, February 17, 2012.
Marguerite Benoit Downes ’43,
of Cheshire, Connecticut,
January 16, 2012.
Elizabeth Deming Goeller ’43,
of Wilmington, Delaware,
January 22, 2012.
Palla Stickney Hazen ’43,
of White River Junction, Vermont,
February 26, 2012.
Marjorie Witham Healy ’43,
of Westborough, Massachussetts,
February 8, 2012.
Mary Germain Keelan ’43,
of Charlottesville, Virginia,
December 28, 2011.
Annette R. Plante G’44, of Potsdam,
New York, February 19, 2012.
Mary E. Mitiguy ’47, G’54, of Burlington, Vermont, February 2, 2012.
61
CLASSIFIEDS
VACATION RENTALS
Together, we can do great things.
MARTHA’S VINEYARD, MA
Let me help you find the perfect vacation
home to buy or rent. Visit our website at
<www.lighthousemv.com>. Call Trish
Lyman ’89. 508-693-6626 or email
[email protected].
NEW YORK, NY
Moving to NYC? I can help. Sales, rentals, all areas.
Eva Posner, BellmarcRealty, 212-688-8530 x276,
[email protected]
ST. MAARTEN
Gorgeous beaches, shopping, dining in the
“Culinary Capital of the Caribbean”. Private 4
bedroom family home sleeps 1-8. Photos, rates:
<www.villaplateau.com>. Special discount for
UVM.
Advertise in
Vermont Quarterly
Contact Theresa Miller
(802) 656-1100
[email protected]
19th c. Bed & Breakfast Charm with 21st c. Comfort & Service
randly built by a lumber merchant
in 1881, today the Lang House is an
Historic Inn in Burlington.
Each of the 11 guest rooms, with
en suite bathrooms, is elegantly and
comfortably decorated. Our breakfast
fare is inventive, nutritious and locally
procured and grown.
Conveniently located one block west
of the UVM green, the Lang House is
owned by UVM alumni family.
We strive to make every guest feel
at home.
www.langhouse.com
360 Main St., Burlington, VT
✦
802-652-2500
✦
877-919-9799 (toll free)
LangHouseAd-UVM-final.indd 1
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DEADLINES:
September 21, 2012 for
November 2012 issue
62
Gifts to the UVM Fund
• Enhance academics
• Ensure affordability
• Enrich campus life
• Strengthen UVM’s reputation
Your annual gift to UVM helps fund programs like the Vermont Rebates
for Roll Bars Program, which provides life-saving tractor roll-bar kits
to prevent this leading cause of farm death. Under the direction of
Professor of Nursing Rycki Maltby, students Calley Brown ’12, Sarah
Schipelliti ’12 , and Krysta Chartrand ’12 provided quality research and
outreach through UVM Extension. Vermont farmers, like Gary Bressor
of Grassland Farm in Richmond, now have help addressing this very
real public-health threat.
Make a gift today at
uvmfoundation.org/giving.
UVM nursing students and UVM Extension are helping save the lives of
Vermont farmers, and you had a hand in that. This is but one example
of how your annual gift helps support innovative programming at UVM.
And that’s a great thing.
UVM FOUNDATION, Grasse Mount
411 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05401
802-656-2010 (toll free) 888-458-8691
www.uvmfoundation.org
To learn more about the Vermont Rebates for Roll Bars Program, please
call 1-877-767-7748.
May 17, 2013 for
July 2013 issue
OUR UVM
ALUMNI:
Staige Davis
Donna LaBerge
Pam Stanley
Courtney Houston
Betsy Gregory
Scott Weinheimer
Rindy Keyser
Linda Sparks
Rick Higgerson
Tom Heney
Holly Kelton
Betsy Frazier
Alex Buskey
Jay Strausser
Kathy O’Brien
POWELL BEACH ON LAKE CHAMPLAIN
Don’t forget to tell them
you saw it in Vermont Quarterly.
Powell Beach is one of Lake Champlain’s very special sandy shores! Add an outstanding panorama of the Lake and the Adirondack Mountains to the west and choose one
of 3 exceptional lakefront home-sites. Make your family’s dreams come true. Bring
your boats! Colchester, VT. $489,000 - $837,000
Sheila Morris, REALTOR® • 802.846.7897 • [email protected]
SUMMER 2012
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
January 4, 2013
for March 2013 issue
Our Team is Your Team – www.LMSRE.com
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FLYING DIAPER
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• 9’ ceilings
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WC–148
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EC–348
CHAMPLAIN
OCTOBER
V E R M O N T Q U A R T E R LY
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COLOR PREVIEW
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Enjoy the simplicity of living in a new riverfront condo.
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U V M PA L E T T E
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EC
Prices Starting at $220,000
www.cascadesvt.com
SUMMER 2012
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60 Winooski Falls Way Winooski, VT 05404
RIV
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ON
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BURLINGTON VT 05401
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86 South Williams Street
Burlington VT 05401
It’s All About Community
Welcome to The Lodge at Shelburne Bay and
The Lodge at Otter Creek Adult Living Communities
Welcome to The Lodge at Shelburne Bay in Shelburne, Vermont and The Lodge at Otter Creek in
Middlebury, Vermont.
The Lodges have established a core philosophy designed to cater to your every need. A world surrounded
by beauty, security and spirit. A world you’ll explore, experience and cherish. There’s something special
here and it’s just waiting for you. At The Lodges we offer a range of all-inclusive rental options that provide
our residents with luxury, amenities and elegance—Spacious Cottages, Independent Living, Assisted Living
apartments and The Haven Memory Care Programs.
There’s a deep and vibrant sense of community spirit that welcomes new
residents, families and friends in every conceivable way. Staff and residents bond
together and create a family atmosphere that’s special and unique to The Lodges.
At The Lodge at Shelburne Bay and The Lodge at Otter Creek it’s all about
community. The only thing missing is you.
The Shores Assisted Living at
The Lodge at Shelburne Bay Now Open.
The Lodge at Shelburne Bay • 185 Pine Haven Shores Road, Shelburne, VT 05482 • 802-985-9847 • www.shelburnebay.com
The Lodge at Otter Creek • 350 Lodge Road, Middlebury, VT 05753 • 802-388-1220 • www.lodgeatottercreek.com
Owned and operated by Bullrock Corporation
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