Posted on Jan 1, 1997

Ruth Anne Evans knows a little about biology, philosophy, math, history, engineering-you name it-and a lot about Union students and Union history.

As a librarian at the College for thirty-seven years, Evans earned a reputation as a great librarian by helping hundreds of students research topics from small protozoa to the history of World War II.

But she has also established a reputation as a master historian of Union. One of the campus legends is that if you have a question about Union's history, Evans probably has the answer.

“You can virtually ask her anything that happened at some point in Union's history and she's likely to have some insight into it,” says Ellen Fladger, the College's archivist, who has worked with Evans for years. “The amazing thing about Ruth Anne is that even if she doesn't know the answer, she knows where to find it, and to me that is the mark of a really good librarian.”

Evans began working in the Union library during her summer vacations while she was a student at Smith College. She remembers those first years fondly: “it was the middle of the war, and we had thirteen people and
two typewriters. That was fun-being eighteen or nineteen and surrounded by all sorts of young men-they were lots of fun to look at and talk with.”

After graduating from Smith, Evans worked fulltime for a year at the library before enrolling in Columbia University's School of Library Science. She graduated one year later, became an assistant cataloguer in Colgate University's library, and returned to Union and her hometown of Schenectady four years later. Beginning as an assistant cataloguer, she later moved to reference and eventually became assistant and then associate librarian. In 1973, she became the first woman at Union to be named a full professor.

Although Evans “retired” in 1989, she still comes in to the library on a daily basis to help with a variety of chores. She is helping to transcribe and footnote the diaries of Jonathan Pearson of the Class of 1835, and she pores over the College history as part of the creation of a Dictionary of Union College History.

Over the years, Evans has become a remarkable repository of information about the College. “I keep thinking we should tap the contents of her brain,” Fladger says. “She just has an incredible amount of
information in her head. She is like a walking version of the College archives.”

With such continued devotion to the College and substantial work in the library, one might wonder why Evans retired. She says the reason is automation, explaining that she was not comfortable with many of the technological advances in library science. “I still like a book,” she says. “I can't see curling up with a computer, but maybe they'll make a computer you can cuddle up to.”

She admits that for a while she was the “test case” for technological services. “If I could make it work, anybody could do it,” she says.

And so, officially retired but just as busy as ever, Ruth Anne Evans scoots around campus dispensing facts and Union trivia to those who want to know. As she cheerfully says, “It hasn't been dull, but most people aren't dull, and even the dull ones you can do something with.”

Posted on Jan 1, 1997

As a senior at Schalmont High School in Rotterdam, N.Y., Elissa Gonzalez '98 considered Union out of reach when she began looking at colleges.

Now, she's working to make sure other minority students don't make the same mistake.

Gonzalez recently coordinated Union students' representation at a Latino Festival in Schenectady. About twenty-five members of Circulo Estudiantil Latino Americano (CELA), the Latino student organization, and ALAS (African and Latino Alliance of Students) attended. Members of CELA later recruited more prospective students at a job and housing conference sponsored by the Schenectady

chapter of the NAACP and other organizations.

The appearances have made a difference, she says.

“Many people did not realize that there were any Latino students at Union,” she says. “And students assume that if they don't have $27,000, they can't afford Union. I want them to be aware that aid is available.”

Gonzalez combined loans, scholarships, and a job in the Admissions Office to attend
Union, and now she is telling her story to other local minority students.

Her role as president of CELA helps. To make visiting students comfortable, Gonzalez matches them with Union student hosts who have similar interests or backgrounds. In addition, she and other members of CELA make an effort to call prospective students at home and offer the opportunity to speak Spanish. This makes communication much more clear, Gonzalez says, and parents especially welcome the chance to have their questions answered in Spanish.

Gonzalez says that her work in the Admission Office has made her well aware of the impact of the language barrier. After Union, she hopes to use her bilingualism to help reach those in need as a social worker, counseling in English or Spanish as needed. In the meantime, she spreads Union's message-even going so far as to take time at a recent party to explain the application process to a couple of high school students from Schenectady.

Gonzalez is pursuing an interdepartmental major in psychology and sociology with a minor in Spanish.

Posted on Jan 1, 1997

Andrea Barrett's collection of short stories, Ship Fever and Other Stories, won the 1996 National Rook Award for Fiction.

After the awards ceremony in New York City, she told the Associated Press,
“I feel enormously lucky about it. I've had quite a quiet publishing career.”

In the novella that gives the short story collection its name, a doctor on a Quebec quarantine island in the 1840s fights the fevers of wretched Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famineand reviews his own life, too.

Barrett, of the Class of 1974, received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the College at the June 1996 Commencement. She lives in Rochester, N.Y.

Barrett graduated from Union with a degree in biology and entered a graduate zoology program at the University of Massachusetts. She left that program to pursue a master's degree in medieval history. Finding herself fascinated with the fictional possibilities of the people she was studying, she left academe to pursue writing seriously.

Ship Fever and Other Stories joins four previous works – The Middle
Kingdom, Lucid Stars, Secret Harmonies, and The Forms of
Water.

Ship Fever and Other Stories is available from W.W. Norton and Company.

Posted on Jan 1, 1997

Douglas Robertson '96, of Whitehouse Station, N.Y., has won third prize in the U.S. Olympic Committee of Sport and Technology's 1996 intercollegiate design contest.

Robertson's project was designed to measure the force exerted by a crew team on the footstretcher in a shell. His instrumentation would enable a coach to precisely monitor rowers' vertical and horizontal movements and the way they exert force. With this knowledge, a rower could optimize performance.

Robertson designed his instrumentation and conducted research in the College's engineering lab as a senior design project. His advisor, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering Ron Bucinell, predicts that Olympic engineers will use Robertson's work to begin their own experimentation.

Robertson is now an applications engineer at IngersollDresser Pumps.

Posted on Jan 1, 1997

To adapt a vaudeville joke:

Q: How do you move a 3,000 pound statue?

A. Very carefully.

Which is what happened on a sunny day in mid-October, when the Idol was moved several hundred yards to make way for the new F.W. Olin Center.

The eight-foot-tall Idol is the ancient Chinese statue of a lioness and cub that has been a campus landmark for more than a century. But its location near the Science and Engineering Center was in the middle of the site for the new
high technology classroom and laboratory building.

So, as the College prepared to begin construction work, the first job was to find a new home for the Idol. The Student Forum voted to move it to
a small plateau between Achilles Rink and Bailey Field, the crossroads of most of the College's athletic facilities.

A little easier said than done.

After an eight-ton crane failed to lift the statue (which, with its concrete base, topped 10,000 pounds), an eighty-ton crane was called in. The Idol was lifted onto a flatbed truck, driven slowly to its new site, and lowered into the ground.

That evening, a couple of hundred students welcomed the Idol to its new home with a pep rally. Featured were freshman bagpiper Alex Bartholomew (in full regalia), the Dutch Pipers and Garnet Minstelles, Student Forum President Manny Cunanan (in a field hockey uniform), Professor of Classics Scott Scullion (in academic
regalia), and senior Jesse Shafer (in a toga).

Scullion read an original work (in Latin), which Shafer translated “for the benefit of our neighbors to the east who do not enjoy the benefits of a liberal education.”

To end the ceremony, team captains followed an old and honorable tradition by dousing the statue with paint. The event was captured by three local television stations, which featured it on their 11 p.m. news programs.

The “Prayer to the Transferred Idol” goes:

“Oh sacred Idol, whatever form of beast you may be, rest here as our defence and gracious glory. With your hideous face and the ever-changing radiant glow of a painted trollop, see to it that no person in the world may know
hunger and that college men and women may not know thirst. Protect our warriors on the fields of battle and malevolently curse the denizens of RPI.”

Audience response:

“Hoc precamur!” (“This we pray!”).

It worked. The football score was Union 17, Rensselaer 0.