Posted on May 2, 1997

Zane Riester '97 will use a Watson Fellowship to study architectural similarities between Renaissance churches and Beaux-Arts train
stations in Italy, France and the U.K. His proposal is described here. Riester and Jessica Bernstein, whose Watson was profiled in the last issue, bring to 42 the number of Union students who have become Watson Fellows since the program began in 1969.

No one would describe a wait in Penn Station as inspiring. Except maybe Zane Riester.

While waiting for his train back to Union at the end of winter break during his sophomore year, Riester saw on the wall of Penn Station a photo of
what he thought was St. Peter's Church in Rome, a grand and beautiful example of
Renaissance church architecture he had just studied in “Introduction to
Architecture.”

Then he read the caption: “Pennsylvania Station,
1906.”

“It was the first time I realized that the original
Penn Station had been destroyed,” the senior recalls. “I couldn't believe
what I saw – it was as if they were taunting me with pictures of this grand original
structure in such a dismal, atrophied place.”

That moment and subsequent “rediscoveries” of
Grand Central Station stirred in Riester a fascination with the architectural similarities
between Renaissance churches and turn-of-the-century train stations.

So began an obsession that recently earned the New York
City native an $18,000 Watson Fellowship to carry on his investigation next year at
churches and train stations in Italy, France and the United Kingdom.

“These buildings share so much in common in terms of
an architectural vocabulary — columns, symmetry, temple fronts, a grand hall —
and the emotional response they invoke in the viewer,” says Riester, a political
science major and history minor. “They are awesome, amazing and humbling.

“While it risks blasphemy to compare a train to the
grand significance of God, churches and stations are in their respective ways visions of
power, strength, and glory,” he wrote in his proposal. “Train stations thus had
to be large imposing structures much like the cathedrals and churches of Europe.”

Trains stations also were symbols of a town's
prosperity, a function once served by churches, he notes. Because of their central
importance, stations employed the highest degree of design and adornment, just as churches
had done centuries before.

Stations – like churches – also serve a role in
integrating members of society. “A lot of different people from different social
classes come to a church for different reasons. It's the same for the stations. The
poor will go to the steps of a church just as they go to the steps of a train
station.”

And stations, like churches centuries before, reflected the
spirit of society. “In the previous generation, there was a sense of romance with
travel, which was something new. The trains were the first to play a role in connecting
everything. It was more than just a railroad. It was about the development of
society.”

Riester says his analysis will use black and white
photography, interviews and archival research. He plans to spend about four months each in
Italy, France and England. He hopes to share his discoveries through a Web site, and
possibly a CD ROM. “Nothing could be more fitting for a study of the technological
progress of one age than to use the technology of my own,” he says.

During his Union career Riester has been a Junior
Achievement volunteer, brotherhood director of Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, treasurer and
founding member of the Union College film club, and participant in the Steinmetz
Symposium. He has served internships with the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York
and with Assemblyman Thomas DiNapoli. He also has traveled in Africa, India and Europe.

After his Watson, Riester says, he would like to go to
architecture school.

Posted on May 1, 1997

The Union Bookshelf regularly calls special attention to books written by alumni and other members of the Union community. If you're an author and would like us to feature your new book, please send us a copy of the book or the jacket as
well as your publisher's news release. Our address is Public Relations Office, Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. 12308-3169.

Robert Barnes '44, M.D.
“Growing up with my father, an energetic, articulate, highly opinionated man, was often unsettling, sometimes frightening, occasionally maddening, but never boring,” writes Robert Barnes in
Harry Elmer Barnes As I Knew Him, a biography of his father. The elder Barnes taught at Harvard, Columbia, Smith, and Amherst and was a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union as well as the New School for Social Research. Included in the book are letters to and from Al Capone, H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, H. G. Wells, John Dewey, Will Rogers, and many others.

Robert Barnes '44, M.D., is a practicing psychiatrist in Scottsdale, Ariz. The book is available from High Plains Publishing Company.

William A. Levinson M.B.A. '88, M.S. '93
Basing his book, The Way of
Strategy, on the theory that “business is war” and that the
marketplace is a battlefield, Levinson discusses the art and science of managing organizations in competitive situations; to win, people and systems must deliver quality products and services.

In SPC Essentials and Productivity Improvement: A Manufacturing Approach, Levinson and coauthor Frank Tumbelty teach the essentials of statistical process control without the manual mathematical calculations usually required. The textbook is designed for quality professionals who must use SPC on the job. Both books are available from Quality Press in Milwaukee.

Levinson is a professional engineer with certification from ASQC, Society of Manufacturing Engineers, American Institute of Chemists, and the Institute of Certified Professional Managers.

Tom Broderick '73
East Burke, Vt., resident Tom Broderick '73 D.O., contributed an essay to the book
Letters for Our Children, a collection of fifty letters from parents to their children sharing values and experiences that have influenced their lives. Broderick's essay is to his ten year-old son, Currie, about making choices in life and “doing the right thing.”

W. Tillar Shugg '39
The Handbook of Electrical and Electronic Insulating Materials is the updated second edition of industry expert W. Tillar Shugg's original information source devoted to all classes of dielectric materials. It is a reference
manual for engineers, material specialists, and all others in the electronics industries. The book is available from IEEE Press in hardcover.

Daniel Schwarz '63
Daniel Schwarz's new book, Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship Between Modern Art and Modern
Literature, considers such painters as Manet, Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, and Cezanne as well as authors Joyce, Conrad, Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf. He asks what these figures have in common and how they may have influenced each other. Schwarz is a professor of English at Cornell University, and the book is published by St. Martin's Press.

Ray Rappaport
Union Professor Emeritus of Biology Ray Rappaport discusses the centrality of cell division to biological development in his book,
Cytokinesis in Animal Cells. Experiments devised to test cell division theories are described and explained. The book also traces the history of
some of the major ideas in the field and gives an account of our current knowledge of animal cytokinesis. The book was published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press.

Gary Prevost '69
The Undermining of the Sandinista Revolution,
co-edited by Gary Prevost '69 and Harry E. Vanden, is a debate on the gains or losses to the Nicaraguan government and populace as the result of the Sandinista revolution. A principal theme is that the revolution is in significant retreat with social and economic gains largely reversed.

Prevost is a professor of political science at St. John's University in Minnesota.

David K. Rosenthal '75
The author, a professional handicapper, shows readers how to maximize profits with proper betting techniques in
The Complete Guide to Racetrack Betting. Using many examples from three popular North American racetracks, Rosenthal discusses proper money management as well as knowing how to place a bet and when. The book is available from Liberty Publishing Co.

Robert Milder '67
Reimagining Thoreau (Cambridge University Press) is a detailed summary of Henry David Thoreau's career from his graduation from Harvard University in 1837 to his death
in 1862. Milder explains the psychosocial undercurrents in Thoreau's works such as
Walden and shows how the works changed over time as Thoreau, himself, was changing.

Milder is a professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of English at Washington University in St. Louis.

Louis W. Joy III '81 and Jo A. Joy
Written as a fictional novel, Frontline Teamwork gives the reader a look at contemporary plant management, explaining how to build teamwork and total quality as well as delegating authority.

Louis Joy is president of Manufacturing Excellence, Inc., a management consulting firm. Jo A. Joy is vice president of Manufacturing Excellence and a senior financial analyst for Hewlett Packard. The book is available from Irwin Professional Publishing.

Emily Monosson '83
Interconnections Between Human and Ecosystem
Health, co-edited by Emily Monosson and Richard T. DiGiulio, is part of a series from Chapman & Hall Publishing on ecotoxicology. The book raises environmental management issues to stimulate discussion of how to deal with environmental disturbances that affect human and ecosystem health.

Monosson is an adjunct professor in the Department of Forestry and Wildlife Management at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Posted on May 1, 1997

Laura Robin '84 is a doctor of osteopathic medicine-a specialist in preventive medicine and an epidemiologist who has helped Navajo Indians, Gulf War veterans, members of the Alaska Miners Association, and chronic sufferers of arthritis in Oregon.

As a biology major at Union, Robin debated between traditional medical school and a school of osteopathic medicine, which in addition to traditional medicine emphasizes looking at the patient as a whole and learning the relationship between structure and function of the body. She chose the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine because it had “more of a relaxed, human atmosphere.”

It was during medical school that Robin, who grew up on Long Island, first visited the American West. Encouraged by an uncle living in Albuquerque, she spent six weeks on the Navajo reservation in western New Mexico and loved it.

After medical school, she joined the Indian Health Service, an agency of the Public Health Service, which provides outpatient and twenty-four-hour emergency care for the reservation. One of several doctors, she lived in government housing on the reservation.

It was, she says, probably the best experience she ever had.

“It was fascinating to be living in a different culture and still be living in the United States,” she explains. And she loved working with the Navajo population.

“The way the Navajo look at disease is very different from the Western medical perspective,” she says. “To them, illness is often caused by negative forces or a curse, and their way to treat it is to go to a medicine man or woman and have them perform a ceremony to remove the curse.”

Although many people would come to the medical doctors, they did not always take the doctors' advice, sometimes relying on medicine men to cure them.

Robin spent two years with the Indian Health Service, becoming frustrated that there were not sufficient resources to prevent the problems. “I'd see a sixteen-year-old girl through a pregnancy only to see her pregnant again four months later,” she says. “I realized we were putting out fires but didn't have the time, money, or energy to
help people prevent these fires.”

Increasingly interested in preventive medicine and public health, she decided to enter the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, where she began to focus on epidemiology-the study of populations and disease.

As part of her residency program, Robin returned to New Mexico to study the high frequency of respiratory disease that she had discovered among children on the Navajo reservation. She suspected that the leaky stoves in the small, smoky huts and houses heated with wood and coal were contributing to the illnesses, and her study proved it.

After she completed her master's program, Robin joined the Center for Disease Control's two-year fellowship program in epidemiology. Able to choose where to work, she went to Alaska. “I'm always up for another adventure, and I really enjoy working with native populations,” she says.

Based in the State Health Department in Anchorage, she investigated illness outbreaks-from outbreaks of botulism that emerged in the native population to an outbreak of illness following a luncheon at the Alaska Miner's Association (due to undercooked reindeer pate). She also continued her research, ranging from the lack of lead poisoning among young children in Alaska to the characterization of illnesses among Persian Gulf veterans.

Robin finished her work with the CDC about two years ago and has settled into two private practices in Oregon, once again relying on her training in osteopathy. She is a county medical examiner and epidemiology consultant to her county's Department of Health and is continuing her research with Johns Hopkins on the Native Americans in the Southwest. And now she is becoming interested in alternative medicine.

“As my time went by in Alaska, I was realizing more and more that Western medicine is wonderful for many things, but somewhat limited-that there are blinders,” she says. “There are cultures around the world that have been using other healing methods for thousands of years. Healing is not only the technical aspect of the disease, but the emotional, mental and spiritual as well.”

To Robin, Western medicine often treats the symptoms, not the underlying problems causing the illness. She is learning more about nutritional concepts of medicine, looking at how what we eat often determines how we feel. She combines traditional, holistic, and nutritional medicine in her two private practices and also works with an internist who uses Chinese medicine and acupuncture.

One day, Robin hopes to combine her interests and expertise to research the effectiveness of some of the many methods of alternative medicine. “My feeling about alternative medicine is that there's a lot that is wonderful and a lot that's not,” she says. If she can discover which is which, a lot of people would listen.

Posted on May 1, 1997

Taryn Merz Howard '79, the new Alumni Council president, says Union's alumni body is a changing entity, and she hopes that Alumni Council decisions will reflect that change.

Howard, chief of staff in The Private Bank of the Union Bank of Switzerland, says that the alumni body is becoming more diverse as women fill a larger proportion. Her biggest challenge, she says, will be to represent that diversity.

The second woman to serve as Alumni Council president (Barbara Burek '75 was the first), Howard says that she was mildly surprised four years ago when she was nominated as second vice-president. “I think I became president in the buffet line at one of our meetings,” she says, explaining that then president Joe Zolner '76 asked her if she was interested in taking a greater leadership role in the Alumni Council.
Her affirmative response that day led to a spot on the executive committee.

Howard joined the Alumni Council just after her tenth ReUnion, where she was nominated to become her class representative. Her husband, Robert Howard '78, had become involved in the leadership of his fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi, and frequently traveled to Schenectady. Since they were often so close to Union, she decided to accept the position.

“I had a great experience at Union and it's had a big impact on my life in terms of my success, and I wanted to give something back,” she says.

Howard has worked in systems marketing, client service projects, management consulting, and administration. She says she landed her first two jobs directly because of her experiences at Union.
In her current position, Howard supports the head of the Private Bank, acts as a liaison with Zurich, runs projects, and heads administration. “I'm basically a jack of all trades,” she says. “It helps that I can manage a lot of things at once.”

Howard likes the diversity of her job-it reminds her of the moves that she often made while growing up with a father who worked for NASA and the Air Force. “I think one reason I loved Union was because I
stayed there the longest time,” she says. “I got used to change, but by the time I got to college I liked the stability of being in one place for four years.”

As a class representative to the Alumni Council, she helped set up the Westchester Alumni Club and served as its president. She also was a member of the career planning committee and went on to chair that committee. Recently, she
was involved in the first Leadership Roundtable for Alumnae, held in New York City last fall.

“I like having an impact, being able to shape what happens and what's going on,” she says. “Being a woman, I think I'm part of the change that is occurring in the alumni body. I think I can help the council adapt to that new environment.”

Howard encourages alumni to get involved, helping with admissions, career development, or fundraising. “Fortunately, my impression working with alumni is that people are usually interested in one of the three,” she says, emphasizing that even the smallest effort can help: “You'll feel good about it and Union will appreciate it.”

Howard and her husband, Robert, live with their two children, Courtney and Jordan, in White Plains, N.Y.

Posted on May 1, 1997

Peter Adasek '61, a Colorado Springs pediatrician and expert on child abuse, had always wanted to give something back to his grandparents' homeland of Czechoslovakia.

So, in 1991, he spent six months teaching and lecturing about child abuse and pediatrics in Prague and throughout the country.

Since then, he has returned to Prague each year and added Austria, Germany, Argentina, Norway, France, the Middle East, Asia, and Guam to his travels, teaching doctors, nurses, teachers, and social service
workers how to identify cases of child abuse.

Adasek went into practice in 1970 and soon found himself spending a lot of time in court testifying about child abuse cases. Becoming increasingly frustrated that so many abusers went free because of lack of evidence, he began videotaping his interviews with victims. ” I was able to take that tape to court so that
it might be admitted as evidence,” he says. “And many times the accused parent alleged perpetrator would plead guilty because the tape existed.”

He shared his videotaping experience in several published articles and became established as a national expert.

After spending so much time in courtrooms fighting to save children, Adasek decided to try his hand at law in 1989, enrolling in the law school at University of San Francisco. “I wanted to be a lawyer-to be a consultant to the district attorney and convict child abusers,” he says.

But he became disenchanted with law, finding lawyers too concerned with monetary gain, so he began examining his options.

Born in Little Falls, N.Y., he was the first of his family to graduate from college. ” I came from a poor family-my parents worked hard and
my grandparents were factory workers,” he says. “I decided that I
wanted to give something back to the country where my grandparents came from-Czechoslovakia.”

After a determined letter-writing campaign to doctors in Czechoslovakia, he finally heard from Czech Minister of Health Martin Bojar, who invited him to lecture at Charles University and its associated medical schools in Prague. The lectures were so successful that Adasek gave talks throughout Czechoslovakia, and he has been invited back to the Czech and Slovak republics annually.

Adasek was spurred to travel to other parts of the world, and he most recently lectured on child abuse at hospitals in Bangkok, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Guam. This summer, when he returns to the Czech and Slovak republics, he also will teach English to Czech students between the ages of six and fourteen.

Adasek no longer practices, devoting his time to his free lectures. He usually covers his own transportation expenses, but he says that the “strokes” he receives for his work are well worth liv
ing a frugal life. “People will tell me they feel more comfortable diagnosing child abuse,” he says-and that translates to saving lives.