Union has become the inspiration and location for an independent film by one highly-motivated Union student, Dave Bernat '00.
The film, called The Trust Factor, is the story of seven college friends who find their lives in upheaval when a change-of-heart threatens their relationships. More importantly, the film is the culmination of Bernat's work, dedication, and dreams.
Bernat, an English major who is known to his friends as “Mr. Dave.” has always been fascinated with movies and began to think seriously about becoming a filmmaker after he began at Union. With this project, he has hopped into the film industry with both feet — which is just what alumni in the field told him to do. Michael Roban '88, a film lawyer in New York City, spoke with Bernat numerous times, helping him with the details of copyright law as well as providing film advice. “What Dave is doing is a great first step into filmmaking,” says Roban. “Learning it on the fly is the best way. You can take all the film classes you want, but at the end of the day you just have to go out and make a film.”
The screenplay was written and reviewed eleven times over the course of six months. Once in the final writing stages, Bernat began preparations for shooting the film — assessing what resources were available, preparing grant applications, casting, reserving equipment, and scheduling the shoot. (Funding for the movie came almost entirely from the College's Internal Education Funding. Cooperation and encouragement also came from Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Brad Lewis, faculty members Charlotte Eyerman [visual arts] and Jordan Smith [English], and the offices of Campus Safety, Residence Life, and Instructional Technology.)
Preproduction for The Trust Factor was arduous, but the complexity of the project was just the kind of hands-on learning experience Bernat sought. “It's a lot of legwork,” he admits. “But I wouldn't trade this experience for the world. It's incredible, there's so much that goes into this.”
Shooting the film was a challenge, as Bernat had to cope with the intricacies of lighting and sound, equipment limitations, a tight budget, and actors' conflicting schedules. “Just getting everybody to one place and getting a shot done is such a tremendous amount of work, but it's wonderful,” he says.
Bernat's girlfriend, Lori Beth Malinoski '00, acted as the film's lead production assistant, overseeing the shooting schedule, props, and script edits. The film's cast included and crew also included Jill Brodsky '02, Greg Fox '02, Heath Fradkoff '99, Michelle Leung '01, Mark Will '99, and a slew of extras. Characters are based loosely on people from Bernat's life, and the result is a believable work of fiction with characters that feel familiar. Bernat knows that, realistically, his movie won't be appearing in malls across America, but he does plan to show it at the College.
Anyone wanting to contact Bernat can reach him at Box 130, Reamer Campus Center, or via e-mail at bernatd@union.edu.
We all know the name of the College's first president — Eliphalet Nott.
Except he wasn't.
Nott, in fact, was Union's third president. The first was John Blair Smith, who lived a life that combined academics and the ministry. His three years at the College were no match for Nott's sixty-four. But whereas Union was Nott's life-blood, Smith's time at the College was just a brief respite before his return to his true passion — preaching.
Smith was the son of a prominent Presbyterian minister in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He was educated at his father's academy and graduated from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1773. Following graduation, he became a tutor at the College of Hampden-Sidney. In 1779, at age twenty-four, he was ordained to the ministry and succeeded his brother as president of the College of Hampden-Sidney and pastor of the churches of Cumberland and Briary (it was common for presidents of colleges to also act as pastors in their communities).
While he taught at the college, Smith served for a short time as a captain of a militia company composed of Hampden-Sidney students. A longtime supporter of the American cause in the Revolutionary War and an avid defender of the Federal Constitution, he was a friend of James Madison, arguing vigorously for the Constitution's ratification in the Virginia legislature.
But Smith's true place was in the pulpit. He was by all accounts an inspiring and eloquent preacher, and from 1786 to 1788 he led a religious revival in the church at Briary and its associate congregations. An attractive and popular man, and a fervid and animated preacher, he had a great impact on the religious, moral, and literary spheres of Virginia and North Carolina. One biographer wrote: “I have heard certain aged men and women, whom Providence has spared to our time, speak with tears of the labors of Smith at that eventful period, giving neither sleep to his eye nor slumber to his eyelids. They likened him to an apostle wrestling with the powers of Darkness, and coming out conqueror over them all.”
Recognizing that his true calling was the pulpit, Smith resigned the presidency of Hampden-Sidney in 1789. In 1791, he became pastor of the Pine Street Church in Pennsylvania. He saw his congregation through the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, but his own health began to weaken, and in 1795 he accepted the presidency at Union, perhaps hoping that a break from the arduous preaching would improve his health.
Union at that time had one building, nineteen students, and one tutor (or professor). Smith oversaw the purchases of books for the library, which showed a much greater proportion of modern science and modern literature than was customary among colleges at that time. He led the almost immediate introduction of French into the curriculum, and the College's early emphasis on American history and constitutional government reflected great innovation.
His career at Union was not longlasting, however. His health improved, and four years after coming to Union he returned to his pastorate in Philadelphia. In his letter of resignation to the trustees, Smith said that while he was honored to have served as Union's president, “at the same time I must declare myself better pleased with the station to which I am again called, and which I find more congenial with my habits, as well as more suitable to my disposition and qualifications.”
On January 28, 1799, the Board of Trustees accepted his resignation, and Smith left the College after Commencement in May. Shortly after returning to his pastorate in Pennsylvania, he was stricken with yellow fever. He died on August 22, 1799.
From John Blair Smith's inaugural address
“But, above all, [the liberal education of the young] is most useful to the general welfare of the state. In our republic, where all men have the same advantages and the same difficulties and where the path to the gaining of honors and offices has been opened to all men, a wide dissemination of knowledge is absolutely necessary. It nourishes freedom, resists servitude, stands up against autocratic domination. It explores and sanctifies the rights of man; it considers liberty of supreme value, and age after age it propagates this most prized heritage of free citizens.”
Since retiring from an engineering firm in 1990, Warren Offutt '50 has built an observatory in New Mexico — and a name for himself in the world of astronomy.
At an age when many men are having grandchildren named after them, Warren Offutt '50 has Minor Planet (7639) Offutt, an asteroid 350 million miles away.
The honor came on his seventieth birthday, when the International Astronomical Union named the asteroid after Offutt to honor his scientific contributions.
Yet astronomy is only a hobby for Offutt, who in 1990 retired from his position as a vice president at a large manufacturing firm in Ohio and moved with his wife, Beverly, to the mountains of southern New Mexico, where they built an observatory.
“I don't play golf, I get tired of fishing in a big hurry, and Beverly and I enjoy astronomy so much that we decided to make it a kernel around which to build a retirement,” he explains. Since they built their observatory, the Offutts have been widely honored for their significant contributions to astronomy — from their careful documentation of the Hale-Bopp comet and their photograph of it that ran in magazines and newspapers nationwide to their recent help in the discovery of a new moon orbiting Uranus.
A lifelong love of engineering and technology
Warren Offutt's interest in astronomy began when he was a boy, but his fascination with technology and engineering — his true passion and the component of astronomy that he finds most intriguing — began when he was a toddler. He remembers playing with an old radio, twisting its big dials and knobs while his mother did the week's wash with a scrub-board. “That kindled my imagination, and to this day, technology of all kinds continues to fascinate to me,” he says.
His interests brought him to Union, where he volunteered to work as an engineer for a local World War II veteran who wanted to manufacture antennas but who had no knowledge of engineering. “That unpaid, free, fun work was actually the ticket to a good job,” he says. After graduation, Offutt landed a job with Airborne Instruments Laboratory (AIL) in Mineola, N.Y., where he designed microwave and radar antennas. His specialty was polarized radar feed and antennas that enabled ground controllers to maintain contact with airplanes even in bad weather. His design enabled the Air Force, and then commercial airlines, to maintain surveillance of aircraft positions for navigation and safety throughout the duration of a flight. “Whenever I land in a small plane, I always crane my neck to look at the antenna to see if it is one of mine. It often is,” he says.
Although Offutt did graduate work at several colleges, he stayed with AIL and moved into management roles as the company was acquired by Cutler-Hammer and later by the Eaton Corp. Before he retired from Eaton, he managed the company's research and advanced engineering development — a staff of about 450 people and an annual budget of $40 million. He also had oversight responsibility for all engineering in the corporation, which included 5,000 people and a $125 million budget.
The downside of all this responsibility, Offutt says, was that he traveled at least five days a week while Beverly “managed the home front” — their ten children. “When I retired, I promised myself that I would never see the inside of another airplane,” he says. “I've almost kept that promise.”
Focusing on astronomy
The Offutts spend most of their time at the home they built in the Sacramento Mountains in south-central New Mexico, a location that they chose for its dark skies and relatively low humidity. Their house and observatory, called W & B Observatory for Warren and Beverly, is on top of a mountain 8,300 feet above sea level — a great spot for optimal stargazing.
The Offutts bought their first telescope when their children were young to simply look at the stars and the planets and to introduce their children to astronomy, which had captivated Warren since he helped assemble a cousin's telescope at the age of twelve. Warren and Beverly enjoyed the telescope all the years their children were growing up, and in 1985, they purchased a five-inch telescope. “Beverly and I wanted to see a comet (never having seen one) and set about studying Comet Halley,” Offutt explains. “We viewed the comet in Illinois and Wisconsin, in Florida Everglades National Park, and in New Zealand, where we spent most of April 1985. All told, we took about 175 photos piggy-backing a 35-mm camera on the telescope.” This included one shot that appeared on the cover of an astronomy journal.
It was after their studies of Comet Halley that the Offutts decided to build their retirements around astronomy. (Beverly graduated from Ellis Hospital School of Nursing but stopped working when their children were small. After an eighteen-year hiatus while the children were maturing, she returned to active nursing, retiring finally in 1986 to help care for Warren's elderly mother. Following the death of Warren's mother, they retired together in 1990 to New Maxico). The Offutts' observatory has a twenty-four-inch telescope controlled by several homemade computers and installed with the help of software that Warren wrote himself for precise polar alignment. “It worked so well that it has since been used for similar alignment projects at five professional observatories,” he says.
[What makes the Offutts' telescope so remarkable, says Jonathan Marr, assistant professor of physics, is that it is large, sits on top of a mountain, is in an area with dark skies, and is accompanied by sophisticated equipment. “It is the equivalent of a telescope at a college, and they have the opportunity to use it anytime they want,” Marr says.]
Making a name for themselves
When Comet Hale-Bopp was discovered in 1995, the Offutts did the confirming observations and got the first post-discovery photos of the comet. (When a new comet is discovered, it must be confirmed by several astronomers, and a series of observations must be made to determine its orbit.) In fact, their photo of the comet was printed in many newspapers and magazines throughout the country.
“What was more important was that I was able to get a very precise location of it in the sky,” Offutt explains. “What was most interesting for me was that I could measure precisely where the comet was and precisely where it was moving in the sky.”
Offutt has come to focus on precision astrometry, the science of precision measurement of the position of astronomical bodies, which provides the basis on which the orbits of comets, planets, and asteroids can be computed. “The precision we achieve here on a good night is equivalent to measuring the angular difference between the top and bottom of a ten-mile distant golf ball,” he explains.
The Offutts' measurements of Comet Hale-Bopp were so precise that they caught the attention of professional astronomers, who often have difficulty getting time on large telescopes. “In general, professionals are driven by the desire, and even the need, to publish new results, but they are often limited by not having enough assigned time on professional telescopes,” Offutt says. “I have all the time I want on my own equipment. As a result, collaborations have developed in which the professionals define the types of research data needed and I endeavor to obtain those measurements for them.”
Offutt is also hailed for his ability to track very faint objects in the sky — so faint that they are typically one ten-millionth as bright as the dimmest star that one can make out with the naked eye on a very clear night in a place with no light pollution. Offutt is thought to be the only amateur astronomer in the world who has successfully observed and measured these objects, and it is high-quality observations of such objects that led to his receiving the Amateur Achievement Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in July.
“I enjoy astronomy because it combines the worthwhile goal of adding to man's knowledge of God's universe with a challenging opportunity to exercise my interest in science and engineering,” Offutt says. In fact, it is clear that it is the technology of astronomy that attracts him. “I came to Union as a hopeful engineer and left as an engineer. Deep down, I think I still am an engineer,” he says.
Sir William Thompson, also known as Lord Kelvin of Largs, once wrote, “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge of it is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.”
“Lord Kelvin's statement inspires me,” says Offutt. “Astronomy offers limitless opportunity to pursue science in this sense and to share it with others.”
Contending with light pollution
One of the characteristics of modern society that bedevils astronomers is light pollution — the contamination of the night sky by stray light from cities and towns.
Warren Offutt says light pollution costs the country money, causes needless glare that hinders the safety of citizens (especially those with certain vision impairments), and destroys both the aesthetic beauty of the night sky and the research opportunities to study it.
“All that is needed to correct this is the use of what are called full cut-off fixtures,” he says. “These are designed to keep the light in the area where it is effective, generally within a ground radius of about three times the height at which the lamp is mounted.”
He says such fixtures are so efficient that their use could reduce electric operating costs by as much as half — and, of course, protect the beauty of the starry sky.
It is nearly six o'clock on a beautiful evening in July, and Peter Tobiessen, professor of biology, is in a committee meeting. Scheduled to last only an hour, the meeting has dragged on for nearly two hours, and he is itching to leave — fishing is on his mind.
When the meeting finally ends, Tobiessen dashes to his office, changes into a pair of jeans, and heads off to pick up Tom Werner, Florence B. Sherwood professor of physical science. By a little after six, the biologist and the chemist are heading west to the Schoharie Creek, the trunk of Tobiessen's Toyota packed with waders, fly rods, fishing vests, boots, and socks.
Tobiessen and Werner have been fishing together for about ten years. On quiet evenings from the spring through the fall, the duo will hop into a car and leave the bustle of the city and the College behind, sneaking away to cool streams surrounded by rolling hills and lush woods, where they can appreciate the pure relaxation and elegance of the sport.
“It is very relaxing because it takes total concentration,” Tobiessen says. “You can't think about anything else.”
Both started fishing intensely when they were department chairs, a fact that is not simply coincidence. “I don't think that there is anything else that I do where I don't think about anything else,” Werner says. “When I'm fishing, I am thinking about the next cast — that's all.”
An evening of fishing with the pair reveals the intricacies and attraction of the sport. “There is a technical level to casting,” Tobiessen says. “You have to make the presentation of the fly look exactly like the insect that you think that the trout is eating.”
Each cast requires analysis, placement, concentration. Each move of the fisherman's body is precise, fluid, natural. It is this elegance that first attracted Werner to the sport. “The way that you can make the rod move and then gently let the fly hit the water — there is a certain grace about it that appealed to me,” he says.
“It is a dance,” Tobiessen adds. “It is just an incredibly esthetic experience.”
Success at the dance is also scientific, something that comes naturally to Tobiessen and Werner. Tobiessen, who has a Ph.D. in botany, is intrigued by the ecosystems in which trout live. His research involves aquatic plants and the forests of the Northeast, so he always has his eyes on streams and forests.
Werner, on the other hand, is an analytical chemist who investigates fluorescence and luminescence of certain chemicals. But the precision of flyfishing is not unlike the patience and persistence he demands of himself and his students in the laboratory; like chemistry, fishing demands skill and attention.
“You read the stream and try to figure out where the fish might be,” Tobiessen says. “Then you try and get the right fly and present it in exactly the right way, since fish won't take flies that don't mimic the food they are eating. Even if there is a little drag on the line, the fish won't take it. Fish can be very selective. As a biologist, it fascinates me.”
The most exciting part of the evening is catching a fish, partly because that is the entire goal of the sport, but also because the catch confirms that the fisherman's cast was just right, his fly choice appropriate, his reading of the river exact. And even though Tobiessen and Werner release all of the fish they catch, they — like fishermen everywhere — enjoy telling fishing stories.
“I remember fishing in a place by the side of the stream where there was so much overhang I really couldn't cast normally,” Werner says, clearly telling one of his favorite fishing stories. “But there was a little undercut of the bank, and I managed to literally throw my line out and let the fly just float right in there, and bang, I had a fish!”
While much of trout fishing is an esthetic experience, the sport is more than just an evening on a beautiful stream. For this duo, it is about nature and science, too. “When I catch a fish, I almost feel like I am sampling the ecosystem,” Tobiessen says. “When I have a fish on the end of a line and I feel it wriggling, I feel like I am communicating with the stream. It's a semi-religious experience.”
Students in quantitative chemistry have joined with Trout Unlimited to test local streams.
Moving away from pre-packaged laboratory samples, students in quantitative chemistry have joined with Trout Unlimited to analyze local streams.
The idea came from Professors Tom Werner (chemistry) and Peter Tobiessen (biology), both avid fly fishermen and members of Trout Unlimited, a national organization committed to conserving, protecting, and restoring North America's trout and salmon fisheries and their watersheds.
As part of their quantitative chemistry labs last spring, students analyzed the levels of cations (positively charged atoms) and anions (negatively charged atoms) in the water — such as calcium, nitrate, chloride, and sodium — as well as relative concentrations of organic matter. The information was turned over to Trout Unlimited, which maintains a profile of streams. The organization uses such analyses to press for improvements, such as shutting down sources of pollution, shoring up eroding banks to keep silt out of the water, or planting trees and shrubs along the stream to provide shade. It also uses the data to rally the Department of Environmental Conservation to stock and restock healthy streams with trout.
Tobiessen says that Trout Unlimited has an important conservation component. “They would like to reestablish trout populations in streams, not necessarily because they like to fish and they want to see trout there, but because trout are indicative of clear water quality,” he explains.
Before working with Trout Unlimited, Werner had already begun to move away from pre-packaged, commercial unknowns in his laboratories. He had his students analyze over-the-counter medication and other household items so that they could see the practical uses of chemistry. “Working with Trout Unlimited seemed to be the next step,” he says. “Not only could we measure real samples, but we could do the analyses for a reason other than to see how students were doing in order to give them a grade.”
Students used ion chromatography as well as high performance liquid chromatography and fluorescence spectroscopy to separate the ion components of each sample and identify them one at a time. In addition, Tobiessen joined the class for a lecture about the biology of the project — to explain where the ions came from and how they reflect the health of a stream. “We wanted to put it into the big picture,” he explains. “We wanted them to understand what it means to have a chloride ion in a stream and where that chloride ion might have come from.”
Looking at the chemical analysis as well as what they had learned about the biology behind that chemistry, the students were able to analyze the relative health of each of the streams they tested. While their findings were fairly predictable, they still enjoyed the process — much more than analyzing a pre-packaged unknown.
“It was very different from other labs that we've done because it is so practical,” says Tania Magoon '01, who studied the level of organic matter in general. And while the students are quick to emphasize that they are always careful in the lab, Magoon's partner, Keiko Ota '00, admits that they were a bit more careful with this lab because their findings would have ramifications beyond just a grade in a class. “It's great to analyze something that exists in the real world, that really affects something,” says Jon Tower '00.
One reason Werner and Tobiessen developed the project was precisely because of the enthusiasm that “real world” applications evoke. “It means a lot to the students to have their data mean something,” Tobiessen says. “It makes a difference that these data are going to go outside of the College and may have some sort of policy impact.” Adds Werner, “What they find affects not only them; it affects fish and people. I think that it gives them another perspective on laboratory work.”
