Take care
Professor of Chemistry John Sowa has had lots of roles at Union, from Chemistry Club advisor to radiation, laser, and chemical safety officer.
But it is as an unofficial counselor to students that he has made countless friends.
The counseling began from the time he joined the faculty in 1967, but it accelerated after he had a life-changing accident in 1983. Now, as he retires, he says that one of his most happy memories will be “that I kept some students here who were having difficulties of one sort or another.”
Sowa is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and earned his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. One of his first assignments at Penn was to teach undergraduates, and it was then that he knew he had found his career (he thought he was headed for a business career with his father). After teaching at the University of Delaware, he came to Union as an assistant professor.
That began a satisfying and busy time. He taught courses from introductory to advanced chemistry, did research, got involved in a variety of campus activities, delivered guest lectures at other institutions, and was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemists. He spoke French and German, was able to do complicated mathematical calculations in his head, jogged sixty miles a week, and participated in community activities from scouting to the United Way. It was a time, he once said, that you were likely to catch him on the run-literally and figuratively.
But on a mild October day in 1983, while riding his bicycle, he was struck by a car, and his life suddenly took a different direction. After getting fifteen stitches in a hospital emergency room, he began a long journey to an accurate diagnosis and treatment of a brain injury. It was, he said later, as if something like the Berlin Wall had come between him and his previous life. Always handy at mechanical projects, he had to work hard even at changing automobile oil; a fine runner (he was the New Jersey state champion in the 220-yard dash while in high school), he had trouble walking for a half hour. A reader, he found his reading skills virtually wiped out.
You could understand if Sowa became bitter. But he didn't. He merely says that he was a statistic-one of the 2,000 out of every 100,000 in this country who experience a head injury. He continued to teach, albeit at less advanced levels; he continued to participate in the life of the campus community, such as advising Phi Gamma Delta; and he began to reach out even more to students and others. Students who had trouble studying but didn't know why came to him. Often the problem was a head injury, and Sowa's sensitivity-and his willingness to go to bat for the students with other professors-made him an unofficial counselor to hundreds of students over the years.
Off campus, he became involved in a community head-injury support group, and he often was one of the first people called to the hospital when someone was brought in with a head injury. “A brain injury can be devastating, but nobody knows anything about it until faced with it. They need to know there is life after the hospital.”
As for Sowa, his life after retirement does not mean he is leaving the campus. Instead, he will continue on a part-time basis as a safety officer, providing advice of a different sort to students and faculty. Although the campus does not generate much radioactive waste, there is enough activity with lasers and chemicals to make vigilance an important word-and Sowa's regular rounds and lectures are designed to make sure that faculty and students take care.
Yellow butterflies
and what's good for the soul
Margaret French, director of the Writing Center,
confesses to having once been a workaholic. But those days
are behind her now: “Playing is beginning to sound pretty nice,” she says, as she slides into retirement this summer after fifteen years at the College.
French was hired as coordinator of Instructional Technology, the Language Labs, and CHUC (computer rooms in Humanities). With a background in English, she says that “instructional technology at first seemed a bit of a stretch, since I always had to ask my kids how to use the stereo. But instructional manuals became my bedtime reading. And I did like computers and figuring out software.”
A couple of years after French arrived, she became director of the Writing Center (continuing to direct IT, the Language Lab, and CHUC for a number of years), following in the footsteps of founder Alan Nelson, now professor of English emeritus. The Writing Center is a peer tutoring service, with students dropping in to get help from other students. “Tutors help with organization, grammar, and so on,” she explains. “We get more than 1,200 visits per year, and, on average, students spend forty-five minutes to
an hour meeting with a tutor. The tutors are wonderful
students-bright, interesting, kind, funny-and the very best thing about my job.”
During her first years as director, she recalls, “We were upstairs in Whittaker House, above the registrar. Very charming, in a funky way. But the wallpaper, covered with yellow butterflies, was ghastly. At the end-of-year party, one student confessed that the tutors had been rubbing out the butterflies-dissolving them with nail polish remover, one at a time, to see how long it would take me to notice. Dozens were missing by then! Several years later, other students put the butterflies back, tracing and cutting and pasting, and filling in the empty spaces. In the process, they added a few to the ceilings and the windows.”
And they didn't stop there. “A couple of years later, when I joined the alumni bowling league, the tutors went on eBay and found me a black and gold bowling shirt from the 50s with a huge butterfly embroidered on the back. Absolutely the most tasteless and beautiful thing you could imagine!”
To mark her last year at Union, French took on a physical challenge last fall: the Avon three-day, sixty-mile walk from Bear Mountain. “It was very cold, we slept in tents, but it was a great experience. I wanted the challenge. Avon supports treatment and diagnosis for poor women; the amount they've raised has been huge. I've had people close to me die of cancer, and I thought doing the walk was a good idea. A couple of days after, I had a biopsy. Fortunately, it was very small and very treatable,” for which she's grateful. She's planning to do the Avon walk again this year.
“When you retire,” she says, “you do a lot of soul-searching about what you'll be afterwards. I'd like to write, I'd like to cook, I'd like to travel, I'd like to become a professional grandmother.” She and her husband have eight randchildren, with a ninth on the way.
Canadian by birth (she was born in New Brunswick, and has lived in places such as Calgary, where she rode in the Stampede Parade), she's working on a book about women's experiences homesteading in the Canadian Northwest. “This is the last area of any great size that was homesteaded. The peak was between 1911 and 1914. These women feel almost contemporary.” Her inspiration comes in part from her sister, who lives in northern Alberta as one of a newer generation of homesteaders: “She had no running water until a few years ago. And the nearest doctor, high school, and market are fifty miles away.” In addition to this book, she says, she also likes to write about travel and food, and thinks she'd “like to write eccentric personal essays.”
In any case, she says, “I think I've spent my entire life not finishing what I'm writing. Whether I'll finish anything now I don't know, but I'll have fewer excuses!”
Wouldn't change a thing
Ask Frank Milillo about his favorite memory from
teaching mechanical engineering for twenty-seven years,
and he has a quick answer.
“It's difficult to say one moment is more magical than another, but I do remember one particular time,” he says. “It was a freshman engineering class and we were building a scale model of a Newcomen steam engine. The students worked for weeks, testing various parts, and in the tenth week they had it all assembled. Then came demonstration day. They fired it up, and I held my breath. Suddenly the piston was drawn downward. The engine worked! Immediately the crowd of spectators joined in with a hearty round of applause-and I finally exhaled in jubilation as the students celebrated their achievement.”
Those who know Milillo would not be surprised at his story. Since coming to Union as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering-his first professional job after graduate school-he has relished working with students in the classroom and on research projects. Teaching, he says, is what he always wanted to do, and now that he has retired he can say happily that he would not have done anything differently.
Milillo was born in Brooklyn, the youngest of six children. His immigrant parents, he says, probably knew 1,000 words of English between them, and Frank was the only child who had the opportunity to go to college. During his first two years at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, he worked during the day (at a freight company and Consolidated Edison) and went to classes at night. He was then able to go to school on a full-time basis, eventually earning his B.S. and M.S. in metallurgical engineering and his Ph.D. in physical metallurgy, all at Polytechnic Institute.
During his Ph.D. work, he occasionally filled in for his advisor, teaching undergraduate classes. So when graduation day approached and it was time to find a job, he decided on teaching rather than research. “When I saw an ad for this position at Union, I asked people at Brooklyn, and they all told me it was an excellent school and great for teaching undergraduates. I knew that my first stop would be at a place like this.”
The Union job turned out to be a perfect fit. Milillo relished the excitement of students uncovering facts and making discoveries, and he enjoyed collaborating on research that over the years ranged from bioengineering projects to the machining of metals at cryogenic temperatures. In 1989 he was named the Thomas J. Watson, Sr. and Emma Watson-Day Professor of Engineering.
“I think it's very important for students to see that their teachers have the excitement of going into the lab,” he says. “That excitement can really spark students, and working side by side can encourage them to go beyond what they think their limits are.”
As the years went on, Milillo got increasingly involved in the advising and committee work of a faculty member. He was the academic advisor to part-time undergraduate and graduate students working on their degrees through the Office of Graduate and Continuing Studies, and he served as chair of his department for nine years, preparing the department for two accreditation visits.
He had intended to teach until he was sixty (he's fifty-eight now), but two years ago he had an attack of Bell's palsy, and the timetable changed. Now, he and his wife, Pamela, are eagerly planning some trips to Europe.
“What has made this so emotionally rewarding is to see students go on for graduate work and then go into teaching or research,” he says. “There's great satisfaction knowing that their decisions may have been sparked by the interaction they had here with their teachers. And, of course, there are the great moments when they come back for ReUnion or Homecoming and we get together. I have friends at larger places who can't enjoy these kinds of moments.”
Milillo says he would like to hear from former students; his e-mail is milillof@union.edu.
Poetry that evokes a past persisting in the present
Listen, you upstate hillsides
Which I have loved
So loyally, your woodlots
And trailers and old farmhouses,
Your satellite dishes-
-From “Money Musk”
by Jordan Smith
So begins a poem by
Professor of English Jordan Smith that practically scolds the local landscape for refusing to reveal its history.
“I always had the sense that landscape involved history and the history was mostly gone because the landscape had been so transformed,” says Smith, explaining the poem that is part of a recent collection titled Three Grange Halls.
The chapbook was co-winner of the 2002 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook competition. A full-length collection of Smith's work (including some of the poems from the chapbook) received first prize in the Tampa Review poetry competition and will be published this fall by the University of Tampa Press.
The title poem refers to Grange halls in Grooms Corners, Brunswick Center, and Malta, all in upstate New York. Like others in the collection, the poem is peppered with references to landmarks that retain a sense of the area's
history-rural roads, boarded-up taverns, overgrown family cemeteries, dilapi-
dated buildings.
Smith, a native of Rochester, recalls a childhood bicycle trip to an 1800s communal farmstead: “I was fascinated by the feeling I got from being around those old buildings. There was a sense of the past persisting in the present. The past had a lot more character to me.”
Smith says he prefers the hardscrabble upstate landscape to, say, the quaint villages of New England or the sprawling Midwest farms. “They're more scrubby and rundown,” he says of the local landmarks. “I find that more picturesque, more interesting.”
Smith does acknowledge, however, that he may be adhering to the creative writing theory that a good poem or story depends on something being amiss. “If everything's right, there's no mystery. We have to have some level of tension to have the impulse for writing.”
If landscape influences Smith's poetry, so does traditional music. He grew up on The Band and Bob Dylan, and his father was a fan of Charles Ives, the American composer who worked folk tunes into his pieces to remind the listener of voices from another time. “You have that sense of musical history and of cultural reference that went back beyond the present,” he says. “A lot of my impulses to write poetry came from liking American music and hanging around with the musicians and not really being a traditional musician myself.”
But Smith would become a musician-a fiddler-when his son began violin lessons a decade ago.
“Music and poetry are analogous experiences,” Smith says. “When you're playing music, you're really involved in the moment. It's not just the notes. It's where you're sitting, who you're playing with, what's going on in the atmosphere around you.
“The experience you're trying to capture when you're writing a poem has that kind of complexity,” he says. “One of the things I say to students is that any moment that you're in, even if it seems ordinary, is a really complex moment.”
In addition to the Swan Scythe Press, located at the University of California at Davis, Smith has had recent poems in The Cortland Review, The Paris Review, and Western Humanities Review.
A reference librarian gives back
A mentor of David Gerhan once told him that everything a reference librarian learns will benefit a student some day.
That advice has proven beneficial to Gerhan as the reference librarian prepares to spend his sabbatical next year as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Botswana in southern Africa.
For Gerhan, his experience in the Peace Corps in Libya some thirty-four years ago was instrumental in developing a proposal to return to Africa as a Fulbright.
“It feels like I've come full circle,” he says, reflecting on his tour in the north African country where he taught English to schoolchildren. His Peace Corps assignment was cut short by the revolution that brought Mohammar Qadaffi to power, but the experience developed his sense for what it means to be an American trying to contribute in a foreign culture, Gerhan says.
This time, Gerhan returns to Africa to teach a new generation of students about reference services and library administration at one of the premier library training programs on the continent. The University of Botswana, in the capital of Gaborone east of the massive Kalahari Desert on the border with South Africa, has about 8,200 students in graduate and undergraduate programs. Botswana, a former British protectorate about the size of Texas, has a population of 1.5 million. The standard of living is somewhat higher than other African nations, thanks to the discovery of diamonds in the 1960s. The climate is mostly arid. Religion is a mix of indigenous traditional faiths and Christianity. Setswana is the native language; English, the official language, is spoken at the university.
The challenge for the University of Botswana is not unlike that facing Schaffer Library-to enhance its access with limited resources. “It takes money to be online,” Gerhan says. “The hardware and some of the subscription resources are expensive while other electronic documents are free. I'm interested in the role that electronic technology plays in libraries internationally and how it will level the playing field.”
Gerhan says he expects to learn things in Botswana that will help him in his role as head of reference services in Schaffer Library. “That's the benefit for me and Union,” he says. “But more than anything, I aim to train new librarians in a changing world. For all I've been given, I want to pay something back.”