Posted on Mar 3, 2009

The liberator of La Croix 

Albert S. Callan ’41 was a World War II spy and a born writer. A letter dated Aug. 17, 1944 written from “somewhere in France” candidly reflects Callan’s observations as a 23-year-old U.S. Army intelligence officer traveling in a foreign land.

“This is a hot, quiet Sunday in the heart of France. Yesterday, we moved forward again, thru beautiful farm country, where old chateaus, fine vineyards and beautiful girls were much in evidence,” Callan wrote. “If rumors I heard today are true, in the next few hours we may well break out our maps of Germany! France will be liberated, then across the border into Berlin and then home, I hope.”

The letter is one of many Callan wrote during World War II to family friend, Carrie Mason. The letters were discovered by the Columbia County (N.Y.) Historical Society about two years after Callan’s death in December 2005. Some letters were reprinted in an issue of the Columbia County History & Heritage magazine published in late 2007, soon after Callan’s widow, Virginia, and son, Steven, traveled to France for two ceremonies honoring Callan’s service in World War II.

At one ceremony in the small village of La Croix Sur Meuse, the family saw the unveiling of a plaque celebrating Callan as the “Liberator of a La Croix.” In late 1944, Callan conducted a lone spy mission to determine the German military presence in the village. Callan noted several tanks in the village and called in U.S. soldiers to liberate the town.

“We knew the ceremony being planned in La Croix would be special because Albert and I have remained in contact with three generations of the French family he befriended when he liberated it,” Virginia Callan told the Chatham (N.Y.) Courier in September 2007.

After serving in the war, Callan returned to Columbia County in upstate New York and joined the staff of the Chatham Courier, where, for nearly six decades, he acted as editor and publisher while also writing an unsigned weekly column called “The Man in the Black Hat.” A book of the collected columns is described: “As the stream of small-town life passes, the ‘anonymous’ chronicler (the worst-kept secret in town), records his wry, humorous, and often poignant observations.”

According to classmate Larry Schwartz ’41, Callan was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-living columnist. At Union, Callan was an athlete and scholar, he learned French and German, putting both to use in the U.S. Army, in which he enlisted just before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Callan stayed closely connected to Union, and was chair of the Class of 1941 65th ReUnion committee. At earlier ReUnions, he won the cup for best ReUnion theme, having hired a group of antique cars, to which he compared his classmates. At another ReUnion, he rounded up a wagon with a team of Clydesdales and barrels, to liken his classmates to vintage wine.

FOR MORE: Click here to read more on Al Callan ’41 and the Class of 1941.

Posted on Mar 3, 2009

HYMAN A. ENZER ’38

Co-editor

Episodes and Fragments: A War and Peacetime Memoir

Outskirts Press, Inc.

Hyman A. Enzer is an emeritus professor of sociology and anthropology at Hostra University and is co-editor of this memoir. Author Kurt Fuchel was one of 10,000 mostly Jewish children transported from Eastern Europe to Britain before the start of the Holocaust. In Episodes and Fragments, Fuchel recounts his years in England following the “Kindertransport.” Fuchel was sent from Vienna to a host family in England in 1939 at age 7. He reunited with his family after World War II and later immigrated to Long Island, where he and Enzer struck up a long friendship.

GARY PREVOST ’69

United States-Cuban Relations: A Critical History

Lexington Books

This book provides a broad analysis of trends and patterns that have marked the long relationship between the two countries. Authors Esteban Morales Dominguez and Gary Prevost argue that U.S. policy toward Cuba is driven largely by developments on the ground in Cuba. From the U.S. intervention at the time of the Cuban Independence War to the most recent revisions of U.S. policy in the wake of the Powell Commission, the authors demonstrate how U.S. policy adjusts to developments and perceived reality in Cuba.

STEPHEN J. CRIMI ’81

Performance in the Garden: A Collection of Talks on Biodynamic French Intensive Horticulture

Logosophia Press

The lectures of Alan Chadwick, a philosopher and horticulturist known for his eloquence, have been collected here by editor Stephen J. Crimi. In the late 1970s, Chadwick lectured on the connection between food and nutrition and the development to an authentic self. He also opposed modern agri-business and food production. Crimi lives in western North Carolina and runs a fiber and produce farm called Philosophy Farm. Crimi also gives classes and talks on biodynamics, Sanskrit, Vedic culture and sacred geometry.

WIL HALLGREN ’81

Broken Film

Outskirts Press, Inc.

Hallgren, an English teacher in New York City and veteran poet, offers a series of poems that “relate to one another in a way similar to a kaleidoscope,” according to the book jacket description. Hallgren earned a master’s degree in fine arts from Brooklyn College and was a founding editor of The National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side. In the collection, Hallgren offers a range of tightly edited poems; from a companion poem to singer Lucinda Williams’ “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” to a description of playing pick-up basketball in Manhattan after a night of drinking. In “Shooting baskets with a hangover,” Hallgren writes: “my body swaying, moving, jars against the stillness/such a morning would claim as due/ a dream lingering misty day/ when eyes would rather dream than see./ And the headache pounds.”

ELISSA D. HECKER ’95

Entertainment Litigation: Know the Issues and Avoid the Courtroom

New York State Bar Association

This easy-to-use guide to entertainment law was edited by two leading legal experts, Elissa D. Hecker and fellow attorney Peter Herbert. Described as a must-read for lawyers and others connected with entertainment law, this handbook explains in simple terms the issues that are fundamental to an artist’s career such as overreaching managers, contracts without stated performance obligations, copyright laws, and protection of the entertainer’s name, likeness, logo and reputation.

SHARON BOHN GMELCH

Former chair of the Department of Anthropology

The Tlingit Encounter with Photography

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Publications

Beginning in the mid-19th century, shortly after the invention of photography, the Tlingit of southeastern Alaska encountered early Russians and Americans. Based on extensive archival research, a close examination of hundreds of photographs, and oral-history interviews, Sharon Bohn Gmelch presents valuable insights on the motivations and reactions of Tlingit subjects to being photographed. She shows the ways the Tlingit incorporated photography and came to use it for their own purposes. This is the first book to explore the photographic imagery of the Tlingit during a critical period of change, from the 1860s through the 1920s.

Posted on Mar 2, 2009

In September 2006, after a 12-year hiatus, the so-called Bike Path Killer resurfaced in Buffalo, N.Y. and brutally strangled a 45-year-old mother of four. The re-emergence set off a public outcry and triggered the formation of a joint police task force to find the killer.

As part of that group, New York State Police Intelligence Analyst Betsy (Duchscherer) Schneider ‘93, then just two years removed from a drastic career shift from marketing research to criminal investigations, poured over police investigation files dating back more than two decades. That’s where she and others found Altemio C. Sanchez, a seemingly ordinary family man who had been mistakenly dropped as a suspect in the early 1990s. The Bike Path Killer, also called the Bike Path Rapist, had committed at least 15 rapes and two murders between 1981 and 1994 on wooded paths near Buffalo.

“There was a lot of information in the old files about where [Sanchez] worked, the hours he worked and physical descriptions and places that he had been seen that brought up some more questions,” Schneider said. “He was somebody that I had identified in looking through these files and I brought it to the attention of the lead investigator.”

Schneider earned an MBA from St. Bonaventure University shortly after graduating from Union and worked for nearly a decade as a marketing research analyst. In 2004, as a recently divorced mother of two young boys, Schneider spotted a job posting for a state police analyst and, after five months of training in Albany, was assigned to the FBI-Buffalo Field Intelligence Group.

“I just always loved police work, television mystery shows and crime books,” she said.

The story of the Bike Path Killer investigation, the Jan. 15, 2007 capture of Sanchez and the eventual exoneration of Anthony Capozzi, who was in 1987 wrongly convicted of raping two women, could be the plot of a crime novel. The investigation was covered by America’s Most Wanted, Dateline NBC and followed closely by Buffalo News reporter Michael Beebe.

After the Sept. 29, 2006 murder of Joan Diver, a drop of the killer’s sweat was found in Diver’s car. That sweat yielded a DNA profile similar to a man of Hispanic descent and was also matched to the Bike Path Killer’s genetic profile.

As the task force focused on Sanchez, Schneider and others saw more connections with similar rapes, attributed to Capozzi, in Buffalo’s Delaware Park in the 1980s. At that time, a rape victim identified another man as her attacker after seeing the man at a local mall. The woman recorded the man’s license plate number, which was traced back to Wilfredo Caraballo, who lied to police at the time, saying his car had been at home.

Schneider’s new research identified Caraballo as Sanchez’s uncle and led to a second round of police questioning. The uncle admitted Sanchez had been driving the car at the mall in 1981.

Days later, police found rape investigation kits connected with the Delaware Park attacks and isolated a DNA sample. So, by early January 2007, the only missing piece was a fresh DNA sample from Sanchez, which police obtained by collecting dinnerware Sanchez used at a local restaurant.

“It was a Sunday morning when I got the phone call that the DNA was a match. I just sat there and shook my head. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe we found the Bike Path Rapist,” Schneider said.

Today, Schneider lives with her sons, Gage, 9, and Brock, 7, near Buffalo. She and other task force members have since been honored by the state police, the Buffalo News and the New York State Bar Association for their work in capturing Sanchez and exonerating Capozzi. Sanchez is serving a life sentence at Clinton County Correctional Facility and Capozzi was released in April 2007 after 20 years in prison.

In looking back on the task force work, Schneider cites writing, research and presentation skills learned in graduate school and from Professor Byron Nichols in “Moral Dilemmas of Governing” seminar course.

“I had to present the connection and why he was a suspect of interest. You definitely have to be able to articulate that to a group of investigators. You don’t want to be blabbering on and on. You want to do it concisely and convincingly,” Schneider said.

Schneider is also part of a family with deep Union roots. Her father David Duchscherer ’67 owns an engineering and architecture firm in Amherst, N.Y. and her brother, Eric Duchscherer ’90, is the director of Residence Life at SUNY Potsdam. Schneider’s grandfather Philip Duchscherer ’39, great uncle Henry Duchscherer ’36 and great grandfather Charlie Duchscherer, Class of 1911, were Union men.

“Other law enforcement people have come up to us and said Betsy was pushing them with the evidence they already had,” David Duchscherer said. “Without that, they may have gone in a different direction. She played a key role in capturing this guy.”  

Posted on Mar 2, 2009

After graduation, Tom Flynn ’69 was a young man with a passion for storytelling. Thirty-two years later, as a seasoned journalist, he watched the skyline-defining twin towers tumble to the New York City streets in tatters.

This emotionally grueling experience Tom endured on Sept. 11, 2001 has birthed a gritty and brutal, yet ultimately inspirational, epic poem called Bikeman.

The book was released by Andrews McMeel Publishing in September 2008. In the poem’s opening lines, Tom hops on his bike, following his reporter’s instincts and the sound of a screaming plane into lower Manhattan.

Tom, then a CBS News television writer and producer, became an impromptu correspondent that day and kept detailed reporting notes—notes he would look to when he began writing Bikeman several years later.

“I started re-reading Dante’s Inferno about the same time I was looking over my notes from the day I got through 9/11,” he recalled. “As it turned out, those two—Dante’s Inferno and my notes—ended up being travel logs to hell.

“My notes and this narrative form of poetry kind of worked together, and that’s how it ended up in the format it did,” Tom added.

Ann Flynn ’93 is proud of the 70-page poem her brother wrote and sees his unique personality reflected in it.

“In the poem, Tom says ‘curiosity is my muse,’” she said. “And I can remember him always being like that.

“If we were out to dinner at a restaurant, he would eat the meal and then ask our mother if he could go look around,” Ann continued. “He’d be in the kitchen talking to the chef or behind the bar talking to the bartender. He was always out there, always curious about people’s lives.”

Curiosity, in the case of 9/11, gave Tom memories he didn’t talk much about—even when he was writing Bikeman.

But he did show the poem to other people, like his daughter, Katie. For Katie, who was a senior at Princeton University in 2001, reading Bikeman was illuminating.

“It allowed me to see another side of him, a deeper, perhaps even more truthful side,” she said. “I think his decision [to write] was borne of the fact that this tragedy was a tragedy felt by many, and was perhaps so great a tragedy that he was physically unable to keep it inside. It needed an escape, a manifestation for him to work through it,” Katie said.

In a heart-pummeling and piercing section of Bikeman, Tom describes the people he saw die. They’re people whose memories will always be with him—not just because he bore witness to the ends of their lives.

Bikeman reads:

The fallen tower carries flame-consumed human remains.

They are the ashes of ashes to ashes.

Dust of the good, dust of the evil.

I breathe from a sea of the death air.

Who of them is within me,

baked in my lungs, seared in my mouth,

dredged in my ears and in my eyes?

Those who this morning were breathing,

hearing and seeing now rest in me.

I will carry them forever.

In composing Bikeman, Tom hopes he wrote a poem that speaks to something greater than what he himself endured.

“September 11 was an experience everybody had. It was going on live on TV,” said Tom, who retired in 2004 from CBS News after 30 years, where he spent several years writing for news anchor Dan Rather. “As such, I feel this is everybody’s poem. This is everybody’s story.”

Reflecting on chapters of his own story, Tom, an Albany, N.Y. native and English student during his tenure at Union, said he remembers his former professors fondly.

“There were some wonderful teachers, some of the English teachers were great,” he recalled. “They taught me things that I still have, that I still remember.”

Tom’s father, James Henry Flynn, Class of 1931, worked as commissioner of health in Troy, N.Y.

Looking toward the future, Tom plans to continue doing freelance work for the likes of CBS News, while splitting his time between homes in New York City and Cape Cod. He also wants to continue telling stories.

“I’m writing, but it’s not poetry,” he said with a laugh. “I wrote my wife a poem when we got married 35 years ago, and then I didn’t write another until this one.”

For more: Click here for more on Bikeman and Tom Flynn '69.

Posted on Mar 2, 2009

For Joseph James ’69, the Purpose Prize is aptly named. The $100,000 national prize given last December honored his ongoing work in South Carolina but also reflects the driving purpose behind his career.  

Dating back to his days as a one-time chemistry student at Union and continuing through his 35-year career in economic development, James has been inspired by the Rev. Martin Luther King’s vision of equal rights and economic advancement for African Americans.

James talked about King’s legacy in a 1996 Union College magazine profile. And he cites it again in a three-minute video made by Civic Ventures, a San Francisco think tank that gives out the Purpose Prize.

“I guess it was in my junior year [that]Martin Luther King was killed, at a time when he was working on the economics of being a free person,” James recalled. “It became very clear to me that, although I loved science, I didn’t want to spend my life in a lab. I wanted to be involved with the community, particularly on the economic side.”

The prize is given each year to five Americans over 60 who are working to solve society’s biggest challenges. James was honored for his economic development initiative, “The Greening of Black America—A Rural Development Opportunity,” which is focused on North Carolina and South Carolina.

In 2002 James left his work in economic development in suburban Washington, D.C. and moved to Columbia, S.C. to take a job with the state’s Commerce Department. By 2004, James saw that by shedding the hindrances of state bureaucracy he could have a broader impact on the African American farming community. He left his job, formed the Corporation for Economic Opportunity, and has since helped lead efforts like the South Carolina Biomass Council that encourage farmers to produce oil seed crops like sunflower, sesame and canola seeds to produce “green” products like biodiesel fuel.

“Rural communities now have assets, like farmland and forests, that are going to be in much higher demand. As we all rush toward that resource, the challenge becomes that we make sure that we do it in such a way that we are lifting everyone up instead of trying to get around them,” James said.

The “Greening of Black America” project aims to connect black farmers directly with urban consumers via efforts like food markets and to boost income by helping farmers crow crops to sell in the bioenergy market.

Beyond his nonprofit work, James has launched a for-profit company called Agri-Tech Producers. The company has recently secured an exclusive license to manufacture a machine, designed at North Carolina State University, that can convert biomass like wood chips into a more energy dense, dry and more valuable fuel or feedstock. This mobile torrefaction machine could reduce transportation costs and help farmers leverage the emerging energy value of their crops. James’ new business venture has rekindled his love for pure science.

“My dream when I began attending Union was to be a scientist. After Dr. King’s death, I devoted myself to economic development, but I have always held a high regard for science and wanted to get back into it. It’s great now to be able to do both,” he said.

For more: Click here to read a 1996 Union College magazine profile of Joseph James '69.