Jim McCord introduces students to cultural icons from their parents' era
I've never gotten those Dylan songs out of my head,” explains Professor of English Jim McCord, commenting on one reason for designing Union's first junior seminar, “Dead Heads, Talking Heads, and Singing Heads: America's Countercultural Revolution, 1955-75.”
The seminar, which explored a period of extraordinary social and artistic ferment in America, was a team-taught course in cultural history. Participating faculty included Andy Feffer, and Bob Wells, of the History Department, and Peter Heinegg, Hugh Jenkins, Bonney MacDonald, Harry Marten, Carolyn Mitchell, Ed Pavlic, Jordan Smith, and Ruth Stevenson, all of the English Department.
On the first day of class, McCord asked students to write for five or ten minutes about why they had signed up. Some admitted to being just curious, some were fascinated, some had heard about the period from their parents, their high school teachers, films, and, not surprisingly, music.
The interdisciplinary seminar looked at American and British literature, film, and music from what came to be called the Beat Generation through the Nixon Presidency and the Vietnam War.
There were personal, social, and political texts on artistic, racial, economic, governmental, and international affairs.
The students read Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, Martin Luther King, Eldridge Cleaver, Joseph Conrad, Gary Snyder, and Robert Pirsig.
They listened to John Prine, Phil Ochs, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, The Doors, the Who, and, of course, Bob Dylan.
And they viewed films such as Rebel Without a Cause, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Woodstock, Easy Rider, and Apocalypse Now.
“It's fascinating to look back now and see how that moment of history holds up,” says McCord, who lived through it. “It was such a dynamic time-so animating and energizing, so wonderful and so frightening. Time has kind of validated this. The country seems ready to look at this period again, which inevitably happens after twenty or thirty years go by.”
Around the time Ferlinghetti and Rexroth were hanging out with Ginsberg and Kerouac at City Lights bookshop and bars in San Francisco, McCord was working the graveyard shift on the truck docks in the same city. It was summer teamster work that paid well and that he thought of as gritty urban Romantic. He remembers driving his convertible around the city during his lunch break, at four in the morning. He'd been across the country three times by the age of nineteen, traveling just for the sake of doing it-by freight train, by bus, by car, by bicycle, by thumb, by plane. He reflects, “Unlike today, when kids worry about getting jobs, I felt I could do anything.”
McCord was a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the 1960s when the local Bank of America branch was burned down. “No police or firefighters were on the scene-they'd been taken by surprise, so there were vicious recriminations later, a lot of face to save. I remember walking by the bank afterwards
-it was gutted. UC Santa Barbara was a very mellow, easygoing place. I don't remember a disturbance on campus, but I do remember that classes were suspended for two or three days. And I remember seeing riot police with those depersonalizing helmets-you couldn't see their eyes.
“Nothing in today's students' experience can approach the dissatisfactions we felt,” he says. “They acknowledge this and say they shouldn't be as apathetic as they are. They know they're protected, privileged-that, in a way, the powers that be have muted or managed to diffuse a lot of their discontent. But down the line, they believe things will change, that conditions are getting worse.”
McCord's style of teaching is well suited to the spirit of the seminar format, with its emphasis on independent discovery. “My notion of teaching is exchange,” he says, “not presenting myself as an authority. This is my attempt to make class a community exploration; the real challenge is to engage, engage, engage.”
The students worked in small groups, selecting, for example, a handful of scenes for discussion from a movie. They were charged not with summarizing but with thinking about, interpreting, and criticizing. As the seminar went on, some of the major themes that emerged were freedom and repression, conventions and myths about the West and machismo, conformity and the marketplace, and styles of writing, moviemaking, and music.
Jack Cole '04 talked about the West as “more than just a landscape; it's idealized as a place of endless possibilities.” Added Jason Tucciarone '05, “Our vision of the West is embedded in our social consciousness-we were all brought up with this.”
Rebecca Bonelli '03 pointed out how widespread cars had become (“They represented escape-a private space outside the home”) as the federal highway system and the rise of suburbs distributed people across the countryside.
Justin Gray '03 asked the students what they thought about the impact of Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness writing in On the Road: “Do you think the message of
the book would have been different if it had been written more traditionally?”
Krystalle Campo '03 responded, “The book breaks from the set ways of society. Writing in another style would have taken away from the message.” To Cole, the book was like a moving car-“like you're literally on the road as you read. Picking up the book in the middle is like getting back in the car.” And Tucciarone said that the style gives a “sincerity and truthfulness to the message. Finely tuned prose, like Scott Fitzgerald's, wouldn't give the same feel.”
The writing style was undoubtedly influenced by jazz, McCord said. “The philosophy of the Beats paralleled that of jazz-free-flowing spontaneity, going with the flow, seeing where the music, or the road, takes you.”
The key concept for the Beat Generation, observed Tucciarone, was detachment
-detachment from a society that had become conformist, fear-ridden, intimidated by the Red Scare, the Cold War, McCarthyism. There was a huge feeling of threat beneath a conformist 'Ozzie-and-Harriet' life.” Religions experienced increased membership, “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1956, and “In God We Trust” was added to U.S. currency.
Added Gray, “America became transfixed by the 'large blue eye' in their living rooms-as Kerouac referred to television.” Gray, an English major, says he's always been interested in the Beat Generation, and is planning to do his thesis on it. For him, finding this course “was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
McCord pointed out parallels between the 50s and the past six months in American history-“a renewed emphasis on family values, and imagining the evil of those who don't live the way you do. These preoccupations are to some extent cyclical.”
Acting outside the box, and the price of waking up, were themes as the class moved into the 60s and 70s and a discussion of the movie version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And freedom was the central topic in the discussion of Easy Rider.
In one session, Professor
of History Andy Feffer gave students a sense of the evolution of folk music, particularly in the 60s. “It was very context dependent, and very dependent on folkloric transmission
-from different people,
different settings, and so on. Listeners were not just consumers of music but participants in an event. Folk music was used to persuade, make an event into a ritual, give people a sense of belonging.”
Students had to write a
final essay from among a list of categories, most proposed by the students themselves, including Freedom: Ideal, Possible, Illusion, Delusion, Joke?; Depiction of Women in Books, Films, Songs; The Passion to be Different; Rebellion vs. Conformity; Influences of the Civil Rights Movement; Drugs in Films, Books, Music; The Highway as Opened and Closed Road; Bob Dylan's/
The Beatles'/The Grateful Dead's Impact on Society and Music; Psychotherapy in the 50s and 60s.
To cap the seminar, the
students put together an exhibit, titled “Countering Culture: The Beat Generation and Beyond,” which was featured in Schaffer Library in May and June. The artifacts came from Special Collections, with commentary provided by the students. One day in June, a youngster with a skateboard under his arm stopped by and lingered over the cases filled with Beat Generation memorabilia. “Wow,” he said, “this is great stuff!”
Proof of William Faulkner's observation: “The past isn't over. It isn't even past.”
Gathering artifacts and providing their own commentary, the students in the “Deadheads” seminar put together an exhibit in Schaffer Library that was open to the public in May and June.
Jason Tucciarone '05 described Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums as “a story of kids, bounded by Zen, rebelling against convention and conformity,” adding, “The Beat Generation was an antebellum period in the counterculture movement of the 60s, but this novel, more importantly, inspired the 'rucksack revolution.' ”
Jack Cole '04 wrote of On the Road, “Much good counter-cultural writing comes from confusion and pain.”
Justin Gray '03 reported that Allen Ginsberg “composed the poem 'Wichita Vortex Sutra' on the road in a Volkswagen bus around Wichita, into an Uher tape recorder given to Ginsberg by Bob Dylan.” (The book bears an inscription written by Ginsberg: “For Jim McCord/
December 1, 1978. My oratory advances on your vaunted Mystery.”)
Julia Maher '03 concluded her
commentary of Ginsberg's “Tear Gas Rag”: “He believed himself to be a prophetic poet along the lines of William Blake and Walt Whitman, and as a gay, Jewish man who came of age in the 1940s, wrestled, as Whitman did, with being different from mainstream society.”
In his remarks at this year's Commencement, President Hull noted that college presidents love to stand up at graduation ceremonies and tell students how far they have come in their years on campus, and how much lies ahead of them.
In that spirit, here is a selection of what members of the Class of 2002 heard in June:
Jeff Greenfield, political
analyst who received an honorary doctor of laws degree:
Here is what those of us on the far shore know that would be very helpful for you to know now. If you spend this one-way journey on a job you do not like because it is important, because it will make your parents feel proud, or because it is what your peers expect of you, no one is going to come around at your retirement party and say, 'Guess what? Now you get to do what you really want to do.'
If you do not believe me-and that's possible, I work in television news-do yourself a favor. Invest as much time thinking about the rest of your life as you would, say, in buying a new computer. Call up an adult you really admire and invite them to lunch. Ask them what they most regret about their lives. I can almost guarantee that they will tell you it is the chance they did not take, the job they did not quit, the love they did not pursue, the adventure they turned down because it took them off the path they somehow felt they had to follow.
It is certainly within your power to cut yourself almost completely off from the outside world. To respond to the very real threats we face by turning inward. And to resent the hard truth that your lives are likely to be less secure, less comfortable, less affluent, even less safe than you or your parents would have thought eight and a half months ago.
But if you turn off the TV and the CD and the VCR and the PC and the DVD and the DSL, and you find these links to other people, you'll make a river cleaner, a neighborhood safer, a family stronger, a town more prosperous. On these stages great and small you will make the world a little better, and you will make your lives incomparably richer.
And decades from now, when you stand on this far shore, it can be true that the only big regret you will have about your life is that there wasn't a whole lot more of it.
Leah J. Nero, senior class speaker:
Sometime between orientation and yesterday, we changed so gradually that we didn't notice-into scholars, interns, artists,
volunteers, scientists, teachers, filmmakers, researchers, and world travelers; into roommates and friends and ourselves. I had wondered if it were too late for anyone to change the world any more, and then I realized you can. You already have. So, we did find some answers here after all, along with many more questions.
I have learned this:
Life is fleeting and goes by faster than four years at Union, faster than the October leaves on Library Lane, or sunny May afternoons on porches, or the trolley when it's not stopping for you. Time is quick, so we must live every day with courage, with tenacity, and with the vivacity to smile. Rather than lament the passing of days, we must fall in love with this day. We must always be curious and seek knowledge-but with the wisdom to discern which lessons to carry with us. Long after we may not remember the name of our Gen Ed science class, or precisely what our psych experiment was really about, or the subtle difference between two art history slides, we will remember each other and what we discovered here about people. About ourselves.
President Hull:
Certainly, Union has held graduation ceremonies when our nation has been at war. From the War of 1812 to the Civil War, from the Great War to World War II, from Korea to Vietnam, our graduates have left this quiet haven knowing that their country may call on them to do battle and that their society would need them.
Yet, never before have we faced the challenge before us today-the challenge of combating a cowardly, secretive enemy without relinquishing our basic freedoms. September 11, 2001, was indeed a dark day in our history, and its aftermath-an aftermath that includes a continuing threat to our well being-will affect all of us for years and years to come. In this challenging time, it gives me a special sense of satisfaction and pride to send you out from Union. You now possess, as the result of your efforts and the people at Union who helped you, the skills to do whatever you wish. But if you have the ability to make a good living, you also have the responsibility
to live a good life. I urge you to do so-for your cities, states, nation, and world-and for yourselves.
A gender note
This year's Commencement marked thirty years since women received degrees in the College's first coeducational class. Some gender notes:
Twenty-six women received degrees in 1972 (a little less than half of this year's 507 bachelor degrees and 136 master's degrees went to women).
The Commencement speaker in 1972 was Ruth M. Adams, the president of Wellesley College; it was the first Commencement speech at Union by a woman.
The valedictorian was Mrs. Paula Maras Frost, the first woman valedictorian.
According to the College's alumni records, job titles for the women members of the Class of 1972 include accountant, attorney, biology teacher, college administrator, editor, educational consultant, photographer, puppeteer, and software engineering manager, among others.
The first woman to receive a Union degree was Florence Buckland, who earned a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1925.
A sign of the times
This year's graduating class included at least two students who turned down job offers in finance for public service jobs.
Adam Cappel, an economics major from Oswego, N.Y., who graduated summa cum laude, rejected a $55,000 a year offer to analyze fixed-income securities, and Neil Routman, a managerial economics major from Prairie Villege, Kansas, rejected a Boston finance job that would have paid in the $30,000 range.
Instead, Cappel will work for $100 a week at AmeriCorps, a network of national groups that performs services such as disaster relief, inner-city tutoring, and building affordable housing. Routman will teach English in Korea and hopes to join the Peace Corps to teach business skills in North Africa.
Both say September 11 had an impact on their decisions.
“It's definitely hard to turn down that money, especially in such a bad job market,” Cappel said. “But at the same time I have to ask myself, 'Will I be glad I took that job?'”
For Routman, his choice was one of trying to “help form relationships and bonds between countries that should have relationships.”
Their decisions reflected national trends. AmeriCorps saw a seventy-five percent increase in online applications over the same period last year, the Peace Corps reported a thirty-nine percent increase in inquiries, and Teach for America, which recruits graduates to teach in a public school, nearly tripled its number of applicants.
Honors
The valedictorian this year was Farhan Javed Khawaja, a biology and sociology major from Vero Beach, Fla., and the salutatorian was Jessica Erin Cook, a history major from Milford, Conn.
Khawaja did his senior thesis on how a lack of health insurance affects the relationship between patients and doctors, hospitals, and clinics. Cook's thesis described the challenges faced by Martha Bradstreet, one of the first single women in the early nineteenth century to pursue her property rights.
They were two of the eighteen students who graduated summa cum laude. There were fifty-one students who received their degrees magna cum laude, and another eighty-eight graduated cum laude.
From the Class of 1952
(collected at ReUnion):
“It is not called commencement for nothing. Your real education has just begun. Union prepared us well for this education and we know it has done the same for you. Go forth and do well.”
“Don't be afraid of change-embrace it.”
“Search hard for what you like to do and don't stop until you find it. Only then will you be successful.”
“Always cherish the time you spent at Union and the friends you made here.”
“Keep a journal to record your thoughts and experiences, and stash it away for 50 years. It will be priceless.”
“Look at learning as a continuing process. Move on to make new and exciting discoveries about life, others, and yourself.”
“Share your learning through your work and service to all.”
“Don't expect to discover your career path based on your first job offer. Stay flexible and keep your long-range goal in mind.”
“Always remember the law of reciprocity-what you give will be returned to you
many fold.”
“Be aware of the passage of time.”
“Flexibility is an essential and beneficial
part of life. Patience is a virtue. Persistence
is paramount.”
“It's never too early to give back to your
community as you work at making a success of your life.”
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
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
Frank Milillo
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
Jordan Smith
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
David Gerhan
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.”
The College web site has added information that showcases some of the distinctive trees on campus.
Located at www.union.edu/Trees, the site provides
a “virtual tour” of some of the campus's arboreal
treasures. By selecting from more than thirty trees on the tour, users can see a photograph of the tree and read about its history, thanks to college arborist Paul Freemantle. Some of the trees were planted shortly after the College moved to its present location in 1812. Among the older trees are a white oak just north of West College and some black walnuts along Library
Lane believed to have been planted by Eliphalet Nott.
Also included on the site are brief descriptions of the history of the College grounds, a checklist for birders, and links to related information.
Some other sites recently added to the College's
web presence include:
The Mandeville Gallery site (www.union.edu/Gallery) has been completely overhauled with an exciting, fun new look. A listing of exhibitions from the last several years is included, as well as selections from the current exhibition. More mundane details, such as gallery hours and directions, are also included.
A “President's Welcome” (www.union.edu/President) now greets visitors to the Union website. In addition to a welcoming message from President Hull, the site includes many of his recent columns from this magazine as well as links to recent major Union initiatives.
Our “Virtual Admissions Counselor” (www.union.edu/Admissions/) is a new online
service that gets prospective students the information they need immediately. A simple question box on the Admissions home page asks prospective students to enter a question-such as “What is the average financial aid package at Union?”-and receive an immediate answer. For more than 100 of the most commonly-asked questions in admissions (or any variant thereof), the “virtual counselor” has an immediate, accurate,
complete answer, with links to more information. Beyond its benefit to busy prospective students and
parents, it has the added internal benefit of reducing the number of e-mail inquiries. Several hundred prospects used the “information on demand” system within the first week of its launch.
Stanley G. Peschel '52, of Pawling, N.Y., an entrepreneur whose gifts to the
College made possible the Stanley G. Peschel Computer Center, died March 29. He was seventy-one.
A native of Hudson, N.Y., he studied electrical engineering at Union. After college and service in the Army during the Korean War, he went to work for his father's small electrical products firm. In 1962, he founded Hipotronics (an acronym for High Potential Electronics) in Brewster, N.Y. Starting with one employee in a building that had been a former chicken coop, he applied his years of high voltage experience to a new line of insulation test equipment. Within a half dozen years, Hipotronics was on its way to becoming the country's leading designer and manufacturer of high voltage test equipment.
Peschel sold his stake in Hipotronics in 1982, but soon founded High Voltage, Inc., of Copake, N.Y., which designs and builds lightweight, portable testing equipment for electrical utilities and manufacturers. A profile of him in Forbes magazine in 1983 described him as a “classic entrepreneur and tinkerer” who landed one of his first contracts after constructing a prototype from coat hangers. He once credited his success in design to Union's machine shop foreman, Walter Mathias, who “taught us to be machinists and gave us a practical education in designing and building a product.”
As an undergraduate, he participated in WRUC and was a member of Psi Upsilon. He received an honorary doctor of science degree from the College in 1982 and was awarded an Eliphalet Nott medal posthumously at this year's ReUnion (the Nott Medal recognizes distinguished alumni for outstanding success in their professional lives). In addition to his earlier gift for the computer center, which was dedicated in 1975, he made a $2,066,000 gift to the College in 1998.
