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SUMMER 2017
Periodical Postage
PAID
Philadelphia, PA
and Additional
Mailing Offices
WATER JUSTICE
p7
DOGMA
p10
RESISTENCIA
p65
ISSUE
IV
500 College Ave.
Swarthmore, PA 19081–1306
www.swarthmore.edu
VOLUME
CXIV
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
YOUR SCHOOL AWAITS
SUMMER 2017
Celebrate what makes Swarthmore special for each of us
Garnet Homecoming and Family Weekend: Oct. 6–8
swarthmore.edu/garnetweekend
CREDIT
Curiosity
in this issue
9
M.I.T. TIME
Science and Stories
Bringing liberal arts flavor
to STEM.
LAURENCE KESTERSON
by Josh Sokol ’11
MOMENT IN TIME
Celebrate Commencement
in full: bit.ly/SwatCom17.
Congrats, Class of 2017!
18
40
45
FEATURES
FEATURES
CLASS NOTES
24 Ways to
Look at a Fish
Song of the Heart
Alumni News and
Events
On assessing everything
anew through the limitless
lens of the liberal arts.
Through music, finding
harmony with one
another—and within.
by Elizabeth Slocum
by Jonathan Riggs
28
The Space Between
2
by Jonathan Riggs
Nathan Graf ’16
Co-taught interdisciplinary courses reveal what
Swarthmore’s all about.
32
American Tiger
Thousands of captive
tigers in the U.S. in private
homes and roadside zoos
are caged proof of a society
gone haywire.
by Kate Campbell
DIALOGUE
Editor’s Column
Letters
Community Voices
Rewind
Dick and Gay Sise
Grossman ’65
Books
Global Thinking
Marcela Escobari ’96
9
COMMON GOOD
Alicia Wilson ’96
Emily Robbins ’07
72
SPOKEN WORD
Eric Jensen and
Pam Shropshire
WEB
EXCLUSIVES
BULLETIN.SWARTHMORE.EDU
PARTNERSHIP POWER
Read interviews with interdisciplinary faculty collaborating to
co-teach creative courses.
THE RIDDLER
Read about Craig Williamson’s
thrillingly new Old English translations.
FISH TALES
Dive into expanded interviews
with our ichthyological experts.
Swarthmore Stories
Learning Curve
STRIPES
Liberal Arts Lives
INVENTION CONVENTION
Eleanor Glewwe ’12
ON THE COVER
Cleared art and photography by
Adam Summers ’86
Profiles
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot ’66
Zack Wiener ’12
Earn yours online with more
tiger-riffic extras.
Browse a Design & Sculpture in
the Digital Age student gallery.
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
1
dialogue
EDITOR’S COLUMN
LETTERS
HOW DO YOU LOOK AT A FISH?
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN
Editor
Jonathan Riggs
Managing Editor
Kate Campbell
Class Notes Editor
Elizabeth Slocum
Designer
Phillip Stern ’84
Photographer
Laurence Kesterson
Administrative/Editorial Assistant
Michelle Crumsho
LAURENCE KESTERSON
Editorial Assistants
Cody McElhinny ’17
Eishna Ranganathan ’20
BLIND OR SIGHTED, artist or engineer, ichthyologist or “icky!” apologist,
each of us has a different answer. What unites us all is our ability to do more
than look, but instead to see. Empathetic curiosity is the theme of this issue—
and, perhaps, the most universal Swarthmorean trait.
So let’s swim on together, an endlessly diverse school, looking at our shared
world of wonders, fishy and otherwise, to ultimately see ourselves. —JR
FROM THE BANKS OF CRUM CREEK:
“I see fish,
and all
Kate
animals,
as complex, living
pieces of art. Fish
always look busy,
but relaxed.”
“A lifelong goal of
mine is to see
Jonathan the Loch Ness
Monster—please
let her know.”
“My aunt
owns a sushi
Michelle restaurant
in Japan. I
grew up
watching very fresh fish
prepared into sashimi.
Sort of sad, sort
of delicious.”
“As a child
I loved
Elizabeth The Little
Mermaid—I’d
bind my ankles
with pool rings to swim
with a ‘fish tail.’”
“Pan-fried trout
with pecans
Laurence makes a
mighty fine
meal.”
“My first
summer job
Phillip
was shelling
shrimp at a
restaurant run
by the mob. Luckily,
I never heard ‘do this
or you swim with the
fishes.’”
Editor Emerita
Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49
bulletin.swarthmore.edu
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Email: bulletin@swarthmore.edu
Telephone: 610-328-8533
We welcome letters on subjects covered
in the magazine. We reserve the right to
edit letters for length, clarity, and style.
Views expressed in this magazine do not
necessarily reflect the opinions of the
editors or the official views or policies of
the College.
Send letters and story ideas to
bulletin@swarthmore.edu
Send address changes to
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The Swarthmore College Bulletin (ISSN
0888-2126), of which this is volume
CXIV, number IV, is published in October,
January, April, and July by Swarthmore
College, 500 College Ave., Swarthmore,
PA 19081-1390. Periodicals postage
paid at Philadelphia, PA and additional
mailing offices. Permit No. 0530-620.
Postmaster: Send address changes
to Alumni Records, 500 College Ave.,
Swarthmore, PA 19081-1390.
i
2
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
ly
H-UV
ks
th
e
nd
+ WRITE TO US: bulletin@swarthmore.edu
Papa Wheelie
I can relate to the report on Lynn West
Salvo ’71’s cross-country ride (“Life
Is Like a Bike,” spring 2017): In 1986,
with my 50th birthday approaching,
I wanted a novel way to celebrate.
When I mentioned that I was considering the big cross-country, two of my
kids volunteered to accompany me:
Dave ’83 and Brie ’89. (Brie was an
undergrad; Dave quit his job at Chess
Life magazine to participate.)
Starting out from Anacortes, Wash.,
we had the intent of ad-libbing—we
crossed into Canada at Sault Ste.
Marie, but soon found the densely
traveled two-lane Trans-Canada
Highway a serious risk and ducked
back into New York. Finishing the
ride at Long Beach Island, N.J., we
did the traditional dipping of the
front wheels into the Atlantic and
went to the hospital to have our
seats surgically removed.
We make no claim to any awards,
but treasure the memories.
—GENE GERTLER ’57, Prescott, Ariz.
WANTED: ORAL HISTORY PROJECT PARTICIPANTS
©2017 Swarthmore College.
Printed in USA.
e c o-fri
“… but what do we see when we look at you?”
It thrilled me to read John Whyte ’74 describe the lastingly
transformative effect of a 1973 student-run course on homosexuality
and affirming presence of a gay movement on campus in the early ’70s
(“Heartfelt, Hopeful, Happy,” spring 2017). We are all indebted to Jesse
Ford ’73, whose stubborn vision created Swarthmore Gay Liberation.
Returning to Swarthmore after working for gay liberation in New
York City—Stonewall had happened only three years earlier—she put up
signs in Parrish, got a coffee pot, and went to see who would show up. In
October we did our first political “zap,” handing out Halloween candy as
“gay ghosts” under purple-dyed sheets with eyeholes cut out.
One of the first events we organized was a talk by Barbara Gittings, who
spoke about her activism on behalf of homosexuals that stretched back
to the 1950s. For the course John cites, we owe lasting thanks to Jeanne
Marecek, then an untenured assistant professor, who courageously agreed
to sponsor it. We drew up a syllabus, surveyed the library’s offerings, and
presented them with a list of books we demanded they purchase. You can
still find them, I hope, on the shelf—along with what was then the library’s
only gay-friendly book, Towards a Quaker View of Sex: An Essay by a
Group of Friends (1963). I remain proud and happy that my Swarthmore
transcript shows a course credit for “Homosexuality.”
I still have a mimeographed copy of the research paper I did on the
Stonewall Rebellion for my senior-year class on folk history—gay people were my “folk.” I quoted from that paper last fall when I delivered
Dartmouth’s 16th annual Stonewall Lecture. I owe my fluency to the work
we did in Swarthmore Gay Liberation, an organization that I hope now
may be more fully recalled in the history of LGBTQ life at Swarthmore.
—CHRISTINA CROSBY ’74, Middletown, Conn.
Printed with agri-based inks.
Please recycle after reading.
pr inted w
A Fish
SWARTHMORE GAY LIBERATION
in
McCabe Library hopes to record interviews with alumni active in the civil
rights movement from 1963 to 1967; they also welcome donations of related
letters, photos, pamphlets, and memorabilia. Email Digital Collections
Librarian Stefanie Ramsay: sramsay1@swarthmore.edu
REMEMBERING A FRIEND
“We mourn the tragic loss of Sam Jenkins
’19. His professors note his astute, ambitious academic work, as well as his ability
to integrate narrative, visual art, performance, animation, and game design in imaginative, compelling ways. A creative, joyful,
and gentle individual, he made a lasting impact on our community.”
—PRESIDENT VALERIE SMITH
+ FULL TRIBUTE: bulletin.swarthmore.edu
HERE’S TO THE REST OF US
I love reading Bulletin articles written by and about
amazing, high-achieving grads, but then I think
about all the others—the silent majority—who went
on to “regular” lives.
Disrupters change the world, but could we hear
from the ones who keep the world operating? Who
are coping? Who are living lives of simplicity? As a
member of the silent majority, I would love to see
you survey the alumni community for the “average”
Swarthmore student. Publishing their stories would
be illuminating and inspiring!
My Swarthmore education fills my life daily, from
deliberating over lettuce purchases (when I was
at Swats, we had none because of the boycott),
to walking away from a finance job dominated
by making the rich richer, to leaving a too-
conservative church. The list is endless.
—KATHY PEARCE GLEDHILL ’80, Little Silver, N.J.
Thanks, Kathy. Readers, the Bulletin belongs to
each of you, regardless of your résumé—it’s our
shared song of Swarthmore, and we would like
to include as many voices as possible. Talk to us,
“silent majority”: bulletin@swarthmore.edu
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
3
dialogue
COMMUNITY VOICES
PETER ARKLE
LEADING THE CHARGE
I
LEARNED about
To avoid the worst effects of climate
global warming back
change, the United Nations agreed
in grade school:
that the planet must restrict its global
With time, global
temperature rise to under 2 degrees
temperatures would
Celsius. To have a reasonable chance
increase, seas would
of meeting that goal, we must keep
rise, storms would intensify—and that
more than 84 percent of our fossil fuel
would be bad. As a child, I viewed the
reserves in the ground. Unfortunately,
polar bears’ plight as sorrowful, but
there aren’t many politically feasible
a problem a later generation would
policy options for that kind of swift
surely figure out.
and deep decarbonization
by
As a Swarthmore stuof the global economy.
dent, I discovered much
What to do?
more about the ways in
Placing a sufficiently
which fossil fuels conexpensive price on
tribute to human sufferextracting carbon is a
ing and death. I learned
rare policy solution that
about food and water insecurity that
can keep those reserves in the ground
will become a reality for many regions,
while holding bipartisan appeal. If the
from extreme permanent drought in
tax is high enough, fossil fuels won’t
East Africa, the Middle East, and the
be able to compete with renewable
western United States to submerenergy, and continued extraction won’t
sion of agricultural land in Bangladesh
be profitable. Even better, in models
and the Mekong Delta. I learned about
with a dividend to families, lowerocean acidification killing marine life
income people come out ahead, since
that tens of millions depend on for
wealthier people consume more
food. I learned about equatorial cities
carbon.
that will become uninhabitable when
Immediately after graduating, I
temperatures regularly exceed what
started work as Swarthmore’s climate
humans can survive and the forced
action senior fellow in the Office of
migrations and political instability
Sustainability to help bring the College
that these impacts will engender.
and higher education into the national
Indeed, the world pays a steep price
carbon-pricing dialogue. Swarthmore’s
for our extraction of fossil fuels.
nascent Carbon Charge program
NATHAN GRAF ’16
Senior Fellow
“The world pays a steep price for
our extraction of fossil fuels.”
4
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
provides a platform to educate and
engage the community on carbon pricing while incentivizing emissions
reductions right here on campus.
Beyond Swarthmore, we’re working
with other colleges and universities to
build awareness and momentum for
internal carbon pricing in academia
and elsewhere.
We’re also working with others to
advance carbon pricing on the national
stage, including David Gelber ’63, H’17,
who co-created the Years of Living
Dangerously documentary series on
the impacts of climate change. That
team partnered with the national
advocacy group Our Climate to create
the Put a Price on It campaign, which
aims to empower students and encourage higher-ed leaders to push for a
national price on carbon. President
Valerie Smith was the second signatory on their endorsement letter, and
she spearheaded efforts to encourage other college presidents to join as
well. (David created a video—bit.ly/
SwatCarbon—on our efforts.)
Even as one of the most feasible
solutions to climate change, enacting
carbon pricing is still an uphill battle.
To change the political landscape, we
need advocates using many strategies
from all sectors of society. We need to
make it clear to elected officials—and
everyone—that the climate is a priority and that carbon pricing is a necessary part of the solution. In many
ways, Swarthmore is taking leadership on this issue. You’re a part of that.
Visit swarthmore.edu/sustainability
to learn more or email sustainability@
swarthmore.edu.
NATHAN GRAF ’16 is Swarthmore’s
climate action senior fellow.
ANNE O’DONNELL
Swarthmore enters the carbon-pricing conversation
REWIND: GIVING GREEN
Supporting Swarthmore while supporting
sustainability
WE WERE friends for most of
our time at the Quaker matchbox, but dated only once. Luckily,
we got together at a party before graduation and we recently celebrated our
50th wedding anniversary, a year after
our 50th Swarthmore reunion.
We’ve been fortunate to build a life
and family together, but thinking about
our three granddaughters made us wonder:
by
Will the world in which
they grow up be anything like the world we
enjoyed?
’65
And so together, we
made choices to limit
the size of our footprint. We live in
a small home with solar panels that
make most of our electricity, including for our plug-in Prius. It’s a duplex,
which is more efficient than a single-family house, and it is part of an
intentional community—Heartwood
Cohousing, outside Durango, Colo. We
are surrounded by friends (almost like
dorm life!) and often borrow from a
neighbor if we run short of something.
Concerns about climate change, sustainability, and footprint size are very
important to us now, but they haven’t
always been. We didn’t give a second
thought to leaving the
heat on and the windows open while at
Swarthmore. But we
realize that resources
are limited and being
depleted much faster
than they regenerate—
the most obvious example being the
planet’s ability to deal with greenhouse-gas emissions.
We’re in our 70s now and probably won’t live to see many of the consequences of climate change, but we
DICK AND GAY
SISE GROSSMAN
want to make a difference with the
time we have left and the resources at
our disposal.
In addition to living relatively simply, we have been careful with how we
invest our money. For years, we have
shunned investments in armaments,
alcohol, and tobacco. More recently,
we divested from all fossil-fuel investments, and we have encouraged our
educational institutions, including Swarthmore, to do the same. In
fact, we helped distribute the orange
squares of cloth (the symbol of divestment) that so many of our fellow alums
wore at their reunion.
That’s why we were pleased to find
that Swarthmore provides donation
options that don’t touch fossil fuels and
support sustainability—primarily, the
President’s Climate Commitment Fund.
In addition to sending Swarthmore
students to international climatechange panels, it has also been used to
hire the College’s first climate action
senior fellow, Nathan Graf ’16.
Another option is The Swarthmore
Fund, where your gift supports this
year’s current expenses, so there is no
investment in fossil fuels through the
endowment.
Of course, there is the Fossil FuelFree Fund, established last year by the
Board of Managers. Unlike the school’s
general endowment, this endowment
fund does not invest in fossil fuels.
Donors may add to it with a gift of any
amount—there is no upper or lower
limit.
Finally, there are the Office of
Sustainability’s student leaders programs, which include two groups: the
President’s Sustainability Research
Fellows and the Green Advisors. Both
groups advance sustainability efforts
on campus by helping build protocols
and behaviors among students, staff,
and faculty that reduce our carbon
footprint.
We feel very strongly about this
cause and will continue our activism.
But even though we want to make sure
none of our donations go to investments
that could spell problems for the future,
it’s important to us, too, to support the
College that prepared us so well for
life—and brought us together.
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
5
dialogue
BOOK REVIEW
AUTHOR Q&A
PRESSURE DROP
POLITICAL H2O:
VERONICA
HERRERA ’03
by Joshua Ellow
LIFE ON A PEDESTAL is risky, especially for doctors who believe
they’re impervious to addiction. In the gripping Free Refills: A
Doctor Confronts His Addiction (Hachette Books), Harvard-trained
Peter Grinspoon ’88 confronts the prickly truth that, even while
healing others, physicians can fall short in recognizing their own
vulnerability.
What began as a way for Grinspoon to manage academic pressures evolved into a mindset that embraced drug use as a coping
strategy. The illness followed him as a husband, father, and primary
care physician until a keen-eyed pharmacist alerted the law to the
fact that Grinspoon was writing bad scripts. The walls of his secret
life collapsed and threatened to devour his family and career.
This unsparing, unforgettable autobiography of addiction,
denial, and recovery sounds the alarm for clinicians. Inspiringly,
Grinspoon describes how he found treatment, legal counsel, and
the way back to his life and work, coming to terms with shame and
uncertainty in order to heal. In sharing the truths of his story, warts
and all, he shows us that transformation is possible, honesty key,
and imperfection a constant companion—not an enemy.
by Michelle Crumsho
While conducting her field
research in Mexico, Veronica
Herrera ’03 fell in love with
the study of water. Tracing its
complicated flow through
candidates, voters, and a convoluted physical infrastructure, the assistant professor of
political science at the University of Connecticut detailed her
findings in Water and Politics:
Clientelism and Reform in
Urban Mexico (University of
Michigan Press).
JOSHUA ELLOW is Swarthmore’s alcohol and other-drug counselor
and educator.
How are water and politics linked?
Everything is revealed through the
development of a country’s water and
sanitation sector. You could read a
century’s worth of history in the story of
water: dictators, reformers, civil society
uprising, democratization, vote-buying,
struggles for equity and justice.
Did you make any surprising discoveries?
The extent of the disrepair of water
infrastructure and its public health effects throughout many Mexican cities.
I saw water pipes that were broken and
crisscrossed with sewage pipes. There
are similar problems in the U.S., too.
What is clientelism?
The exchange of material goods and
services for the vote. Water utilities can
demand that residents produce voter ID
cards when having their cisterns filled, or
distribute water rations during the week
of elections.
What’s the takeaway for readers?
Water access is determined largely due
to political considerations, so there are
two major political issues that need to be
overcome: creating political support for
investing in infrastructure maintenance
even if it’s not seen as “sexy,” and creating incentives to move away from clientelistic manipulation of water service to
a more universalistic public distribution.
Policy solutions, just like infrastructure,
need to be maintained over time in order
to be effective.
+ READ HER EXTENDED INTERVIEW
bulletin.swarthmore.edu
HOT TYPE: NEW BOOKS BY SWARTHMOREANS
Abby Hafer ’80
The Not-So-Intelligent
Designer
Cascade Books
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Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
Frustrated by scientists who
don’t disprove intelligent
design (ID) accessibly and
impactfully to the general
public, Hafer delivers her
best knockout punch in
this laugh-out-loud work.
Drawing on anatomical
design flaws reflecting the
messiness of evolution rather
than the meticulousness of a
Creator—like how men’s testicles hang outside the body,
vulnerable, while a frog’s are
safely inside the body—she
makes her deadly serious
point with a smile. “ID is not
a theory,” she writes, “it is a
political pressure group.”
Nancy Weller Dorian ’54
My Name Is Quarnig
CreateSpace
The love story between
Quarnig and Nancy Dorian
began with a chance meeting
at Grand Central Terminal’s
Oyster Bar in 1957; it ended
decades later with Nancy,
widowed, penning his biography. A testament to their
marriage and enduring bond,
to the life they built together,
and to the survival of the Armenian people, her book tells
the story of many through the
lens of one: Quarnig, whose
real-life journey is more epic
than fiction. “It’s an American as well as an Armenian
story,” she writes.
Jon Raymond ’94
Freebird
Graywolf Press
On the cusp of losing it all
in Los Angeles, the Singer
family is struggling. Anne is
a city bureaucrat tempted
to sell out; Ben is a Navy
SEAL suffering from PTSD;
Aaron is a teen aching to find
himself; and Grandpa Sam is
shaped by his experience of
the Holocaust. Investing his
novel with wry power, Raymond—also the screenwriter
of Meek’s Cutoff and HBO’s
Mildred Pierce—has authored
a dark, moving exploration of
the ways we shape each other
as part of the human family.
Mimi Hanaoka ’02
Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography
Cambridge University Press
Centuries ago, Persianate
scholars recorded history
by weaving dreams, myths,
and invented genealogies.
Hanaoka, assistant professor
of religious studies at the
University of Richmond,
interprets these ancient texts
with fresh eyes to “examine
these rich and mysterious
portions of early Islamic historical writing ... and offer a
new framework for considering them.” Her rigorous effort
transforms imagined histories into reliable sources of
identity and rhetoric from
the peripheries of Islamic
empires.
SUMMER 2017
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7
common good
dialogue
SHARING SUCCESS AND STORIES OF SWARTHMORE
GLOBAL THINKING
BEING THE CHANGE
She turns humanitarian theory into real-life practice
by Amanda Whitbred
MARCELA ESCOBARI ’96 wants
to eradicate poverty. But after two
decades in international development,
she knows it’s an ambitious goal. “It
will not have one solution,” she says.
“There’s no silver bullet.”
Escobari has spent her career
focused on how to make societies more
prosperous, attempting to put theoretical ideas into real-life practice.
Her experience reaches back to her
time at Swarthmore. “I was always
interested in social causes,” she says.
As a student, Escobari accepted an
internship in her home country of
Bolivia working with indigenous
communities.
“I was shocked at the inefficiency of
the nonprofits and multilateral organizations I was working with on the
ground,” she says. “Good intentions are
often not enough.”
That led Escobari to an unusual
first job for someone with the ultimate
goal of ending poverty: working as an
investment banker on Wall Street.
“I wanted to know how markets
worked and how the most efficient
organizations ran,” she says, “so I could
bring that rigor to these problems.”
Escobari applied her training soon
after, working with industries in developing countries and helping them
compete globally. Her work took her
to coffee farmers in Rwanda, tourism
operators in Colombia, and music producers in Jamaica.
When Escobari eventually became
director of Harvard’s Center for
International Development (CID), she
worked with some of the leading thinkers in the field, making their academic
ideas “action-orientated, practical, and
usable.” Under her leadership, the CID
expanded from a staff of three to 70
with a fivefold increase in its budget,
8
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
becoming one of the top international
development think tanks in the world.
“In 2016, I got a call out of the
blue from the Obama White House,”
remembers Escobari. “I have always
admired the values of this country and
jumped at the opportunity to serve.”
Following her Senate confirmation, Escobari was appointed USAID
assistant administrator for Latin
America and the Caribbean. She took
the approach she honed at Harvard—
bringing “rigor, data, and practicality”
to inform U.S. policy on Latin America
and guide her work in 17 countries.
Escobari’s approach focused on the
root causes of illegal migration—poverty and violence—and building relationships with Central American
countries to address them. She was
also at the table for major developments in Latin American policy, assisting Colombia in its peace process,
providing humanitarian assistance in
Haiti after the hurricane, and developing options to confront the political
and economic crises in Venezuela.
As a political appointee, Escobari
stepped down from her USAID role
with the change in presidential administrations. After working on the larger
organizational level for so long, she’s
ON
THE
WEB
MARCELA ESCOBARI ’96
Change-Maker
thinking about the ways our everyday
decisions can make a difference.
“If people see what’s at stake,” she
says, “they might be willing to make
different choices: how we consume,
how we invest, and what we ask our
politicians to do.”
Now a visiting fellow at the Brookings
Institution, Escobari is weighing her
next step. Whatever it might be, she
sees her work as a continuation of her
Swarthmore experience.
“The fervor and action orientation
that’s embedded in the culture of
Swarthmore—not just thinking good
thoughts but rolling up your sleeves
and doing something about it,” she
says, “that’s what’s needed today more
than ever.”
BUILD BRIDGES,
NOT WALLS
Attorney Jonah Eaton
’02 on challenges to
immigrant communities.
+ LISTEN
bit.ly/JEaton02
THE WORDS YOU
SPEAK BECOME THE
HOUSE YOU LIVE IN
Peter Schmidt shares
a literature professor’s
perspective on politics.
+ LISTEN
bit.ly/PSchmidt
PROMISE OR PERIL?
Professor Emerita
Aurora Camacho de
Schmidt and others
discuss the historical
and theological roots of
“sanctuary.”
+ LISTEN
bit.ly/SanctuaryForum
HELPING HANDS
Four graduating Lang
Scholars discuss their
community projects.
+ LISTEN
bit.ly/4Lang2017
“I have always admired the values
of this country and jumped at the
opportunity to serve.”
POWER OF THREE
Science and
Stories
by Josh Sokol ’11
photography by Laurence Kesterson
IN SPRING 2016, Janet Conrad ’85, Michelle
Tomasik ’07, and I co-created and co-taught an
unorthodox interdisciplinary class in the STEMcentric halls of MIT. With subject matter as broad
as physics itself—spanning the smallest subatomic particles to the chains of galaxies that fill
the universe at its largest scales—our goal was to
help students communicate science to the public
sphere with accuracy and verve.
You know: typical Swarthmore.
+ READ ALL ABOUT IT: bulletin.swarthmore.edu
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
9
common good
SIT. STAY. HEAL.
Illuminating Age
“Nobody in the past
200 years (or even
centuries before that)
has ever translated all
these things, let alone
into poetry,” Professor Craig Williamson
says of his new,
world-changing work.
“Something really
unusual has been done
here, something faithful and beautiful.”
+ MORE: bulletin.
swarthmore.edu
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
“AM I OLD YET?”
Jeanette Strasser Pfaff ’60 ponders that question
and more as a newsletter columnist for the Carol
Woods retirement community in Chapel Hill, N.C.
Her wry glance falls on the many aspects of getting
older and results in musings that are sometimes
funny, sometimes wistful, and often illuminating.
“My 60th college reunion is not far in the future,”
Pfaff notes in one column, featured at bulletin.
swarthmore.edu. “The month I finished my freshman year, the Class of 1897 celebrated its 60th
Reunion. They were old.”
Pfaff says that these writings have helped her
find her voice—and her place—in a community that
reminds her a lot of Swarthmore.
“When you first get to a retirement community,
you think you’re fitting into something that is fixed,
and that’s the way you feel when you’re a freshman,
too,” she says. “And then, gradually, you realize that
it’s always changing—and that you’re a part of the
change.”
—ELIZABETH SLOCUM
LAURENCE KESTERSON
ALICE HOLLAND
Last fall, the Worth Health & Wellness Center adopted a new staffer: Izzy, a cream-colored standard poodle puppy learning new
tricks to earn therapy-dog certification.
Animal-assisted therapy is an addition
to Swarthmore’s comprehensive wellness
plan. Students meet with Izzy one-on-one,
take her on walks, engage with her publicly,
and more—while Izzy lends a floppy ear.
“Something as simple as an adorable,
soft, fluffy dog can really help the community,” says Cheryl Donnelly, Izzy’s off-campus caretaker and a registered nurse at
Worth. “In a culture of rigor and stress, Izzy
provides an immediate boost to students’
well-being. She is always happy to see them,
as evidenced by her ever-wagging tail.”
“Reception across campus has been
great,” says Worth director Alice Holland.
“Izzy has already been so impactful in such
a positive way. It’s incredible to experience
the power of a puppy.”
—CODY McELHINNY ’17
Izzy engages with pup-arazzo Cody McElhinny ’17 in her first paw-sclusive.
10
CHECK IT OUT
Bibliophile Charles Miller ’59 is curating his legacy, book by book.
One Tome at a Time
I
MAGINE a library
of the 500 books that
mean the most to you.
Charles Miller
’59 is creating just
such a place, selecting his most cherished books and shipping them from Virginia to a nephew
in Arcola, Ill., who will turn a room of
his home into a noncirculating library.
The “Arcola Collection” will be Miller’s
intellectual legacy.
He’s drawing from a remarkable wealth of source material that
reflects the scope of his own journey—
after Swarthmore, Miller studied at
Germany’s University of Freiburg on
a Fulbright grant. He earned a Ph.D.
in government at Harvard and taught
at Clark College in Atlanta (now Clark
Atlanta University) and Princeton
University before landing at Lake
Forest College in Illinois, where he
spent the majority of his career teaching politics and American studies.
His own books in the collection include The Supreme Court
and the Uses of History (Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press,
1969), Jefferson and Nature: An
Interpretation (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1988), and Ship
of State: The Nautical Metaphors of
Thomas Jefferson, with Numerous
Examples by Other Writers from
Classical Antiquity to the Present
(University Press of America, 2003).
The Arcola Collection contains
many items with connections to
Miller’s Swarthmore years, including books by professors J. Roland
Pennock ’27 and Franz Mautner.
Miller describes Pennock’s seminars in political theory and public law
and jurisprudence as “the most influential college courses in my life” and
has archived his Democratic Political
Theory (Princeton University Press,
1979) for Arcola. From Professor
Mautner—who “taught with a gentle humor and a twinkle in his eye”—
he has selected the writings of Georg
Christoph Lichtenberg, a physicist
and aphorist who penned such pithy
phrases as “It is almost impossible to
bear the torch of truth through a crowd
without singeing somebody’s beard.”
The collection also includes works
by Swarthmore friends and classmates, among them Peter Schickele
’57, H’80’s The Definitive Biography
of P.D.Q. Bach (Random House, 1976);
David Porter ’58’s books and articles on texts from classical antiquity, author Willa Cather, and
pianist Eduard Steuermann; The
Roman Market Economy (Princeton
University Press, 2013) by Miller’s
freshman- and senior-year roommate,
Peter Temin ’59, an economic historian; and Maurice Eldridge ’61’s baccalaureate address from 2009, which
speaks to racial issues at the College.
His lifelong love of music is
also apparent in his choices. At
Swarthmore, Miller wrote the background score for three plays, among
them Tennessee Williams’s The Glass
Menagerie, and was a member of the
Madrigal Singers. He has archived several folksong books by Ruth Crawford
Seeger, a noted composer, stepmother
of folk singer Pete Seeger, and Miller’s
own childhood piano teacher.
Miller, who has prepared notes for
about 200 titles so far, does not miss
his favorite books after he mails them.
“I’m creating a small library. How
many people get to do that?” he asks.
“More importantly, I get to be with all
these books for the rest of my life.”
—ELIZABETH REDDEN ’05
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
11
common good
Honoring
an Inspiration
GUIDING LIGHTS
12
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
LAURENCE KESTERSON
The generosity of Eugene Lang ’38, H’81, shown here in the Dean Bond Rose Garden, flowered
on campus and off. “We all need heroes,” says Salem Shuchman ’84, a Board of Managers member
who was among the first class of Lang Scholars. “Gene is mine.”
grammar school, taught him that “the
only human being that merits the dignity of the adjective ‘human’ was one
who was creative, someone who added
something to the social condition of
the community.”
In 1996, President Bill Clinton
awarded him the Presidential Medal
of Freedom, saying that “hardly anyone has ever done more personally to
give people who didn’t have it, opportunity. ... We are all the beneficiaries of
Eugene Lang’s innovative vision.”
In 2011, Gene’s philanthropy and
legacy to Swarthmore were celebrated on campus in a symposium
that addressed social responsibility in the 21st century and artists as
agents of social change. Also present
were Gene’s children Jane Lang ’67
and Stephen Lang ’73, H’10, as well as
Jane’s daughter Jessica Lang ’92 and
Stephen’s son Noah Lang ’10. Lang
is also survived by son David and six
other grandchildren—Lucy Lang ’03,
Joanna Lang ’11, Ben, Dan, Grace, and
Jacob—and eight great-grandchildren.
In 2012, the College announced a
gift of $50 million, the largest in its
history, from Gene to make possible
the planned Biology, Engineering, and
Psychology Building. A critical aspect
of the College’s strategic plan, the project will help to extend connections
between the College’s engineering program and the other disciplines that
comprise a liberal arts education.
“Higher education in the 21st century will serve its students—and society—best if it focuses on knowledge
design, real-world problem solving,
and basic research,” he once said. “It is
deeply rewarding to be able to steward
Swarthmore’s strong commitment to
the creation of knowledge and the use
of that knowledge to improve the lives
of others.”
—PRESIDENT VALERIE SMITH
+ FULL TRIBUTE: bulletin.swarthmore.edu
The Onion’s satirical video where
a fictional Trump voter questions
his support for the president after
attending a “gender-fluid nonbinary poetry slam” at Swarthmore
(bit.ly/SwatOnion) caught the
attention of Marie Rousseau ’12.
“As a Swattie, I had to suppress a
grin,” laughs Rousseau, the founder
of Self-ish, a Parisian open mic for
women, trans, and/or non-binary
poets and musicians.
A year in, Self-ish is going
strong—more than 200 people
attend the monthly events.
“I’m so happy to be able to contribute to the queer feminist scene
in my hometown of Paris,” she says.
“It often revolves around either
activism or nightlife, so it’s nice to
have something in between where
artists can speak up and put their
work out there.”
— KATE CAMPBELL
LAURENCE KESTERSON
SPEAKING OUT
E
UGENE M. “Gene”
Lang ’38, H’81—entrepreneur, philanthropist, and chair
emeritus of the
College’s Board of
Managers—died peacefully at home
April 8. A giant in the world of education, a champion of the liberal arts, and
an acknowledged force in promoting
civic and social responsibility among
students, faculty members, and educational institutions, he was 98.
“Gene Lang’s gifts to Swarthmore
College were transformative, but his
legacy is more than financial,” says
current Board Chair Tom Spock ’78.
“Generations of students, faculty, and
staff have been shaped by Gene’s intellect and passion, and that’s a gift without a price.”
Gene gave hundreds of millions of
dollars to help thousands of students at
Swarthmore and around the country;
by establishing the “I Have a Dream”
Foundation, he inspired even more
students to pursue a college degree.
At Swarthmore, his decades of support established, matched, or made
possible 10 community spaces on
campus, including the Eugene and
Theresa Lang Performing Arts Center,
the Lang Music Building, and the fragrance garden named for Theresa, his
beloved wife of 62 years who predeceased him in 2008. He helped sustain
the College’s academic excellence by
endowing dozens of faculty positions,
fellowships, and scholarships.
Gene’s Swarthmore legacy is perhaps best represented by the more
than 200 current and past Lang
Opportunity Scholars who have completed projects, stewarded by the
Lang Center for Civic and Social
Responsibility, in more than 80 cities
in 31 countries.
Born to Hungarian immigrants in
New York City in 1919, Gene recalled
that his father, who never finished
AT SWARTHMORE’S 145th Commencement on May 21, President Valerie Smith
awarded honorary degrees to documentarian David Gelber ’63, philanthropist John
Goldman ’71, and actor-playwright Anna
Deavere Smith.
“I assume most of you aspire to a purpose-driven life,” Gelber told graduates.
“One of those can be to help save the planet
by finding real-world solutions to our
dependence on fossil fuels. Tough assignment. I wish you luck, wisdom, and the
strength to keep at it.”
“Life is uncomfortable, and life is rife
with change,” Goldman said. “I ask you to
be brave. I ask you to be bold. I ask you to
believe in yourself. And I ask you to relish
every step along the path before you.”
“Looking at the mission statement of
Swarthmore, I think you are, in fact, aware
of your connectedness, and of your responsibilities as a citizen,” concluded honoree
Smith. “There are no walls between you
and the rest of the world, unless you make
those walls. You are free to carry love yourself. I hope you will. Godspeed. Agape. Be
strong. Be new. Be you. Change stuff.”
+
EXPERIENCE Commencement and watch
all speeches: bit.ly/SwatCom17
SUBMIT YOUR NOMINATIONS
FOR 2018 HONORARY DEGREES:
news@swarthmore.edu
Honorees David Gelber ’63,
John Goldman ’71, and
Anna Deavere Smith.
Into the Grove
In 1940, Swarthmore was home to a freshman who would go on to
become the country’s leading crusader for artistic freedom.
Barney Rosset ’44 fought those battles not as a lawyer, but as a
publisher. After buying the tiny operation known as Grove Books
in the early 1950s, he published banned books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, knowing it would cost him dearly through years of
litigation to overcome anti-obscenity laws. (“Rosset liberated the
[publishing] industry,” read a recent essay in The New Yorker.
“He also picked up the check.”)
Rosset’s fascination with “obscene” books started when he
obtained a bootleg copy of Tropic of Cancer at Swarthmore and
earned a B-minus from Professor Robert Spiller on his essay
“Henry Miller versus ‘Our Way of Life.’”
Grove’s author list included Samuel Beckett, Malcolm X, Ho Chi
Minh, and the Beat poets. In 1968, the offices were bombed by
anti-Castro Cuban exiles angered Rosset published Che Guevara.
Though condemned in the 1960s as a “smut peddler,” Rosset
was honored in 2008 by the National Book Foundation as “a
tenacious champion for writers struggling to be read in America.”
Burdened by debt for years, Rosset finally had to sell a
controlling stake in Grove Press in the mid-1980s, and the new
owners squeezed him out. The New York Times reported that in
2012, “he died penniless, or close to it.”
He left behind an unfinished memoir, which was completed and
published last year as Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I
Fought Censorship (OR Books). In it, he reiterated his “long-held
conviction that an author should be free to write whatever he
or she pleased, and a publisher free to publish anything. I mean
anything.”
—MATT ZENCEY ’79
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
13
common good
LEARNING CURVE
LACROSSE
The women’s team won five
straight games, its best season
start since 2009; the men’s team
beat 15th-ranked Gettysburg on
April 8 for its first victory over
the Bullets since 1985.
FANTASY STAR
She creates worlds while improving this one
by Jonathan Riggs
LAURENCE KESTERSON
John Larkin ’17 won his 100th
career match in singles and
doubles April 29 against Johns
Hopkins; the women’s team got
its first national ranking from
the Intercollegiate Tennis
Association in a decade.
SOFTBALL
Accompanied by family and friends, Ernie and Matilda Prudente cut the ribbon. “It feels great
to know current and future players will play on such a nice baseball field,” Ernie says.
Building for the Future
by Roy Greim ’14
Sara Planthaber ’17 hit a home
run in her final collegiate game,
clinching a dramatic 9–8 win.
Kennedy Kings ’20 was named
the Centennial Rookie of the
Year; Kalli Segel ’20 and Emilie
Morse ’20 also received All-Conference recognition.
GOLF
Soon, PPR Apartments residents can
catch a Garnet baseball game from their
dorm. The new structure, which joins the
Pittenger, Palmer, and Roberts dormitories, will be combined with the Clothier
Field fence, allowing for a terrace in leftcenter and a lounge with a field-level view.
Also part of a project to enhance the
experience for all is a state-of-the-art
press box and seating area, constructed
and dedicated in honor of Swarthmore
coaching legend Ernie Prudente, who
recorded a program-best 216 wins on the
diamond from 1969 to 1995. The generosity of more than 100 donors contributed to
the press box, which houses new broadcasting equipment to provide high-quality
video to viewers around the world.
“We are in a position to impress potential student-athletes,” head coach Matt
Midkiff says, “by giving them an athletic
experience equaling the academic one
Swarthmore’s offered for over 150 years.”
That bright future translates to the
present: Garnet baseball finished just
14
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
one game shy of making the conference
playoffs with a relatively young team—the
35-player roster was composed of 25 underclassmen, including several impressive
freshman starters.
Pitcher Sawyer Lake ’20, who led the
team with a 2.50 ERA, was named the
Centennial Conference Rookie of the
Year and an All-Conference Honorable
Mention. Cole Beeker ’20 also received
an Honorable Mention, while Max Grullon
’20, A.J. Liu ’20, Kenji Yoshii ’20, Ryan
Warm ’20, and Jared Gillen ’20 saw significant time in the lineup.
This season, the classes of 2019 and
2020 combined for 75 percent of the
team’s runs and 70 percent of hits, but
the leadership of Ryan Burnett ’17, Steven
Matos-Torres ’17, and Wesley Fishburn ’17
was vital.
“They paved the way for success this
year,” says Beeker. “Losing them will be
difficult, but it’s time for us younger guys
to step up.”
At the Centennial Conference
Championship (CCC), the team
took second. Vamsi Damerla
’19 and Dan Altieri ’19 finished
top four. Jim Heller was named
Coach of the Year.
TRACK & FIELD
Andrew Jansen ’18 (hammer)
and Maggie O’Neil ’17 (hammer,
shotput, javelin) won CCC
silvers. Earlier this year, Jansen
shattered a 112-year-old College
record; his 43.99-meter hurl
here broke his earlier record.
Athletic or otherwise, did you
have a memorable Swarthmore
sports experience? Inspiring,
funny, emotional, delightful,
awful—anything! Please share:
bulletin@swarthmore.edu
NOT EVEN Eleanor Glewwe ’12’s parents knew how
seriously she took a certain hobby until she casually
mentioned how far she’d progressed in an Amazon.com
novel-writing contest.
“I said, ‘There’s a chance I might have to go to Seattle,’”
Glewwe remembers with a laugh.
Although she didn’t win that contest, she did secure a literary agent while at Swarthmore for her middle-grade fantasy
novel Sparkers.
The saga of an oppressive society ruled by magicians—
and how one non-magical young woman fights back to incite
a revolution—Sparkers was published during Glewwe’s second year as a linguistics doctoral student at UCLA to great
acclaim, both for its artistic and social merit.
“I didn’t set out to create explicit comparisons in the novel,
but it makes me humbled to hear readers draw parallels from
apartheid in South Africa to the Ferguson protests to Sovietcontrolled Romania,” she says. “Fantasy allows us to work
through real-life issues in a secondary world and see things
in a different, helpful perspective.”
For example, she was able to gain new insight into her
scholarly field when conceptual artist Glenn Kaino asked her
and a colleague for help with his alternate history project.
“He was doing an installation involving a crescent moon
automaton that would sing ‘The Internationale,’ the famous
socialist anthem, in a new kind of French spoken by the
descendants of lunar colonists,” she says.
The dialect she co-created (bit.ly/Glewwe) turned out so
well that Kaino also asked them to create a Martian English.
It’s all in a day’s work for Glewwe, whose second novel in
the Sparkers universe, Wildings, came out in November.
As she looks forward to life beyond grad school—and
her first entrée into the job market—she’s approaching it
MARY YEE
TENNIS
with the same self-composure she uses to tackle any creative challenge, like her recent acquisition of a hammered
dulcimer.
“I don’t know how to play it,” she says with a smile. “Yet.”
“There’s so much more interest now in fantasy
exploring diverse voices and creating diverse
worlds. I want to be a part of that.”
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
15
common good
LIBERAL ARTS LIVES
SARA
LAWRENCELIGHTFOOT ’66
THE ESSENCE OF MAMA BY TOLANI LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT
“In almost every place I talk about Growing Each Other Up, someone begins weeping,” says
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot ’66. “People recognize themselves in these stories.”
LIBERAL ARTS LIVES
CONSCIENTIOUS OBSERVER
She was inspired by the moment when the
teacher becomes the student
by Ryan Dougherty
16
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot ’66 thought
that her 10th book, the aptly named Exit:
The Endings That Set Us Free, would be
her last. But then a topic that had been
“simmering within” became No. 11.
“Just about all my work begins—and I
think this is true about most social scientists—with some very personal questions,
dilemmas, struggles, puzzles that I’ve
held on to for a long time,” she says of the
spark for Growing Each Other Up: When
Our Children Become Our Teachers.
The book begins with a conflict she had
with her adolescent daughter, from which
a friend guided her to a revelation.
“As soon as you get to the point of
thinking, I get it, as a parent, your children are on to the next developmental
moment,” she says. “Parenting requires
that we become lifelong learners.”
Social scientists have focused on
parents “being the ones who transmit the
knowledge and wisdom,” says LawrenceLightfoot, a MacArthur prize-winning
sociologist. But the empirical, lyrical
Growing Each Other Up examines the
ways in which children teach their parents, as roles and reciprocity evolve.
The book builds upon her pioneering
methodology of “portraiture,” which
blends art and science to create individual and cultural narratives.
Lawrence-Lightfoot credits the College
with enhancing her talents as a writer and
analyst and for teaching her how to ask
good questions. She continues to hone
these skills as a public intellectual and
writer, the Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard, a witness
and activist, and—of course—a mom.
So will book 11 be her last?
“I imagine there will be something else
that bubbles up within me that I’ll decide
I’m curious about and want to explore,”
she says.
ELENA JACKENDOFF
Sociologist
“It feels so important to say a Jewish student adviser at Swarthmore—Rabbi Jacob Lieberman at the time—was really helpful for a kid who didn’t
think he was really that Jewish,” says Zack Wiener ’12.
INTUITION
SPIKES
Faithfully, he found
his way
by Amanda Whitbred
WORKING on a master’s toward an
education Ph.D. at the University
of British Columbia, Zack Wiener
’12 thought he’d figured out what he
wanted to do with his life. “But I had
this sense of disturbance,” he says, and
the academic work wasn’t as fulfilling
as he’d hoped.
Feeling adrift after the death of a
friend, Danny Cramer ’12, and a move
from Malaysia—where he’d been a
Fulbright teaching assistant—Wiener
turned to “the one way that I knew how
to feel connected to things” by attending morning services at a Vancouver
synagogue.
“I had stepped away from religion
for a long time,” he says. “It was the
way I grew up, but it wasn’t necessarily
anything I wanted to do.”
Those synagogue visits eventually
became part of Wiener’s fieldwork
examining how individuals form religious identities through developing
prayer literacies. While there under
the guise of conducting qualitative
research, he says, “I wasn’t going to
stand in the room and not pray—that’s
not what you do.” The more time he
spent in prayer at services, the more he
felt a deeper resonance.
There were early clues—what
Wiener calls “intuition spikes”—that
his relationship to Judaism was changing. While in Malaysia, Wiener and
his roommate traveled 18 hours by
bus to Singapore where, while fasting all day in 95-degree heat, they
attended progressive Yom Kippur services. Wiener’s suggestion to attend
had been, he thought, for the benefit
of his roommate. And yet, “I remember thinking to myself, I didn’t know I
wanted this.”
When he graduated from
Swarthmore, Wiener thought the
“rich, vibrant, intellectual experience”
he valued could only happen by getting a Ph.D. and becoming a scholar in
the academy. Now entering his third
year at Reconstructionist Rabbinical
College, Wiener has embarked on a
more fulfilling path.
“I’m pretty joyous,” he says, “to have
gotten yanked out of academia by my
dumb intuition.”
ZACK WIENER ’12
Rabbinical Student
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
17
se
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Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
LAURENCE KESTERSON
by Jonathan Riggs
19
S
IX BLIND MEN,
so the story goes,
sought to define
by touch what an
elephant was. Each
offered a different
interpretation based on the body part
he felt: trunk, side, ear, leg, tusk, tail.
All were right, yet all were wrong.
Elephant-touchers all, we would do
well to remember this parable’s wisdom. According to the following community members, we can never be too
curious about the world around us;
we should never take anything in it
for granted, no matter how seemingly
mundane. It’s an excellent reminder of
the power of a place like Swarthmore,
where there are as many ways to look
at something—an elephant, a problem, the future, a fish—as there are
Swarthmoreans.
After all: The way we look at a fish
says little about the animal … but
everything about us.
ix blind elephants, so a better story goes, sought to
S
define by touch what a man was. “Flat,” they agreed.
1
20
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
4
“I respect fish enough not
to eat them—the way and
conditions in which they
are farmed in America are
pretty horrendous, and I’m
not optimistic about how they
are treated across the world, either,”
says animal-rights activist and vegetarian Daniel Paz ’17. “How can anyone think it’s humane to pierce a fish
with a hook, yank it out of the water,
then either kill it, wait for it to asphyxiate, or toss it back?”
2
3
Charles Harris ’59
coined “Like a fish
without a bicycle”
(bit.ly/CHarris59).
Why a fish?
HARRIS: Why a bicycle?
What do fish mean to you?
HARRIS: Dinner.
“Have you ever tried one of those little plastic fortunetelling fish that you put in the palm of your hand to tell
if you’re passionate or a ‘cold fish’?” laughs Russian
Professor Sibelan Forrester. “In fortune-telling,
astrology, tarot, dream interpretation, anything, the
fish has a ton of symbolism.”
Beyond literary and religious associations—she describes a
scene from the 19th-century Polish novel Quo Vadis in which a
character in ancient Rome secretly communicates her Christianity
by drawing a fish in the sand—Forrester sees fish swimming
through humanity’s collective unconsciousness.
“In tarot, fish may suggest a new relationship, new feelings,
something new—possibly a child or the idea of conception,” she
says. “It’s no surprise we see so much meaning in fish, especially
with fish being in the water and water often standing in for the flow
of the subconscious or of the emotions.”
5
LIEVAN VAN LATHEM, THE ENTOMBMENT, THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES; CARTOON: ELIZABETH VOGDES
“In the study of faith, Jacob
Neusner says everyone is ‘part fish
and part ichthyologist.’ That should be
true for all of our studies,” says Rabbi
Helen Plotkin ’77, director of Swarthmore’s
Beit Midrash. “While you’re studying something
from an objective standpoint, you’re also studying yourself.”
As a scholar of classical Jewish texts, she points to the
ultimate religious fish story: the tale of Jonah, who spent
three days in the belly of a giant marine creature.
“There’s a passage in the Zohar—a foundational text of Jewish mysticism from the 13th century—that asks, ‘What did Jonah experience inside that fish and how did it transform him?’”
she says. “It reminds me of the first time I saw a color TV as a
child and they were showing a Jacques Cousteau special.
What transformed Jonah—what transforms us—is seeing the complexity and beauty of the undersea world,
hidden from all, through the crystal eyes of a fish.”
Only by getting beneath the surface can anyone become completely engaged in their faith, their
studies, their humanity, she adds, an approach that
exemplifies the ideal Swarthmore seminar approach
she’s aiming for with the Beit Midrash.
“If the text is a fish, I want us to look at it together
with fresh eyes, full of questions, searching both
outward and inward,” she says. “There’s a line in the
Talmud that is the key to looking at a fish, looking at a
text, looking at ourselves: ‘Turn it over, turn it over,
everything is in it.’”
“I had never seen a tidepool before,” says Grace Farley ’17, who completed a summer research project on
anemone behavior. “Observing so many different critters living in them was magical.”
Fascinated by marine biology since the fourth grade, Farley wants to continue her studies. “People’s lives
and entire economies rely on our relationship to fish and aquatic creatures,” she says. “Better understanding them and the whole cycle of how the ocean works is crucial to appreciating and protecting it.”
6
“We’ve kept a tank for about 18 years,”
say Rowena Yeung ’88 and Thomas
Bouquet ’88. “About five years ago,
we restarted it with live coral, so it’s
always changing.”
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
21
“I didn’t think
of The L
ittle
Mermaid,” says
Linguistics Professor Donna Jo
Napoli, coauthor
with David Wiesner of the
graphic novel Fish Girl. “We
see the sea as infinite, a place
of enormous freedom and privilege, so to have a mermaid—
that glorious hybrid between
fish and woman—like ours
trapped in a glass box, what
could be worse?
“This is not the s tory of a girl
rescued through romance. This
is the story of a sea creature
finding—and fighting for—her
identity.”
10
LAURENCE KESTERSON
7
Powerful, odd, appealing: Fish
symbolism swims through
Swarthmore’s Peace Collection.
9
“I’ve always been
a fish guy,” says
biomechanist
Adam Summers
’86. “I’ve had an
aquarium since I was 4 and
spent all my summers in the woods, fishing.”
As associate director of the University of
Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories and Pixar’s
go-to ichthyologic consultant on Finding Nemo and
Finding Dory, Summers constantly looks to aquatic
animals for bio-inspired design.
He explores that intersection of art and science for
his visual series Cleared, where he photographs chemically bleached and stained fish specimens. (Exhibited at
the Seattle Aquarium and around the world, Cleared
images are featured above and on this issue’s cover.)
“I see unbelievably breathtaking beauty in the skeletal anatomy of fishes,” he says, “with dozens of symmetric vertebrae, ribs, and spines.”
Fish business is family business—while Summers
works to digitize the more than 25,000 fish species,
his 10-year-old daughter leads tours of his lab’s 50 sea
tables. (The showstopper is when she gets the hagfish
to make slime.) And, ultimately, fish are family.
“We are all fish. There’s two big radiations—rayfinned fishes, the Actinopterygians, and lobe-finned
fishes, the Sarcopterygians,” he says. “In that latter
group are the tetrapods: amphibians, reptiles, birds,
and, of course, mammals. You are a lobe-finned fish.”
“Fish are yucky!” says
Patrick, 3, son of Swarthmore senior writer/editor
Ryan Dougherty, although
he named this one “Meemo.”
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SUMMER 2017
STICKER: © 1985 DONNELLY/COLT PROGRESSIVE RESOURCES; SUMMERS: KATHY BALLARD COWELL; ART FROM FISH GIRL BY DAVID WIESNER
AND DONNA JO NAPOLI. © 2017 BY DAVID WIESNER. USED BY PERMISSION OF HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
8
“I named my fish Lola after the Kinks
song,” says soon-to-be-science-teacher
Amit Schwalb ’17 of his male betta,
“because I wanted her to be trans so I
could relate to her.”
His mother’s hasty replacement
for a pet fish she accidentally killed—
“She forgot I’d notice Pablo was blue
and Lola was red”—Lola slowly
swam into Schwalb’s heart.
He played guitar and sang to her
in the dorm; she accompanied him
to class, to Sharples, and even on
road trips in a travel container.
“Ultimately, we’re all just pro-
11
jecting onto our pets, and I would laugh and think, This
is almost performance art,” Schwalb says. “But I genuinely developed an emotional connection with her.”
In front of her “diva” fish bowl decoration and beneath posters of Madonna, Emma Goldman, and Angela
Davis, Lola bore witness to some
of Schwalb’s most formative
years; when she died, he buried
her in the northwest corner of
West Philadelphia’s Clark Park.
“She was a big part of my life,” he
says. “A little fish named Lola was worth
caring about. We all are.”
SUMMER 2017
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23
“I was just showing my makeup class a
YouTube tutorial where women use fishnet stockings to paint face scales,” says
Tara Webb ’94, manager of Swarthmore’s costume shop. “How it feels,
looks, sounds to breathe and move underwater—there’s no end to the artistic inspiration fish
provide.”
High on her list: Esther Williams’s water ballets; scifi characters like Hellboy’s merman Abe Sapien; the
many-tentacled charms of Cthulhu.
She and the Media Center’s Jeremy Polk hope to
create a “Whale Garden”: a 360-degree undersea projection experience in the Theresa Lang Fragrance
Garden.
“Visitors will be able to create clicks and
songs,” Webb says. “We want to allow
people to become whales and swim
around on campus.”
“We’re also hoping to stream the experience,” Polk adds, “so TriCo students
can hear Swarthmore’s whale songs and sing
their own back.”
In love with the ocean since
he was a kid reading 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea and
Island of the Blue Dolphins,
Polk volunteers as a weekend
diver at Camden, N.J.’s Adventure Aquarium and hopes to
launch a Swarthmore scuba
certification program.
“It’s a great recreational activity, a potential professional credential, and an immersive way to transform
people’s perspectives on conservation,” he says. “The
ocean sustains all life on earth. When you see it and
the world from a fish’s eye view, it changes the way
you look at everything.”
LAURENCE KESTERSON
12
For April Fool’s
Day—punning
on the French
“poisson d’avril”
tradition—
librarians Pam
Harris, Maria Aghazarian, and
Kate Carter filled McCabe
with microfiche “microfish.”
“We all know each other
here so this was a metaphor,”
Harris laughs. “Swarthmore is
a fishbowl.”
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Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
17
Russell Fernald ’63 studies brain changes
that occur when one animal prevails over
another. He discovered complex social
structures among African cichlids, where
nondominant male fish gain access to food
resources controlled by dominant males—by
pretending to be female.
18
DEVIKA BANSAL
13
“The night sky is like the ocean:
deep, dark, and mysterious. So
it’s no surprise we named Neptune and Pisces,” says Astronomy
Professor David Cohen, citing the
prominence of fish across our culture, our emojis, and maybe even our universe.
“Instead of picturing English-speaking Star
Trek villains, it’s a good exercise in openmindedness to think about what other forms
of life we might find beyond Earth,” he adds.
“Physicist Freeman Dyson famously suggested
that we should look for freeze-dried fish in orbit
around Jupiter.”
What Dyson meant, Cohen explains,
concerns one of Jupiter’s many moons. Europa
has ice-covered saltwater oceans—maybe
double the amount of Earth’s water—and chemical energy, all the prerequisites for “fishy sort
of life.” (Princeton astrobiologist Christopher
Chyba ’82, H’03 is perhaps the world’s expert
on the icy moon.)
If an asteroid or meteor hit the surface of
Europa—a not-unlikely occurrence due to
Jupiter’s strong gravitational pull—it could
send water into orbit, which could theoretically
be spectroscopically analyzed.
“I’m not sure how serious Dyson was, but I
think there’s something to it,” says Cohen. “It’s
also a nice way to look at fish in the astronomical context: as cosmic messengers of life.”
16
14
“I’m mesmerized by fish fins because I’ve been building robots
for six years based on them,” says
Jeff Kahn ’10, who followed his
interest in fluid dynamics all the
way to a Ph.D. “It’s surprising how
much fish can actively control the flexibility of
their fins and bodies. We’ll need underwater
technologies inspired by the movements of fish
to survey ocean environments and safely transport cargo and people.”
URANIA’S MIRROR, 1824
15
“Sushi is a beautiful art
of fine details,” says
Henry Han ’20. “It
takes practice and
precision.”
Arriving on campus
with some sushi-chef training, Han
teamed with Natasha Markov-Riss
’20 to open Late Nite, an immensely
popular after-hours Swarthmore
sushi dorm-delivery service.
(Max Katz-Balmes ’20, left, helps
with deliveries; Han made sure to
secure a food handler’s license.)
“Sushi also brings to mind overfishing—ahi tuna could be extinct in
20 years,” he says. “Maybe my thing
will be innovating sustainable ways
to make sushi.”
SUMMER 2017
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25
A cone snail sting changed Kasie Groom Regnier ’07’s life. Then a
doctoral student in Oahu researching neuropeptides in sex-changing fish, she spent her hospital stay recovering from temporary
paralysis—and reconsidering her direction.
“Initially, I just wanted to play with fish and hated chemistry,
but I realized how everything in my work traced back to water
itself,” she says. “Fish take water for granted—and, too often, so do we.”
Now the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s water quality manager, Regnier
loves her work—chemistry and all.
“In a tank or in the wild, when you look at a fish, think about the intricate balance between it and its environment—and us,” she says. “We’re all
more interconnected than you might realize.”
“Fishing can connect us to
each other and to the outdoors,” says Joel Johnson
’96, left, a lifelong angler and
the former chief marketing officer of Trout Unlimited. “My father gave me my love of the natural world
when he taught me how to fish.”
Growing up in a large family, at times
“minutes from welfare,” Johnson remembers how rich they felt whenever his father
would bring home enough perch for a fish
fry, and how fishing has remained his own
constant escape, comfort, and inspiration.
“Fish don’t care about your politics, your
race, your gender—anything,” he says.
“Trying to catch them connects us to our
wilder side. You can find out so much about
yourself and the world through a fish.
“For example, two summers ago, I guided a group of young black men from a leadership charter school here in D.C. They
were loud, obnoxious, funny, annoying—
you know, teenagers,” he remembers.
“But when they started catching fish, you
should’ve heard them scream—it was this
scream of pure joy that a child would make,
and it was wonderful.”
It’s a reminder he believes we all share—
especially here.
“Almost everybody at Swarthmore—all
these different people with all these different views, talents, and interests—has a
connection to the Crum,” he says. “Crum
Creek has native fish that have been here
long before the College ever was. I would
imagine nearly every Swarthmore student
has stood on the edge of that bank, looked
down into the water, and spotted a fish.
“That moment changes us,” he says.
“That little thrill of discovery you get when
you see a fish connects you to your younger, best self, when you were fascinated by
the world and everything it.”
19
20
Inspired by pop star
Katy Perry’s surfside Super Bowl halftime show, he tasked
students to write a
program making her
Internet sensation
“Left Shark” dance,
dance, dance.
In addition to
sharks’ sweet moves,
Waterman remains
fascinated by their
ability to sense and
process electrical
fields.
“Sharks are
basically swimming
computers,” he says.
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Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
21
“SAMAK MASHWI”
A poem by Nader Helmy ’17
I talk a really good game but to be
frank, I didn’t really care for Finding Nemo
(unpopular opinion can topple a whole metropolis)
I suppose that’s my inability to empathize
with a loss that resolves itself too quickly
(I needed a sequel toward some burdened light)
I am swimming in the Red Sea before I can count
and my whole world are the critters kissing my ankles
(there is no suffering here, just me and the crew)
We all gotta eat so eventually, we depart from the coast
course correct to the feast, family eating the crew
(from afar the market sets up a circus in the nostrils)
Before we sit down, our critter friends wait for us
on the table, half a crispy brown sheen glistening
(half charred skin blackened flakes like shingles)
Eyes gouged out, mouth agape, skeleton intact
I get it when we squeeze the lemon on top
(greens from the earth, meat from the sea, the elements)
Still me daydreaming about the friends I’ve yet to meet
deep sea monsters, wading, one with the still blackness
(me kissing their ankles / the closest analogue on their body)
Spiky horns, lizard lions, cyclops squids, animated coral
all part of the sea, married to the ocean like us
(we the lost children of diaspora dumped by the mainland)
We have always been an agile species, darting through
the water, surviving despite the odds against us
(depriving this infant evolution of the oxygen it needs)
And so there is calm and light amidst the constant thunder
our people giving proper honors for the struggle of the crew
(blackened scales, flaking abyss with hollow eyes bone-in)
LAURENCE KESTERSON
“As a computer scientist, I am
intrigued by how fish school,”
says professor Jason Waterman,
now at
Vassar.
“This fish
behavior has been the
basis for b
iologically
inspired computing
used in designing
certain algorithms.”
Waterman created
an unforgettable lab at
Swarthmore in 2015.
23
As a student at Swarthmore, the late Eugene
Lang ’38, H’81 ran a youth club at a settlement house in Philadelphia. Inspired by a
freshman bio lab, he engaged his charges
with a guided dissection of a dogfish.
Five years later, he received word from one
young man informing him that the dogfish experience had
inspired him to earn a scholarship to med school.
“I can never forget that,” Lang said.
22
24
Yours:
bulletin@swarthmore.edu
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
27
O
THE SPACE BETWEEN
Co-taught interdisciplinary courses reveal what Swarthmore’s all about
by Jonathan Riggs
N THE WORKTABLE, the tiny wooden
model rests light and lovely: the size of an
exquisite sculpture to fit an artistic mouse’s
gallery. In the hands of Mariam Bahmane
’19 and Wendy Wu ’19, however, it takes on
weight and character and dimension.
“This is a very special space,” Bahmane says, looking at the
model but seeing instead what could be. “It’s a refuge in the
Crum Woods for students.”
“We’ve been trying out different design elements in each
model,” adds Wu, using her fingers to follow the design’s
flow—the sweep of a circular Japanese-inspired window, the
space left open in the center for an interior garden.
As biology major Wu and and engineering major Bahmane
take turns describing it, their shared vision reveals itself:
Here is where you could sit or sleep or soak up a sunny
College day; here is a solution to a real issue students see on
campus; here is an exciting idea born of the push-and-pull
that happens when smart people cross disciplines and differences to create collaboratively.
That synergy—between students, between subjects,
between professors—inspired the creation of this course,
Design & Sculpture in the Digital Age. Created and taught by
Logan Grider (studio art) and Matt Zucker (engineering), the
course has 16 students who represent all four class years and
all three TriCo institutions; they work in pairs that rotate
with each new project.
“They have to compromise and communicate,” says
Grider. “Building in that collaboration has been exciting—
they’re so engaged in the projects and with each other.”
“Our original vision was artists pushing engineers creatively and engineers pushing artists technically, but the
roles proved much blurrier,” says Zucker. “Everybody is
doing everything, and that’s how it should be.”
This year alone at Swarthmore, there have been—
or will be—several co-taught, interdisciplinary courses,
including Art, Chemistry, and Conservation, co-taught by
Patricia Reilly (art history) and Ginger Heck (chemistry);
A Transnational Study of Graphic Fictions, co-taught by
William Gardner (Japanese) and Alexandra Gueydan-Turek
(French/Francophone studies); and Intro to Environmental
Studies, co-taught by Betsy Bolton (English literature) and
Christopher Graves (chemistry).
“It’s the 21st century—we need to rethink the essence
of the liberal arts education,” says Haili Kong, chair of the
Chinese program, who co-taught Water Policies, Water
Issues: Shenzhen/Hong Kong/Taiwan and the U.S. last
semester with Richter Professor of Political Science Carol
Nackenoff; Liliya Yatsunyk (chemistry) and Art McGarity
(engineering/environmental studies) gave guest lectures.
photography by Laurence Kesterson
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29
Enjoy a gallery of the students’ projects: bulletin.swarthmore.edu
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Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
Mainly funded by a grant from the Henry Luce
Foundation’s Initiative on Asian Studies and the
Environment, the course included an experiential component where Kong, Nackenoff, and Yatsunyk traveled with
students to Asia to conduct field research. In many ways,
it echoed the course Kong co-taught with the late Chinese
Professor Alan Berkowitz exploring tea from agricultural,
economic, cultural, political, and chemical perspectives.
“It’s exciting to see students engaging with topics on many
levels,” Kong adds. “Courses like these help students look at
the world in new ways. They’ve helped me to do that, too.”
Although co-taught interdisciplinary classes have provided some of the College’s most interesting and dynamic
course offerings in recent history, they’re still more the
exception than the rule.
“I’d like to see co-teaching become more routine—I’ve
been at the College for 16 years and only got to do it for the
first time last year,” says David Harrison, linguistics professor and associate provost for academic programs. “I’m giving
us the challenge: How can we do more? How can we create
space for unusual and unexpected collaborations?”
“Connecting the liberal arts, across departments and disciplines, opens up new frontiers of learning and discovery,”
says President Valerie Smith. “These experiences foster
creativity and critical thinking, thus preparing students to
adapt to a rapidly changing world.”
That necessary enthusiasm exists across campus: To make
Grider and Zucker’s course happen, the facilities department converted a Willets Hall storage space into a workroom; employees from the engineering shop, Information
Technology Services, and the Media Center signed on to help
students master the College’s 3-D printer and laser cutter.
Dividing their time between learning computer-aided
design and drafting software in a Hicks lab and creating
handmade prototypes in the Willets workspace, Zucker
and Grider’s students crafted multiple creations inspired
by poem-worthy prompts: Create a form that rhymes with
something found on campus; design a box that holds something you would not want to forget; improve on-campus life
in an aesthetically pleasing way.
At one end of the room, Emily Cai ’18 and Stephen Sekula
’17 demonstrate redesigned campus beehives—hexagonal,
honeycomb-inspired boxes with ingenious sliding shelves.
At the other, Maisie Luo ’19 and Grace Newman-Lapinski
(Bryn Mawr ’19) finalize the clay-and-aluminum-tape details
of a swirling interactive metal sculpture inspired by the
Dean Bond Rose Garden’s distinctive gates, large enough for
dozens of students to loll on, under, or around.
It’s thrilling to feel the excitement, the possibility, the creativity at play in this place of making where plasticine figurines, Gorilla Glue tubes, and scribbled-on blueprints battle
for desk space with laptops and Legos. Students are drafting,
Michael Lutzker ’19 and Isabella Fiorante ’20 receive a desk crit from professors Matt Zucker and Logan Grider.
refining, and remaking models as varied as an LED lamp that
elegantly reflects how crowded Sharples is and a revamped
Crumhenge fire pit with sculptures that draw attention to
invasive Crum Woods vine species.
The through line of it all is a shared sense of adventure in
a supportive place where it’s not just OK to stretch yourself,
even if you fall short—it’s encouraged.
“My apprehension in teaching this class is that I’m an analog guy. I know nothing about digital anything—I can barely
open my email—and Matt is an expert,” laughs Grider. “But
this works because the students know that we’re collaborating to learn the way that they’re collaborating to learn.”
“Working within that framework from the beginning has
really helped students feel willing to explore other possibilities, rather than sticking to what they’re already comfortable
with,” adds Zucker. “That’s true for Logan and myself, too.”
After all, the most exciting intellectual distance to travel
is between what you’ve learned and how you’re able to apply
it. In many ways, Design & Sculpture in the Digital Age and
interdisciplinary co-taught courses like it are the essence of
Swarthmore and the liberal arts: We make each other—and
ourselves—better by being well-rounded.
“This class made me realize I want to take a good balance
of courses to get the fullest base of knowledge,” says Michael
Lutzker ’19. “Arts, humanities, technology, everything: I love
the view from the place where all these interests meet.”
+ READ interviews with other professors who co-teach
interdisciplinary courses: bulletin.swarthmore.edu
SUMMER 2017
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31
32
AMERICAN TIGER
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
Thousands of captive tigers in
the U.S. in private homes and
roadside zoos are caged proof
of a society gone haywire
by Kate Campbell
photography by Laurence Kesterson
SUMMER 2017
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33
N WORN-OUT LEVI’S, Kizmin
Reeves ’72 ignored the bracing
Colorado cold. As the wind struck in
sharp, punchy gusts, she leaned closer
to the chain-link fence, talking quietly with 4-year-old
Waldo, a tiger pacing at the cage’s edge. He lifted his chin
and chuffed, a rush of throaty air. Reassuring the 500-pound
animal, she eyed the cramped dirt yard behind him that was
his home.
For now.
Not long ago, Reeves discovered the mysterious and
largely unregulated world of privately owned tigers in the
U.S. The rise in captive breeding and ramshackle roadside
zoos tell of a sordid industry too abysmal—too dangerous—
for her to turn a blind eye. Dragging this shadow world into
the light, she and husband Bill Nimmo walked away from
Wall Street careers to found Tigers in America, a nonprofit
devoted to rescuing the magnificent, fierce—and, tragically,
growing—American tiger population.
The decrepit conditions in Colorado where young Waldo
was housed sum it all up. Scattered behind him were a metal
beer keg, two empty bowls, and some blowing trash. Even
with an injured shoulder, he relentlessly paced, like an
agitated colonel.
“A starving tiger is terrible to see,” says Reeves.
Stories like Waldo’s, although they sound rare, are becoming less so. According to the World Wildlife Fund, around
3,890 tigers are left in the wild—a drop of 97 percent over the
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Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
last hundred years—living in 13 countries including India,
Indonesia, and China. In the U.S., however, the estimated
number of tigers kept in private captivity hovers around
7,000. Only about 400 are in accredited zoos, with the rest in
roadside attractions, private menageries, or kept by backyard
breeders. Seven states have no laws at all on owning wild
animals.
“There’s no way of knowing the true extent of the problem, since no single agency tracks who keeps tigers,” says
Debbie Leahy, manager of captive wildlife protection for the
Humane Society of the United States.
“Injuries are inevitable,” adds Reeves, “when you put inexperienced people into direct contact with wild, big cats.”
A Kansas man, for example, kept tigers and lions in his
junkyard, housed in rickety cages. In 2009 when a friend
agreed to help the owner at feeding time, one of the animals
shredded his arm.
Authorities arrived at the surreal scene and set in motion
a series of events that are becoming more commonplace: a
hurriedly placed call to a rescue organization; a pitiful, dangerous collection process; a new and daunting quest for
proper shelter.
It’s happening all over. In the Chicago suburb of Lockport
in 2014, police arrested a man walking to a bar with a tiger
cub on a six-foot leash. A New York City man kept a tiger
named Ming in his apartment until it attacked him in 2003;
he told doctors that his pit bull bit him, but police eventually discovered the tiger when neighbors complained. Last
fall, a Texas woman was arrested for leaving her 14-year-old
daughter in a house overrun with exotic animals, including
three tigers, a fox, a skunk, and several monkeys.
“We typically only learn about an unlicensed person keeping pet tigers when something bad happens—such as the
Zanesville, Ohio, incident where a suicidal man released
nearly 50 tigers, lions, and dangerous wild animals before
killing himself,” says Leahy. “Tigers in America has taken on
the very difficult, labor-intensive, and expensive work of rescuing tigers from miserable conditions and relocating them
to reputable sanctuaries. Many, many tigers are much better
off today thanks to their hard work.”
BEFORE HER WORK with tigers, Reeves designed computer
systems and owned Partners & Crime, a Manhattan mysterythemed bookstore. A lifelong bookworm and nature lover, she
grew up in a log cabin in Florida, a self-proclaimed “river rat”
who dug for fossils and was perpetually late for dinner.
“I went to Swarthmore as the oldest of six kids. Financial
assistance made it possible,” says Reeves, who majored in art
history with a minor in zoology. “The zeitgeist and challenge
of being around really bright people generated a thoughtful and discussion-oriented community where my ability to
question authority developed significantly.”
That skill came in handy on Wall Street, where she spent
time on trading floors and was often the only woman there.
“In the trading world, there’s a lot of adrenaline,” she says.
“I saw Wall Street chew up and spit out a lot of people.”
What has become the defining mission of her and her
husband’s lives began somewhat by chance in 2011 when a
Kizmin Reeves ’72 greets Lakota, one of the big cats she helped rescue from Colorado. Aurora, the white tiger featured on the previous pages,
watches from the background.
friend called to tell them about tigers in a bankrupt Texas
facility. Longtime admirers of big cats, Reeves and Nimmo
had visited the tigers as cubs in 1996 when a New Jersey
woman owned them. Reeves had photographed the cubs, but
she and the woman had lost touch. Now, no one was willing
to take the tigers—large, agitated, slated for euthanasia.
“Fifteen angry, aggressive tigers are not an asset in a bankruptcy proceeding,” Reeves says dryly.
She and Nimmo began working to find the Texas tigers
homes, all the while planning to settle back into retirement
in New York City afterward.
They started with a list of 130 sanctuaries, whittling it
down to 30 that were reputable and placing the tigers in
two of them, including a trio of siblings who were miraculously kept together. Among them was a fierce female named
Amanda who bared teeth, charged fences, and generally
menaced anyone on two feet—she became Reeves’s favorite.
“She is so pure tiger,” she says.
But no sooner had that problem been solved than new calls
came in from Ohio, Missouri, Alabama, each one regarding
tigers in precarious situations with nowhere to go and no one
to help.
“We didn’t know that retirement would be so hard—or so
rewarding,” says Nimmo. “Fortunately, our careers and education made it possible.”
“I sort of look at it like the tigers found us,” says Reeves.
In her gravelly voice, she describes the situation for tigers in
the United States today: “A short word would be insanity.”
Since 2011, Reeves and Nimmo’s efforts have changed and
saved lives. Not only do they rescue and advocate for the animals, but Tigers in America is also working with Stanford
University on mapping the tiger genome.
“Kiz and Bill are animal protection heroes,” says Carson
Barylak, campaigns officer for International Fund for Animal
Welfare. “They’re committed to rescuing big cats from inhumane private ownership situations and to advancing public
policy to bring an end to irresponsible breeding, trade, and
possession of these iconic animals.”
“Iconic” is a perfect description. So are “beautiful” and
“fearsome.”
In a group, tigers are called an ambush. Apex predators,
they hunt alone but share their kill with offspring. A tiger is a
watchful, silent hunter, able to crush the skull of a cow with
one strike. They eat roughly 10 pounds of meat daily, can
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35
“Their eyes were not even open,” she says. X-rays showed
their bones were almost transparent and studded with tiny
fractures from poor nutrition.
Wearing a bomber jacket and hoodie, Reeves checked that
her cellphone was charged and made sure there was extra
rope in case a cage came loose. Among the tools on hand: a
pack of tie-wires, used to help fasten visual barriers between
rolling cages to prevent fights between neighbors. The volunteers, including veterinarians and drivers, were ready to
rehearse their roles in moving the menagerie.
In the kitchen of a small house on the property, Reeves
stood in front of a whiteboard. It was hours before the operation would start. Maps, including a spray of brightly colored
sticky notes marking the location of every animal, were in
place. When it came time to head to the pens, a certain quiet
settled over the team. After all, their cargo was carnivorous,
between 300 and 600 pounds, and very, very anxious.
“I’ve met a couple of bat-shit-crazy tigers—usually the
product of years of abuse—who wanted to kill every living
thing they could get at, and they are very scary,” says Reeves.
Sometimes during a transport load, if the cats are too scared
or aggressive—“the same thing, really”—the vet will dart
them and then administer wake-up drugs and liquids to flush
their systems of the sedative and make sure they are alert
before the trip.
Reeves’s role spans from the complex to the mundane: “I
may have to let a vet know that a tiger is seizing, or I could be
making a food run for the drivers.” If things go smoothly, the
highly organized rescues lack drama: The tigers step right
into their rolling transport cages, make a nest in the straw,
and go to sleep. Reeves helps out when needed, and stays out
of the way when not. “Mainly,” she admits, “I’m trying not to
do something stupid that could put a cat or a human in danger so the experts can do their stuff.”
Henri Rousseau’s 1891 oil on canvas Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) was the first of his many famous jungle scenes.
burst to speeds of up to 40 mph, and are strong swimmers.
More whimsically, in captivity they seem to like to pee in
wading pools … and on unwary visitors.
“Tigers don’t hold anything back,” says Reeves. It is one
of the reasons she admires them. “If they are angry and they
charge iron bars, they will break their teeth. They didn’t
evolve to be afraid of anything, yet they are incredibly graceful and strong. They are very bright, and they’re great to
watch when they are having fun.”
Immortalized in art, literature, and pop culture, the tiger’s
rank is unrivaled. In T.S. Eliot’s “Gerontion,” the poet wrote:
“The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.” William
Blake’s “Tyger” was burning bright. The 17th century’s The
Tiger Hunt by Peter Paul Rubens illuminates the tiger’s
ferocity and power.
“All the myths are true,” Reeves says. “Tigers are mesmerizing, like a tractor beam.”
Sadly, their allure hasn’t worked in their favor: Not only
is there a lucrative global market for their body parts for
36
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
trophies and for use in traditional Asian medicine, but
inbreeding among captive tigers has contributed to a host of
medical problems. Poor understanding of cubs’ nutritional
needs by ignorant or negligent breeders can lead to completely avoidable metabolic bone disease.
But when faced with any sprawling and complicated
dilemma, Reeves is steely, tenacious. “I can trace a trait back
to Swarthmore that still applies to what I’m doing today,” she
says, “which is asking, ‘What will it take to solve this problem and how will you do that?’”
THOSE SKILLS HELPED during the tiger-breeding facility shutdown in Colorado where Waldo lived. Tigers in
America partnered with Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge,
an Arkansas sanctuary, to provide as much on-site care and
medical assistance as possible and to relocate all the tigers.
Reeves quickly sized up a wide range of injuries and
neglect—three white cubs had been pulled from their mother
at just a few days old, unable to stand or walk.
IN THE U.S., tigers can be purchased for as little as a few
hundred dollars. Misguided consumers often buy cubs, failing to reflect on the inherent danger of possessing a wild animal and the significant size and cost of such an animal as it
grows into adulthood, says Tony Eliseuson, senior staff attorney for Animal Legal Defense Fund. This means hundreds of
tigers are abandoned annually.
“Rescue organizations like Tigers in America are a crucial
part of providing relief for animals who have been exploited,”
says Eliseuson. “When tigers are released from substandard
conditions or private ownership, they cannot be returned
to the wild. Tigers in America works to identify and support legitimate sanctuaries that allow big cats a safe place to
retire and perform natural behaviors in an expansive space.”
A major contributor to the U.S. tiger surplus is the practice of using tiger cubs for photo opportunities with the public, says the Humane Society’s Leahy. The cuteness fades as
they grow—and then they’re typically discarded. In the wild,
a tiger has cubs every three years. In the world of captive
breeding, females sometimes have three litters a year and are
bred until they are no longer able to bear live cubs, usually
dying of mammary cancer.
And so, the picture remains bleak—but that’s what keeps
Young tigers Tanya and Kizmin were nursed back to health at
Turpentine Creek. The refuge named the latter cub in Reeves’s honor.
Reeves and Nimmo so committed.
“You can’t just walk away knowing everything you know,”
she says.
BACK IN COLORADO, tigers gazed from behind dilapidated enclosures on 12 scrubby acres. Snow, an 18-yearold male, was in bad shape. He would be moved at night so
he could be on the first transport out. White with a ribbon
of steel-colored stripes around his thin tail, he seemed to
sense the noise and movement blurring on the other side of
his enclosure. A jutting stump poked out from his back-left
side where, years ago, his leg had been crudely amputated.
This left him with three legs to weakly power his once-muscular frame. His massive paws, declawed to render him less
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
37
Aurora—very vocally and frequently—interrupted the speeches during the celebration of Turpentine Creek’s 25th anniversary in April.
dangerous during performances, had never stopped causing
him pain.
Watching Snow simultaneously limp and pull his large
body across the spare den caused Reeves to wince. It’s not
only her compassion for the tigers that fuels her mission to
save them. She’s angry, too.
“They would sell the chicken for visitors to throw over the
fence so they could watch him drag himself across the yard
for food,” she says.
Snow lived for only a few weeks after the transport. An
X-ray of his spine showed it was so severely injured that
euthanasia would be the most humane course. At his new
home, finally receiving pain medication, Snow relaxed. His
caretakers talked quietly with him throughout his last days,
which could be described as peaceful. If an animal can convey gratitude with an expression of dignity, this is what Snow
seemed to offer his rescuers. A slow eye blink. A chuff.
THE COLORADO PROJECT was the largest tiger rescue in
U.S. history. Sanctuaries took in 75 tigers as well as 25 other
big cats including lions, leopards, and cougars. It took five
months to complete. By the time the last tigers were delivered in February, 115 animals had been moved out of bleak,
unsafe conditions to the safety of 15 sanctuaries nationwide, from Big Cat Rescue in Florida to Performing Animal
Welfare Society (PAWS) in California. Some of the 40 trips
took place in the dead of night and often through snowy
passes. Tigers in America and their partner Turpentine
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Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
Creek Wildlife Refuge had court orders, capital, experience,
and help from a network of Tigers in America sanctuaries
where tigers will spend the rest of their lives free from fear
and the obligation to perform.
There are glimmers of hope. The three white cubs from
Colorado grew quickly thanks to a new diet, medication,
and room to run in Arkansas. This spring, they battled joyfully over a new pool, snuck tricky tail bites, and stealthily
charged and tackled one another. Amanda, one of the first
tigers rescued six years ago, still furious, delighted in butchering a stuffed St. Patrick’s Day toy. Waldo gained weight at
PAWS, content in his new home with a new name, Morris.
For Reeves, proof that a tiger’s fate has brightened is a gift.
A great thrill is watching them explore a safe place.
“When we actually see a tiger being released into its new
home, that first step on grass,” says Reeves, smiling, “you can
see the sense of wonder.”
In April, Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge honored
Reeves and Nimmo for their efforts. Violent weather—hailstorms, lightning, floods—marked the occasion, making the
sanctuary look even more like an ark.
With a break in the storm, Reeves was glad for a chance to
stretch her legs and watch some of the animals she’d helped
save. But later that day, a stream of new phone messages
arrived.
Reeves started to pack her bag for the flight home.
At twilight the tigers moved through the wet grass like
ghosts.
Spotting movement in the distance, 11-year-old Rayn starts to run. “Tigers didn’t evolve to be afraid of anything,” says Reeves.
SUMMER 2017
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39
J
ON STANCATO ’02
has a secret.
“I’ve never performed as a singer
in my life,” he says,
“and somehow, I’m
entrusted with this responsibility to
help people find their voices.”
But as a vocal coach and founder
of the New York- and London-based
Inside Voice, Stancato goes beyond
the traditional trainings of pitch, tone,
and vibrato—delving instead into lessons on establishing intimacy with an
audience, unlocking the natural five-
octave range, and vocalizing the internal secrets that burden and break us.
“Because of my really damaged relationship to my own voice and the way
SONG OF
THE HEART
Through music, finding harmony with
one another—and within
by Elizabeth Slocum
40
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
it was liberated by these experiences
that I had,” he says, “I realized that I
had something special to offer.”
To Stancato’s mind, music—like the
liberal arts—is interdisciplinary, a tool
to help us understand and appreciate
the world around us. And by sharing our
songs, and singing our secrets, we tune
in to one another—and to ourselves.
PIANO LESSONS FOR THE ENTIRE WORLD
After years of struggling as a musician in New York, Joe Raciti ’05 was
ready to part ways with a city he never
loved—but not with the young pianists
who had made it possible for him to
live there. In holding on to those students, though, he didn’t expect to pick
up tens of thousands more.
“I had heard that one of my kids—
who sounded really good—had learned
to play something online,” Raciti says.
“And I thought, Cool, maybe there’s a
way I can still teach them even though
I’m not with them.”
He stuck with his plan to leave the
city and set out to publish free piano
tutorials on YouTube. With a camera mounted above his keyboard in his
apartment’s makeshift studio, he broke
down pop songs into easy-to-play snippets. The web took notice—but not in a
good way.
“I look back and I’m embarrassed,
they were so bad,” Raciti says. “For
a year and a half, people left really
insulting comments.”
Instead of recoiling, Raciti embraced
his chance to listen and learn.
“I was able to distill the truth from
the slurs,” he says, “and change the way
I delivered my piano lessons.”
Over time, the feedback improved—
and so did his following, to the tune of
200,000 YouTube subscribers. Some of
his most popular tutorials, such as for
Adele’s “Someone Like You,” have even
topped the million-view mark.
A music teacher at a prep school
in Millbrook, N.Y.—where his wife,
Jessie Martin ’05, teaches biology and
chemistry—Raciti is now expanding
“We so often think of our voice as this
expression that comes out of us,” says Jon
Stancato ’02, photographed here by Laurence
Kesterson. “The whole idea of Inside Voice is
that it starts inside you.”
SUMMER
ISSUE
FALLYEAR
2016
2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
41
“I tell my students to never practice the
piano, but to always play the piano,” says Joe
Raciti ’05, whose hands are featured in this
YouTube screengrab. “When you think it’s fun,
you do it more often.”
AND ALL THAT JAZZ
Judith Lorick ’69’s life has played out
much like a jazz tune: with passion,
excitement, and unpredictability.
A human resources executive on
track to become her firm’s first female
vice president, Lorick left her career—
and, eventually, the U.S.—to pursue her
dream of singing professionally.
“People said, ‘You’re out of your
mind,’” she remembers. “Everybody
knew I loved my job; I loved the company. And I thought, You know what? If
I stay, I’ll never get off the ladder—it’s
too seductive. So I quit.”
The decision didn’t come out
of nowhere: As a young girl in
Philadelphia in the ’50s and ’60s—
inspired by a glamorous neighborhood
woman who had lived in France (“My
image of her is heading down the street
in a red dress and a big hat with high
heels, looking spectacular”)—Lorick
would tell family that she wanted to
travel the world, live overseas, marry
late. “And so as I grew up,” she says,
“that was just in me somehow.”
So was singing in church and school,
and she even won a local talent show at
age 4, earning her a crown and scepter.
By college, the Spanish major had discovered a love of jazz, joining a trio and
making a name for herself at festivals
in and around Swarthmore.
“Then right out of school, I went to
audition for a gig. And it was disastrous,” she says. “I was a huge hit: The
audience loved me, the band was amazing. But the guy who was making the
decision was sitting at the bar talking
to somebody the whole time. I was
so offended, I just walked out—and I
didn’t sing for 13 years.”
Meanwhile, she built her corporate
career, got married, had a child. But a
piece of her heart was missing.
“One morning, I woke up and said,
‘I need to sing’”—and she approached
her first audition as any HR executive would. “I had my cover letter, my
résumé—the guy said he’d never seen
that from a singer before,” Lorick
says. “I also had no clue what singers earned, so when I asked for what I
asked for, he just said yes.
“It taught me a lesson: I may work
less than other people. I may not
have as many gigs. But when I work,
it’s going to be on my terms. I will be
respected.”
That instinct served her well:
A couple of years later—on the
brink of divorce, her son barely 2—
Lorick plunged heart-first into
full-time singing. After building a following in California, she
moved with her son to the south of
France, a region well-known for its
“A MUSICAL FOUNDATION IS IMPORTANT FOR YOUNG PEOPLE.”
—JOE RACITI ’05
42
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
“MUSIC IS EVERYTHING: IT BRINGS
PEOPLE TOGETHER.’”
—JUDITH LORICK ’69
appreciation of American jazz. Her
career crescendoed.
“Too often we get in our heads, and
we forget about our intuition and our
emotions and our passions,” Lorick
says. “I have never regretted my decision. It was the best thing I ever did.”
Lorick returned to the U.S. last
fall after 28 years abroad—following
another love this time, a soulmate with
whom she reconnected. Once again,
the pieces have fallen into place. It’s
confirmation for Lorick that in life, in
love—in music—it’s best to heed the
song of the heart.
“I don’t know if jazz influenced me
or if I’m into jazz because of who I am,
but jazz is free and easy—you can’t do
it unless you are open and listen with
your soul,” she says. “Music is everything: It brings people together. It’s
nourishing. It’s a way to bring love and
beauty into life.”
TO WORK ON THE VOICE …
Jon Stancato ’02 lost his voice in grade
school. He didn’t find it again until
Swarthmore.
A boisterous child with a flair for
drama—“I was basically screaming
for attention,” he says—the young
Stancato began to develop nodes on
his vocal cords. To help him learn an
“inside voice,” Stancato was pulled
from classes for daily speech therapy.
But the 9-year-old felt more shame
than relief.
“My voice dropped down to bassbaritone range early, and I struggled to
sing along with other boys,” he says. “I
had a deteriorated idea of what pitch
was, to where I was effectively tonedeaf by high school.”
EMANUEL HAHN
his tutorials to include sight-reading,
rhythm work, and classical music.
He’s also incorporating some lessons
learned from YouTube—as well as from
Swarthmore—into his own classroom.
“From my viewers, I learned I was
a terrible teacher who thought he was
good,” he laughs. “So now I have this
problem-slash-blessing, which is that I
continue to think that. It’s a good mentality to have—I can always get better.”
It was the same at Swarthmore: “The
other students inspired me to raise my
game, to be really good at something
and try to make the world better.”
On that note, he’s happy to play a
role in making music education accessible to everyone.
“I always assumed everyone agreed
that music was incredible and the most
important thing, but when I became a
music teacher, I was surprised to find
out almost the opposite,” he says. “Part
of me is worried about how seriously
people take music education. A musical foundation is important for young
people: As you get older, it gives you
a gift—it’s always there for you if you
want to go back to it.”
“In jazz, we have a lot of freedom,” says Judith Lorick ’69. “But in order to
work within the frame, we have to be totally attentive to each other, and listen
and build on what we hear.”
Further crushing his spirits,
Stancato later developed a love for theater, particularly musicals—“but I was
told I shouldn’t ever audition for one.”
Undeterred, Stancato entered
Swarthmore as a theater major, with
dreams of directing. Fascinated by
the relationship between body and
voice, and encouraged by Professor
Allen Kuharski, Stancato applied for
a Lang humanities grant to research
at the Grotowski Workcenter in Italy,
exploring the therapeutic power of
theater. The physically intensive summer program—focusing on the voice
as an instrument of expression rather
than song—was so challenging, it
was preceded by a preparatory workshop (led by his now-mentor Richard
Armstrong) that aimed to break down
self-imposed limits on the voice, put
there through socialization, sexualization, and other outside forces.
“The idea was that if you come to
understand your self in all of its limitations, you come to understand your
voice in all of its limitations,” Stancato
says. “Working with the two simultaneously, you can unlock both.”
A few hours into the first session,
Stancato was told he had a beautiful
soprano. “I was completely baffled,” he
says, “because as a man, I’d never been
told I had a beautiful anything. This
idea that I had this rich, lovely soprano
lying right on top of my voice, just hidden there all these years, made me fall
in love with the possibilities that were
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
43
“Hi, I’m Elizabeth. And I am a singer.”
OK, so I may not have had an audience since sixth-grade choir (aside
from some off-key karaoke performances), but I am a singer.
We all are, Jon Stancato ’02 says,
which is why his free “Sing a Secret”
workshop opens with that affirmation.
It’s surprising how difficult and meaningful it is to tell that to a room full of
people—and yourself.
“The voice is the audible manifestation of the self,” he says—an integral
part of what makes us human.
But over time, that voice can be
stifled—shrouded in armor constructed
from our own secrets and insecurities:
I hate how my voice sounds. Everyone will judge me. What I have to say
doesn’t matter. Through a series of
exercises that awaken the senses,
Stancato’s course aims to release the
imprisoned singer inside each of us.
Well into the three-hour-long
workshop—after rolling on the floor,
allowing three perfect strangers to rub
my shoulders and hands (“Just let go!”
one admonished, my wrists stiff with
control), and getting in tune with my
inner symphony—I felt my armor begin
to melt. And as I sang my secret and
heard others sing theirs, I finally did let
go, giving in to the emotion I normally
would have suppressed.
It was at that moment, I truly felt it: I
am a singer. And my own unique self.
—ELIZABETH SLOCUM
LAURENCE KESTERSON
TUNED IN
“I stand in complete disbelief every day that I go to work and spend eight hours listening to
some of New York’s most beautiful singers sing private concerts and then ask me for advice,” says
Jon Stancato ’02. “I can’t believe that’s my job now.”
available if I continued to pursue this
work.”
Stancato applied his newly learned
techniques to his daily life and his theater company, Stolen Chair—founded
soon after Swarthmore with his
wife, Kiran Rikhye ’02. But a teaching gig in 2013 at the Royal Academy
of Dramatic Art in London afforded
him the first true chance to share the
therapeutic tactics that allowed him
to unleash a voice that had long been
suppressed.
“In doing this work, I wasn’t just
transmitting technique or expertise,
or having fun or creating theater,”
“AS A MAN, I’D NEVER BEEN TOLD I
HAD A BEAUTIFUL ANYTHING.”
—JON STANCATO ’02
44
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
Stancato says. “Instead, it felt like we
engaged in some delicate dance of
understanding each other’s souls. It
was completely entrancing to do this
work and to have actors in tears saying that their entire life, they had felt
estranged from their voice, and they
now had a relationship to it.”
In just a few years, Stancato’s Inside
Voice training program has grown to
include free twice-monthly “Sing a
Secret” workshops, intermediate and
advanced classes, and 38 private students who believe—like Stancato—that
to work on the voice is to work on the
self.
Stancato hopes to expand further—
guided by an inner voice that so far
hasn’t led him astray.
“I have been happy for the longest
time, because I’ve been able to work
as an artist in New York City,” he says.
“But until I found this work of helping
others discover the potential of their
voice, I didn’t realize what happiness
actually was.”
class notes
A TREASURY OF ALUMNI-RELATED ITEMS
ALUMNI
EVENTS
GARNET HOMECOMING
AND FAMILY WEEKEND
Oct. 6–8
Attend lectures, cheer
on Garnet teams, or just
bask on Parrish Beach
during this fun annual
celebration of what
makes Swarthmore
special:
swarthmore.edu/
garnetweekend
ALUMNI COLLEGE
ABROAD
Jan. 7–16
Join your fellow
Swarthmoreans on
“Cuba: An Extraordinary People-to-People
Experience”:
bit.ly/SwatAbroad
LAURENCE KESTERSON
SEND-OFFS TO
SWARTHMORE
Welcome the Class
of 2021 to our alumni
community at a summer
send-off. Find a locale:
swarthmore.edu/
sendoffs
Kenneth Mehan ’62 and wife Janet share a visit and a laugh at Alumni Weekend. More photos: bulletin.swarthmore.edu
1941
Libby Murch Livingston
lizliv33@gmail.com
Emily Audet ’18 sent a fine,
interesting letter thanking
us for the class scholarships that have allowed
her to attend Swarthmore:
“Two of the most memorable and formative experiences have been studying
abroad in Amman, Jordan,
and taking an internship
in Philadelphia. I worked
with refugees from around
the world, helping them
navigate the complicated
resettlement process. I
hope to continue working
with refugee populations,
and I know that without
Swarthmore, I may not
have discovered this
passion.” We all should be
pleased that we have aided
Emily’s training in this
important field.
Our only class news item
is a sad one. Ann Driver
Miller died at home in Seaside Park, N.J., in March.
In our 50th Reunion book
(Can you believe that
was in 1991?), Ann wrote:
“Following teacher’s
certificate and a master’s
degree from Temple, I
taught English in private
and public schools and in
a reformatory for girls for
a total of 22 years. Three
sons and their related
interests called for a time
out in the middle of it all.
Now I’m a retired reading
specialist who hates to
give up, so I am working
for Literary Volunteers as
an evaluator, workshop
leader, and tutor.” Her later
years showed this same
tenacity: She displayed
gallantry in her long battle
with illness, and then in
rebuilding after Superstorm Sandy, which almost
wiped out the home she
and Charles had for many
years. Her health had
declined in the past year,
and she went in peace.
I had a tragedy, as well.
We lost a dear granddaughter in March, a good
beach-walking companion
of mine. Sue was an active,
outdoor-loving person, so
it’s even more of a shock.
Our family gathered from
all over the U.S.—Denver,
Chicago, New Orleans, and
the East Coast—to give
support. I look back on our
gathering and the courage
of Elinor and Dan, her
parents, to understand the
importance of family, especially at a time like this.
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
45
class notes
Lucy Rickman Baruch
writes from England:
“Leaving your home after
55 years is no fun, but we
are well looked after. Our
three children visit often
and take us to interesting
places. We can also drive
to the River Thames, walk,
and enjoy spring.”
Lucy Selligman Schneider
has been rehanging her
political memorabilia collection. One of her earliest
pieces is a 120-year-old
framed election poster of
Grover Cleveland and Vice
President Adlai Stevenson,
grandfather of the 1952
and 1956 presidential
candidate.
Roland Park Place, my
retirement community in
Baltimore, will undergo a
multiyear rebuilding plan
to modernize, add healthcare accommodations, and
construct a new residential center. We are in for
noisy, interesting times!
Sadly, Laurence Lohman
died in December.
News from classmates is
more than welcome!
1943
Betty Glenn Webber
bettywebber22@yahoo.com
616-245-2687
It was good to hear from
friends. Jack Dugan has
limited eyesight and relies
on a young amanuensis
to help with the computer,
phone, and other office
items. He celebrated his
95th birthday in November
46
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
1944
Esther Ridpath Delaplaine
edelaplaine1@verizon.net
Sue Davison Cooley died
in February. She had been
married to Ed Cooley ’43,
who died in 2000. Please
share your memories.
Jean Forster H
anchett
died in October. After
Swarthmore, where she
majored in political science and was inspired by
the Quaker values of social
justice and pacifism, she
worked for the War Labor
Board, focusing on gender
and racial equality in the
workplace. While husband
Bill completed his Ph.D.
at Berkeley, Jean worked
for the Berkeley Planning
Commission. They rented
an ark on stilts that
became a haven for San
Francisco Beat scene artists of the 1950s. The pair
later moved to San Diego,
where Jean completed a
master’s in political science and they raised two
children. After her divorce
in 1968, she attended law
school and researched as
a paralegal at a San Diego
law firm. Jean received
two Fulbright awards: to
London and Egypt.
In the 1990s, Jean and
longtime companion
Luther Whitten moved
to Castro Valley, Calif.,
where she helped try to
incorporate the area as a
city. In retirement, Jean
produced beautiful pastels
and recited many poems
with her friends and family. Truly, a Renaissance
woman!
In January, I, Esther, had
the pleasure of hosting
Irene Kwon ’17, a student
from Korea, during her
stint at the World Bank.
Later, I joined 500,000
people in the Women’s
March on Washington.
Due to a production error,
my spring notes failed to
appear in the last Bulletin:
Jane Reppert Jenks Small
had reported that a broken
ankle left her temporarily
wheelchair-bound. She
still lives at Foxdale Village, the retirement community in State College,
Pa., that she and her late
first husband, Bart Jenks,
co-founded. Our mothers
(Eleanor Runk Reppert
and Mary Wilson Ridpath)
were in the Class of 1919.
In October I flew to San
Francisco with 12 children
and grands to attend the
wedding of granddaughter
Emily ’neath redwood
trees. She and husband
Nick flew off to the Far
East for six months of
travel. I am now enjoying
photos from their trek
above Kathmandu, Nepal,
where they volunteer
with All Hands rebuilding
schools destroyed in the
2015 earthquakes.
It was a great pleasure
to meet President Valerie
Smith in the fall when
she introduced Sara
Lawrence-Lightfoot ’66
(pg. 16) at a reading from
Growing Each Other Up at
Politics & Prose Bookstore
in D.C. Also attending were
Lucy Axelbank Cifuentes
’45 and Lee Smith Ingram
’66.
If you wish to visit the
splendid new National Museum of African American
History and Culture on the
National Mall, I offer use of
my guest room.
1945
Verdenal Hoag Johnson
verdij76@comcast.net
“Oh, we’re going to the
Hamburg Show / See the
elephant and the wild
kangaroo, / Oh, we’re off
to be together / In fair or
stormy weather / Oh, we’re
going to see the whole
thing through.”
Good grief, I haven’t
thought of that song in
half a century. There are
other things that come to
mind. Do you remember
“mystery meatballs”? We
had meat-rationing at
Swarthmore during World
War II, and we never really
knew what was in those
scrunched-up meatballs,
always with delicious
gravy. I was a waitress on
campus, and one day my
trays tipped and I spilled
nine plates of food all
over the floor. I was very
strong; I would show off
by carrying two coffee
pots or two pitchers of
milk in each hand. When
I was a freshman, we had
tablecloths in the dining
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ALUMNI IN ACTION
Ex-members of the
Warmothers and
Earthworms Ultimate
Frisbee teams reunited
on campus in early April.
OLIVIA SMARTT
Mary Weintraub Delbanco
delbanco660@gmail.com
students and faculty. On
March 10, the Accreditation Council for Graduate
Medical Education and
Gold Foundation DeWitt
C. Baldwin Jr. Award was
presented to three hospital
institutions. Additionally,
in August, Bud will receive
the Nexus Pioneer Award
from the National Center
for Interprofessional
Practice and Education in
Minneapolis. Congratulations, Bud! He and Michele
hope to take a farewell trip
to France after his 95th
birthday in July. He still
works full time, but admits
to slowing down. Really?
Have you visited friends,
family, or classmates lately? Have you relocated?
Do you still indulge old
hobbies or interests, or
have they been replaced?
Do you belong to a
stimulating book group
and want to tout a recent
favorite? We’d like to
hear from you long-silent
friends; call or email me.
Thuy Tran ’04, Ari Greenberg, and more than 100
other alumni and friends of the College celebrated
the launch of “Changing Lives, Changing the World”
April 25 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San
Francisco. Slideshow: bulletin.swarthmore.edu
Murtaza Khomusi ’17 and Sedinam Worlanyo ’17
were runners-up in the Georgetown Development
Innovation Marketplace Case Competition.
Win Armstrong ’51
participates in
January’s Women’s
March in New York City.
Patty O’Connor ’72 and David Hicks ’71 discuss
their Swarthmore band Phaedra and reminisce
about making music during the politically charged late
’60s and early ’70s: bulletin.swarthmore.edu
FEDERAL DONUTS
1942
by falling and breaking a
hip and now gets around
with walker or wheelchair.
Nevertheless, he and
Barbara hosted a 70th
anniversary dinner party
for 23 family members at
Christmastime. Not all bad!
Ginny Curry Hille is well
in St. Louis. She revels
in Skype to keep up with
great-grand Eliza and is
pleased with the retirement community she and
Bob moved to in 2008,
with good friends and
activities now that she is
widowed. Besides church,
bridge, and book clubs,
she says, “best of all, I still
love to drive. They didn’t
bat an eye when I renewed
my license for four years.”
Self-chauffeuring is also
the preferred option for
Mary Stewart Trageser,
who enjoys the independence it affords. She
looked forward to the
arrival of her first greatgrand and to the Boston
Marathon, which a granddaughter planned to run.
The late Betty Stern
Hoffenberg’s son Peter
was in touch in the fall to
say that Libby Hoffenberg ’20 started at the
College in August, where
“in addition to intensive
Greek, psychology, and
other courses, she is
playing Ultimate Frisbee,
stretching with yoga, and
making good new friends.”
Peter says Betty died in
October 2013 within 72
hours of lifelong friend
Ruth Spangler Smith.
“Wherever my mom’s
soul is—and I’m sure it is
protesting current events
and reading The New York
Times—she is happy that
her family’s Swarthmore
tradition is being carried
out by such a wonderful
young woman.”
DeWitt “Bud” Baldwin
brings us up to date on
his longtime passion for
interdisciplinary education
and training of med-school
David Dye ’72, who retired this spring after 25 years
leading WXPN’s World Café radio show, received a
sweet tribute from Philadelphia’s Federal Donuts: a
“Swirled Café” doughnut.
Professor Emeritus of Biology Scott Gilbert presented a lecture on embryology
this winter to the Dalai Lama, a meeting facilitated with help from Anna
Friedman Edlund ’91. More: bulletin.swarthmore.edu
Ethan Landis ’84 hosted D.C.-area
alumni volunteers for a Day of Giving
House Party in support of the College’s
successful 1864 Challenge.
The Swarthmore College Lab
Orchestra, conducted by
Andrew Kim ’18 and Aaron Slepoi
’17, performed at the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts in April.
+ SEND YOUR PHOTOS/BLURBS TO BULLETIN@SWARTHMORE.EDU
Suzanne Durrell ’75 cheered on her beloved New
England Patriots at Super Bowl LI in Houston.
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
47
class notes
room, but that elegance
didn’t last after the Navy
came—we changed to
cafeteria-style.
Our freshman year, the
student body was pretty
homogeneous; there was
no talk of diversity. But it
was part of us after the
Navy came in 1943, though
we never thought or talked
about it. The only things
those beautiful young men
had in common were that
they were male, around 19
or 20 years old, and bright.
They were mostly engineering majors, because
the Navy intended to send
them to the Seabee group
to build ports and air
bases, and they came from
all over the U.S. Edward
’46 and I would never have
met without his being in
the V-12 program.
Even in our ivory tower,
the war still came to us. I
wrote two or three letters
to servicemen every day.
Our food choices were
limited, but we never
suffered because we had
such an innovative kitchen
staff. Soldiers and sailors,
besides our classmates,
would turn up on campus
to visit friends, and many
of us coeds went to military bases in New Jersey
and Pennsylvania to
“entertain” the troops. We
all took first-aid training,
and many of us were air
wardens; my beat area was
the cloisters at Clothier. It
was really spooky all alone
in the middle of the night,
and the air-raid sirens
were heart-stopping.
Then, too, we had our
trauma. One of my best
friends received a phone
call from the parents of
her beloved—he had been
killed in a plane accident.
It was just before finals in
1944; neither of us did very
well on those exams.
Wartime also affected
travel. Gas was rationed,
so if we wanted to go
home badly enough, we
48
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
would ride trains and
buses. We were young,
pretty, and friendly, and we
were encouraged to talk to
anyone in uniform—very
different from our prewar
experiences. We were
brought up not to talk to
strangers, particularly if
the stranger was not “of
our class.” We had been
rescued from our snobbish
attitudes, and our freedom
to mix was joyous.
We learned so much from
our wartime experience—
strange as it was—not
heretofore included in the
Swarthmore curriculum.
1946
Nancy Fitts Donaldson has
retired as class secretary.
If you are interested in
taking over, please contact
Class Notes Editor Elizabeth Slocum at eslocum1@
swarthmore.edu. We thank
you, Nancy!
1947
Marshall Schmidt
kinmarshal@aol.com
Vaughan “Arky” Chambers
died March 6 in West
Chester, Pa. We send condolences to his family.
Arky received a chemistry Ph.D. from MIT in
1951 and spent his career
with DuPont’s photo
products division, retiring
as director of research
and development in 1987.
Although he was deaf the
last 30 years of his life,
Arky still sang and entertained family and friends
with special renditions
of old songs. He enjoyed
SUMMER 2017
woodworking, sailing, and
completing The New York
Times crossword. Arky is
survived by his wife of 68
years, Carol, four children,
and nine grandchildren.
I hope to have caught
up with you at our 70th
Reunion. Please write and
share your experiences.
1948
Phil Gilbert has retired as
class secretary. If you are
interested in taking over,
please contact Class Notes
Editor Elizabeth Slocum
at eslocum1@swarthmore.
edu. We thank you, Phil!
1949
Marjorie Merwin Daggett
mmdaggett@verizon.net
Jack Koelle’s wife, Barbara, writes that Jack is
not very active these days.
The pair still have their
unit at the Strath Haven
Condominium, so he hasn’t
gone far from the College.
Jack enjoys reading P.G.
Wodehouse and Robert
Parker, listening to classical music, and visiting with
daughter Kate.
From Seattle comes news
that Alan and Andrea
Wolf Rabinowitz are still
in the house they moved
into 45 years ago. She
long ago retired as a child
therapist. A granddaughter
who is a first-year medical
student at the University
of Washington lives on
their third floor. Andrea
reports: “I keep up with
friends, go to yoga once
a week, and take singing
lessons, which I have done
most of my life. We belong
to a Swarthmore book
group, and this year we are
reading autobiographies. I
devour many other books,
as well. My health is great,
and I know how fortunate I
am. My husband is well but
has some health issues.
We had lunch with Valerie
Smith, and I came away
feeling Swarthmore is in
very good hands. She is a
delight. Our four children
and many grandchildren
give us endless pleasure
and keep us going.”
Eliza Larsh Lewis writes
from Kennett Square, Pa.:
“I live in a garden cottage
in a life-care community,
Kendal at Longwood,
where I serve on the
horticulture committee.
Combined with our sister
community, Crosslands,
we have extensive acreage
and a fully recognized
arboretum. We also have
personal gardens, as well
as a group vegetable and
cut-flower garden. We
have a Quaker monthly
meeting here, and I am on
its finance committee. I am
also in the ESL tutoring
program and enjoy working
one-on-one with a lively
young Chinese-American
woman once a week. Several Swarthmoreans are
here: Peggy Gwynn, David
Hewitt ’44, and Peg Allen
’50 come to mind. I also
go out a couple of times a
week to women’s groups I
belonged to before I came
to Kendal 13 years ago.
They mostly center on
meditation and reading.
“Crosslands also has
some Swarthmoreans:
Maralyn Orbison Gillespie,
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Sara-Page Merritt White,
Betty Nathan ’50, Phil
Gilbert ’48, Jean Ashmead
Perkins, and Esther
Leeds Cooperman ’48,
for starters. I enjoy going
over for a meal there from
time to time and seeing old
friends.”
Bob Norman reports:
“Nita and I live in a
retirement community in
Lebanon, N.H., quite close
to Dartmouth College.
We’ve lived here almost
seven years. With almost
90 residents, it is about
the right size—we all know
each other. We are fortunate to have many music
and theater events nearby.
I don’t read much due to
macular degeneration (dry
kind). I look forward to a
magnifying scheme that
will enlarge any written
material. I try to keep up
on current events. I still
make occasional small
contributions to research
on voting systems. I write
this after my favorite
lunch of toast or crackers
with chunky peanut
butter topped with sliced
radishes.”
I, too, live in a retirement
community, editing a quarterly newsletter with short
biographies of new residents, going to exercise
classes, and participating
in a women’s history
group. I am also the board
secretary for the Concord–
Carlisle League of Women
Voters in Massachusetts
and took two courses at
the Brandeis Osher Lifelong Learning Institute this
spring. Nancy Burnholz
Rawson ’48 and I were in
the same course, Traveling
Through Cultures, reading
historical fiction.
Sad news: William Amis,
professor emeritus at
Georgia State University,
died Jan. 18. Bill grew
up in South Carolina and
attended college there as
well as at Johns Hopkins
before entering the Army
in summer 1945. One of
his military assignments
was in France, where he
formed the lifelong conviction that there “can be
nothing quite like Paris.”
After he graduated from
Swarthmore with a double
major in psychology and
sociology, he earned a
Ph.D. from the University
of North Carolina–Chapel
Hill. He joined the faculty
of Georgia State in 1955
and later taught at Emory
and Wake Forest before
returning to Georgia State
in 1961. Five years before
retiring in 1983, he and a
friend founded the Science
Fiction and Mystery Book
Shop in Atlanta. Bill loved
languages, especially German, French, and Italian.
For the past 16 years, Bill
and his wife of 42 years,
Paula, spent part of each
year in Paris, where they
kept an apartment, and in
Turin, Italy, where Paula
worked. Our condolences
to Paula and their son.
I appreciate all of you
who responded with
updates on your lives.
1950
1950 has no class secretary. If you are interested,
please contact Class Notes
Editor Elizabeth Slocum
at eslocum1@swarthmore.
edu.
1951
Elisabeth “Liesje”
Boessenkool Ketchel
eketchel@netscape.com
Jean Matter Mandler’s
husband, George, died last
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year, and the memorial
service was at UC–San
Diego, where they worked.
Jean lives in London, but
spends winters in La Jolla,
Calif. “I hang out at the
cognitive science department I started many years
ago. It’s so nice that ‘cog
sci’ has become a popular
set of words.”
Robin Cooley Krivanek
writes: “What’s new in
Sanibel, Fla.? The same
thing the whole country is
experiencing: a renewed
commitment to civic
involvement. It’s a great
time to be membership
and nominating committee
chair of the local League of
Women Voters.”
Richard Frost spent the
winter recovering from
heart surgery. He and wife
Barbara split their time between Hamilton, N.Y., and
Santa Fe, N.M. His book on
the impact of the railroad
on the Pueblo Indians has
been well-received. “As
an American historian, I
spend a good deal of time
following our national
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political catastrophe, and
have emailed senators on
the historic fallacy of constitutional ‘originalism.’”
Dot Wynne Marschak
invites D.C.-area alums to
two series she organized with the Woman’s
National Democratic Club:
“U.S. Role in a Changing
World” and “Social Role
of the Arts.” Her nonprofit
CHIME (Community Help
in Music Education) now
supports the Swarthmore-affiliated Chester
Children’s Chorus. Dot
writes poetry and keeps
her arthritic fingers active
with piano chamber music.
She’s also active politically—“given extremely
limited mobility, on the
computer, not the streets.”
Jerry Pollack and
wife Pat visited Switzerland and England
last year. This year, it’s
California, then Ireland
with their daughters’
families. “We need to
travel while we can.” He’s
sorry to have missed our
65th Reunion—the first
he couldn’t attend. At a
Swarthmore reception in
NYC a few years ago, he
met Robert Putnam ’63,
whose presentation about
the effects of globalization
and technology on his Ohio
hometown made a great
impression. “As a consequence, I now support
Swarthmore’s Summer
Scholars, which opens
doors for students who are
the first in their family to
attend college and belong
to historically underrepresented groups in STEM
fields.”
Dan Singer “spent much
of the last six months
tending to medical
issues—not surprising
for our age cohort.” Dan
now uses a cane and has
lost weight. He and wife
Maxine Frank Singer ’52
live independently at the
D.C. home they’ve shared
since 1960. Stop by!
Win Armstrong attended
the Women’s March in
New York. “After listening
to the president’s inaugural speech, with its
‘America First’ antagonism, I wanted to put not
only mind but body on the
line.” Win says her use of a
walker inspires marchers:
“They look at me and say,
‘If you can do this, so
can I.’”
After 43 years in the
same house, Ken Kurtz
is moving into a retirement center, spurred
by a diagnosis of “early
and mild” Parkinson’s. “I
don’t feel bad—mainly a
shaking of the hands and
my ‘crab-walk,’ as I call it.
Problem is, I never know
what sort of day it will be.”
Daughters Eli and Margaret have been a big help.
Meanwhile, Ken teaches
an adult-ed class, Classic
French Comedy Films, and
blogs on Kentucky politics
and civic issues for his
NPR affiliate. He’s also on
the local Society of Professional Journalists board
and plays bridge. “Will cut
down on things as this
goes on. As Bette Davis
supposedly remarked, ‘Old
age is not for sissies.’”
Ralph Lee Smith writes:
“One thing that ‘keeps
me interested and vital’ is
a group in our Unitarian
Universalist church called
the ROMEOs: Retired
Older Men Eating Out.
Every Tuesday, we gather
at a local hangout for
breakfast. It’s delightful
because we have traveled
such diverse paths. The
group includes a former
ambassador to Croatia,
a Navy fighter pilot, an
old-time Midwestern farm
boy, and, of course, me—a
folk-music goofball from
Greenwich Village.”
Joy Sundgaard Kaiser
reports no changes among
herself, husband Herb ’49,
and their family, “except
for the outrage we feel
about President Trump. I’m
86 but healthy enough (I
think) to see him roundly
defeated for a second
term.”
Diane Duke Amussen
writes: “Most of you have
been in the grand business
for some time, but my
two appeared one day
before my 83rd birthday—a long time to wait!
We just celebrated their
third birthday.” Diane also
took part in a get-together initiated by Muslim
women emphasizing what
unites us. “I live in the San
Joaquin Valley, the ‘salad
bowl’ of our country and
not an activist territory, so
this seemed an especially
encouraging, important
opportunity to work on an
interfaith basis.”
Setha Goodyear Olson, a
well-known chemist in the
field of microphotolithography, and Joseph Cary,
professor emeritus at the
University of Connecticut,
died in January. They will
be greatly missed.
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
49
class notes
1952
Barbara Wolff Searle
bsearle70@msn.com
I received a long message
from Jane Fletcher Fiske,
which I will provide in a
slightly abridged version:
“My sister-in-law Esther
Fiske Doherty passed
away Jan. 28 in Boston,
following a fall about
10 days earlier. She is
survived by her husband
of 62 years, Robert,
three children, and three
grandchildren, as well
as by my husband (her
brother), John Fiske ’49,
our two sons, and our five
grandchildren.
“Esther’s enthusiasm
made being around her the
absolute best place to be,
wherever that was. She
and Bob lived in Louisville,
Ky., then Rochester, N.Y.,
Salt Lake City, and Ithaca,
N.Y., before moving to
Cambridge, Mass., to be
near two of her children.
Despite mobility issues,
she and Bob traveled the
world and lived in Malaysia
for a year when she was
awarded a Fulbright. Since
moving to Cambridge, she
had made new friends and
renewed childhood friendships. She provided the
glue—phone calls, remembrances of birthdays—so
important in holding the
extended family together.
The tradition she started
30 years ago of holding
a family reunion at her
summer house in Wolfeboro, N.H., will continue.
A celebration of her life
will be held there in the
summer.
“John and I moved to
Cape Cod the summer before last to be close to our
elder son, Bill Fiske ’78,
and wife Anna. It has been
50
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
an adjustment, after 45
years in Boxford, Mass.,
in a house we built and
loved, but being just down
the street from Bill and
Anna has its advantages,
and it’s fun to watch our
grandson Thomas growing
up. We enjoy visits from
our three granddaughters
who live off-Cape and our
other son, Tom, who lives
in Princeton, N.J., with his
wife and son.
“For the past seven years,
I’ve been editor of The
Genealogical Magazine of
New Jersey. I’ve learned
a lot and enjoy working
long distance with a great
group of people. I also
work on book projects for
the Society of Mayflower
Descendants (of which I
am not a member). My last
chance to visit Swarthmore was several years
ago when the Pennsylvania Society of Mayflower
Descendants awarded
me the Katherine F. Little
award and I gave a talk at
their annual meeting near
Philadelphia. Having been
painfully shy in college,
I can only wish that I’d
known then that I would
give lectures to large
crowds and actually enjoy
doing it. If I’d been able to
open my mouth in classes,
my Swarthmore experience would have been
different. Oh, to be able to
do it over again!”
I was sad to hear about
Esther but delighted to get
the news about Jane.
I’m trying to keep better
track of our classmates.
The winter 2017 Bulletin
reports the death of Ellen
Hook Norbom. Do you have
information about her?
Nancy Cliffe Vernon died
March 29. She earned
a master’s at Radcliffe
and became a teacher,
CAPTION THIS
first in London and then
in South Africa. After
moving to Fairfax, Va., and
raising her children, Nancy
received a master’s from
George Mason and became an addictions counselor. In retirement, she
taught disabled children
how to swim. Nancy is
survived by three children
and four grandchildren.
After 35 interesting and
fulfilling years in D.C., I
have decided to move to
Carlsbad, Calif., where my
daughter, Karen Linnea
Searle ’84, and her family
live. I certainly have trepidations about moving into
a retirement community
(I swore many times that
I would never do so!) but I
think it is the right thing to
do. So, soon, probably just
about when you are reading this, I will be packed up
and on my way.
I think I’ve mentioned
before that Linnea and I
are probably the only two
family members who are
both Swarthmore class
secretaries. We’ll keep this
up as long as you write to
me with your news! I look
forward to hearing from
more of you.
1953
Carol Lange Davis
cldavis5@optonline.net
YOUR CAPTION HERE!
Be creative! Submit a caption by Sept. 16
to cartoon@swarthmore.edu.
To see last issue’s cartoon with suggested captions,
go to Page 66.
SUMMER 2017
Thanks to a nudge from
Bob Fetter, I received a
wonderful update from
Eleanor “Hutch” Hutcheson Epler: “Our retirement
life gives us six months in
Guilford, Conn., where I
am a docent emeritus from
Yale University Art Gallery.
My husband, Pim, is a
fellow at Trumbull College
at Yale.”
Eleanor is also a guide at
the Stewart B. McKinney
National Wildlife Refuge at
the Outer Island Unit
in the Thimble Islands
off Branford, Conn. The
refuge is open on summer
weekends and is accessed
by water taxi from the
Stony Creek ferry dock.
In the winter, the Eplers
live in Florida, where Eleanor is a museum docent.
They reside on the banks
of the St. Lucie River,
which accesses the Atlantic and Lake Okeechobee,
a pivotal component in the
preservation and restoration of the Everglades.
“Our most interesting trip
in recent years was to the
Azores, the midocean destination of the trans-Atlantic sailor,” Eleanor says.
“My husband has been an
off-shore sailboat racer,
and many friends here are
‘circumnavigators.’”
Their Eplers’ adult
children are in New
England and Texas; all five
grandchildren are west of
the Mississippi.
Bob Fetter urged fellow
classmates to prepare for
our 65th Reunion by going
to the 64th Reunion in
May. I hope you joined Bob
and report back.
Barbara Jackson Hazard
showed 10 paintings at an
art show, “Sourcing Color,”
at the Marin Community
Foundation in Novato,
Calif., Jan. 25 to June 9.
I hope nearby classmates
were able to see it.
I am proud to announce
the arrival of a third
great-granddaughter, Ilona
Lehtonen. Parents Heather
and Stephanie bought
a house in Vergennes,
Vt., shortly before Ilona
arrived. Steph is a speech
therapist, and Heather—
after several years as a
dog groomer—is starting a
master’s at the University
of Vermont to become an
English teacher.
Please send me your
news. It is hard to do this
job without it.
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1954
Elizabeth Dun Colten
lizcolten@aol.com
Jay Ochroch received the
Philadelphia Bar Association’s PNC Achievement
Award for his work with
the Consumer Bankruptcy
Assistance Project.
Corinne Lyman was
honored as a longtime
Democratic volunteer.
She participated “with
men, women, and dogs” in
Delaware, Ohio’s Women’s
March. Did other 1954ers
join the ranks?
Harriet Donow Cornell’s
son Keith ’84 announced
his candidacy for Surrogate’s Court judge in
Rockland County, N.Y.
Keith’s elder son, Robin, is
an Oberlin junior; Skyler,
17, is a high-school senior.
And Nancy Weller Dorian
published My Name Is
Quarnig (pg. 6), available
on Amazon.
To quote Porky Pig,
“That’s all folks!” Our
shortest column in 63
years.
1955
Sally Schneckenburger
Rumbaugh
srumbaugh@san.rr.com
Judy Wubnig, having
closed her apartment in
Cambridge, Mass., and
about to close the one in
Ontario, is living in her
parents’ home in Silver
Spring, Md. She is working
on a book of articles
by Brand Blanshard, a
philosopher who taught
at Swarthmore and under
whom she studied at Yale.
Judy retired from the
University of Waterloo’s
philosophy department in
2002.
Several people kindly
sent me their holiday
letters. Bill Shepard’s included a photo of him, wife
Elza, and their 10-yearold grandson, all looking
relaxed and happy. Continuing his academic work,
Bill updated an article on
Muslims in New Zealand,
reconnecting with locals
and visiting a Shiite temple
for the first time. Son Bill
works with a new stateof-the-art detector for a
beamline whose installation he supervised last
year. He manages people,
gives teaching workshops,
and writes scientific
articles, using karate to
relieve stress and teaching
it to his daughters, one of
whom is a brown belt.
Bill and Phyllis Klock
Dominick ’57 had a busy
2016, including grandchild
graduations at James
Mason University and a
Denver high school. One
grandson graduated with
honors from the University
of Michigan and another
with a combined undergraduate and law degree
from a university in Mexico. The Dominicks attended Bill’s 65th prep-school
reunion in West Hartford,
Conn., then Phyllis’s
cousins’ reunion in Blue
Bell, Pa. In October came
the “7-D family reunion”:
Phyllis and Bill and their
five adult children—“no inlaws and no children!”—in
Nags Head, N.C.
Both are active—Phyllis
with yoga, swimming,
physical therapy, book
club, garden club, and
women’s club; Bill with
cardiac rehab workouts
that help his arthritis.
With Swarthmore classmates, they see shows in
Richmond, Va., and at the
Kennedy Center in D.C.
Sadly, Jack Hughlett
died April 16 at home in
Lancaster, Pa. Earlier this
spring, he had written a
lovely note about his life
after Swarthmore, which
I’ll share in tribute to Jack:
“After graduating, my
only job offer was from
Armstrong in Lancaster.
Their section that produced musical shows for
wholesale conventions
wanted someone to write
lyrics. I showed them my
songs for the Hamburg
Show and spent eight
years there before being
promoted to managing
other advertising and
promotion activities.
“In 1977, I was sent to
England with my wife, Kay,
to oversee their ad departments in England, France,
and Germany. In the four
years there, son Chris was
born and Kay’s daughter Melanie learned the
accents that landed her
the lead in her high-school
production of My Fair Lady
in Lancaster. She graduated from Wesleyan and
now handles marketing for
TV commercial services.
Kay was president of the
American Wives Club in
England as well as of three
Lancaster clubs and our
church.
“Since returning to
Lancaster, I’ve directed
two plays and seven musicals—most at the Fulton
Opera House, the oldest
community-operating
theater in the U.S. Chris
performed in five of them,
from The Wizard of Oz to
West Side Story.
“I decided to write a
musical of my own after
reading a book by Kate
Summersby, Eisenhower’s
Irish driver and aide during
World War II, describing
their romantic relationship.
It has been performed by
three theaters with three
different casts. A newspaper critic wrote that ‘it’s a
terrific show. It’s the songs
that make For the Love of
Ike soar.’
“Chris also writes music,
majoring in composition at
Vanderbilt. Since moving
to NYC, he’s produced a
CD of his songs, joined the
Central City Chorus, and
formed/directed an eightman a cappella group. He
works for an ad agency,
and two years ago, he and
wife Amy, a Vanderbilt
voice major, had my first
grandchild, Sequoia.”
We lost two other
classmates. Anne Kesten
Bernstein died Nov. 15 in
Los Altos Hills, Calif. She
was civic-minded and
generously supported
local education, mediation
services, patient-support
services, and political
causes. An avid Francophile and opera buff, she
also loved gardening and
photography.
John Parkes, of Philadelphia, died Jan. 15. He was
an Army captain from 1961
to 1963 and was a retired
research scientist at Penn.
Our sympathy to John’s
wife and his brother Alan
Parkes; to Jack’s family;
and to Anne’s husband,
children, and grandchildren.
1956
Caro Luhrs
celuhrs@verizon.net
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I am sorry to report the
death of Michael Juviler
from pancreatic cancer
Jan. 20. He died peaceful-
ly at home in Boca Raton,
Fla., and is survived by
wife Barbara; children
Elizabeth and Adam;
stepdaughter Julie; four
grandchildren; and two
step-grandchildren.
Michael was born in London in 1936 and became
a U.S. citizen in 1945.
He graduated from Yale
Law School in 1960 and
spent his career in public
service, devoted to the
integrity of institutions of
criminal justice. He began
at the Manhattan D.A.’s office, becoming chief of the
appeals bureau and working on cases of organized
crime and corruption,
quiz-show scandals, and
music-payola cases.
Michael argued five times
before the U.S. Supreme
Court. He wrote a “friend
of the court” brief in Terry
v. Ohio—the “stop and
frisk” case—after which
the court gave him the
unusual honor of arguing
as an amicus.
From 1979 to his 2001
retirement, Michael was a
judge—first on the Brooklyn Criminal Court and
then, for 17 years, on the
New York State Supreme
Court. For the last 18
years, until a month before
his death, he was a mentor
on the New York State
Advisory Commission on
Judicial Ethics.
In 2001, Barbara and
Michael moved to South
Florida, where he shared
his lifelong passions for
baseball, horse racing,
and literature with family
and friends. His wry sense
of humor was legendary,
and Barbara notes that
“a small few will miss his
Kabuki performances.”
We will miss Michael and
send condolences to his
family and friends.
As winners of a 60th
Reunion auction, Carla
and Roger Levien and
Joyce and Jack Finkelstein—with daughter
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
51
class notes
Julia ’13—had lunch with
President Valerie Smith in
December. They met in a
beautiful setting: the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s
dining room overlooking
Central Park. Two hours of
conversation about every
kind of College concern
ensued. Jack found President Smith to be “friendly,
knowledgeable, and
understanding”; in a single
word, “delightful.” He feels
we have an excellent president to lead us now and
prepare for the future.
Medical issues prevented
Bill Cunningham from attending our 60th Reunion.
He’s back in shape now for
road racing and competing
with two granddaughters
who “left him in the dust”
at their first 5K competitions. Last summer, Bill’s
six children and their families (24 in all) joined him
for a reunion in Hawaii.
Five of his children are on
the West Coast, including
son Bill, an urban planner
in Portland; daughter
Dawn, who has led communications for the Pacific
School of Religion and
Mills College; and daughter Rosanne, an executive
film producer in LA.
As of June 30, 2016, our
Class of 1956 Scholarship
fund totaled $609,273.
Our estimated distribution
for 2016–17 is $25,398.
Almost 60 percent of the
2016–17 entering class will
receive need-based aid.
Our 2016–17 class recipient is Terell Dale ’20, who
says our scholarship is “an
honor and a privilege that
I will try to respect with
hard work and achievement.” He plans to major
in engineering (with an interest in fuel technologies)
and chose Swarthmore
because he wanted the
added benefit of a strong
liberal arts education.
An active Boy Scout,
Terell planned and led
the Scouts’ creation of a
52
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
permanent orienteering
trail for Norristown, Pa.’s
Farm Park. He is a church
member and youth leader
and plays on Swarthmore’s
varsity baseball team.
1958
Vera Lundy Jones
549 East Ave.
Bay Head, NJ 08742
verajonesbayhead@
comcast.net
Marianne Wertheim
Makman and her husband
live a cheerful, music-filled
retirement. Their six
grandchildren, ages 9 to
25, “are all coming along in
their corners of our world.”
One grandchild is at Kenyon College, where Sean
Decatur ’90 is president.
Marianne looks forward
to our 60th Reunion in
2018 and likes the idea
of a 1958 class lunch or
dinner. Our class president, Babette Barbash
Weksler, and Ginnie Paine
DeForest are working on
reunion plans. Please send
suggestions to Babette or
Ginnie—or me!
1959
Miriam Repp Staloff
staloff@verizon.net
Peter Temin retired from
MIT several years ago, “as
the economics department
believes in early retirement. My wife, Charlotte,
and I took our children and
grandchildren on a trip to
the west of England last
summer to celebrate our
50th wedding anniversary. The trip was a great
success: no fights among
SUMMER 2017
siblings and cousins with
visits to Stonehenge,
Roman baths at Bath,
and country houses like
Longleat and Stourhead. I
have continued to write,
publishing five books since
my retirement. The latest
is The Vanishing Middle
Class: Prejudice and
Power in a Dual Economy, which explains how
we have become such a
polarized society.”
1960
Jeanette Strasser Pfaff
jfalk2@mac.com
This column has some new
voices.
Judith Nordblom Alger
writes from Santa Fe,
N.M., that she can’t decide
whether she avoids writing
to the class because she
has nothing to say—or
too much. However, she
responded enthusiastically to my viola da gamba
story by recounting that
she once constructed a
dulcimer. Having finished
it, though, she realized she
hadn’t wanted to play it—
just to make it. She shares
a book recommendation:
Anatole Broyard’s Kafka
Was the Rage. Its atmosphere reminds her of her
Swarthmore days. She’d
appreciate hearing about
books you have enjoyed—
maybe someone could
send her a Swarthmore
book club reading list:
vbede673@aol.com.
Susan Cotts Watkins
spends summers on family
vacations in Delaware and
researching in Africa for
her just-published book,
A Fraught Embrace: The
Romance and Reality of
AIDS Altruism in Africa
(bit.ly/CottsWatkins). The
rest of the time, she enjoys
a peaceful life in her beloved California apartment
overlooking the Pacific,
swimming every day in the
outdoor heated pool. But,
she adds, “I sometimes feel
as if I’m like a jalopy—bits
and pieces don’t work (car
window stuck, windshield
wipers drop off). I’ve
learned to be more orderly,
to have rituals—even
though I live in a small
apartment, I have to have
rituals—reading glasses
go here, Kindle there, put
‘don’t forget’ notes on
every surface, check that I
have my house key before
I go out the door. And no
more driving—it’s all Uber.”
Mary “Mecca” Keller
Zervigon hasn’t written
before partly because she
left Swarthmore midway
through our sophomore
year, but also, she admits,
because she felt intimidated by accounts sent in by
our many accomplished
classmates. Mary lives
in New Orleans, where
in addition to raising five
children, she has had
an active life in politics.
“Not being qualified to do
anything, I did a little bit
of everything,” she says.
Among the “everythings,”
she worked on election
campaigns. (“Most of the
candidates I worked for
lost. That’s how I knew
they were the good guys.”)
She had a role in the revision of the Louisiana state
constitution, was a legislative lobbyist, and negotiated with the labor unions
of the local theater. She
then returned to school at
Loyola and obtained a law
degree. “Now I chair the
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board of a charter school,
the only kind of public
school we have around
here. It is an open-admission science and math
high school—one of the
very few in the country
that is not selective. I also
chair the academic affairs
committee of the board of
Xavier University of New
Orleans, and the Board
of Liquidation, which
issues and services the
bonded debt for the city.
I’m a member of the board
of a small nonprofit that
does in-service training
for principals and their
staff members, and I’m
on a couple of charitable
foundations. I love giving
money away!”
Peter Filene writes: “Ten
years into retirement, I feel
fortunate and happy. After
the shock of divorce, I’ve
found a loving partnership
with a woman (a political
science professor) whom
I had known casually (our
dogs were best friends).
Lucky me, my children
and four grandchildren
live here in Chapel Hill/
Carrboro, N.C. I belong to
a local gallery that exhibits
my photographs and provides an exciting art community. And I satisfy my
love of teaching at Duke’s
Lifelong Learning program
for retired adults. Now if
only my long-in-the-works,
much-revised book on
the history of fatherhood
would be published.”
Jude Cobb reports:
“Larry and I happily live
in New York City, close to
‘our’ lovely Central Park.
I still enjoy my part-time
psychotherapy practice,
watercolor classes, and
singing in an a cappella
choir. A peer supervision group and an aging
group keep me close to
colleagues and friends.
Larry is active in singing
groups and volunteers in
a soup kitchen. In addition
to frequent visits to En-
gland, we have loved trips
with Overseas Adventure
Travel to Turkey, Vietnam,
and, soon, Morocco. But
we are slowing down
and considering future
options. Staying put in our
apartment with our longterm-care insurance in the
wings is very appealing,
but so is being in a more
rural setting for the ‘come
what may’ health issues.
I would love to hear from
others who have explored
these options: judecobb@
aol.com.”
Joan Bond Sax is adjusting to living alone after
54-plus years of marriage.
“I am going through all
the stuff in our house and
trying to recycle it—my
husband’s and mine. It is a
slow process. I have been
traveling to visit my son
in Chapel Hill, N.C., and
my daughter in Montana.
I also got a young rescue
dog who is forcing me to
walk a lot.”
Sue Willis Ruff reminds
us that Walt Strong had
been working on a book
when he died. His brother
saw it to completion. Finding Tony Doughty: Essays,
Notes, and Anecdotes is
available on Amazon.
1961
Patricia Myers Westine
pat@westinefamily.com
It’s a springlike March
with flowers in bloom
in northern Virginia as I
write, but we have a threat
of a snowstorm—the first
this winter—predicted.
My apologies to Maurice
Eldridge; in the winter
Class Notes, I not only
reported the wrong
year for his grandson at
Morehouse College (he’s
a sophomore) but also
gave the wrong date for
the completion of Chester
School of the Arts’ new
school building; it will be
finished in time for the
2017 fall semester.
Due to my early submission of the spring
Class Notes, I missed
including Neil Austrian’s
update. Neil is “finally
retired for good.” In 2010,
after being retired for 10
years, Neil was asked by
Office Depot’s board of
directors to be interim
chairman and CEO. Interim
became permanent, and
he stayed for more than
three years. When the
Federal Trade Commission
approved Office Depot’s
acquisition of Office Max
in 2013, Neil again retired.
Married 54 years, he and
Nancy have four children
and 11 grandchildren with
whom they’ve spent the
Christmas holidays in
Colorado for the past 40
years. They just stopped
skiing last year when
the “grandkid challenge”
became too challenging.
Two grands graduate from
college this year, two more
enter college, and the
youngest boy is an infant.
The Austrians winter in
Florida and summer in
Old Greenwich, Conn.
Neil golfs several times a
week and has gotten back
into photography, taking
classes in Florida, Maine,
and New York City. He and
Nancy enjoy cooking, traveling, and spending quality
time with family.
June Rothman Scott,
in Atlanta with husband
John, retired from Emory
University Medical School
in 2012. She enjoys playing
the flute (which she gave
up at Swarthmore) and
taking undergraduate
courses at Emory in music
history and art history.
June edits the donor
newsletter for the Atlanta
Symphony and, with John,
has traveled to Western
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Europe, to Canada, and
throughout the U.S.
For their 50th wedding
anniversary, they rented a
condo with Ken and Linda
Habas Mantel ’60 in Newport, Ore., and explored
the seashore, tidal pools
(Linda’s expertise), lighthouses, art galleries, and
food, which they really enjoyed. Randy Moore helped
June and John plan their
first trip to Hawaii in
2016, when they spent
two weeks on three of the
islands. Thanks to Randy’s
help, they saw botanical
gardens, volcanoes, and
the tropical rainforest.
June is on Swarthmore’s
Board of Managers, but
she was sorry to miss our
55th Reunion due to a trip
to England. She hopes to
see everyone at our 60th.
There was an interesting
article in The New York
Times (bit.ly/AyeletW)
about Ricki Feingold Waldman’s daughter Ayelet,
whose book A Really
Good Day describes the
difference LSD microdosing made in her mood,
marriage, and life.
The College sent me a
financial summary of the
1961 Reunion Fund for the
Arts and Social Change;
the market value is close
to $270,000.
Helen Howard Harmon
died March 8 of complications from breast cancer.
I’ll provide more details in
my fall column.
I am also sorry to report
the death of Lawrence
Shepley on Dec. 30 of
congestive heart failure.
After Swarthmore, Larry
earned master’s and doctorate degrees in physics
at Princeton, spent two
years in a postdoc at
Berkeley, and then taught
at the University of Texas
at Austin. His research
interest was the theory of
general relativity, and he
taught all levels, retiring in
1995. He was a longtime
member of the Gilbert and
Sullivan Society of Austin,
serving on the board and
as president. He is survived by his sister and her
family. His obituary ends
with his “final sentiments,
in his own words, ‘Farewell
and good luck’”—a good
way to end this column.
1962
Evelyn Edson
268 Springtree Lane
Scottsville, VA 24590
eedson@pvcc.edu
John Solodar has been
“term-limited” out of local
government, having been
on the University City,
Mo., planning and zoning
commission for six years
and the board of adjustment for 15. “Sometimes I
ask myself how a research
chemist ended up in these
positions,” he says, “and
I think the broad-based
education Swarthmore
offered must have helped.”
After many years leading
birding trips for the St.
Louis Audubon Society, he
has taken emeritus status,
finding that his eyes are no
longer able to distinguish
field marks well and that
his ears, even with hypedup hearing aids, seem to
have no idea where bird
calls are coming from.
John is still active in the
Green Center, an environmental and outdoor education and arts group.
John kindly sent copies
of reports from the
Summer 2016 Interns, a
program sponsored by our
class. Christine Jung ’17
interned at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
working with fundraising
software. As a studio arts
and economics double
major, she found the
experience guided her
toward what she wants to
do academically as well
as professionally. Rares
Andrei Mosneanu ’18
worked with Psychology
Professor Frank Durgin
to isolate electrical scalp
activity in the human brain
when it processes visual
information. “This summer
has allowed me to build an
experiment and improve
its design,” he writes.
As a prospective honors
neuroscience major, he
appreciated the opportunity to work closely with Professor Durgin and to discover the field of cognitive
neuroscience. The third
intern, Henry Ortmeyer
’18, is a painter and spent
the summer in Ballycastle,
Ireland. “Thank you for
making this possible,” he
writes. “I immersed myself
in a truly beautiful place
with people devoted to art,
and I am still parsing what
I saw and did. I expect I will
be for a while.”
Phyllis Foster Johnson Satter is taking a
memoir-writing class and
sent along “An Uncommon Language,” about
her first meeting with her
future husband, the late
Keith Johnson, in Parrish
Commons. Look for her
beautiful piece in the fall
Bulletin.
Rebecca Brown Corwin,
whose career focused on
the teaching of elementary-school mathematics,
died in October. Becky
graduated with a fine
arts degree and earned
an Ed.D. from Harvard.
She was an education
professor at Lesley College
and Bridgewater State,
where she helped develop
a unique master’s degree
program. A cat-lover, she
requested memorial donations be sent to the Angell
Animal Medical Center.
She is survived by a sister,
Gretchen Brown.
Alan Broughton came to
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
53
class notes
Swarthmore from Juilliard,
where he studied classical
piano. He taught writing
and literature at the University of Vermont for 35
years, retiring as emeritus
professor in 2001. At
Vermont he developed and
directed the Writers’ Workshop Program. He was the
author of four novels, two
short-story collections,
and nine poetry collections. Alan died in May
2013 at Vermont Respite
House. He is survived by
wife Laurel, three children,
and five grandchildren.
Our sympathies to these
families.
1963
Diana Judd Stevens
429 Crosslands Drive
Kennett Square, PA 19348
djsteven1@verizon.net
In my annual spring comparison of ’63’s current
address list with the previous year’s, I noted classmates who either moved or
have a new address. New
addresses: Chris Brown in
Baltimore; Lynne Fleming
Goss in Gaithersburg, Md.;
Marcy Lansman in Chapel
Hill, N.C.; Ted Nyquist in
Bartlett, Ill.; and Bill Potts
in Tucson, Ariz. Moves:
Barry Mendelsohn from
Gallup, N.M., to Fort Defiance, Ariz.; Elsa Resnick
Prigozy from Averill Park,
N.Y., to Slingerlands, N.Y.;
and Anne Welsh from Kirkland, Wash., to Seattle. A
year ago, when I compared
addresses, I incorrectly
reported that Bill Raich
had moved from Philadelphia to D.C. Turns out
there was a mix-up in the
College’s records that took
Bill, still a Philly resident,
time to straighten out.
As many of you know,
54
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
Paul ’65 and I moved to
Crosslands continuing-
care retirement community, Kennett Square,
Pa., in December. We are
making new friends, enjoy
seven miles of trails, are
engaged in a wide range
of activities, and have
experienced many “it’s a
small world” connections.
At dinner one night, a
new friend—seeing my
name tag (first and last
name only)—asked if I
knew Diana Judd Stevens.
I did a double-take and
replied, “That’s me.” Pat
Dilley O’Neil ’56 reads
’63’s Class Notes and
recognized my name from
the column.
Keeping the resolution
mentioned in the spring
Class Notes, I called
Barbara Allen Fuchsman
and Scott Kane. Scott
and Courtney retired
to the eastern shore of
Maryland, where Scott
chairs the Talbot County
Democratic Central
Committee and is involved
with solar power. He
worked with Kevin Cornell
(who signed up to teach
another year of physics at
Georgetown Day) to bring
solar power to Kevin’s
Maryland farm. Barbara
is learning the recorder,
enjoys her five grandchildren, and like many of us
is learning the importance
of exercising to maintain muscle and core
strength. Barbara said
a highlight of our 50th
Reunion was connecting
with fellow Unitarian Tom
Owen-Towle. Speaking of
reunions, please put June
1–3, 2018, the dates of our
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SUMMER 2017
55th, on your calendar.
This year, Larry Phillips
celebrated his 50th med
school reunion. He still
enjoys full-time work at
Emory and the Atlanta VA,
seeing patients, teaching,
and researching. Earlier
this year, Dave ’62 and
Alice Handsaker Kidder
helped create a Sanctuary Network in Harvard
Square, Cambridge, Mass.
Alice has also connected with Dorothy Earley
Weitzman.
Last winter, Jane Jonas
Srivastava spent a month
on the road, visiting Beth
Welfling King in Maryland,
traveling with Beth to visit
Polly Glennan Watts in
Florida, and snorkeling
and English country dancing on St. Croix. Polly sings
karaoke and goes to lots
of concerts. Atala Perry
Toy had four of her nature
spirit prints accepted into
an exhibit at the Norris
Cultural Arts Center, St.
Charles, Ill.
Sucheng Chan writes that
her main news is the degeneration of her physical
condition at an unwelcome
speed; she moves around
with a wheelchair or
electric scooter. Sucheng
installed a very expensive
warm-water (95-degree)
therapy pool where
she can do gentle aqua
exercises. She is doing
her best to keep her body
functioning to sustain her
brain, which is needed for
the books she is still trying
to write.
As of June 30, 2016, the
Class of 1963 Scholarship had a market value
of $648,186.74 and an
estimated distribution of
$27,020.76. The current
class scholar is Hanan
Ahmed ’19, a psychology
and Arabic major from
Chicago. Hanan, who is
passionate about social
entrepreneurship, is a
student academic mentor
and a social-justice and
Muslim-life coordinator
of the Muslim Student
Association. John Bernard
and wife Esther attended
the April 1 donor/scholar
luncheon. John writes
that the students were
thoughtful, impressive
young people who showed
a deep interest in using
their Swarthmore education to improve the world.
Cay Hall Roberts has
a new career writing
recycling tips for her
community newsletter.
Her “nom de plume” is
Verdant Girl. Austine Read
Wood Comarow is creating
designs for mugs and
stickers to raise money for
the ACLU. A last-minute
change in travel plans for
Austine and David meant
David flew them to Bryce
Canyon National Park,
which they toured on their
fold-up bikes.
While I was writing this
column, a game of phone
tag with Susannah Stone
Eldridge ended with
her saying she was in
California and would call
later with news for the fall
column. Meanwhile, I will
continue calling classmates. Emails with news
are always welcome.
1964
Diana Bailey Harris
harris.diana@gmail.com
swarthmore64.com
Thanks to everyone for
maintaining the news flow,
including sad items.
Louise Jung Elbaum
reports: “My husband, Nathan, passed away Jan. 18.
He was a true intellectual
with a great appreciation
of other people. Gloria
Steinem said, ‘Dying
seems less sad than having lived too little.’ Nathan
lived a lot and well.”
Philip Grier continues
to “live a lot”: “a couple
of trips to Russia to visit
Ella’s family”; “realizing
that there’s very little to
be gained from acting our
age, we bought new sets
of downhill-ski equipment
and managed a couple
of ski trips each of the
last two winters”; and “I
was abruptly called out of
retirement last spring to
take over—midstream—a
course in the classics of
political theory. I felt slight
trepidation (the students,
after all, had gotten seven
years younger and had no
idea who I was). The instant the bell rang, I found
myself completely at home
and it all went quite well.
“Lately, I’m spending time
with newly formed local
organizations attempting
to do something about the
political catastrophe.”
Peter Freedman writes:
“I’ve signed more online
petitions and attended
more demonstrations in
the last few months than
in my whole life, and that’s
a lot! I’ve reconnected
with Bruce Leimsidor ’63,
an immigration specialist
whose posts are very
informative.” Peter is
also thinking of cutting
back on his teaching of
the strategy game Go and
re-engaging in politics.
Similarly, Michael Meeropol reports: “Annie and I
have done more political
activity since the election
than we did in the previous
year. I continue my monthly radio commentaries
over WAMC-FM in Albany,
N.Y., focusing almost all
my attention on resisting
the agenda of the fascist
Trump presidency.
“We’re appalled at the
willingness of fellow
citizens to swallow the lies
of Trump—and of others
(we hope are a minority)
who agree with his racism,
xenophobia, sexism, and
Share your pics—on campus and off—on
Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin
religious bigotry.
“The sign we made for a
(smallish) demonstration
at the office of one of our
senators comes from a
Springsteen song: ‘No
Retreat! No Surrender!’
“It’s essential we keep at
it all four years. No getting
tired—burning out is not
an option. Too much is at
stake. (I write the day after
the gutting of the healthcare law was rolled out.)”
Lydia Razran Stone “once
had a Russian teacher
who’d been a translator
of the Nuremberg trials.
She told us that it took
years for her to shake the
sensation of something
horrible right around the
next corner. I’m feeling
somewhat the same.
“My husband and I have
worked with our mainly
Latino immigrant community for decades, running a
free drop-in, no-questionsasked English program,
with beginners taught in
Spanish. Attendance has
dropped off sharply because immigrants around
here are afraid—there was
a raid blocks away from
where we hold classes.
So far, my only additional
help is a day at a legal-aid
center helping Spanish
speakers fill out powers of
attorney for child custody
in case the sole or both
parents are deported or
detained. I’m looking for
more things like this to do.
Any suggestions?”
Bernie Beitman’s new
radio show is Connecting
with Coincidence (bit.ly/
CCwithBB). He interviews
people involved in the
study and experience of
coincidences.
Peter Linebaugh writes:
“Everything seems to be
going along swimmingly,
despite the maelstrom
brought by the new regime. My book, The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and
Wonderful History of May
Day, has been published.”
Robin Smith Chapman
offers—“for your entertainment, at least—my
new poetry book, Six True
Things.” She also had a
solo show of her acrylic
paintings at the Steenbock
Gallery of the Wisconsin
Academy of Sciences,
Arts, and Letters.
Rosamund Stone Zander
also has a new book,
Pathways to Possibility,
coming out in paperback
in June. She and partner
Hansjorg travel to keep
an eye on their projects,
including to Africa in June
to follow the relocation
of elephants into parks
that better accommodate
them. “I am supporting an
orphanage and schools
in Tanzania, as well as
working with Jane Goodall
to educate communities
on sustainable practices
that support a chimpanzee
population,” she writes.
This spring, she joined the
board of Al Gore’s Climate
Reality organization.
1965
Kiki Skagen Munshi
kiki@skagenranch.com
smore65.com
As I begin this column,
Kay and Warren “Tuck”
Forsythe are pulling onto
the road after a good visit.
They had come to see the
wildflowers in Borrego
Springs, Calif., a few miles
straight down the mountain and over a desert pass
from us. Botanists by education, Tuck and Kay have
been wildflower fans for
many years and make me
flush with embarrassment
at all I don’t know.
Grant Miller writes: “I
will have just returned
from two weeks in Beijing
helping my oldest son
IN MEMORIAM
1937
Margaret Coale McBane
Nov. 4, 2011
1938
Elizabeth Watson Calfee
March 2, 2017
Eugene Lang
April 8, 2017
1941
Jean Merritt Hubbard
April 26, 2017
1942
Elizabeth Bragdon
Easton
June 5, 2013
1943
Alumni death notices received by the College from
Feb. 12 to May 20, 2017.
View expanded memorials at bulletin.swarthmore.edu.
1953
Richard Heineman
Feb. 21, 2017
Dorothy Dodson Haag
April 7, 2017
Warren Higgins
March 24, 2017
1955
Helen Blankenagel Miller
April 30, 2017
Marjory Clough
Schwertner
Feb. 3, 2017
1949
Charles Bush
March 24, 2017
John Parkes
Jan. 15, 2017
1956
John Chapman
March 16, 2017
Patricia Hardy Jacques
April 24, 2017
Joseph D’Annunzio Jr.
March 21, 2017
Herbert Fraser
May 2, 2017
Susan Reinoehl Miller
March 24, 2017
1944
Joann Broadhurst Sparks
April 1, 2017
Jean Forster Hanchett
Oct. 18, 2016
1950
Mary Teale Battin
Feb. 27, 2017
Frank Tarbox
Unknown
Elinor Grobert
Unknown
1946
Paul Guinn Jr.
April 22, 2017
Anne Newton Burnett
April 22, 2017
Mary Louise Milam
Creed
Dec. 25, 2015
Marie Cooley Haabestad
April 8, 2017
Charles Shoemaker
Feb. 24, 2017
1947
Vaughan Chambers Jr.
March 6, 2017
1948
John Adamson
Feb. 19, 2017
Edward Mahler
Feb. 22, 2017
Frederick Weymuller
Jan. 30, 2017
1952
William Brosius Jr.
Aug. 31, 2014
Esther Fiske Doherty
Jan. 28, 2017
Richard Heath
Jan. 7. 2017
Lee Hallberg
April 1, 2017
John Hughlett Jr.
May 16, 2017
William Foust
Aug. 30, 2013
Sue Davison Cooley
Feb. 18, 2017
Anne Kesten Bernstein
Nov. 15, 2016
Suzanne Gilbert Sieverts
Unknown
1961
Helen Howard Harmon
March 8, 2017
1969
Glenda Rauscher
March 18, 2017
1970
Marvin Berg
July 17, 2016
1972
Howard Richards
Oct. 10, 2014
1974
Jean Millican
Jan. 16, 2017
1979
Timothy Cohn
Feb. 20, 2017
1982
David Shaiken
March 16, 2017
2019
Samuel Jenkins
March 19, 2017
Nancy Cliffe Vernon
March 29, 2017
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
55
class notes
adopt his sixth kid from
China. They are taking
their five current adoptees
over and returning with
the six kids—three boys,
three girls. They need
help entertaining the kids
while they deal with the
legalities. Shortly after
retiring in May, I will spend
two weeks in Yellowstone/
Grand Teton with my
husband, followed by two
weeks in New Zealand.
After that I start working
with homeless teenagers to get them off the
streets. We just hosted
five participants for the
Native American March on
Washington. I really look
forward to retiring.”
Peter Meyer writes: “I
was recruited to run for
our New Hope Borough
council; it took 10 signatures to get on the ballot.
Twenty-four hours later, I
found out that I am one of
four Democrats who filed
for four open seats with no
Republican opposition! So
my next (unpaid) career
starts in January 2018.” (I,
Kiki, was appointed to the
Julian Community Planning Group under similar
circumstances.)
Dave Darby writes that
wife Mary Lee “is painting
more, with work in the
Yellowstone and Red
Lodge, Mont., art museum
consignment shops. I
remain less accomplished,
contemplate a lot, putter,
golf some, worry about
the state of the world and
the nation.” After selling
their Seattle condo, the
Darbys will divide their
time between Fiji and
Montana—if Dave isn’t
pulling our legs. Dave?
Fiji? Kate Donnelly Hickey
has become a snowbird
closer to home, spending
a month in a small RV on
the Chassahowitzka River
in Florida, kayaking with
manatees.
Now the news I really
don’t like to get or share:
56
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
Keith MacAdam died
after a brief, acute illness
Nov. 6. A masterful
teacher, problem-solver,
avid hiker, photographer,
and enthusiastic singer,
he is survived by wife
Phyllis and children Daniel
and Alison. Keith was
born in Rochester, N.Y.,
and received a physics
doctorate from Harvard.
In 1977, he joined the
University of Kentucky. He
was elected a fellow of the
American Physical Society
in 1987 and served as a
longtime associate editor
of Physical Review A.
After retiring, Keith still
taught a physics class he
developed for non-physics
majors called How Things
Work. He was proud of his
efforts to help create an
astronomical observatory
for UK students and the
general public—the MacAdam Student Observatory opened in 2008.
As a postdoctoral fellow
in Stirling, Scotland, Keith
was drawn to the rugged
mountains of the country’s
northwest coast. He
returned to hike and take
photos there, most recently in June 2016. Music
played a central role in
Keith’s life—growing up,
he studied piano, and, as
an adult, he sang with the
Appalachian Association
of Sacred Harp Singers
and in the Crestwood
Christian Church choir.
Mark Frankena of
Alexandria, Va., died Jan.
11. He was born in Ann
Arbor, Mich., and earned
a B.A. with highest honors
from Swarthmore and an
economics Ph.D. from MIT.
Mark had been the deputy
director for antitrust in
the Bureau of Economics
of the Federal Trade Commission, but before joining
the FTC, he was a tenured
associate professor of
economics at the University of Western Ontario. He
co-authored a book and
SUMMER 2017
wrote several articles on
antitrust issues. Mark
was an avid collector of
antique office equipment
and was curator of the
Early Office Museum. He
leaves his wife of 30 years,
Kim, and children Morgan
and Gregory.
A sad postscript: Tuck
Forsythe died of a heart
attack June 1, shortly
before publication. I left
the column as is in tribute
to him but will follow up
in the fall. Condolences to
Kay and his children.
1966
Jill Robinson Grubb
jillgrubb44@gmail.com
swarthmore66.com
Today, Gorsuch hearings
continue when Trump-
administration ties to
Russian hackers should be
investigated. I escape to a
beautiful book written and
illustrated by Pam Corbett
Hoffer for and about her
granddaughter. Maggie, a
sensitive 7-year-old, takes
time to include an outsider
at her party. Her MO—pay
attention and be kind—
seems a good mantra for
our country and us.
With help on the financial
side, Stephen Bennett has
offered to email a copy
of his book The Organic
Dividend Portfolio to
interested classmates.
If you prefer hardcover,
it’s available on Amazon.
For those struggling to
understand the Trump
phenomenon, Steve
recommends Hillbilly Elegy
by J.D. Vance. Steve’s
daughter Tina is Vance’s
literary agent. For me, this
book reaffirmed the importance of grandmothers
(and others) who provide a
safe, quiet place and wise
advice to children to help
them escape an almost
hopeless situation.
Carl Abbott writes that
he and Tom Webb, Frank
Cochran, Daniel Pope,
and Ellie Arguimbau are
working with Swarthmore College Libraries to
document the civil-rights
activism of students in
the early 1960s. Their
goal is to compile existing
information, conduct
oral histories, and collect
documents. Your participation is welcome. Visit
swatstories.swarthmore.
edu/civil-rights-activism.
Cathy Wilkerson went to
Vietnam with Veterans for
Peace working with the
Vietnam Association for
Victims of Agent Orange/
Dioxin. Children and
grandchildren of victims
of the chemical warfare
are now suffering effects.
Veterans for Peace also
supports a project to train
Vietnamese farmers and
children to report ordnance in the demilitarized
zone. Thanks to their efforts, fatalities have been
reduced from 100 annually,
to just one last year.
Also reaching out are Rod
’67 and Dorothy Woods
Chronister. Hosting a
young Afghan student who
was abandoned by her
sponsor soon after she
arrived in the U.S., Dorothy
and Rod have shepherded
her through ESL classes.
She’s now at a community
college, trying to get into
a nursing program and
seeking asylum. They, too,
are mitigating against the
current madness.
Rasaba Sudarkasa-Kyasa,
formerly Delmar Scutter, is
considering giving a legacy
to the College, inspired by
James Michener ’29.
On the other hand, Tony
Loeb—along with Alex
Capron, Terry Chapin, and
Tom Webb—urges us to
sign a petition asking the
College to divest holdings
in the fossil-fuel industry
(bit.ly/66divest).
Tony tells me he was
a ham-radio operator in
Russia in 1983. He joined
an expedition to the Soviet
Arctic in 1989, married a
woman from Russia, and
maintains contact with
friends there. There’s more
to his story. Ask him.
Some of you might have
seen Wendy Prindle Berlind in her pink pussy hat
at the Women’s March on
Washington.
Congrats to Ann Mosely
Lesch for receiving the
Service Award from the
Middle East Studies Association of North America
(MESA) in November.
She served on MESA’s
board of directors, as its
president, and as editor
of its book-review journal.
Ann also founded MESA’s
Committee on Academic
Freedom in the Middle
East and North Africa. Noble and necessary work.
Responding to the Class
Notes editor’s request
for interesting houses,
Barbara Alden-Bosc
reported living in a cave in
France years ago. Nancy
Cooley lived in a string
of solar-heated homes
with views of mountains,
meadows, and the Strait of
Juan de Fuca.
Sending in a few “bests,”
Bill Belanger went on an
October cruise up the
Atlantic coast with his
brother and their wives.
A strong young woman
peddled them around
Newport, R.I. Meg Sprague
Oravetz’s best trips were
four days with her daughter in California and 10
days in Paris with a good
friend. Her best musical
event was Cold Mountain,
an opera by Jennifer
Higdon.
From Maui, Judy
Graybeal Eagle’s upside
includes returning to
employment consulting,
swimming, and dog-walk-
ing instead of playing
tennis. The downside?
Bugs grow as fast as
plants, overt anti-haole (or
anti-Caucasian-newcomer) racism, and missing us.
Best memories shared by
Pat Lykens Hankins: going
to our warm and wonderful
50th Reunion; climbing
to the Tiger’s Nest in
Bhutan in the pouring rain;
shooing swimming pigs
away from their dinghy in
the Exumas, Bahamas; and
seeing from the top of a
pyramid the amazing ruins
of Tikal peaking (intended
spelling) out of the jungle
in Guatemala.
Nancy Axelrod, following
a career in molecular
biology and then working
with law firms writing and
prosecuting biotechnology
patents, has returned to
the violin, playing chamber
music.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor
asks herself if she has
learned anything and done
something kind each day.
If not, she reads or sends
a letter. What have we
learned, and how have we
been kind?
1967
Donald Marritz
dmarritz@gmail.com
swarthmore67.com
We will have had our 50th
Reunion by the time you
read this, so I’m not sure
what tense to use in these
notes. I do know that those
who attended experienced
some sort of time travel. To
go back even further—to
a life in being even before
our own—you doubtless
have heard about the April
death of Jane Lang’s father, Eugene Lang ’38 (pg.
13), monumental figure not
only in the College’s histo-
ry but in American society
overall. With gratitude and
grace, he personified what
philanthropy ought to look
like. His death wrought
a “seismic change” for
Jane, who has our deepest
communal sympathy.
On a happier note, Jane
enjoyed a visit from Eric
Brown, with whom she
biked and reminisced
about taking the bus
from Swarthmore to NYC
together. “Ah, the fumes
of Port Authority!” Eric
did an eight-day guided
bicycle tour last fall on the
Peloponnese with Cycle
Greece, followed by two
days in Athens. This was
his seventh bicycle trip in
Europe, and he’s planning
the next one, with his two
adult daughters.
Katharine Rubio Murdock
Briggs wasn’t sure that
she had news or that she
would make it to the reunion. We’ll see if she was
successful in getting there
by train from Vermont—
this being the country of
the car. I really hope it
happened, Katie, although
I’m not sure I will know,
given that, as you say, we
“are all old and wrinkled,
and some of us have
cognitive problems.”
Tom Harriman and
Sheridan Phillips intended
to bring a big blender and
pour margaritas in our
class party suite. Tom
plans to finally meet Vietnam War poet and Marine
veteran Bill Ehrhart ’73,
with whom he has been in
“extensive raucous email
correspondence for years.”
Tom consulted Army
Field Manual 135: Urban
Warfare and created an
alum profile. There was
discussion about Vietnam
on our class website and
surely will have been more
at the reunion.
My crystal ball is on the
fritz, so I can’t report on
what happened at the reunion. I will do a follow-up
Share your pics—on campus and off—on
Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin
for the next Class Notes,
which will now appear in
every Bulletin issue. Just
one of the many perks of
having graduated 50 years
ago. Thanks to Belle Vreeland Hoverman for having
organized everything, and
to Alexander Nehamas,
Rob Lewine, Jane Lang,
Heidi Hartmann, Kaete
Brittin Honig Shaw, Robin
Hannay Nelson, Spencer
Putnam, Charles Bailey,
Barbara Stubbs Cochran,
and Menno van Wyk for
their talks, music and art.
Let’s end on an ever-
brighter note: Alice Dong
’20 (’20?!) is the recipient
of the Class of ’67 Scholarship. Alice intends to
be a statistics/economics
major. She is a pianist and
a chess player—a pursuit
in which she excels. We’re
glad that we’re able to help
you, Alice.
1969
adise Valley, Ariz. Glenda
was valedictorian of her
Missouri high school and
after Swarthmore earned
master’s degrees from
Harvard and the University
of New Mexico. She took
such pride in compiling
1969’s news, and her fondness for Swarthmore and
devotion to her classmates
was apparent in each of
her columns. The Bulletin
staff joins me in offering
condolences to her family,
including sons Emerson
and Jefferson.
What better way to honor
Glenda than to fill her class
secretary role? Please
contact me at eslocum1@
swarthmore.edu.
1971
Bob Abrahams
bobabrahams@yahoo.com
swarthmore71.org
As the Bulletin’s Class
Notes editor, I, Elizabeth
Slocum, was saddened
by the loss of Glenda
Rauscher, a retired English
teacher and faithful class
secretary who compiled
Class Notes for 16 years.
She died March 18 in Par-
Folks have been busy
since our 45th Reunion!
Lynn West Salvo set a
Guinness World Record
for oldest woman to cycle
across the U.S. (bit.ly/
LynnWestSalvo). Lynn did
a mini-documentary last
year in which she looks at
the challenges and resolution in setting the record.
David Inouye has kept
busy since retiring from
teaching by giving talks in
Turkey, Rome, and Bangkok (where he met with
the princess); participating
in a Food and Agriculture
Organization/Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change meeting in
Rome; and doing summer
research in Colorado. He
and wife Bonnie Gregory
Inouye ’69 took their eldest granddaughter along
to introduce her to Paris
and Rome. Their Colorado
home is in the largest
concentration of organic
farms in the state; they
recommend visiting to try
the peaches, nectarines,
and other fruits.
Linda Barrett Osborne
was a finalist for the Young
Adult Library Services
Association Award for
Excellence in Nonfiction
for This Land Is Our Land
(bit.ly/SCWriter).
Monica Carsky-Kennedy
visited with four classmates, “certainly some
sort of record for me.” In
December, Susan Taylor
Jackson was in from Israel
to visit the Brooklyn, N.Y.,
office of the organization
she helps run that aids
Holocaust survivors using
German reparations money. She and Monica “met
up at Rockefeller Center
for Tubachristmas, during
which Bill ’70 and about
400 others play carols
using only tubas, sousa-
SPOTLIGHT ON …
CHERYL WARFIELD MITCHELL ’71
Cheryl Warfield Mitchell ’71 is the recipient of the 2017
Kimberly Krans Women Who Change the World Award,
presented by WomenSafe for work that betters the lives of
women and children.
“Sister Janice Ryan, one of my mentors, said, ‘No matter
what you are trying to accomplish, you need a place to
stand,’” Mitchell says. “Swarthmore helps you develop
great values and skills that can be your solid ground.”
+
CONTINUED: bulletin.swarthmore.edu
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
57
class notes
phones, and baritones.”
Next was lunch and the
Jerusalem exhibit at the
Metropolitan Museum of
Art with Tina Tolins and
husband Grady. A month
later, Monica and Bill
saw Ralph Tryon and wife
Maida, who were up for
the Michael J. Fox Parkinson’s benefit. And Monica
sees Phee Brown Rosnick
at professional meetings.
“As time passes, Bill and I
find more and more pleasure in our Swarthmore
contacts—even those we
did not know well during
our years there—as having
Swarthmore in common
seems an increasingly
valuable shared experience.”
Don Mizell has been
confirmed as a member of
the Florida State Advisory
Committee to the U.S.
Commission on Civil
Rights, which has played a
vital role in protecting the
civil rights of Americans
since its creation in 1957.
His appointment—along
with that of 13 others—was
approved by commissioners in D.C. in March.
As for me, Bob, I keep
busy as a community
emergency response team
volunteer—California is
“earthquake country”—
and stay involved in the
community. And I do lots
of things that are just fun,
including going to comedy
(not just stand-up) and
music shows.
1973
Martha Shirk
swarthmorecollege73@
gmail.com
swarthmorecollege73.com
It’s not too early to start
planning to attend our
45th (gulp) Reunion, June
58
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
1–3, 2018.
Congratulations to
Ronda Muir ’74 on
the publication of The
Emotional Intelligence
Edge for 21st-Century
Lawyers. “The book’s
been awhile coming, but
changes in law practice
are making emotional
intelligence critical, although not always an easy
concept for lawyers to get
their heads around,” she
says. Ronda writes regularly at lawpeopleblog.
com on behavioral science
in the legal workplace.
Congrats also to JoAnn
Jones, who received a
master’s of divinity in May
from the General Theological Seminary of the
Episcopal Church, where
a classmate was Matt
Jacobson ’97. Stay tuned
for her next step.
Since 1992, Herb
Bedolfe has been the
executive director at the
Marisla Foundation, which
focuses on international
biodiversity conservation
efforts and environmental
health and justice issues.
He and wife Tamar live
in Dana Point, Calif.,
and have two children:
Sarah ’11 and Mathias, a
2015 Dickinson graduate.
“I still surf, and I am a
member of the board of
the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association
Environmental Fund,” he
writes.
Ann Lindsay and
husband Alan Glaseroff
’74 have retired from
practicing family medicine
and moved back to
Humboldt County, in far
north California. For the
last five years, they were
clinical professors of
medicine and co-founded
and co-directed Stanford
Coordinated Care, a clinic
for members of the Stanford University health
plan with complex chronic
health conditions. They
plan to still teach and
SUMMER 2017
spread the model of care
they developed (tinyurl.
com/lttaacw).
Joan Rubinstein has also
retired from practicing
family medicine, with
husband Alex Sherriffs, in
Fowler, Calif., near Fresno.
“After 33 years of trying to
be in at least two places
at once, I am savoring
doing one thing at a time,
including hobbies, grandparenting, and being fully
present when I’m with my
husband,” she writes.
Terrence Hicks is “happily retired, splitting time
among consulting (startup
company fundraising),
spending time with the
grandkids, and traveling.”
He spent most of his
career in banking and
venture-capital groups
engaged with startups
(mostly tech companies)
and retired as VP for
investment at Ben Franklin
Technology Partners.
He and wife Gail live in
Philadelphia.
Galip Ulsoy retired last
July from the University of
Michigan, where he taught
mechanical engineering
for 36 years. “So far,
retirement has been great
with lots of travel (Alberta,
Italy, Croatia, Hawaii) and
fun (golf, canoeing, hiking,
reading, shows) as well as
continued professional activities (research, lectures,
consulting, service).”
And here’s a nice,
newsy update from Hugh
Roberts: “After 45 years
of nonstop employment,
retirement has meant
playing tennis till my knees
cried ‘uncle’; bingeing on
internet news/Facebook/
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Netflix; getting new KEF
LS50 wireless speakers
and streaming Spotify ad
nauseum; and shopping
online for every kitchen
convenience known to
mankind (I’m the cook
now). And, yes, I dragged
out my stamp collection.”
He’s gotten involved in
fighting gerrymandering
in Pennsylvania. “I was
instantly hooked, and now,
for the first time in my
adult life, I’m a busy volunteer—and loving it.” Son
Jack, 25, works for ESPN’s
TheTournament.com; son
David, 23, is developing a
learning platform for Elsevier; and daughter Alice,
20, studied abroad at the
University of Santiago in
Chile and will return to
Middlebury for her senior
year. Hugh’s wife, Sarah, a
registered nurse, started a
job in quality assurance at
Main Line Health.
Condolences to the family
of Jean Millican ’74, who
entered Swarthmore
with our class. Jean died
unexpectedly from a
heart attack Jan. 16 in
Seattle. She was a board-
certified neurologist who
was affiliated with the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound
Health Care System and
was a consultant for the
Southeast Alaska Regional
Health Consortium. Jean
is survived by husband
Frank; daughters Maddie
and Laura; and sisters
Carol and Adrienne.
Hugh Cort died in August
in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where
he had practiced psychiatry at Brookwood Medical
Center and the Tuscaloosa
VA Medical Center. Early
in 2014, he underwent a
double lung transplant.
Wife Debbie preceded him
in death; Hugh is survived
by sister Meredith and
brother Charles. Hugh
ran for the Republican
presidential nomination in
2008 on an anti-abortion,
anti-terrorism platform
that advocated immediate
airstrikes against nuclear
sites in Iran.
We’ve made it easier for
you to submit news. Email
me; update your profile on
swarthmorecollege73.com;
or post on facebook.com/
SwarthmoreClassOf1973.
1975
Sam Agger
sam.agger@gmail.com
Lauren Belfer’s novel And
After the Fire received
a 2016 National Jewish
Book Award. Congrats!
Richard Barasch ’76
finished 12 years on the
College’s Board of Managers. “The school is in great
shape, and Valerie Smith
is, and will be, a great
president. Best part was
reconnecting with Dave
McElhinny, who joined the
Board.”
Bill Huneke left the U.S.
Department of Transportation’s Surface Transportation Board, where
he was chief economist. “I
am spending my birthday
with a spa day in the Napa
Valley.” Congratulations
and well done, Bill.
Jean Macfarlane-
Malarkey retired as
Market Strategies International’s managing director/
executive VP in January.
Certified as an executive/
transition coach in 2015,
she’s building a practice
and consulting. “I am
loving having time to catch
up on long-postponed
projects and still happily
living in Portland, Ore.”
Suzanne Durrell went to
Super Bowl LI in Houston
and saw her Patriots
“stage a historic comeback
and Tom Brady (aka the
GOAT) win his fifth ring.
One less item on my
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bucket list, and memories
to last a lifetime.”
Jeffrey Kahn had an
eventful few years. “Our
two daughters are married,
and our wonderful first
grandchild was born. Orli
will no doubt follow in
the small-college family
tradition.” Jeffrey was
promoted to full psychiatry
professor at Cornell Med,
and after penning a run of
psychosis papers, his two
new ones are on atypical
depression. “We’ve also
had delightful get-togethers with Theresa Sherrod
and John Stively ’76.”
John Deshong enjoys
heading a Bechtel Group
global tax team, spending
time on legislation matters
in Sacramento and D.C.
Wife Fran is chair of the
Democratic Party of Orange County, Calif. His son
is a special assistant U.S.
attorney in San Diego, and
his daughter is getting a
molecular biology Ph.D. at
UC–Davis. “No thoughts of
retirement—as reformed
Pennsylvanians, we are
very happy living in the
Republic of California.”
David Gold’s middle son,
Jonathan, joined his law
firm, so he is now practicing with two sons—“fine
line between boss and
Dad.” David also has two
grandchildren in southern
Florida, “which makes us
very happy. Life is good!”
Gary Albright and wife
Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio,
a violinist, celebrated the
20th anniversary season
of their Cactus Pear Music
Festival in San Antonio last
summer. They look forward
to the downbeat on their
third decade of worldclass chamber music.
Anita Cava’s daughter
Emily earned a master’s in
coastal-zone management
at the University of Miami,
found a job in Saipan,
Northern Mariana Islands,
and completed the Saipan
Iron Man. Daughter Laura
finished three years at
Boston’s Dana-Farber
Cancer Institute and is
exploring opportunities
while husband Jakub finishes a physics postdoc at
Harvard. “I have long loved
Asheville, N.C., and after
spending time exploring it
with Alex Henderson and
his wife, Molly, I decided
to buy a home there,”
Anita writes. “Visitors are
welcome.” Anita reunited
with Holly Corn and Terry
Fromson last August and
they “greeted each other
wearing almost exactly the
same outfits. Roommates
rock!” Anita, who teaches
at UM, sold her home of
30 years in Coral Gables,
Fla., and downsized to an
apartment there.
Peter Wiggins was busy
in Europe as senior vice
president of the vocal
division of IMG Artists. He
is now retired and lives in
Chicago, although he kept
his Paris apartment. “It
was a great experience,
and I had the pleasure to
represent the musical directors of the Royal Opera
House Covent Garden and
the Paris Opera as well as
artists like Renée Fleming.
I would be happy to hear
from nearby alumni!”
George Hui writes that
Hong Kong received two
Swat presidents in a short
period: Al and Peggi Bloom
visited in mid-October
en route to Shanghai,
where NYU (Al’s current
employer) was opening a
campus. Valerie Smith was
in town in mid-November
to receive an honorary
degree. “At year end, word
came that Dan Bennett,
who taught philosophy at
Swarthmore, died at age
86. I had kept in touch
with him through the
years.” George’s wife, Lianne, will retire in the fall,
so they expect to travel
more. “But with my father
and mother-in-law under
our charge, that travel will
be constrained.”
Finally, Steve Stutman
is in the Boston suburbs,
where his son, 16, and
daughter, 11, enjoy building
things, writing code,
swimming, and biking.
“They spent a couple of
days helping a group of 60
students from Beijing build
remotely operated vehicles
at MIT.” Steve’s wife is
considering importing
products from the Netherlands, while Steve works
on connected-health gadgets and a home health/
clinic hybrid model.
1977
Terri-Jean Pyer
tpyer@hartnell.edu
LinkedIn named Bill
Boulding one of 2016’s Top
10 Voices in Education, the
“must-know” writers who
thoughtfully weighed in
on important issues. Bill’s
subject matter included
leadership trends and
how business schools can
adapt to changing times.
He was proudest of his
article on embracing discomfort (bit.ly/Boulding).
Charles Bennett, endowed chair of the South
Carolina SmartState
Center for Medication
Safety and Efficacy, is
on the editorial board for
Drugs in Context Health
Economics & Outcomes
Research, an open-access,
peer-reviewed journal. He
continues his research on
preventing adverse drug
events and improving
drug safety and his work
running the Southern
Network on Adverse Reactions (SONAR), hailed as
one of the nation’s most
successful pharmaceutical
watchdogs.
Dave Schroeder is making
the most of retirement. He
published his first novel,
Xenotech Rising: A Novel
of the Galactic Free Trade
Association, in 2015 and
has added three titles
and a novelette to the
series. All are available on
Amazon.
1979
Laurie Stearns Trescott
sundncr88@comcast.net
Brady Kiesling, who spent
two decades at the State
Department and signed
dissent cables during his
time there, talked with
NPR in February about
the department’s criticism
of President Trump’s
executive orders. Brady
explained how the government works to keep American borders and residents
safe from terrorism, noting
that while our systems are
not perfect, those involved
are highly trained professionals with many years
of solid experience who
shouldn’t be discounted
because they worked for
former administrations.
Separately, Brady’s
ToposText classics/
archaeology app/website
was nominated for a 2016
Digital Humanities Award
for Best Use DH Public
Engagement. Kudos!
Also weighing in on world
affairs, Joshua Landis
discussed the Syrian
cease-fire talks between
Russia and Turkey on
PBS Newshour just before
Trump took office. He
voiced skepticism that it
would last, and much has
transpired since then.
Hopefully, Josh will continue to help us understand
the very complicated
situation in Syria.
Allen Webb, an English
professor at Western
Michigan University, coled “Addressing Threats
to Justice, the Climate,
and Civil Rights: A Day of
Learning and Action” with
history professor Lewis
Pyenson ’69 in honor of
Martin Luther King Jr. Day
in January.
Life is uncertain. And
it’s with great sadness
that I report we have
lost another classmate.
Timothy Cohn, a U.S. Geological Survey statistical
hydrologist and expert on
flood risks, water quality,
and hydrologic trends,
died at home in Reston,
Va., Feb. 20, a few days
short of his 60th birthday.
Tim served on community
boards and was an avid
runner, participating in
short races, marathons,
and ultramarathons.
He battled cancer for
three years and, as a
scientist, was fascinated
by advances in cancer
treatment; he participated
in clinical trials with the
hopes that the research
would advance science
to benefit others. Our
collective condolences to
Tim’s family, including wife
Sarah Humphrey, children
Alexander and Hannah,
and mother Barbara
Norfleet ’47.
Please email me or send
a note to the alumni office
with any news you have
to share. Wishing you all a
peaceful summer.
1981
Karen Oliver
karen.oliver.01@gmail.com
Lalitha Vaidyanathan leads
off: “Life has been crazy
busy between work and
my 5(!)-year-old, Pia, who
is delightfully naughty
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
59
class notes
and already prepping for
teenage years by going
to bed late and sleeping
in the next morning. In
between, she is busy doing
anything and everything
that is fun. Amid all this,
I have been remiss in my
class secretary role, and
Karen has been flying solo
in authoring our notes.
I have loved being your
class secretary since we
graduated, but my little Pia
has changed the order of
things in life. If you would
like to help Karen, please
let her know! Sending
loads of love to all.”
Christopher Udry is
joining Northwestern University as an economics
professor. “A key element
motivating me is their commitment to scholarship in
development economics,
building on an already
strong base,” says Chris.
“I anticipate expanding
the research activities my
colleagues, students, and I
can undertake around the
world, but with a special
emphasis on Ghana. On
the personal side, the
move to Chicago puts
me and my wife, Barbara
O’Brien, in closer proximity
to extended family in the
Midwest.”
Susan Morrison’s novel
Grendel’s Mother: The
Saga of the Wyrd-Wife
won the 2016 Words on
Wings Book Award for
young-adult fiction, a Literary Classics Top Honors
Award. Her book The Literature of Waste: Material
Ecopoetics and Ethical
Matter was published in
2015, and she hints that
yet another book will be
coming soon.
From Douglas Miron Nydick: “I continue to teach
seventh-grade language
arts and social studies
in ‘Down East’ coastal
N.C. I don’t practice law
anymore, but I am the teen
court judge for the county.
I also play Blackbeard’s
60
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
first mate, Israel Hands,
for regular tours, and I
do nature tours of the
feral horse herd on the
Outer Banks. I keep up my
commercial/recreational
fishing license and collect
clams, oysters, mussels,
crabs, whelks, and finfish
whenever I can. I have become a reasonably adept
Zumba participant in the
last few years, shaking my
groove thang several times
a week. This is not the
status update I would have
predicted 36 years ago,
but I’m OK with that. My
children, with Julia Knerr,
are doing well. Our two
boys are makin’ it in Hollywood, and our daughter is
a junior at Vassar.”
From Doylestown, Pa.,
Bill Guerin reports that he
and wife Kim Carter “are
watching in wonder as our
three boys grow into young
men—Brian in his last
year at Sarah Lawrence
College; Kindrick back in
high school as a junior
after a year of traveling
and homeschooling to represent the U.S. skeleton
team at the 2016 Winter
Youth Olympics in Norway
(wonderful family trip);
and Cooper in eighth grade
playing football, which has
given me an opportunity to
coach. Last year, we discovered a love of RV-ing
and purchased a 30-foot
travel trailer, which has
taken us to a number of
state and national parks
in the mid-Atlantic, with
plans for an extended trip
out west next summer. I
moved into management
consulting 10 years ago
and found it rewarding
on many levels—and so
three years ago I founded
Catalytics Performance
Consulting. I’m thoroughly
enjoying owning and growing a business and doing
meaningful, gratifying
work with a diverse group
of clients. I’ve taken up
long-distance running and
SUMMER 2017
SPOTLIGHT ON …
GREG DAVIDSON ’83 & TAMAH KUSHNER ’83
Greg Davidson ’83 and Tamah Kushner ’83 enjoy their
empty nest and look forward to the next life phase now that
their three children (including Arik Davidson ’11) have
graduated from college.
“Find work you value and value the work you have,”
says Tamah, an executive director of a synagogue. “Define
‘balance’ whatever way works for you.”
“The most important actions I have taken for a meaningful life have been to prioritize my relationship with
Tamah and our children,” adds Greg, a director at an aerospace company. “Take conscious steps to try to love what
you do, and if you cannot, then try to effect change.”
+
will be in the 2017 Boston
Marathon.”
Are we jealous? Yes!
In March, Pat Goldband
retired from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania after 32.5 years.
Thirty-one of those were
as an attorney with the
governor’s Office of
Administration. “So far,
my plans include traveling
in my new little RV and
gardening. I’m sure other
projects will find me.”
Susan Cole-Domanico
writes: “I live with my husband, Jerry, in North Granby, Conn. Since finishing
my Ed.D. at UConn, I’ve
worked as director of adult
education and education
specialist at EdAdvance, a
regional education service
center in Litchfield, Conn.
This follows a decade as
a curriculum director and
assistant superintendent
in the Granby, Torrington,
and Woodbury school
districts. This year my
children, Robyn and twins
Alex and Rachel, are
all in college (Salisbury
University in Maryland,
UMass–Amherst, and
Worcester Polytechnic
Institute). Now that we
are empty nesters (sort of,
they keep coming back!),
CONTINUED: bulletin.swarthmore.edu
I hope to catch up with
classmates.”
1983
John Bowe
john@bowe.us
Patty Pesavento and her
husband “bought the farm.
Really, truly bought a farm.
We are learning how to
handle land, grow our own
food, and tread lightly on
this Earth.” Patty still loves
teaching at the UC–Davis
vet school. Her daughter
just finished her freshman
year at St. Olaf College.
Bill Green leads MIT’s
Mobility of the Future project, trying to understand
how personal transportation will work in 2050.
He was elected Fellow of
the American Association
for the Advancement of
Science, an award presented by former physics
professor Rush Holt.
Elizabeth McCrary
Asselin is doing the
college-application dance
with her older son. (“What
a horrible process it is.”)
At Shell she works on
long-term strategy—“what
might a non-hydrocarbon-
dominated energy system
look like, and what technical and regulatory changes
are needed to make that
happen?”
After 25 years as a rock
critic and arts/entertainment editor at the
Newark Star-Ledger, Jay
Lustig took a buyout and
now freelances and runs
NJArts.net.
Lisa Hostein is now
executive editor of
Hadassah Magazine, “a
new challenge that I love
even though I’m back to
commuting from Philly to
New York.” Her elder son
is an engineering student
at Lehigh and her younger
one is in high school.
Gordon Lafer, a University of Oregon professor,
has a new book, The One
Percent Solution: How
Corporations Are Remaking America One State at
a Time. It builds on earlier
work on state legislatures’ attacks on unions,
minimum wage, and public
services since 2011.
Betsey Buckheit is
working on a certificate
at the Minnesota Center
for Book Arts, making
books, building boxes, and
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looking to start letterpress
printing. “We’re all about
empty-nest fun—new puppy, new bike, and being a
freelance agitator around
city government.”
Lisa Berglund enjoyed
her spring sabbatical,
working on a book on
reader annotations in early
American dictionaries.
In July, she becomes
executive director of
the American Society
for Eighteenth-Century
Studies.
Brenda Monroe Greene
“has a 13-year-old boy in
seventh grade, so college
and empty-nesting are
many years away.”
Jeff Barkin lives in
Portland, Maine, and
is a medical director at
a health IT company
managing state Medicaid
pharmacy programs. “Our
eldest graduated Penn
State ’12, and our baby
William & Mary ’15.”
Kurt Eichenwald covered
“Trumpism Versus Republicanism, Explained”
in Newsweek, as well
as many other topics of
national (and global!)
political interest.
For 20 years, Nils Davis
has worked in enterprise
software product management, and he writes,
trains, coaches, and
mentors product managers. He’s in search of his
next gig.
Ellen Argyros teaches at
Babson College and presented a paper on Annie
Proulx’s use of the trailer
motif. She also wrote and
illustrated a children’s
book, Angie the Anglerfish.
Katy Roth and Dreux
Patton ’84 dropped
middle child Megan ’20
off at Swarthmore for her
freshman year. She started
in Mary Lyon, where Katy
and Dreux met. Their other
kids are at Williams and in
high school. Katy is a busy
neurologist who enjoys
gardening and grows her
own plants from seed.
Felicia Rosenfeld is in her
second year as executive
director of the Dance
Resource Center in LA.
Husband David Linde ’82
was an Academy Award
nominee as a producer of
Arrival.
Leslie Johnson Nielsen’s
kids are out of college. “It’s
wonderful when they come
home (in herds, or alone),
but we’re also getting used
to having our space!”
Siu Li GoGwilt began
working at the International Women’s Health
Coalition last fall—quite a
change from the Metropolitan Opera. Husband Chris,
at Fordham, co-edited a
book of essays, Mocking
Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry,
and Other Starling Tropes,
due out this fall. It includes
contributions by Holt
Meyer and a cameo by
Professor Kaori Kitao.
Suellen Heath Riffkin
retired in March 2016 and
survived an “idle” year.
She’s still editing University of Utah Press books—a
gig with Friends Council
on Education in Philly—40
hours per month.
Sara Tjossem’s book
Fostering Internationalism
through Marine Science
has been published.
Andrea Davis is “so
happy to report my new
life as an empty nester
has been fulfilling in work
and social relationships.”
Both children are pursuing
their dream careers—at
UC–Davis veterinary
school and finishing an
architecture master’s at
WashU in St Louis.
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SwarthmoreBulletin
1985
Tim Kinnel
kinnel@swarthmore.
warpmail.net
Maria Tikoff Vargas
maria@chrisandmaria.com
Once upon a time, a ragtag
group of Swarthmoreans
did Don Nigro’s play The
Curate Shakespeare As
You Like It, about a ragtag
group of seven players
putting on the Bard’s
classic. It’s enormously
charming, and as sometimes happens in theater,
the cast and crew became
enormously close and
were loath to say goodbye
at the end of the school
year. So, led by Mike
Frontczak and Shelley
Lippman ’86, the group
spent the summer of ’85 in
Stowe, Vt., as the Northern
Light Theatre Company,
putting on The Curate in
repertory with Wilde’s
The Importance of Being
Earnest.
Thanks to Shelley, who
dredged up photos of that
summer and posted them
to Facebook, great memories were generated. Along
with Mike and Shelley, the
company included Liza
Knapp, Tim Kinnel, Julia
Stein ’87, Simon Hawkins
’87, Patrick McNamara
’87, Hope Nye Yeager ’88,
and Ethan Knapp ’88. The
late Jack Sutherland ’87,
brother of Jill Sutherland,
was part of the original
production but unable to
join for the summer.
Once upon another time,
there “was a co-captain
of that overachieving
Swarthmore baseball team
of ’85.” His name was
Charlie Green. “I wrote a
screenplay about it. Got
an agent. It didn’t sell,”
he says. “Turned it into a
novel. Got an agent. All the
major publishers passed.”
Then a book titled The
Art of Fielding by Chad
Harbach was published
in 2011, to great acclaim;
Jonathan Franzen ’81
wrote, “Reading [it] is like
watching a hugely gifted
young shortstop; you keep
waiting for the errors, but
there are no errors.” But
what if there were one
big error? For, as Charlie
explicates in “Hit by a
Pitch ... Beaned by ‘The
Art of Fielding’” for Medium, there are quite a few
“uncanny coincidences”
between his text and Harbach’s. Charlie tells us The
Washington Post killed a
story about it shortly before publication because it
“could not prove access.”
Judge for yourself (bit.ly/
HitByPitch).
And in more mainstream
sorts of Class Notes news:
Ted Abel is now at the
University of Iowa as
founding director of
the Iowa Neuroscience
Institute, the Roy J. Carver
Chair in Neuroscience, and
a professor of molecular
physiology and biophysics.
It’s quite a change after
18 years at Penn. “It’s an
exciting time of building
research programs and
hiring faculty.” Ted is also
chair of the neuroscience
section of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science and
president of the Molecular
and Cellular Cognition
Society.
Although her mother died
in 2016, Andrea Packard
has also had reasons
to celebrate: 20 years
as director of Swarthmore’s List Gallery (bit.
ly/APackard), 25 years
hitched to Jay Dahlke ’83,
and an exhibit, “The Fabric
of Nature,” at the Walton
Arts Center in Fayetteville,
Ark. You can see her art at
andreapackard.net. (It’s
beautiful, Andrea!)
The U.K. report: Although
no news of Brexit, Abby
Honeywell, who lives just
outside London, reports
she is taking a “charity
sabbatical” working on
behalf of the homeless.
“Over the past two years,
the number of clients
sleeping through the night
before we meet them has
doubled,” she says. Participation with her residents’
association sounds a bit
happier: teas, a summer
boat party, a Christmas
sing-along, and the local
pantomime (a musical
comedy common in the
U.K. around the holidays).
Among all the organizing
and doing, Abby and her
husband celebrated 10
years together, eight with
their two cats.
While not occupied with
her community clinic in
Seattle, Sarah Hufbauer
is “happy to have our
daughter studying at the
big university in Mexico
City this year. She’s
learning about our country
from all sides.” Her son is
looking at colleges (but he
won’t be a Swarthmorean,
either).
On the other hand,
Nathan and Ruth Woodliff-Stanley have one
son at Swarthmore and
another accepted for next
year. Nathan is executive
director of the Colorado ACLU (“as you can
imagine, his plate is more
than full right now”). Ruth
is canon to the ordinary for
the Episcopal Diocese of
Colorado—something like
chief operating officer to
the bishop’s CEO.
Finally, Paula Rockovich Gable is finishing a
one-year contract as a
senior minister of the First
Unitarian Congregation of
Ottawa and an executive
doctorate in business administration from Georgia
State University. “I’ve been
enjoying cross-country
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
61
class notes
skiing in Canada and finally can keep up with my
trainer. Problem is, she’s
well into her 80s.”
That’s all the non-fake
news that’s fit to print!
1987
Tom Newman
thomas.newman@hdrinc.com
Looking for news from
our 30th Reunion but
can’t wait until the winter
Bulletin? Try alumni
weekend.swarthmore.edu.
Or, if you want answers
to questions like, “Why
isn’t Swarthmore still
Quaker?” and “When did
Swarthmore admit its first
black student?” and “What
Parrish cornerstone motto
was featured in our last
Class Notes?” then check
out a documentary directed, written, produced, and
edited by Shayne Lightner:
bit.ly/MindingSwarthmore.
(Thanks, Shayne, for the
great work!)
Leslie Annexstein, a
first-timer to Class Notes,
writes: “Has it really been
30 years? Yikes! Here
are some life highlights:
I live in D.C. with my
partner, Todd Cox, a 1987
Princeton graduate, and
our daughters, Jasmine, 8,
and Leila, 5, who keep us
energetic and optimistic.
Professionally, I served in
the Obama administration
for 6 1/2 years as the
senior attorney adviser
to the general counsel of
the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, and just started as
deputy director of the
Office of Civil Rights and
Sexual Misconduct at the
University of Maryland–
College Park. I have been
serving on the board of our
daughters’ public charter
62
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
school in D.C., which
has kept me in the loop
regarding issues in public
elementary education.
Because I live in D.C., I
run into Swatties from
time to time. A real treat is
that my former roommate
and forever friend, Heidi
Feldman, visited us from
San Diego, where she and
her husband live with their
two lovely children. I may
not plug in formally very
much, but I have very fond
memories and happily
recommend Swarthmore
to all who are interested.
Happy 30th Reunion!”
I also caught up with
Peter Andreas, a professor of international
studies and political
science at the Watson
Institute at Brown University, after I found his
professional profile: bit.
ly/PAndreas. (Check it
out, it’s amazing!) “Much
of my life these days has
been about children and
childhood,” says Peter.
“We have ‘two under 2’ at
home, both girls. (I know,
I’m late to the whole parenting thing—some of my
Swarthmore classmates
visit while touring New England colleges with their
kids.) I also published a
memoir, Rebel Mother: My
Childhood Chasing the
Revolution (bit.ly/RebelMother), about growing
up on the run and a family
torn apart by the political
upheavals of the ’60s
and ’70s. Totally different
from any other writing I’ve
done. I spend a lot of time
around students—not
exactly ‘children,’ but not
fully formed adults, either.
I’d like to think all this
keeps me young, even if
I feel exhausted most of
the time.”
1930: Life Is Given But
Once
SUMMER 2017
SPOTLIGHT ON …
JOHN ERLER ’89
John Erler ’89, a comedian in Austin, Texas, made news
this spring dressed as Moses to protest a state bill to limit
transgender access to bathrooms. He held signs saying,
“Let my people go … to the bathroom.”
“On those rare occasions when you can stand up for the
marginalized and also make people laugh,” he says, “there’s
no better feeling.”
+
1989
Martha Easton
measton@elmira.edu
Kathy Stevens
stevkath@gmail.com
How nice to hear from so
many people. I, Martha,
am already thinking about
our next reunion!
Jennifer Rawcliffe Covarrubias is “officially an empty nester—younger son
Francisco is a freshman
studying film production at
USC. Elder son Martin ’16
is back in Portland, Ore.,
working with homeless
youth. I have had a busy,
challenging year as I
returned to teaching high
school after 20 years, but
I’m thoroughly enjoying the
kids, my colleagues, and
integrating 21st-century
technology into instruction.”
Andy and Sharon Seyfarth Garner live outside
Cleveland, where Andy is
a primary care pediatrician and child advocate,
and Sharon works with
Belly of the Whale
Spiritual Direction and
Retreat Ministries. Sharon
published a book, Praying
with Mandalas, and has a
follow-up coming out next
fall. Daughter Deborah is
CONTINUED: bulletin.swarthmore.edu
a high school junior, and
son Timothy is in college
studying music. As Sharon
says, “It’s crazy our kids
are around the age we
were when we were meeting at Swarthmore.”
Wayne Finegar, in
Columbia, Md., works at
Baltimore Yearly Meeting,
“running their website,
editing publications, event
planning, and administering the 10,000-plus membership database. William
and Thomas, 12, are doing
great in sixth grade. Robert turns 9 this summer.
Karen Ohland ’83 and
Matt Ohland’s wife, Emily,
stayed at our house the
night before the Women’s
March in January, and Leif
Kirschenbaum ’92 visited
in February. This spring, I
will take one of our sons
to look at Swarthmore as a
prospective!”
Speaking of, Bob and
Betsy Witt Bein happily
report that son Will was
accepted into the Class
of ’21. “We look forward
to spending four years
driving him crazy as we
vicariously relive our
own Swarthmore experience.” Bob is a VP and
senior counsel at Select
Medical, while Betsy
left teaching to pursue
a master of library and
information science.
Julie Blue “had a fantastic year with wonderful visits from Laura Augustine,
Kir Talmage, and Deborah
How. I was lucky to help
Deb celebrate a new MBA
when she graduated from
UMass–Amherst. Shortly
after, my 9-year-old,
Snowden, and I headed to
Japan, where I presented at a climate-change
conference and fell in love
with the wild monkeys on
a mountain outside Kyoto.
During the conference,
Dan Mont ’83 helped
me find a babysitter so
Snowden wouldn’t be
too bored. So glad to
be a Swarthmore alum!
We hope to do more
traveling—we’ve picked up
birding as a hobby.”
A succinct report: “My
life is great. But nothing
newsworthy.” Thus says
Valerie Lieber.
Elizabeth McCulley Gore
was promoted to the new
government relations
department chair of
Brownstein Hyatt Farber
Schreck, where she will
oversee the integration of
federal and state lobbying
teams. Congrats!
Deborah How took
ownership of a small West
LA performing-arts conservatory, hoping to add
creative offerings beyond
music and dance. She is
going on her seventh year
on the Swarthmore Alumni
Council and is the global
connections chair. “If you
are on Facebook, please
join our Swarthmore
College Alumni Virtual
Connection.”
Share your pics—on campus and off—on
Instagram: @swarthmorebulletin, #swatbulletin
Betsy Hayes Wilson and
C.J. Malanga hosted an
(ill-fated) election-watch
in Cambridge, Mass., with
Gerald Quirk and Patrick
and Alida Zweidler-McKay
’92. On vacation in Hawaii,
Betsy and C.J. bumped
into Javier Provencio at
the Pearl Harbor Memorial,
while Javier attended the
Critical Care Congress in
Honolulu.
Erica Barks Ruggles
writes: “As part of turning
50, I am trying to see
as many of Africa’s
primates—our cousins—as possible. It gives
one a new appreciation
for our fragile planet. So
far, I have seen mountain gorillas (the largest
primate), golden monkeys,
blue monkeys, olive
baboons, vervet monkeys,
L’Hoste monkeys, colobus
monkeys, chimpanzees,
and eight different lemurs
(including Goodman’s
mouse lemur—the smallest primate).”
Gecole Harley finishes
with these lovely words: “I
am happy and healthy …
and so are my parents and
sister. For that alone, I am
blessed. I love and miss
you all. The last few reunions have reminded me
how very special Swarthmore is—I look forward to
the next one. I am still in
Southern California and
open to visits.”
Thanks, Gecole—and
everyone. Be well!
1991
Nick Jesdanun
me@anick.org
A few years ago, I wrote
about Valerie Aymer’s
work on the elevated
Liberty Park overlooking
NYC’s World Trade Center
memorial. By chance, my
office moved to the neighborhood in January, and I
now walk across Val’s park
regularly. Thank you, Val.
Other encounters include
coffee with Courtney
Richmond during her trip
to New York and, while in
Thailand in December, I
met up with Jim Wallace,
who lives in Bangkok’s
Thonburi section,
where my mom grew up.
(Check out our selfie on
Facebook.) A month later,
someone called my name
at Disneyland—Rob Biggar
and his wife. We were all
there for the Star Wars
half-marathon. I let Chewbacca win, by the way.
Meanwhile, I enrolled in a
class in New York offered
through Swarthmore’s
Lifelong Learning program.
Other attendees include
Charlotte Rotterdam’s
mom, Heidi, and Raul
Cuza. Small world! We’re
learning about the role of
math in nature and everyday life—no competency in
math required!
Like most of us, Jeannine
Mastre Thompson is
realizing that college
admissions have gotten
so competitive, “I doubt I
could get into Swarthmore
again.” Well, there’s always
Haverford … I kid! Her
daughters, 13 and 15, will
start looking at schools
soon. Jeannine teaches
elementary-school math
near Sacramento, Calif.,
and works with at-risk
students in grades 4–8.
Matt Kennel’s eldest
daughter, Madison, is off
to Northwestern, where
she’ll play soccer. Matt
is a partner with a travel
company, Premier World
Discovery, in Redondo
Beach, Calif. He caught
up with his Swarthmore
basketball teammates on
campus last year. Some of
them played in the annual
alumni game preceding
the last varsity home game
(Swat beat Haverford, 7665.) Do today’s Swatties
know the “safety school”
chant? Classic.
Jed Bell started a film
program at San Francisco State University and
finished a short, “Dropping
Penny,” about two transgender dog-walkers.
University of Chicago
professor Mike Greenstone was appointed director of the Becker Friedman
Institute for Research in
Economics. He will retain
his job as director of the
university’s Energy Policy
Institute.
In the final days of the
Obama administration,
Vietnam War expert Ed
Miller joined then-Secretary of State John Kerry
on a trip to the Mekong
Delta to find the site of a
Viet Cong attack on Kerry-
led Swift boats in 1969.
According to news reports,
Kerry met a Viet Cong soldier who took part in that
ambush. Ed, a Dartmouth
history professor, helped
Kerry locate the site using
maps from the 1960s.
Speaking of the State
Department, Juan Martinez was appointed to an
office on cybersecurity
and other internet policies.
He joins JeeYoung Oh ’08
and Martha Marrazza ’09
in hosting happy hours for
D.C.-area alums interested
in foreign policy or international development.
Fred Wilson Horch and
Chris Lyford, along with
their sons, spent a weekend skiing at Sugarloaf in
Maine. Fred and wife Hadley Wilson Horch ’93 live
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in Brunswick, Maine, not
far from Bowdoin College,
where Hadley chairs the
neuroscience program.
Nicole Theodosiou Napier
is overseeing construction
of a $100 million science
and engineering center
at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. Let’s hope
the funds don’t get sucked
up the way our chemistry
samples inadvertently
did in college, as her lab
partner (and this writer)
likes to remind her as
often as possible. Nicole
was appointed director
of biochemistry at Union,
though she’ll head to Australia this fall to run another term abroad. Nicole
also visits Claire Hartten
in Cambridge, N.Y., where
“she has a lovely home and
more free-range pigs than
you can count.”
Maybe my newly acquired math skills will help.
1995
Sally Chin
sallypchin@gmail.com
Erik Thoen
erik_thoen@alum.
swarthmore.edu
We hope you’re having an
exciting year—we’d love to
hear all about it!
Laura Raicovich had
two books come out this
spring: At the Lightning
Field, reflecting on the
iconic artwork by Walter
De Maria, chaos theory,
time, and memory; and
Assuming Boycott:
Resistance, Agency, and
Cultural Production, which
she co-edited. Laura, the
director of the Queens
Museum, writes: “We are
opening five projects that
run through mid-August.
All feature contemporary
artists contending with
subjects ranging from water justice and the poetry
of protest to boundaries
and borders.”
Sarah Cebik Walters writes: “I’m still in
Cambridge, England, still
loving life in a university
city, and still working
for a major international
assessment provider and
education consultancy
(in a noneducation role);
I enjoy the work but wish
I had taken advantage of
the education department
when I was at Swat. My
kid is fast approaching the
start of his career at Big
Kid School in September.
(‘Reception’ is like kindergarten.)”
Danielle Tylke remarried in 2016 and is one
year into a renovation
project with her husband
and children. She is
also helping develop the
service-learning program
at her high school; every
student does direct service
as part of graduation
requirements.
Mehdi Nejad-Sattari
writes: “My wife, Katie, and
I are moving with our two
kids to Chico, Calif., where
I’ll work at Enloe Medical
Center. Hope to connect
with Western Swatties.
Best wishes—come visit!”
Hattie Fletcher is in Pittsburgh as the managing editor at Creative Nonfiction,
where she also now edits
a new monthly magazine,
True Story, featuring one
exceptional long-form
essay each issue.
Richard Tchen reports
that his bicycle has withstood the tenfold increase
in his daily commute,
SEPTA has wrapped up its
work on the Crum overpass, and the woods have
reawakened for spring.
Phyllis “Bunny” Sedmont
Bennett’s new book, The
Jealous Dandelion, was
released: amazon.com/
author/bunnybennett.
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
63
class notes
Adam Koplan writes:
“After nearly 20 wonderful years in New York
City, my family and I
moved to my hometown
of Atlanta. My company,
Flying Carpet Theatre,
now has two chapters—
in NYC and Georgia. I
had a blast directing an
NYC production of my
musical 1001 Nights (co-
written with Robert Lopez
of Frozen and Book of
Mormon fame), staged at
Off-Broadway’s Atlantic
Theater (bit.ly/NYT1001).
My daughters are 9 and
5, and they seem to be
adjusting to the Atlanta
lifestyle (i.e. much more
outdoor time). We miss
NYC’s huge Swattie
contingent and welcome
anyone traveling through.”
As for me, Sally, I’m
with my family enjoying
Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and
I find I’m spending a lot
more time protesting in the
streets than ever before.
In the news: Krister
Johnson, executive
producer of Childrens
Hospital, won an Emmy for
short-form comedy series:
bit.ly/KristerTweet
Dan Rothenberg is working on a play for FringeArts
about the planet’s future in
the age of climate change:
bit.ly/Rothenberg
Ben Vigoda made
deep-learning computers
able to continually refine
their own capabilities,
increasing efficiencies:
bit.ly/BVigoda
1997
Joy Oliver
joy_oliver@hotmail.com
I write this in March, two
months before our 20th
Reunion; you will read it
around July, two months
64
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
after the reunion. I still live
in Morocco, and the distance rendered me unable
to attend. I felt this loss
most sharply when I read
about Alan Sama’s nostalgic DJ set for the Saturday
night party. Nothing beats
a Class of ’97 dance party
DJ’d by Alan! Please tell
me all about the fun.
Living in Westchester
County, N.Y., for the last
year, Alan Sama and
wife Jennifer had their
second child, Ella Rose,
in November. Robin
Mandel celebrated son
Arlo’s arrival in September. Robin is in his fourth
year at UMass–Amherst
in the art department.
Katie Jozwicki Morgan
and her husband bought
a house last year and
love living in Houston’s
Montrose neighborhood.
Meghan Kriegel Moore
writes that she survived
childbirth, a year of sleep
deprivation, shingles (Had
chickenpox? You might
get shingles), and an appendectomy. She then cut
off all her hair, figured out
which foods were messing
with her body, and
dropped an eighth of her
weight. She’s recommitted
to photographing families
and small businesses, and
gives a more reasonable
amount of time to community organizations. Erica
Schreiber is a partner at
the Conscious Leadership
Group—a big departure
from her fiercely independent career as an identity
and impact strategist for
leaders. Erica lives in
Santa Barbara, Calif., with
son Noah, who is 11 going
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SUMMER 2017
on 35. She travels more
these days—Bay Area,
Chicago, D.C., NYC—and
calls it a gift to come home
to such a beautiful place
and to a boy who brings
her such delight. Theresa
Williamson still runs
the nonprofit Catalytic
Communities in Rio de
Janeiro, coming up on 17
years, and is launching the
Sustainable Favela Network. Todd West finished
a first career in hardware
and cloud services and is
pursuing a second in natural resources, studying
habitat use and denning
of endangered mountain
foxes. Tom Makin moved
his intellectual-property litigation practice
uptown to Shearman &
Sterling. Tom runs across
numerous Swattie IP
litigators—he broke bread
in Boston with patent
litigator Ben Stern ’96
and Tushar Parlikar ’01.
In March, Matt Jacobson
was ordained a deacon at
the Cathedral of St. John
the Divine in NYC. Wife
Meredith Linn and Jason
Sturm, Hanan Hussein
Knoll, and Courtney Clark
Metakis ’98 were at the
ordination. In May, Matt
graduated from the General Theological Seminary
of the Episcopal Church,
receiving a master of
divinity, alongside JoAnn
Bradley Jones ’73.
Walid Gellad appeared on
NPR to discuss negotiation
and the pharmaceutical
buying power of Medicare
(bit.ly/WalidGellad). Uri
Ko Yoo lives in the D.C.
area with her husband and
sons Noel, 3, and baby
Asher. She still works
at the Social Security
Administration HQ in
Baltimore—and calls it an
exciting (or absolutely,
frightfully mind-boggling)
time to be a government
lawyer at a federal agency.
Emily Marston lives with
her husband and son, age
3, off the Blue Ridge Parkway in beautiful Roanoke,
Va. She’s been a clinical
psychologist at VA hospitals for six years and is the
coordinator of an inpatient
PTSD unit at the Salem VA
Medical Center. It’s not a
job she anticipated, Emily
notes, but one she loves.
Twenty years later, we
still seek adventures and
find that with the laugh
lines and gray hairs come
a strong sense of self and
contentment with the
place we’ve carved for ourselves in the world. Good
job, Class of ’97.
1999
Melissa Morrell MacBeth
mmacbeth@gmail.com
Tyler Wigg Stevenson had
a busy year. “We welcomed
our second daughter,
Heloise Appeline, in March
2016, and I just wrapped
up 10 delightful weeks
at home caring for her
and her sister, courtesy
of Canada’s generous
parental-leave laws. I was
ordained in the Anglican
Church of Canada to the
diaconate in May 2016,
and to the priesthood in
December. I’ve been loving
full-time congregational
ministry at Little Trinity
Church in Toronto since
last June.”
Daniel Laurison’s
research on the “class
ceiling” was quoted in the
Financial Times (bit.ly/
DLaurison).
Erika Johansen and
husband Shane had baby
George in September. “We
haven’t really slept since,”
she writes, “but George
is huge and healthy and
we’re pretty happy. We
live outside London, and
I have to learn to drive on
the wrong side of the road
(and car!), which should
undoubtedly be hell.” She’s
also working on a book,
“but it’s slow going.”
Mason Astley saw Matt
Menendez at Jed Lewis
’00’s house in Marblehead,
Mass., last summer. Jed
visited Mason in Boston
this spring, “and his wife
gave birth two days later.”
Katherine Hall Carvajal
lives in San Francisco with
husband Lucas. “In addition to Sofia, 8, we also
have Elena, 4, and Nicolas,
1. The car is full, life is full,
and we enjoy staying connected to Swat by hosting
students during extern
week and summertime.”
Mariah Peelle Sotelino
doesn’t mind being
almost 40, despite Louis
C.K. saying being 40 is
“being half-dead.” “It is
wonderful to be done with
diapers and day care” for
daughters Marisa, 9, and
Vivian, 6, who are thriving
in their public elementary
International Baccalaureate schools. Mariah
and husband Daniel
Sotelino ’01 moved to Falls
Church, Va., in summer
2015 and are happy to
have a backyard. “Daniel
installed two swings up
high in the maple for the
girls, and we’ve had many
a weekend grilling, playing
music, and hangin’ out by
the fire pit. Nothin’ better
than that!” Mariah still
teaches Pilates (17 years
and counting), and her
latest interests are singing
at Daniel’s gigs, training
in Brazilian jiujitsu with
her daughters, and sewing
18-inch doll clothes.
Stacey Bearden, like
many of us, is contemplating this year of turning
40: “I’ve decided to start
planning my midlife crisis.”
She is considering a trip to
celebrate (good idea). She
is in a new role leading the
global HR department at
Wind River Systems—“the
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ILANA NAGIB
ALUMNI PROFILE
“Our work is broader than just what happens in the exam room—we have to have an
impact on the whole community,” says Alicia Wilson ’96, executive director of La Clinica del
Pueblo. “The bigger we make the circle of human compassion, the better off we all are.”
‘OUR WORK IS RESISTANCE’
Across barriers, she keeps a community
healthy and whole
by Leigh Anderson ’96
WHAT DO YOU DO when your life’s
work is threatened by President
Trump’s America? For Alicia Wilson
’96, you do what you’ve done for 17
years: Keep the door open at a health
center serving one of Washington,
D.C.’s most vulnerable populations.
Wilson is the executive director of
La Clinica del Pueblo, a community-
based nonprofit that provides primary
and mental-health care, interpretation
services, health education, and advocacy support to a largely Salvadoran
population in the D.C. area.
The 35-year-old clinic annually
serves roughly 4,000 clients who face
considerable obstacles to health care
access: 97 percent of its patients have
a household income 200 percent below
the federal poverty line. Many are
uninsured immigrants whose journeys
to the U.S. have been physically and
mentally traumatizing and who face
cultural, linguistic, professional, and
even legal barriers once they’re here.
All of these factors can contribute to
a lack of quality, routine preventive
health care—which is where La Clinica
comes in. The institution abides by
the philosophy that good health begins
with the community at large—that
treating the unique risk factors of an
entire group will improve the health
outcomes of the individuals.
Even so, Wilson is concerned that
the election of Donald Trump, and the
concomitant emboldening of conservative policymakers and the alt-right,
threatens La Clinica’s clients. The
potential repeal of the Affordable Care
Act could eliminate funding that keeps
the heat and lights on; Wilson also
worries about patients becoming victims of hate crimes.
She draws strength from her clients, recounting the story of América
Guardado, an undocumented immigrant who frequently arrived for her
primary-care appointments covered
in bruises. Her doctor persuaded her
to accept La Clinica’s other services
and connected her with their “swat
team”—an intervention that included
a peer-support group for domestic-
violence survivors and immigration
assistance. The team helped Guardado
move into a shelter, get a work permit,
and find English classes and coursework for a new career.
Guardado is now a certified nursing and medical assistant as well as a
member of La Clinica’s board—and so
one of Wilson’s bosses.
“She works six-and-a-half days a
week, but still takes Friday afternoons
to support other domestic-violence
survivors. La Clinica has a philosophy that ‘we’re all in this together,’ and
she’s a great example of that,” Wilson
says. “It’s incredibly affirming to work
with and for folks like her. It gets me
out of bed in the morning.”
Looking back, Wilson credits the
College with sparking her curiosity—
and humility.
“I think a lot of us arrived at
Swarthmore as high achievers, and
we were humbled very fast. Going
through that process is an important
part of growth,” she says. “I came from
a white, Midwestern community and
started in a job after college in which
I was a minority. That was an opportunity to adopt that humility: I don’t
know anything. Please teach me.”
Throughout her life and career, that
mindset has served her well.
“Swat taught me a lot about how to
think about power and privilege and
how societies are organized,” Wilson
says. “It taught me to question my
assumptions, to be open, and to push
past my sense of my own capacity.”
Life’s demands keep testing that
capacity, especially in today’s climate.
“I’m certainly not a poster child for
work-life balance these days—I blame
Trump,” laughs Wilson, who has two
small children. “I’m sure my partner
would agree, as she often takes up the
slack in keeping us all clothed and fed.”
So how will she face this new era
and its challenges? “Our work is resistance,” Wilson says. “That’s what we
do—and will do—every day.”
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
65
class notes
only operating system
on Mars!” (They’re in the
Mars rover.) It’s challenging because of job and
budget cuts, “but also
because I have so much to
learn and do and change.”
On the home front, she
enjoys son Glen, 3. “It’s
been a tough year with
so many transitions from
baby to little boy.” Stacey
saw Cathy Polinsky in San
Francisco; she’s the CTO
of Stitch Fix. “After seven
years at Salesforce, it’s
been really fun jumping
into a new business.
Coincidentally, David
Pearce ’03 joined around
the same time. We hosted
students as part of the
Swarthmore CIL@SF trip.”
Ellen Johnson-Price,
husband Jason, and son
Rhys visited Anna Tischler
in Minneapolis in the fall.
“We had fun taking our
kids to the Renaissance
festival and the zoo.”
Anne Holland and partner
Ngawang live in Montreal, “where we translate
Tibetan Buddhist literature
into English.” Her first
book, A Clear Mirror: The
Visionary Autobiography
of a Tibetan Master, was
published in 2010. They
had daughter Delphine
Holland on Nov. 13, and
“we’re all in love, amazed,
and sleep-deprived!” They
also had a fantastic visit in
the Bay Area with Richard
Vezina, husband Alex, and
“their delightful, precocious daughter, Abby.”
Roger Bock has had
the same job for 12 years,
“which is a little scary,
but I guess also a sign I’ve
found something I like.” He
works on getting computers to predict cyberattacks
by reading the news. In his
spare time, he trains in and
teaches Brazilian jiujitsu.
Roger visited Pittsburgh in
October and saw Carl Wellington and Jenny Briggs
and Amy and Sarah. “We
had a fun time stalking a
66
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
self-driving car that Carl
helped design.” Roger’s
kids attend a school in
Cambridge, Mass., with
a strong social-justice
focus that reminds me of
Swarthmore. “My older
son even wrote a letter to
the town newspaper about
transgender rights.”
To all of us almost- and
just-past-40-year-olds,
sleep-deprived and jiujitsu
warriors alike, thank you
for your news.
2001
Claudia Zambra
claudiazambra@gmail.com
Evan Gregory happily
reports the arrival of twins
Gus and Oliver in September; Allyn Dullighan and
husband Jeff had Aurora
in August; and C.J. Riley
and wife Linda had second
daughter Laurel. C.J.
attended Pat Thrasher’s
wedding with Ryan Neiheiser and Darren and Caitlin
Schlap-Gilgoff Wood.
Emilia Pastor Feldman also
had her second child and
moved to Paris with her
family. She misses Boston
(except for the winter).
Since 2014, Ryan Neiheiser and wife Xristina
Argyros have lived in London, running an architecture practice, Neiheiser
Argyros, and teaching
design. After nine years in
Cologne, Germany, Kristen
Panfilio accepted a faculty
position at the University
of Warwick and is moving
back to the U.K., slowly
transitioning her developmental genetics lab,
and beginning a year of
international commuting.
Kwabena Adu and wife
Kate live in Barbados,
where they set up a mission of their church, Shep-
SUMMER 2017
herd House International.
Kwabena pastors the
church and makes a living
in software engineering.
He would love visitors!
Amber Adamson is now
development director of
Starfinder Foundation,
a Philadelphia nonprofit
that uses soccer for social
change. Kara Spangler
Rosenberg teaches high
school English in Montpelier, Vt., and reads books
about teens for Vermont’s
Green Mountain Book
Award committee. She’s
learning guitar and enjoys
sing-and-play-alongs with
Xiang Lan Zhuo (banjo and
mandolin), Robyn Stewart
(uke), and their families.
Ben Chan received tenure
at St. Norbert College and
made a new connection
when Abraham Nussbaum
’97 visited his bioethics
class in February to discuss his brilliant book The
Finest Traditions of My
Calling. After almost a
decade in finance, Gabe
Turzo spent some time in
a mental hospital and now
works at a Trader Joe’s
while shopping around his
writing. For the first time
in a long time, he doesn’t
hate his job. He recently
moved in with his longtime
girlfriend, and they are
very happy.
Lynne DeSilva-Johnson
joined the faculty at Pratt
Institute as an assistant
visiting professor, teaching
interdisciplinary literature/
criticism/theory. The
Operating System, an arts
organization/small press
she founded and runs
(pro bono!), will publish
20 books in 2017 and
continues to thrive. Among
those books she’s most
proud of is a title from
the OS’s new Unsilenced
Texts series, a right-bound
Arabic-English translation
of Palestinian poet/artist
and political prisoner
Ashraf Fayadh; after its
publication, Fayadh won
the Oxfam Novib/PEN
Award for Freedom of
Expression, and the book
is now longlisted for the
2017 Best Translated Book
Awards. Wish them luck!
Lynne is busy leading
ACLU trainings; is making
art, writing, editing, and
designing beyond the OS;
and has publications forthcoming in mags, journals,
and anthologies—plus
two books on the way!
In her, uh, spare time,
she’s writing a series for
Drunken Boat on National
Endowment for the Arts
grantees in danger of
losing their funding.
The D.C. area is ex-
periencing shake-ups.
Ambrose Dieringer and
his family relocated and
greatly prefer the Seattle
version of Washington
over D.C. Aryani Manring
is moving from D.C to Yangon, Myanmar, to work at
the U.S. Embassy. She and
husband Scott Kofmehl
and their kids, Talia and
Kate, expect to be there
until 2020. (Visitors welcome!) Meanwhile, Mattathias Schwartz moved with
wife Eva to D.C.; they live
near Adams Morgan. And
I, Claudia, still live in D.C.,
traveling often across the
planet to Cambodia, Laos,
and Myanmar for work.
CAPTIONED!
“There goes another Swarthmore graduate,
off to save the world.”
— Robin McCarthy Arehart ’92
“The R.A.s are returning early this year!”
—Josephine Michener ’79
“Not another phoenix.”
—Charles Miller ’59
“Normally he migrates in May, but I guess global
warming is affecting him, too.”
—James Pasterczyk ’81
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2003
Robin Smith Petruzielo
robinleslie@alum.
swarthmore.edu
Abram and E.B. Fortier
Falk had son Charlie in
September. E.B. started as
a veterinary dermatologist
at Cornell University’s
Veterinary Specialists in
Stamford, Conn. Abram
is a physicist for IBM
Research in Yorktown
Heights, N.Y. They now live
in Port Chester, N.Y.
Feng He married wife
Jane in November; the
story of how they met
was reported in an NPR
segment (bit.ly/FengJane).
The startup they founded
is growing fast.
Still teaching math at
the GI School in Armenia,
Colombia, Eric Schober
Maya married Maria
Fernanda Uribe López in
November.
Eden Wales Freedman accepted a position as assistant professor of English
and diversity studies at
Mount Mercy University in
Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Eden
is Mount Mercy’s director
of diversity studies and
the English department’s
graduate coordinator.
Laurel Eckhouse is
finishing a Ph.D. She and
her partner are moving to
Colorado, where she will
be an assistant professor
of political science at the
University of Denver.
Jeff Regier completed
a Ph.D. in statistics at
UC–Berkeley in August
and stayed for a postdoc in
computer science.
Franzeska Dickson is
finishing a film editing degree at the American Film
Institute. Her thesis short
on slash fanfiction was to
shoot this June in LA.
Rob Melick started a law
firm in September near
his Wisconsin hometown.
His practice focuses
exclusively on estate
planning. Rob and wife
Erica Newton Melick ’05
have two sons—Grady,
7, and Hudson, 4—who
are already tremendous
hockey players.
John Fort teaches high
school science in Southern
California. He visited with
Lucy Lang and her lovely
family in NYC. Lucy was
appointed special counsel
for policy and projects at
the Manhattan District
Attorney’s Office and
director of that office’s
educational arm, the
DANY Academy. As a 2017
Presidential Leadership
Scholar, she is studying
leadership under the
auspices of the Presidential Libraries. With partner
Scott Asher, Lucy celebrated daughter Theresa
(“Tessa”) Lang Asher’s
turning 1 in December, and
son Isaiah (“Ike”) Lang
Asher’s turning 3 in April.
John Anderson still
works at the World Bank,
focusing on trade and
competitiveness issues in
the Caribbean. Wife Karen
is an ABC White House
correspondent. John and
Karen enjoy watching
twins Matt and Kelly start
to walk, talk, and adore big
sister Maeve.
Todd Gillette started a
job at Northrop Grumman
researching acoustic
force fields as part of a
three-year rotation. Wife
Laura also joined Northrop
Grumman, as a UX designer. Before starting work,
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the two honeymooned in
Playa del Carmen, Mexico,
and visited Chichen Itza.
Hollis Easter and fiancée
Jasmine Walker bought a
house in Burlington, Vt.,
where he is a business
coach and process doctor/
performance-improvement
consultant.
2005
Jessica Zagory
jazagory@alum.swarthmore.
edu
Elizabeth Redden had a
piece published on Inside
Higher Ed (bit.ly/ReddenSanctuary). Blogger
Benjamin Kabak talked the
Q train and subways with
The Village Voice—with a
shout out to The Phoenix
(bit.ly/KabakSubway).
Mary Blair gave the Sigma Xi talk on conservation
biology of primates March
13 at Swarthmore.
Joseph Altuzarra got personal in a New York Times
piece (bit.ly/AltuzarraNYT)
and designed the statement-making Golden
Globes suit worn by Evan
Rachel Wood (bit.ly/
AltuzarraGlobes).
Geoff Hollinger and wife
Bridget Tyler had daughter
Antoinette “Toni” Tyler
Hollinger on Dec. 18 in
Corvallis, Ore. Toni is a
happy, healthy baby who
looks forward to meeting
Swarthmore friends. Ian
Miller and wife Evelyn had
second child Kai Benjamin
Miller on Jan. 11. Big
brother Rye has been a
big help. Sarah Bryan Fask
had second son Samuel
McLellan Fask on March
1. She spent a lot of quality
time with Samuel and elder
son George this spring
during her maternity
leave. In July, she will be
back practicing labor and
employment law at Littler
Mendelson in Philadelphia.
Jawaad Hussain and his
family moved from South
Philadelphia to Cherry Hill,
N.J. He works part time
at Weisman Children’s
Rehabilitation Hospital in
Marlton, N.J., developing
projects for pediatric
patients with poorly
controlled medical illnesses. “Basically, I get to
‘tune-up’ kids who, despite
traditional care, are falling
apart. And my daughter
loves kindergarten.”
Class vice president
Eugene Palatulan had a
second daughter, Emma
Juliette. He was accepted
into a physical medicine
and rehabilitation residency at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Not to be
outdone, president Jorge
Aguilar was accepted into
a pediatrics residency
at Children’s Hospital of
Philadelphia. They both
graduated from Albert Einstein College of Medicine
this spring.
Jason Mui lives in Chicago with wife Elizabeth
Gorgas, daughter Harley
Mui Gorgas, and motherin-law Peggy Kratz. He
still works in advertising,
teaches trapeze, and
performs magic.
Tafadzwa Muguwe, Ryan
Esquejo, and Melanie
Johncilla had a mini-
reunion in Boston.
Finally, Lauren Sippel
started as associate
director for research at
the VA National Center for
PTSD Executive Division
in White River Junction,
Vt. Her main responsibility is to assure the latest
research findings help
those exposed to trauma.
Lauren also has a joint
appointment as assistant
professor of psychiatry at
Geisel School of Medicine
at Dartmouth.
2007
Kristin Leitzel Hoy
kleitzel@gmail.com
After finally living in the
same city after many
years of long distance,
Jillian Astarita married
James Peck on Sept. 30
in the White Mountains
of New Hampshire. They
honeymooned in Peru,
where they hiked the Inca
Trail to Machu Picchu,
enjoyed many pisco sours,
and squeezed in some
relaxation. After returning,
they adopted an adorable
pit bull puppy named
Sierra. Jillian lives in San
Francisco and researches
cancer immunology at
Genentech.
Eleanor Joseph finally
got her act together to
contribute a Class Note in
honor of our 10th Reunion.
Her decade in brief: two
years in economic and
strategy consulting in
D.C., two years in global
health in Uganda, three
years of graduate school in
Massachusetts, one year
in municipal government
in Boston, and almost
two years of working on
her business, Ubuntu
Capital—a Yelp or Angie’s
List of sorts designed for
urban emerging markets. In October, Eleanor
married Andrew Johnston
in Hopewell Junction, N.Y.
Nick Groh, Cristina Alva,
Dan Forman, Lizzy Vogel,
Rob McKeon, Eric Zwick,
Ben Oldfield, Erica Lukoski
’08, Katie Camillus ’08,
and Inessa Lurye ’06
attended. In addition,
Swatties—Garth Sheldon-Coulson, Dan Sullivan,
Jayne Koellhoffer, and
Jayanti Owens ’06—comprised almost 30 percent
of the bridal party. Eleanor
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
67
class notes
is incredibly grateful for all
her Swarthmore friends.
Thomas Bennett, Peter
Brennan, and Edward “Sal”
Goldstein, and their wives,
Randall Johnston ’09,
Lauren Kluz-Wisniewski
Brennan ’08, and Saori Yamaguchi, respectively, had
babies Bennett Johnston,
Emilia Brennan, and Kent
Yamaguchi, respectively,
in December, February,
and January, respectively.
The proud parents look
forward to helping their
children become independent thinkers, but for
now, they’ll settle for basic
motor control.
Stephanie Chuang and
Jeremy Fahringer ’06 had
baby Evangeline “Eva”
Grace. Newly minted big
brother Theo is pleased
that they now create a
“square” in the car.
Juliet Braslow and
Carlos Villafuerte ’08 said
goodbye to Kenya after
four years and moved to
Santiago, Chile. Juliet
works with the U.N. in the
Sustainable Development
and Human Settlements
Department of the
Economic Commission for
Latin America and the Caribbean. Juliet and Carlos
welcome Swattie visitors.
Jonathan Stott moved
from relaxing Austin,
Texas, to busy NYC with
partner Emily and cats
Frank the Tank and Trina.
He is the deputy director
of EcoRise, a nonprofit
that provides sustainability curriculum and
professional development
to K–12 educators globally.
Jon lives in the boonies of
Queens but enjoys running
into Swatties in the city.
Karl Petre moved from
Baltimore to San Francisco
to begin a job with Apple.
Brandy Monk-Payton
is finishing a year at
Dartmouth as a postdoctoral fellow. She is excited
to move back to NYC
this summer and begin
68
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
a tenure-track position
as assistant professor of
communication and media
studies at Fordham, where
she will teach courses like
Television and Civil Rights.
She’s also working on her
first book, Dark Optics:
Blackness, Exposure, and
Celebrity in Media Culture,
and would love to hang out
with NYC Swatties.
Sherelle Harmon is a
fifth-year clinical psychology doctoral candidate at
Florida State University. In
October, she hung out with
Jaky Joseph ’06 in NYC
as the first houseguest at
his new pad. Little did she
know she would spend
countless hours unpacking
and helping him organize.
Earlier this year, she
caught up with Kendra McDow in D.C. Kendra later
joined her in Tallahassee,
Fla., for a good ol’ Southern celebration for Match
Day last month. Despite
being crazy busy working
on her dissertation,
Sherelle looks forward
to moving to Charleston,
S.C., this summer to begin
a yearlong predoctoral
internship at the Medical
University of South Carolina, where she learned that
CJ Seitz-Brown ’10 will
also be interning.
Elsita Kiekebusch is a
second-year Ph.D. student
in North Carolina State
University’s Department of
Applied Ecology, studying
the effects of climate
change on rare and
endangered butterflies.
She loves Raleigh, N.C.,
plays ultimate Frisbee, and
welcomes visitors.
Anna Torres began a two-
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SUMMER 2017
year postdoc in UChicago’s
comparative literature
department. She is completing her first book, an
examination of the Yiddish
literary avant-garde and
the anarchist press in Russia, Canada, and the U.S.
Nathaniel Peters defended his dissertation on
12th-century monks and
their theology March 22.
He and his wife have been
enjoying dorm life and fish
fries in Milwaukee.
Erica George Baugh is on
the home stretch of a glide
year before medical school
this fall, working in clinical
research and volunteering
at Planned Parenthood
Los Angeles.
Nick Groh and new wife
Ambika Satija visited
friends and family in
Delhi, India; discovered the
speakeasies of Bangkok;
and explored Angkor Wat
before heading to Hong
Kong and then back to
Boston. Working in cybersecurity has allowed Nick
to visit numerous ’07ers,
including Peter Kriss in
San Francisco and Dan
Sullivan in Chicago. Nick
planned to be back in
Chicago in April for Eric
Zwick’s birthday.
James Kalafus found
the life-affirming joy of
gardening in response to
collective despair after
fall’s election. He volunteers, works part time, and
hoped this spring to open
a free Growers Community
Yoga Center Saturdays
through Tuesdays in
Eugene, Ore. He loves his
huggable, wiggly dog.
Jesse Goodall completed
a six-month sabbatical
backpacking through 17
countries in Southeast
Asia and Central Europe. Staying in all those
dorms with so many young
friends reminded him of
college. He is now in NYC
at Contently, where he has
had a great time working
for three years.
2009
Melanie Spaulding
maspauld1@gmail.com
Todd Friedman joined a
Miami law firm where
he focuses on complex
commercial litigation,
class-action defense, and
professional malpractice.
He and wife Lindsey
adopted a 100-pound Lab/
shepherd and are thinking
about getting her a friend.
Erin Heaney now lives in
Buffalo, N.Y., where she
is co-director of Showing
Up for Racial Justice, a
national network organizing white people against
racism. Jessie Bear is
still making theater (The
New York Times reviewed
her Pool Play 2.0)and
changing the food system
at Blue Apron. Phil Issa is
a journalist, focusing on
the impact war has on the
lives of Syrian civilians.
In the field of academic
achievements, Emlen Metz
finished a psychology
Ph.D. at Penn and began a
postdoc in the assessment
of scientific thinking at
Berkeley. If you’re in the
Bay Area, say hi. Sarah Ifft
Decker is finishing a medieval history dissertation
for a Ph.D. from Yale. Abbey Agresta received a medieval history Ph.D. from
Yale in May 2016 and is
doing a postdoc at Queen’s
University in Canada. She
married Eric Holzhauer
’10 in April with numerous
Swatties attending. Abbey
was also a Swarthmore
honors examiner for the
Medieval Mediterranean
course this spring, which
is pretty much living the
dream. Diana “Teddy” Pozo
graduated in December
from UC–Santa Barbara
with a Ph.D. in film and
media studies and a doctoral emphasis in feminist
studies. Elizabeth “Zebi”
Brown is completing her
first year of architectural
grad school at the University of Maryland.
Kara Peterman and
Kelsey Hatzell continue to
lead parallel lives and are
now assistant professors
at UMass–Amherst and
Vanderbilt, respectively.
Coincidentally, Kelsey’s
parents met at UMass
and Kara’s parents met at
Vanderbilt. Lauren Stokes
earned a Ph.D. in August
and is now an assistant
professor of German history at Northwestern—just
in time to teach the next
generation about fascism.
She also got married in a
courthouse ceremony in
January 2016. After working in the Peace Corps in
Liberia, Kristin Caspar
started at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies. She
will graduate with an M.A.
in international economics
and conflict management
in 2018.
Faith Pampel Sikorski
married David Sikorski in
July 2016 in the Catskill
Mountains. She was joined
by bridesmaids Kathleen
Feeney, Elise Garrity,
Nyika Corbett ’10, and Lauren DeLuca ’10. Andrew
VanBuren ’10 officiated,
and Henry Clapp was
master of ceremonies. Jeff
and Karen Berk Kushner
’08 had son Grayson
William in November.
Annie Carter married
Prabath Silva in July 2016
in Virginia. Emma Otheguy
married Tim Roeper ’07 in
August in Pennsylvania,
surrounded by happy
Swatties. Emma and Tim
are working on doctorates
in NYC. Kevin and Jordan
Schmidt Shaughnessy
had son Liam James in
October 2015. They live in
Austin, Texas, where Kevin
is a tech sales manager
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LAURENCE KESTERSON
ALUMNI PROFILE
“For me, fiction is a form of empathy,” says Emily Robbins ’07. “The sense of joy that
comes from reading a good novel brings us closer to the characters on the page, whatever
place they’re living in, and their struggles in a way that connects us to them—and each other.”
WHAT ARE WORDS FOR?
Love—and heartbreak—for Syria
inspired her to write
by Jonathan Riggs
THERE’S A SAYING that there are 99
words for God in the Quran, and since
“God” means “love,” all these words
also mean love.
For Emily Robbins ’07, a woman who
chooses her own words with precision and invests each one with power,
that poetic reflection reaffirmed her
appreciation for Arabic—and inspired
the title of her debut novel, A Word for
Love (Riverhead Books).
“As an Arabic student at Swarthmore,
I learned the ancient story of Qais and
Leila, where he loves her so much that he
gives up his own name and is only called
‘Crazy for Leila,’” she says. “The idea that
language can have such a strong tie to
love that we can lose our identity and end
up with a new one excited me.”
Echoing this immortal story, A Word
for Love is the tale of Bea, a young
American who travels to Syria to study
a mysterious classical manuscript
known only as “The Astonishing Text.”
Its poetry, romance, and wisdom illuminate essential human truths Bea discovers about love in a time and place beset
by war.
Written in elegantly spare prose—
“so clear and clean you could drink it,”
according to fellow novelist Kathryn
Davis—the book reflects Robbins’s fascination with the ways political and historical complexities overlap with the
human heart’s—and how we endlessly,
linguistically reinvent ourselves and one
another.
As a Swarthmore student, Robbins
initially chose to study abroad in
Damascus to better understand the
region of the world where her activist
cousin, Rachel Corrie, famously died in a
protest in 2003.
“My experience there made me start
loving Arabic apart from Rachel—for
myself,” she says. “That—and living with
a host family who was politically active
at a time when that was very dangerous—
shaped my idea of how one can be political in the world.”
After graduation, Robbins returned
to Syria to complete her first Fulbright
fellowship, continuing the research for
what would become her debut novel and
delving deeper into the inner workings
and weavings of words.
“Arabic is a language based on three
letter roots, so it’s very clear which
words are related,” she says. “Making
those relationships, like realizing that
the word for ‘together’ is related to the
word for ‘university’—which is related to
the word for ‘Friday,’ the day of prayer—
allowed me to start making connections
between words in English that I hadn’t
thought to make before.”
Although Robbins is researching
her next novel in Jordan on a second
Fulbright, she continues to draw inspiration from Syria as a reminder of why, no
matter who we are or where we live, the
twinned might of art and love can open
our eyes, break our hearts, and remind us
what it is to be human.
“A Word for Love takes place somewhere that no longer exists the way that
it once did and never will again,” she
says. “People kept asking me whether
I was going to set it during the revolution, but that never seemed like a choice
I wanted to make. It feels even more
important now to have stories of love and
stories of Syria as it once was in order to
show us what is—and always will be—at
stake.”
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
69
class notes
SPOTLIGHT ON …
NINA PELAEZ ’11
Nina Pelaez ’11, assistant curator of public programs at the
Williams College Museum of Art, runs People’s Library
(goo.gl/NmJmWV), an archive in response to “What book
is helping you understand the world right now?”
“I remember reading Shakespeare alongside queer theory in Nora Johnson’s Renaissance Sexualities Class and
seeing, for the first time, that 16th century literature could
be relevant to my life,” she says. “That type of experience
showed me, as someone recently said, that ‘there are no
dead objects, only living ideas.’”
+
and Jordan teaches middle-school history.
Farah Hussain finished
an internal medicine
residency in summer 2016.
She moved to Philadelphia, where she is now an
attending at Penn. Aleta
Hong graduated from med
school last year and is
completing an emergency
medicine residency at the
University of Maryland.
When she’s not busy
resuscitating people, she
occasionally enjoys leaving
the hospital, exploring
Baltimore by bike, and
eating her way through the
local restaurants. When
their schedules align,
Aleta also visits with Eric
Loui and Lin Gyi. Krys and
Anna Belc ’07 relocated
from Philadelphia to snowy
Marquette, Mich., where
Krys started an MFA program in fiction at Northern
Michigan University. In
sunnier climes, Sasha
Shahidi led a study tour
in Costa Rica and is now
back in LA, working at the
Ford Theatres in Hollywood and promoting local
artists in dance, music,
and theater.
I, Melanie, am an attorney for the New York State
Department of Taxation
and Finance. In August
2015, I bought a house,
and I’m working on build-
70
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
CONTINUED: bulletin.swarthmore.edu
ing my menagerie—so far
I have a dog, two cats, and
a fish. Please let me know
if you have any updates;
I look forward to hearing
from you all!
2011
Ming Cai
mcai223@gmail.com
International. Andrew Loh
works for the President’s
Delivery Team in Sierra
Leone by supporting government implementation
of post-Ebola recovery priorities. In the Kathmandu
office of IMC Worldwide,
Sneha Shrestha is the
country programmes
coordinator for Nepal.
She is also working on
her startup, Sight-Impact,
providing Nepali travel
experiences. Melinda Neal
is working on a global MBA
from Yonsei University in
South Korea. Having received the Edward Capps
Fellowship, Bill Beck is
continuing his work at the
American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
Sam Barrows lives with his
wife in St. Thomas, Virgin
Islands, and is a business
development manager.
SUMMER 2017
West. Kathryn Stockbower survived her first year
of a pediatric residency
at Oregon Health &
Science University and
loves everything about the
Pacific Northwest, “minus
the rainy winters, which
do require umbrellas
no matter what native
Portlanders say.” Kelsey
Cline graduated from the
University of Washington
School of Medicine and
will start a family medicine
residency at Swedish
First Hill in Seattle. Kate
Walton and Zack Ontiveros
married in June 2016 in
Blooming Grove, N.Y., and
live in the Bay Area with
their two dogs. Blaine
O’Neill is launching the
beta version of Support.
fm, a web platform that
securely raises funds to
post bail for transgender
and gender-nonconforming individuals.
South and Southwest.
Rebecca Woo is in her
second year of a Ph.D.
program in school psychology at the University
of Texas–Austin, with
Gabriela Echavarria Moats
’12 in her cohort. Rebecca’s
first publication this year
stems from a project she
worked on while living in
Philly. Shilpa Boppana is
finishing the second year
of a doctoral program at
the University of Mississippi. Her master’s thesis
examines the relationship
between religiosity and
psychological well-being
in LGBT Christians. She
counts Zoe Davis and
Amy Smolek among her
visitors, and is enjoying
the Mississippi Delta blues
(and went to her first such
festival in April).
Midwest. Camilia Kamoun
moved to Cincinnati for
a pediatrics residency
at Cincinnati Children’s
Hospital, and Karen
Shen started an internal
medicine residency at the
Barnes-Jewish Hospital
of Washington University in St. Louis. Ben Van
Zee spent the past few
years learning Polish and
is working on a history
Ph.D. at UChicago. Alicia
Farnos-Wilker works in
sartorial commerce with
a Canadian design house
and shares her Chicago
home with a kitten named
Jane (after Austen),
though “she’s neither sensible nor sentimental.”
Northeast and Mid-
Atlantic. Nina Pelaez (box
above), the assistant
curator of public programs
at the Williams College
Museum of Art, is working
on “Summer School: The
Library and the Archive,” a
series of public programs
inspired by academia. This
summer, she will host a
reading group; screenings
of vintage educational
shorts; mini-courses led
by scholars, artists, and
makers; and a lending
library of games, picnic
blankets, and books to
enjoy on the museum’s
patio. Nina, who lives in
Williamstown, Mass., with
cat Juniper, still writes
poetry and is part of a
local writing group. She
was also fortunate to have
her best friend and former
roommate, Samia Abbass,
nearby in Brattleboro, Vt.
Susanna Mitro started an
epidemiology Ph.D. program at Harvard’s School
of Public Health last fall
and enjoys exploring Boston. After five years in the
Swarthmore Admissions
Office and traveling the
world in search of new
Swatties, Ruby Bhattacharya moved (with the
help of Neda Daneshvar
’10 and her husband) to
Cambridge, Mass., to
pursue a master’s at the
Harvard Graduate School
of Education; she graduated in May.
After more than five
years as an actor in Philadelphia, Brian Ratcliffe
moved to Syracuse,
N.Y., to begin an applied
ecology master’s program
at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and
Forestry. Brian attends the
Syracuse Friends Meeting
with Ed Stabler ’51. This
summer, Brian is back in
Philly, having received a
Sussman Foundation grant
to pursue environmental
justice research for the
grass-roots environmental
group Philly Thrive (whose
members include Alexa
Ross ’13, Zein Nakhoda ’13,
and Dinah DeWald ’13).
After clerking for Judge
Richard Boulware in the
U.S. District Court, District
of Nevada, Candice Nguyen is a litigation associate
at Cleary Gottlieb in NYC.
In addition to practicing general commercial
litigation, Candice engages
in pro bono matters and
filed her first complaint in
federal court alleging sex
discrimination under Title
VII. Next year, Candice will
clerk for Judge Allyson
Kay Duncan on the 4th
U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals.
After the presidential
election, Steve Dean
created the political accelerator Polispace, which
secures physical spaces
for working on preserving
institutions and demo-
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cratic safeguards. They’ve
partnered with the Human
Rights Foundation and
Run for Something.
Amelia Kidd is a licensed
social worker for the
Mental Health Service
Corps, part of the Thrive
NYC initiative seeking to
improve mental-health
services. She is placed
at Housing Works, which
provides health care,
housing, job training, legal
assistance, and more to
homeless and socioeconomically disadvantaged
people with HIV/AIDS.
Amelia works with individuals seeking help for
depression, anxiety, and
substance-use disorders.
She also started acting in
audio-drama podcasts, including the hit found-footage horror series Archive
81. James Preimesberger
teaches first grade at
the East Village Community School in NYC and
is finishing his second
certification in teaching
students with disabilities.
This year, James and a
co-teacher have amped up
the school’s social-justice
focus, including leading
a project to create a
framework and resources
for teaching race and
anti-racism in developmentally appropriate ways
in grades pre-K to 5. Once
tenured, James hopes
to be more vocal about
adopting more radical
stances to anti-oppressive
pedagogy and school
community-building.
Cecilia Marquez is a
professor at NYU teaching
Latino/a studies in the
Department of Social and
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Cultural Analysis. She lives
in Greenwich Village and
would like to know if any
Swatties are around.
Nicole Machac graduated
from Cooper Medical
School and was accepted into New Jersey
Medical School’s ob-gyn
residency. She vacationed
in California with Sally
Chang, Jordan Bernhardt,
Vy Vo, and Jen Tinsman.
Samantha Griggs is in
Philly teaching yoga, reading, writing, and applying
to Ph.D. programs. She
wants to study yoga from
a sociological perspective
and traveled to Japan
in May for her brother’s
wedding. Sarah Bedolfe
relocated to D.C. from the
Netherlands in February
as a Global Fellow with
Oceana, an international
conservation organization
focused on ocean issues,
after receiving a master’s
in marine biology. Sarah is
thrilled about the job and
super excited to be closer
to Swatties.
2013
Paige Grand Pré
jpgrandpre@gmail.com
Four years out, our class
is as active as ever. On
the East Coast, Abby Starr
lives in NYC and works at
Macmillan Publishers. She
welcomed her 10th “nibling”—and wishes there
were a better gender-neutral term for “nieces and
nephews.” New NYC resident Rory McTear left his
paralegal job in D.C. this
winter for a position with
Goldman Sachs and lives
in the East Village with
Iggy Rodriguez ’12. Living
in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, is Andrew Greenblatt,
the first hire at startup
Journey Meditation, which
leads live, in-office guided
meditation sessions in 10
U.S. cities. Andrew still
rocks sweatpants and
is looking for people to
travel to Tibet with in the
fall. Across town, Peter
Gross is back in the city
with Nina Kogekar, who
graduated from medical
school in May and started
a residency at Mount Sinai
this summer.
Two-and-a-half years
into their marriage, Allen
Welkie begins a computer
science Ph.D. at Princeton
this fall, while Petra Currie
Welkie is spending the
summer in Morocco working on a horse-breeding
farm before joining him in
New Jersey.
On the West Coast, Michael Fleischmann studies
public policy at UC–Berkeley. He reconnected with
Cariad Chester this spring
and sees Rebecca Roelofs
occasionally, too. As for
Becca, she is completing
a computer science Ph.D.
at Berkeley and found a
specialty focusing on optimization of deep neural
networks. This March, she
traveled to a wedding with
Amandine Lee and enjoyed
visiting with 2013ers.
In San Francisco, Taryn
Colonnese finished her
master’s in education program in May; she teaches
third grade and enjoyed a
spring filled with beautiful
bike rides. At UCLA, Allie
Coleman finished her third
year of medical school
and is deciding on her
speciality.
Between coasts, Max
Nesterak moved to Minneapolis, where he is a producer for Minnesota Public
Radio News. In January
2016, Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya became certified
in Russian-to-English
translation. The following
May, she graduated from
Kent State with a master’s
in translation and moved
to Columbus, Ohio. Since
graduating, she has been
gainfully self-employed as
a freelance translator—it
was scary to launch full
time but has worked out
pretty well. (Eugenia married Nicholas Tietz on Dec.
28.) Due south, Alejandro
Sills enjoys a growing
career with Interactions
LLC in Austin, Texas. He
was promoted in January,
and in March received a
reclassification from parttime to full-time benefits
status. He has not forgotten his musical liberal arts
vibe, however, and plays in
the Central Texas Medical
Orchestra in his spare
time. To keep his body and
spirit strong, Alejandro
performs calisthenics and
runs in the mornings, just
as he did in college.
Ben Goossen authored
Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a
Global Era, a history of
origins and worldwide
spread of nationalism
since the 19th century,
told through the lens
of a diasporic Christian
community. The tome, released in May, is based on
Ben’s Swarthmore honors
thesis, written under the
advisement of Professor
Pieter Judson as Ben
double-majored in history
and German studies. Ben
revised that thesis at the
Free University of Berlin
before Chosen Nation’s
publication and is now a
history Ph.D. candidate
at Harvard. He will soon
be joined in Boston by
Yin Guan, who has been
practicing austerity while
backpacking India and
Nepal since February. She
is hopeful about enrolling
at Harvard Divinity School
this fall to study Buddhism. Ariel Finegold will
start an MBA at Harvard
this fall.
Will Schulz wrote a piece
for Huffington Post U.K.,
“Why We Shouldn’t Get So
Depressed About Vaccine
Hesitancy” (bit.ly/SchulzVaccines). Katie Schultz
lives in Amsterdam, where
she received a master’s
in linguistics research
from the University of
Amsterdam in 2015. In
April, she started as an
assessment research and
design researcher for the
International Baccalaureate Organization and is
now based at the IB Global
Center in The Hague. Malik Mubeen and Eli Siegel
visited her—she welcomes
others! In her spare time,
Katie bikes around the
canals and makes quinoa.
Lastly, Katherine Ozawa
married Hunter Davis, and
they are now Katie Ozawa
and Hunter Davis Ozawa.
2015
Alexis Leanza
leanzaalexis@gmail.com
Treasure Tinsley works at
Locus Analytics, a small
research firm in New York.
She spends most of her
free time doing pottery.
Harris Hoke finally
accepted the Void into his
heart—Harr & the Void
plan to move into a charming two-bedroom colonial
with granite countertops in
Exton, Pa., to start a family. They’ve been reading a
lot of Nick Land and look
forward to building a small
part of the unstoppable
world-killing machine that
will crush humanity forever. He promised me one
Meat Mountain sandwich
from Arby’s if I submitted
this, verbatim.
I, Alexis, am slowly succumbing to the corrupting
influence of my class secretary position; with great
power comes great Meat
Mountain sandwiches.
SUMMER 2017
/ Swarthmore College Bulletin
71
spoken word
campuses springing up in India, China,
and Africa—like Patrick Awuah ’89
founding Ashesi University College
in Ghana—in countries where the approach to college education had been
very different. Continuing to connect
our faculty and students to these other
places could yield rich opportunities
and collaborations.
SWARTHMORE
SALON
by Jonathan Riggs
ENDOWED IN 2014 by James ’79
and Anahita Naficy Lovelace, the
Frank Aydelotte Foundation for the
Advancement of the Liberal Arts celebrates and supports Swarthmore’s
dynamic intellectual community in
myriad ways, according to Senior
Associate Director for Program
Development Pam Shropshire and outgoing Director Eric Jensen, professor
of astronomy. (Each faculty director
term lasts three years; this month’s
incoming faculty co-directors are
English literature’s Rachel Buurma ’99
and history’s Timothy Burke.)
72
Swarthmore College Bulletin /
SUMMER 2017
PAM SHROPSHIRE: Before Swarthmore, I
worked for nonprofits focused on arts and
culture, the humanities, and education. I
was drawn to the Aydelotte Foundation
because I want to build relationships.
ERIC JENSEN: I come from the faculty, where we all have our individual
disciplines and research, but we care
about connecting across disciplines.
It’s important to have a structure like
the Aydelotte Foundation that explicitly pays attention to and supports that.
It acts as a catalyst for intellectual exploration and engagement. We aim to inspire
a greater understanding of, appreciation
for, and participation in the liberal arts.
That applies to two different but
related spheres: on campus and in the
outside world. An interesting future
possibility for the Foundation is to
look outward at the growth of liberal
arts education in countries beyond the
United States. There are liberal arts
Another great initiative is spearheaded by Grace Ledbetter, a classics
and philosophy professor who’s part
of the Foundation. Faculty meet for
dinner and a discussion of one faculty
member’s scholarly work. Those conversations can feel like a luxury, but
they’re an important part of making us
stronger educators and more connected colleagues. I’ve heard faculty say
these dinners are exactly the kind of
thing they hoped they’d be able to do
when they came to Swarthmore.
Our goal is to demystify the liberal arts
and give voice to those who champion its
mission of empowering students with the
interdisciplinary knowledge, insight, and
experience they need to become leaders
for the common good.
That leadership is crucial—so many
of the problems we wrestle with as a
society are multifaceted. For example, I’m trained as an astronomer, but
I’ve shifted some of my teaching time
toward environmental studies and
climate change. It’s a complex issue
that requires input and insight from a
lot of different disciplines. Working together, the way we do at Swarthmore,
to find solutions that take advantage of
the entire scope of human knowledge
enriches and elevates us all.
+
LEARN MORE: swarthmore.edu/
aydelotte-foundation
LAURENCE KESTERSON
LAURENCE KESTERSON
On campus, I’m excited about the launch
of a new pilot: The Frank 5 Fellows—in
recognition of Frank Aydelotte, Swarthmore’s seventh president—will showcase
five alums under 30 undertaking interesting, inspiring work across different fields.
Through their stories, we aim to expand
our conversations with diverse public audiences and ground these conversations in
shared values and beliefs.
in this issue
9
M.I.T. TIME
Science and Stories
Bringing liberal arts flavor
to STEM.
LAURENCE KESTERSON
by Josh Sokol ’11
MOMENT IN TIME
Celebrate Commencement
in full: bit.ly/SwatCom17.
Congrats, Class of 2017!
SUMMER 2017
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and Additional
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YOUR SCHOOL AWAITS
SUMMER 2017
Celebrate what makes Swarthmore special for each of us
Garnet Homecoming and Family Weekend: Oct. 6–8
swarthmore.edu/garnetweekend
CREDIT
Curiosity
Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 2017-07-01
The Swarthmore College Bulletin is the official alumni magazine of the college. It evolved from the Garnet Letter, a newsletter published by the Alumni Association beginning in 1935. After World War II, college staff assumed responsibility for the periodical, and in 1952 it was renamed the Swarthmore College Bulletin. (The renaming apparently had more to do with postal regulations than an editorial decision. Since 1902, the College had been calling all of its mailed periodicals the Swarthmore College Bulletin, with each volume spanning an academic year and typically including a course catalog issue and an annual report issue, with a varying number of other special issues.)
The first editor of the Swarthmore College Bulletin alumni issue was Kathryn “Kay” Bassett ’35. After a few years, Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49 was appointed editor and held the position for 36 years, during which she reshaped the mission of the magazine from focusing narrowly on Swarthmore College to reporting broadly on the college's impact on the world at large. Gillespie currently appears on the masthead as Editor Emerita.
Today, the quarterly Swarthmore College Bulletin is an award-winning alumni magazine sent to all alumni, parents, faculty, staff, friends of the College, and members of the senior class. This searchable collection spans every issue from 1935 to the present.
Swarthmore College
2017-07-01
reformatted digital
The class notes section of The Bulletin has been extracted in this collection to protect the privacy of alumni. To view the complete version of The Bulletin, contact Friends Historical Library.