World - Bucknell University

November 2004 

Alcohol Education on the Agenda 

Volume 32 

Number 6 

First-year Students Go BuckWild 

BUCKNELL World 

A RAY OF HOPE 

The Bucknell Brigade brings new life to Nicaragua.

PoTENTIAL 

Editor’s Note 

A Place of 

Possibility 

GIGI MARINO 

Because one young woman, Jamie Cistoldi 

Lee ’99, believed in the spirit of generosity 

and convinced others to share her belief 

and vision, an amazing thing happened — 

the seemingly impossible became possible. This year 

marks the fifth anniversary of the Bucknell Brigade, 

a student-initiated program that provides education, 

medicine, and hope to a community of Nicaraguans, 

whose lives and livelihoods were devastated by 

Hurricane Mitch in 1998 (see the cover story on p. 

10). Over the years, hundreds of students, faculty, 

staff members, and alumni have helped in 

numerous ways — fundraising, collecting supplies, 

organizing trips, and traveling to Nicaragua, to dig 

latrines, pour concrete, work with children, and 

assist with medical exams — for people who are 

often overlooked because their situation is so dire, 

so overwhelming. 

The Bucknell Brigade is emblematic, in many 

ways, of the university’s own mission and vision, 

which is about community, humanity, and, at its 

very core, about education. 

A Bucknell education is about more than 

the acquisition of knowledge and skills. It’s also 

about transformation and helping individuals realize 

their potential. Cistoldi Lee was able to follow 

her vision because she had teachers at Bucknell who 

taught her to believe in herself and, in turn, believed 

in her when she came to them with this project. 

The Brigade has continued these last five years 

because the Bucknell community embraced it 

wholeheartedly. 

One of the things that distinguishes the Brigade, 

and indeed, many of Bucknell’s study and travel 

opportunities, is that the trip is open to staff and 

faculty as well as students. All Brigade participants 

agree that the trip is “a life-changing experience.” 

How many programs have that kind of profound 

effect on people? And the beauty of this effect is that 

it works both ways. Indeed, hundreds of 

Bucknellians have been a part of this life-altering 

experience, but the numbers of Nicaraguans who 

have benefited is two or three times that amount. 

All photos for the cover story are courtesy of Terry Wild. 

2 BUCKNELL WORLD • November 2004 

Here on campus, Janice Butler, director of 

service learning, organizes all of the trips. Rabbi 

Serena Fujita and Reverend Ian Oliver have traveled 

to Nueva Vida many times with the Brigade and 

have never been tourists. Don Stechschulte, university 

physician, has made every trip except one, each 

time treating villagers stricken with parasites, 

malaria, malnutrition. Cindy Peltier, operations 

manager at the Samek Art Gallery, sends out email 

reminders to buy organic coffee from Nicaraguan 

farmers, which benefits the farmers and the Brigade. 

Several groups including fraternities and sororities 

raise money or collect medical supplies and other 

necessary items. 

In conversations about the Brigade, no one talks 

about personal sacrifice. Quite the opposite. For 

example, Ian Oliver speaks of the anthropological 

concept that we all have a place where we belong, a 

place where we feel at home: our own tribe. He calls 

the Brigade his “tribe.” 

For many of us, the university is not just a place 

where we work or where students attend classes, 

but where discovering our talents is encouraged and 

nurtured. The sum of our parts can be a mighty 

force. Bucknell — where opportunity and initiative 

can transform lives. W 

Terry Wild 

BUCKNELL 

World 

Executive Editor 

Sharon Poff 

Editor 

Gigi Marino 

Contributing Editors 

Bob Gaines 

Alan Janesch 

Kathryn Kopchik MA’89 

Class Notes Editors 

Debrah Krauss 

Pat Parker 

Erma Gustafson (Emerita) 

Editorial Assistant 

Paula Bryden 

Art Director 

Mary Meacham 

Communications Designer 

Stephanie Zettlemoyer 

Bucknell World Webmaster 

Stephanie Zettlemoyer 

Bucknell World Intern 

Stephanie Malenich ’05 

Published by 

Division of Enrollment Management 

Bucknell World (USPS 068-880, 

ISSN 1044-7563), copyright 2004, 

is published six times a year, 

in the months of January, April, 

June, September, October, and 

November, and is mailed without 

charge to alumni, parents, students, 

faculty, staff, and friends of 

Bucknell University. 

Periodicals postage paid at 

Lewisburg, PA 17837, 

and at additional entry offices. 

Circulation: 46,000. Address all 

correspondence to the editor. 

email: bworld@bucknell.edu 

Bucknell World website: 

www.bucknell.edu/BucknellWorld 

Postmaster: 

Send all address changes to 

Editor, Bucknell World, 

Judd House, Bucknell University, 

Lewisburg, PA 17837 

Telephone: 570-577-3260 

Fax: 570-577-3683 

Bucknell World 

is printed on recycled paper 

and is recyclable.

Inside this issue 

University Archives 

FEATURES 

10 NEW LIFE IN NICARAGUA 

In 1998, Hurricane Mitch killed 10,000 people in Nicaragua and 

left 15,000 homeless. One Bucknell student wanted to help and 

began the Bucknell Brigade, which has given hope to hundreds of 

Nicaraguans in the last five years. — Jamie Cistoldi Lee ’99 

14 DIGGING INTO THE PAST 

A Bucknell student, alumna, and professor made some rare finds 

in the site of the ancient Agora in Athens, Greece, against the 

backdrop of the 2004 summer Olympic games. — Elisabeth 

Hulette ’03 

16 OH, WILDERNESS! 

A week in the woods — backpacking on the Appalachian trail, 

sliding through mud, squeezing through foot-wide spaces in 

caves, climbing 40 feet up a tree only to leap to grab a trapeze 

bar. It’s called BuckWild and it’s great fun. — Gigi Marino 

DEPARTMENTS 

2 Editor’s Note 

4 Letters 

5 Bucknell Express 

18 Backward Glance 

The Memorial Stadium was built 80 years ago with 

horsepower and steampower. 

20 Alumni Association 

Alumni help recruit students in Western states. 

21 Class Notes 

Alumni Profiles: Albert Ketler ’56, p. 25 

Marcia Bonta ’62, p. 26 • Joel Boyd ’79, MA’80, p. 30 

Mary DeCredico ’81, p. 32 • Joe Bridy ’98, p. 36 

29 Flashback — 1970s 

Campus Politics 

40 World’s End 

Judith Esmay ’54 is called on to help elect a bishop, 

but not without controversy. 

A BIG BUILD 

The new football stadium 

was a major undertaking 

in the early 1920s. 

Page 18 

Terry Wild 

N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 4 

A PLACE OF THE HEART 

Janelle Nodhturft ’07, pictured here, says, 

“In Nicaragua, I would sometimes look 

around and know that there was nowhere 

else I could ever want to be at that moment.” 

Page 10 

BUCKNELL 

A CLASSICAL PERSPECTIVE 

Fifth-century B.C.E. buildings on the 

Acropolis tower over the excavated Agora 

that spreads out into the city below, where 

a group of Bucknellians dug for artifacts. 

Page 14 

November 2004 • BUCKNELL WORLD 3 

Terry Wild 

Elisabeth Hulette ’03

Readers Write 

Letters 

Editor’s Note: We encourage letters to the editor related to issues discussed in 

Bucknell World, issues that relate to university news or policies, or that are of interest 

to a segment of our readership. Letters should be no longer than 300 words and 

may be edited for length, clarity, and civility. Letters can be mailed, faxed, or sent 

via email to bworld@bucknell.edu. The complete letters policy can be read at 

www.bucknell.edu/BucknellWorld. 

A REAGAN DEBATE 

I N 

PRAISE OF RONALD REAGAN, 

was a great article [September 2004]. 

Time and history will continue to 

bring into focus the positive impact that 

he had, not only on the history of this 

country, but the history of the world, in 

bringing down the “evil empire” and 

making our country more secure. No one 

is more qualified to speak to this issue 

than our own Bucknellian Ben Elliott 

who served him many years. 

Thanks, Ben. 

Charlie Vogel ’37 

West Chester, Pa. 

I WAS 

DELIGHTFULLY SURPRISED TO 

open Bucknell World and discover 

praise for Ronald Reagan, though my 

surprise was supplanted with pride upon 

reading the byline. As someone who owes 

his scruples to President Reagan, it’s my 

hope that his summer passing inspired 

Bucknell’s fall semester political science 

classrooms to sequester discussion for the 

man’s ideas, successes, and shortcomings. 

Reagan was cut from the fabric of 

common men; his faith in his American 

brethren was steadfast and eternal. His 

beliefs were emblematic: America’s natural 

course is advancement, if only the government 

lets it. Reduced taxes, regulation, 

and social interference were his methods. 

He’s the 20th century’s only president to 

hold American individualism in greater 

esteem than D.C. bureaucracy. Today’s 

youth, whether radical, liberal, conservative, 

or libertarian, seem to share this 

appreciation: we idealize a society where 

men may steer a course toward felicity 

unrestrained by governmental barriers. 

His critics may disagree with his willingness 

to take on federal debt to create 

growth, or with a foreign policy that 

preferred victory over painful stalemate; 

however, whatever arguments his detractors 

still cling to, they will never succeed in 

changing the minds of so many in my 

generation who view Reagan as a determined 

doer of good deeds, a role model in 

an era of cultural decay, and a personification 

that, yes, children of alcoholic shoe 

salesmen can become President of the 

United States. Today’s young Americans 

can be grateful for a legacy that inspires 

direction, humility, and inspiration. 

Tom Elliott ’03 

New Canaan, Conn. 

he nice little propaganda 

NICE LITTLE PROPAGANDA 

piece on Reagan was a great sound 

T HE 

bite for an election year, but kind of 

glossed over a lot of reality. Why didn’t 

Reagan believe in the existence of acid rain 

and its horrendous effects on the environment? 

Why did he start his campaign for 

the presidency in the racist Southern town 

where three civil rights workers were 

murdered? (Was he a racist or merely 

pandering to them?) Why did he insist in 

speaking in a stereotypical and demeaning 

way about people on welfare? My Russian 

officemates will tell you that the corrupt 

Soviet Union collapsed under its own 


incompetence and one-party system. Why 

did the author speak in percentages when 

glorifying the trebling of the national debt 

(only 2.5 percent of the economy), while 

speaking in hard numbers (over $50,000) 

when speaking of the incomes of blacks? 

What was their actual percentage 

improvement in Reagan’s eight years? 

Why did Reagan’s successor feel it necessary 

to pardon Reagan’s secretary of 

defense before any charges were even 

brought? Why did Reagan ignore a 

massive terrorist attack that killed 

hundreds of our Marines in Lebanon? 

Why did the author forget to mention the 

racist secretary of agriculture under 

Reagan and the corrupt revolving door 

between his administration and industry? 

I guess he forgot! 

Rich Trefflich ’65 

Princeton Junction, N.J 

B EN 

ELLIOTT’S “ENCOMIUM” TO 

Ronald Reagan was not only a 

touching tribute from a former asso- 

ciate but also an astonishing bid to rewrite 

history from the radical right. This isn’t the 

forum, however, to debate alarmingly false 

statements like “Ronald Reagan stood for 

freedom,” or “The great American comeback 

was not reserved for rich, white 

males.” I can only note that this was a man 

who in 1980 chose to give his first major 

presidential campaign speech at the 

Nesoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss., 

in part at the urging of young lawmaker 

named Trent Lott. Reagan’s attack on big 

government from the place where three 

civil rights workers were murdered in 

1964 sent a not-so-subtle and thoroughly 

disgusting signal about his own “deeper 

message.” 

Don Michak ’74 

Northampton, Mass. 

I ’M 

SHOW ME THE 

MONEY 

HAPPY THAT BILL GRAHAM’S ’62 

gift of $5.6 million dollars will restore 

the Bucknell wrestling program but 

still feel a sense of resentment as to how 

the events of the past three years transpired 

and take issue with the explanation 

[“Express,” September]. Portraying the 

administration’s decision to drop wrestling 

three years ago as being “required” by the 

NCAA is misleading. Bucknell “chose” to 

drop the program as it worked toward 

compliance with Title IX. How such 

compliance is reached is totally up to the 

university itself — not the NCAA. 

More importantly, it seems that cash 

is king — and to ensure that Bucknell 

“will provide our students with the 

quality opportunities they deserve” as 

athletics director John Hardt states in 

the article, such wealthy benefactors as 

Mr. Graham may become a necessity for 

the “less attractive” sports. Compliance 

with Title IX is an ongoing process. 

The numbers will change each year, so 

it’s possible that in two years the school 

will be out of compliance again. 

No offense meant to Bill Graham, as 

I truly appreciate his generous gift and 

look forward to following the wrestling 

program in the future. But it would have 

been nice to build a wrestling facility like 

Cornell did last year when it received a 

sizable donation, rather than do what the 

Bucknell should have been doing all 

along by adding a women’s team and 

defending the value of such minor sports 

as wrestling. 

Mickey DeSimone ’78 

Monsey, N.Y. 

GREAT GAY SUPPORT 

I JUST 

READ ABOUT THE GAY? FINE 

by Me t-shirt project [September 

2004]. I’m so glad that Bucknell is 

dealing with this issue. I’m a graduate 

from the Class of ’95, and would have felt 

much more comfortable about coming out 

at the time had I known that I could have 

gotten support from my classmates and 

professors. Thank you, thank you, thank 

you for publicizing that Bucknell is 

progressing around this issue. It’s so 

important that both students and alumni 

know this. 

Rachael McClennen ’95 

Seattle, Wash. 

VILLAGE MEMORIES 

T HE 

SEPTEMBER ISSUE BROUGHT 

me a great surprise and an even 

greater reminder of my apprecia- 

tion of the university. The surprise was 

the article on Bucknell Village with the 

group picture that had my late brotherin-law, 

Jack Peters ’51, and my sister, 

Salle Wolf Peters, with their son, Jeffrey, 

front row center. 

The appreciation stems from the 

great history trio of J. Orin Oliphant, 

Cyrus Karraker, and Bill Johnson, who 

prepared me well for doctoral work in 

American Civilization at Penn. Oliphant 

ranks with Roy Nichols as my greatest 

teachers. Karraker’s humanitarianism 

added immeasurably to his impact. And 

Johnson, my adviser, offered the kind of 

support and encouragement needed for a 

college and university teaching career. 

Bucknell provided me with an introduction 

to higher education teaching in 

1953. Part-time teaching at Lycoming 

while still at Williamsport High School led 

to Lock Haven, a postdoctoral year as a 

special assistant to Governor Scranton, 

and ultimately dean of faculty at Penn 

State Harrisburg. Penn State loaned me to 

the Department of Education to write the 

“Master Plan for Higher Education” in 

1971 after serving as historian for the 

Constitutional Convention in 1967–68. I 

would be remiss were I to fail to mention 

Charlie Hollister in political science who 

even tried to get me to take over his job 

as assistant director of municipal affairs 

when he went back to the university. 

Thanks, Bucknell. 

George D. Wolf MA’53 

Camp Hill, Pa. 

TITANIC SURVIVOR 

T HE 

JUNE 27 ISSUE OF THE 

Philadelphia Inquirer carried an 

item listing 45 Titanic survivors 

from the Philadelphia area. One listed is 

“Emma Eliza Ward Bucknell, 59, the 

widow of William Robert Bucknell, a 

millionaire Philadelphia real estate 

tycoon, and founder of Bucknell 

University.” The article says, “She pulled 

an oar, as did eight other women, for 

many hours prior to their rescue.” 

I have read reports of the founding 

of Bucknell, but never saw any reference 

to the above. Did the Inquirer make an 

error, or did I fail to know this? 

Ken Stauffer ’54 

Bally, Pa. 

Editor’s Note: Emma Bucknell was indeed a 

Titanic survivor. Legend has it that she was in 

the same lifeboat as the “unsinkable Molly 

Brown,” but there is no evidence of this. 

According to the Encyclopedia Titanica, 

“While awaiting the Titanic on the Tender at 

Cherbourg, Mrs. Bucknell told Molly Brown 

that she had ‘evil forebodings’ that something 

might happen to the ship. Mrs. Brown 

laughed.” Also, the university was named for 

William Bucknell in 1886, but he was not its 

founder. 

Errata: We incorrectly identified the 

Temple of the Resurrection of Christ as St. 

Basil’s Cathedral in the September issue. 

Thanks to Professor Andrew Jenks ’86 of 

Niagara University for letting us know. 

“The university could probably sell memorial plaques to the couples who used to 

meet there in the early ’60s and pay for most of that old cornfield they just added 

to the campus. It could be sort of like the Christy Mathewson Gateway.”

Art Foxall 

World 

BUCKNELL Express 

President’s House Restored 

THE LANDMARK VICTORIAN GOTHIC 

Revival house that has served as home to virtually 

every Bucknell president since it was built in 1855 

has seen both minor and major renovations with 

each new president. 

Over the years, though, some of those renovations have 

been at odds with the 19-room structure’s rich history and 

tradition. 

But in conjunction with the arrival of President Brian 

and Maryjane Mitchell this summer, university trustees 

agreed it was time to return the house’s interior to its traditional 

roots and, at the same time, create a welcoming 

public space for university entertaining. 

John Mathias ’69, M’72, trustee and presidential 

transition committee chair, formed a committee composed 

of Georgeann Eckstine, Stephen Lindenmuth, Betty Lou 

McClure, Gayle Pollock, Sandy Sojka, Lisa Steele, and 

April Young to both oversee the renovation and envision 

its future. 

“Viewing this as the property of Bucknell and agreeing 

that it should be decorated more in a traditional style, the 

committee’s function was to decide, essentially, how that 

would manifest itself,” says Mathias. “We reviewed the 

decisions with the Mitchells, but, nevertheless, it was the 

committee representing Bucknell and the thought that this 

is the way the first-floor public space of the house will 

continue to be decorated, essentially now and forever more.” 

Mathias says that approach will reduce future expenses 

and invite donations for purchases of furniture that will 

A Restored Look: The library contains a renovated fireplace mantle, oriental 

carpets that had been in storage, and Chinese-style lamps. 

always be in style and not “end up in a warehouse.” 

Committee chair Lisa Steele characterizes the renovation 

as cosmetic, including a complete interior repainting. 

“The interior has been repainted with colors that are more 

in keeping with the period of the house,” she says. “The 

colors used are much more vibrant. These are deep, rich 

colors — deep greens, deep burgundies, deep golds.” 

The university owned several antique oriental carpets 

that had been in storage. They were cleaned, repaired 

where necessary, and put back in the house. “The room 

colors were selected to work with all these wonderful 

oriental carpets,” says Steele. 

The renovation included re-upholstering several pieces 

of furniture with fabric that utilized color and floral and 

stripe patterns. It also involved work on a fireplace that 

wasn’t done in a “period-correct manner. Looking at it, you 

could tell that the addition was done in the mid-1900s,” 

says Steele. “We had the glass door taken off and a new 

wooden mantle built to frame the brick. Now, when you 

look at that fireplace, even though it is a gas fireplace, it 

looks as though it belongs with the house.” 

Lewisburg architect and designer Stephen Lindenmuth 

says that part of the house design goal was to achieve a 

sense of warmth and hospitality. The wall art will include 

works by art department faculty. 

“The house is pretty gutsy, and the rooms are large. You 

can use a lot of great color. It brings the garden in through 

very large windows. The colors inside are really just great 

colors,” says Lindenmuth. “We took inspiration from the 

very colorful antique rugs. I like color and playing with 

color and pattern and texture because that makes the house 

seem more inviting.” 

Lindenmuth, who was able to locate at cost perioddocumented 

fabric and wallpaper that express a “history 

and a pedigree,” says multiple fabrics and complementary 

patterns add to the textural layering of the rooms. “It had 

to work in harmony. When you walk in the front door, 

you can see almost every room on the first floor.” 

The renovation committee, says Mathias, will stay 

intact. “Just because the renovations are virtually complete, 

their work is not done. They have a vision of how the 

house should look in the future and what pieces might be 

missing, and the committee will become a subset of the 

trustees’ building and grounds committee. Essentially, 

anything done to the public space is going to go through 

the committee to ensure that it stays in the style we want 

— irrespective of the occupant. There’s a longer view.” 

The results? “I am extremely pleased,” says Steele. “It’s 

very telling is that the Mitchells are very pleased with it.” 

“I think it’s fabulous,” says Mathias. “It’s stunning. The 

committee has done an excellent job. It’s going to be a very 

comfortable house, very warm and inviting. I think as the 

rest of the university community sees it they’re going to be 

impressed.” — Sam Alcorn 

November 2004 • BUCKNELL WORLD 5

The Road Taken 

Art Foxall 

’RAY BUCKNELL 


Unlike Frost’s woodland journey, 

for the Chips joining this year’s Class of 2008, 

it was not the path less traveled, but the paths 

taken by their parents that led them to 

Bucknell. Far from being a choice based on lack of originality, 

however, these students are eager to forge their 

own courses here at the university. Yet, they remain 

mindful of the advantages their parent’s experience has 

bestowed upon them as they embark upon their own 

Bucknell adventures. 

Bryn Beyer ’08, daughter of Linda Leh ’68, is excited 

that her college experience is happening at a place that 

already feels familiar. “Now that I am a Bucknellian 

myself, I do feel a certain sense of warmth knowing that 

I can walk on the same path (literally) as my mother did 

before me, learning about her Bucknell memories, and 

anticipating making new ones of my own.” 

A Word to the Already Wise: President Mitchell addresses alumni, their first-year 

children, and staff at a Chips reception at the Samek Art Gallery in August. 

• The Confessions Marathons, one 

of Bucknell’s Catholic Campus Ministry’s 

innovative programs, received 

national attention when it was selected 

to be showcased at the 2004 United 

States Conference of Catholic Bishops 

meeting, to be held in Washington, 

D.C., on Nov. 17. The marathons are 

six-hour-long programs, during which 

Catholic priests and vocational directors 

meet with students, give vocational 

advice, and hear confessions. The 

marathons have taken place biannually 

for five years during Advent and Lent. 

This year’s Chips include: 

Gary Bachman ’75, daughter Tracey 

Steven Barth ’86, son Michael 

Robert ’80 and Nancy Weaver Bastian ’82, 

son Scott 

Richard ’75 and Anne Houston Bentzen ’76, 

son Bradford 

Linda Leh Beyer ’68, daughter Bryn 

Jeffrey ’78 and Lynn Scarr Blakemore ’79, 

son Robert 

Michael Borelli ’78, son Michael 

Geoffrey Brown ’77, son Christopher 

James Carll ’71, daughter Jamie 

Peter ’76 and Irene Fil Carrato ’76, 

daughter Bethany 

George Carter ’78, daughter Lindsay 

Kathleen Nemes Cassidy ’81, daughter 

Meaghan 

Jack Collins ’84, daughter Bridget 

Alan ’74 and Nancy Abbott Cooper ’76, 

son Andrew 

Joseph Cooper ’77, son Joseph 

Karen Benton Crawley ’80, son Peter 

Stuart Cubbon ’78, daughter Natalie 

Mike ’77 and Sharon Mahony Davidson ’79, 

daughter Laura 

John Diemer ’76, son Erik 

Diane Hymas ’79, daughter Heidi Dybeck 

Nancy Seidensticker Faux ’78, daughter 

Alison 

Tim Fitzgerald ’77, son Garret 

Mary Forman Flynn ’82, daughter Katherine 

Dale Gallaher ’79, son Timothy 

Richard Goglia ’73, daughter Lauren 

Gordon Groff ’77, daughter Kimberly 

James William ’71 and Sandra Fishel 

Haines ’73, daughter Bethany 

Peter Hall ’78, daughter Gina 

C. Randall ’78 and Laura McCormick 

Hinrichs ’79, daughter Caitlin 

Stephen ’79 and Bonnie Bencsko Holmes 

’77, son Kevin 

Geoffrey Horsfield ’76, son Stephen 

Andrew Jacobson ’84, daughter Jamie 

Judith Johnson, wife of J. Van Wirt Johnson 

’77*, daughter Courtnay 

Janice Johnson ’77, daughter Christine 

Kassab 

David ’76 and Dawn Fischette Keller ’76, 

daughter Katherine 

Richard ’72 and Robin Hummel Kenner ’74, 

son Richard 

Roger ’77 and Mary Ellen Ruszkiewicz Kerr 

’77, son Kevin 

Frank King ’72, son Andrew 

• In a story published in the 

October issue of the Atlantic Monthly, 

Bucknell is mentioned along with 

Barnard, Bowdoin, Carnegie Mellon, 

Colby, Colgate, Holy Cross, Lafayette, 

and other schools as one of a number 

of institutions that may provide nearly 

as many advantages as schools in 

the very top ranks. The story is titled 

“Who Needs Harvard?” and was 

written by Gregg Easterbrook. A full 

text version is available to Atlantic 

Monthly subscribers at www.theatlantic.com/doc/200410/Easterbrook. 

Edwin Klett ’57, son Keenan 

Kraig ’76 and Susan Smith Kummer ’76, 

son Andrew 

Deborah Compte ’74, daughter Ariel Lee 

Carol Malesardi Litwak ’75, daughter Allison 

Thomas Long ’78, daughter Amanda 

Jamie Bougioukas James ’81, son Timothy 

Mauritz 

Peter Mauritz ’81, son Timothy 

James McGrath ’72, son Edward 

James Merrill ’77, daughter Amanda 

Julia Bernett Merrill ’77, daughter Amanda 

Andy Meyer ’71, son James 

Barbara Wik Miller ’80, son Stephen 

James Molzon ’78, daughter Elizabeth 

Rebecca Frederick Mooney ’78, son Brian 

Carolyn Pernice Mulligan ’74, son Brian 

Joseph ’76 and Kathleen Bosek Murray ’77, 

son Thomas 

Steven Pierce ’86, son Joshua 

Ira Pitel ’75, son Adam 

Carole Chaney Prosser ’81, son Andrew 

Polly Bergreen Pyle ’76, daughter Margaret 

Mark Reibeisen ’66, son Ira 

John Rickard ’75 and Martha Holland 

MS’03, son James 

David Rifkin ’77, daughter Amanda 

Donald Rockwell ’64, daughter Julia 

Donna Triptow ’73, son Aaron Salsbury 

Paul Sant Ambrogio ’80, daughter Judith 

Donna Spinweber Schibener ’81, daughter 

Kristen 

Sharon Zavaglia Schmitt ’72, son Michael 

Linda Christman Sepsy ’79, son Ryan 

Don ’77 and Pamela Heller Shassian ’78, 

son Brian 

Cheryl Cooper Shaw ’73, daughter Ashley 

M. Steven ’78 and Julie Ross Silbermann 

’78, son Matthew 

Steven Snyder ’78, son Bryan 

Paul Sutton ’78, son Gregory 

Neal ’76 and Nayda Hershman Suway ’77, 

son Jeffrey 

Wayne Suway ’75, son Jason 

Richard J. ’79 and Nancy Murphy Thompson 

’79, son Robert 

Marina Geipel Van Orden ’73, daughter 

Marina 

David Weller ’73, son Daniel 

John ’79 and Laurie Byers Wilson ’79, 

son Christopher 

Leonard Wolfe ’78, daughter Katherine 

*Deceased 

• In October, Amy Pasquinelli ’93 

received the first Rosalind Franklin 

Young Investigator Award of the Peter 

Gruber Foundation, given by the 

Genetics Society of America and the 

American Society of Human Genetics. 

The prize of $75,000 was established 

for a young woman geneticist who is 

in her first three years of an independent 

faculty-level position in any 

realm of genetics to honor the groundbreaking 

contributions of Dr. Rosalind 

Franklin to the field of genetics and to 

inspire other women in the field.

BRIEFS 

Paschke 

Art Foxall 

Athletics Webcasts In a partnership 

that will once again make Internet 

broadcasts of Bison athletics events 

free of charge to listeners, Bucknell 

will team with SportsJuice.com for 

all of its webcasts during the 2004–05 

season. Fans wishing to connect to 

Bison Sports Network broadcasts via 

the Internet need only follow the 

audio links off the official web site 

of Bucknell Athletics, http://www. 

BucknellBison.com. Or, they can log 

on directly to www.SportsJuice.com. 

Every Bucknell football, men’s basketball, 

and women’s basketball game 

Teaberry Press Exhibit From Oct. 29 until Dec. 5, the Samek Art 

Gallery will display 67 original prints in an exhibition titled “The 

Intimate Collaboration: Twenty-Five Years of Teaberry Press.” As its 

name suggests, the exhibition has been assembled to highlight the 

25 years of work produced by this San Francisco press and its 

founder, Timothy Berry. The intaglio prints included in the show, such 

as Ed Paschke’s “Closure” (shown above), span numerous artistic 

movements, from Pop to Abstraction to Photo-realism, and showcase 

some of the most distinguished artists of American origin, such as 

Terry Allen, William T. Wiley, and Ed Ruscha. 

will be available live on SportsJuice. 

com, as will select events featuring 

other Bison teams. 

Rich Named Rooke Chair Tom Rich, 

professor of mechanical engineering 

and former dean of the College of 

Engineering, has been named to a 

five-year term as the Rooke Chair 

in the Historical and Social Context 

of Engineering. He will be charged 

with teaching about and conducting, 

guiding, and supporting personal and 

student research on the historical and 

social effects of technology and engineering. 

Rich has held positions as a 

research mechanical engineer with 

the Army Materials and Mechanics 

Research Center and as an associate 

professor of mechanical engineering 

at Texas A&M University. He joined 

the Bucknell faculty in 1981 and 

served as dean of the College of 

Engineering from 1986–97. 

I Want My BU TV Students demanded 

it, and now they can have it. This 

fall, thanks to the efforts of Bucknell 

Student Government and the division 

of Student Affairs, digital cable has 

been made available with the launch 

of BUTV. The service, offering 57 

commercial television channels and 7 

channels designated for international 

programming, is accessible to students 

in all residence hall rooms, including 

the mods and Gateway complexes. 

Special attention was paid during the 

selection of channels to achieve a 

line-up consistent with both the 

educational and the entertainment 

values of campus. To get connected, 

students must purchase a box-top set, 

available in the University Bookstore, 

and subscribe via the website. For 

details or to register, visit www.isr. 

digital.bucknell.edu/BUTV. 

Nonprofits Profit from BPIP The 

Bucknell Public Interest Program 

(BPIP), established in 2001, facilitates 

student interest and involvement in 

the nonprofit sector. Combining efforts 

of alumni, faculty, and administrators, 

the BPIP provides students with information 

regarding nonprofit organizations 

to which they may apply. Nonprofit 

organizations benefit equally 

from BPIP, as they gain the enthusiasm 

and talents of Bucknell students eager 

to involve themselves in nonprofit 

work. This past summer, seven students 

were recipients of the BPIP Internship 

Fund, four of whom interned at local 

organizations, including the Lewisburg 

Prison Project, Hope for Kids in State 

College, and Diversified Treatment 

Alternatives. For 2004–05, the BPIP’s 

fellowship program is seeking nonprofit, 

public-interest organizations, 

especially those based in New York, 

Boston, and Philadelphia, willing to 

host graduating seniors in meaningful 

positions for a year’s time. For more 

information about the BPIP, or how 

to become involved, contact Emily 

Dietrich at edietric@bucknell.edu or 

by phone at 570-577-1238. 

New Press Series 

The Bucknell 

University Press 

has launched 

a new series, 

Aperçus: Histories 

Texts Cultures, 

replacing the 

Bucknell Review, 

which was 

published from 

1976–2004. 

According to Greg 

Clingham, professor of English and director 

of the Bucknell University Press, “Each of the 

paperback books in the Aperçus series will 

be a guest-edited volume addressing important 

issues and problems in the humanities, 

and will feature critical, historical, and theoretical 

essays by individual contributors.” 

The first volume, edited by Philip Smallwood, 

Critical Pasts: Writing Criticism, Writing 

History, assembles new thinking by various 

contributors from the United States and 

abroad on the theory, practice, and cultural 

value of the history of literary criticism. For 

more information about this series, contact 

Clingham at 570-577-1552 or see www. 

bucknell.edu/universitypress. 

Five Bison Greats Honored During 

Homecoming weekend, five individuals 

will join the ranks of Bison greats 

as they are inducted into the Bucknell 

Athletics Hall of Fame. On Nov. 6, a 

formal breakfast ceremony will honor 

these athletes, followed by further 

recognition at halftime of the Fordham 

football game. Those elected to this 

26th Hall of Fame class are former 

halfback and team captain of the 

1960 football squad Clifford “Mickey” 

Melberger ’61; former tailback and 

return specialist Hassen Abdellah ’80; 

former defender and team captain of 

the 1976 soccer team Gary Toubman 

’76; record-holding swimmer Margaret 

Grunow Conze ’93; and Bucknell’s 

only two-time wrestling All-American, 

Bobby Ferraro ’94. 


Faculty Profile: Alf Siewers 


Windy City Medievalist It was while 

working as a beat reporter at the Chicago 

Sun-Times that Alfred “Alf” 

Siewers became interested 

in connections between 

the environment and 

medieval literature. 

“I was interested in 

the ways in which premodern 

cultures reacted 

with and wrote about the 

environment,” says the 

assistant professor of 

English. “As I got more 

into it, it took me further 

and further away from 

covering the Chicago city council, 

airplane crashes, and elections.” 

Medieval literature — written in 

ancient languages like Norse, Celtic, 

and Welsh — is a unique point from 

which to examine the origins of a 

culture’s attitudes toward nature and 

the physical environment, he says. 

“This was increasingly apparent to me 

in the Chicago area, where you have 

a landscape redone by Euro-American 

settlement and development in a 

An aura of serenity pervades ROOKE 

Chapel, which Robert L. Rooke ’13 donated to 

Bucknell in honor of his parents, Charles M. and 

Olive S. Rooke, in 1963. As with many of the 

buildings on campus, it is designed in the Georgian colonial 

style. Inside, the chancel screens are 

embellished with sacred symbols of 

the Christian and Jewish faiths, and 

the chapel is good place for meditation. 

However, for Bucknell students, 

staff, faculty, and community members, 

it’s much more than a sacred 

space, as a variety of religious and 

nonreligious activities are held there 

every week. 

The original dedication of Rooke 

Chapel took place on Oct. 25, 1964. 

To celebrate the chapel’s role in 

university life, a 40th anniversary 

dedication ceremony will be held on 

Nov. 7 during Homecoming Weekend. 

William Payn, professor of music and 

director of choral studies, has composed 

a commemorative piece based 

on the Book of Micah for the occasion. 

The words of the lyrics — from 

Micah, Ch. 6, verses 6 and 8 — are 

also inscribed on the east wall of the 

chapel, where many of the September 

11 observances were held. 

very short period of time.” 

While writing about city sprawl 

and reading Anglo-Saxon literature, 

Siewers pondered those ancient attitudes 

and “what values might have 

been carried here.” 

That work extends to his study 

of J.R.R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the 

Rings trilogy translated to a big-screen 

success. Siewers has written a number 

of papers on Tolkien, including “Tolkien 

as a Medieval Ecologist,” and has 

hosted a national conference for 

Tolkien scholars at Bucknell. 

“There are aspects of nature that 

are important to Tolkien,” says Siewers. 

“And because of Tolkien’s direct knowledge 

or encounters with early literature, 

The Lord of the Rings has a depth and a 

networking connection with medieval 

literature that is more direct than some 

other fantasy types of works.” 

Medieval literature is a touchstone, 

of sorts, he explains. “It’s a way of 

getting in touch with traditions that go 

deeper and in different directions than 

a lot of the currents in our consumer 

society today.” Medieval culture was 

also more experientially aware of the 

physical world. That relationship to the 

physical has become somewhat frayed 

in today’s “virtual” Internet world. 

Working on studies of medieval 

literary landscapes, while co-editing 

a collection of essays by scholars 

relating Tolkien’s interest in medieval 

literature to his engagement with 

20th-century issues of war, race, 

and the environment, Siewers is on 

sabbatical this year and is planning 

to visit Ireland for more literary 

research. It is important to him to 

personally experience the landscape 

identified in ancient literature. 

Important, too, is the landscape 

beyond his front door, accounting for 

his involvement in the Susquehanna 

Greenway Partnership, a public/private 

effort to preserve and protect the 

Susquehanna River. That effort 

includes “everything from developing 

trail networks, improving the quality 

of the river and boating use of the 

river, and collecting narratives about 

the river — oral histories or stories,” 

says Siewers. — Sam Alcorn 

Chapel Celebrates 40th Anniversary Dedication 

Terry Wild 

Rakerd Studio 

The university community’s interest in the chapel’s 

offerings, which include Protestant and Catholic services, 

commencement ceremonies, choral practices, holiday celebrations, 

memorial services, and guest lecturers, delights 

University Chaplain Ian Oliver. “It doesn’t make sense to 

have a sacred space that isn’t used. In the last 10 to 15 

years, there’s been a real resurgence in student interest in 

religion,” he says. 

The chapel is a popular choice for weddings. The 

summer calendar is always full — each year, approximately 

40 couples marry in the chapel, which can accommodate 

as many as 850 people. During the Christmas season, the 

annual Candlelight Services, featuring traditional Bible 

readings and the Rooke Chapel Ringers, are wildly popular. 

With Payn directing, the Chapel Choir is joined by students 

and other attendees in singing traditional carols. 

“There is a grand ending — the lights go out and we 

sing ‘Silent Night.’ Then there is transitional music and 

more ringers. The organ joins in and the lights come on. 

Then everyone sings, ‘Joy to the World,’” says Oliver. 

Pastor Scott Zimmerer, of Christ’s Lutheran Church in 

Lewisburg, has attended the service several times. He says, 

“It really is, for me, my family worship service. I think it’s 

one of the neat ways the university reaches out to the 

community.” — Camille Belolan 

g Rooke Chapel will be renovated for the first time during the summer of 2005 and will 

be closed after graduation until orientation. The annual memorial service held during 

Reunion will be moved to another location. For more information about the chapel, go to 

www.bucknell.edu/About_Bucknell/Offices_Resources/Chaplains_Office/Rooke_Chapel.html.

Alcohol 101 — Attendance Mandatory 

Student Profile: Micaela Deming ’06 

Rakerd Studio 

ARISTOTLE BELIEVED THAT MODERATION 

leads to virtue and that virtue leads to happiness. 

Although not a classicist by training, Dean of 

Students Rick Ferraro believes the same thing, 

especially when it comes to alcohol consumption. 

College binge drinking made front-page news in 1993 

with the publication of the Harvard School of Public Health 

College Alcohol Study, which reported that 40 percent of 

college students engaged in binge drinking on a regular 

basis. Today, the Harvard study indicates that 44 percent of 

college students still binge drink. Despite all of the publicity, 

Ferraro has discovered that most students aren’t well 

educated about alcohol. “We assumed that students had had a 

lot of good education in high school,” he says, “but it mostly 

focused on drinking and driving.” 

This year, Bucknell instituted a mandatory alcohol 

education course for all incoming first-year students, titled 

College, Alcohol, and the Bucknell Experience. “We 

decided to do the course because we are an educational 

institution, and it makes fundamental good sense to 

address an issue that is a national problem,” says Ferraro. 

The course focuses on identifying high-risk behaviors 

and promoting moderation. A number of fact-based 

vignettes (with names changed) are used to teach students 

how alcohol is metabolized, how men and women metabolize 

alcohol differently, how alcohol use can lead to sexual 

assault and other crimes, and what liability exists. 

Bryan, for example, is a 180-pound, first-year student 

with a history of depression and is on medication. His 

hometown girlfriend breaks up with him, and he seeks 

solace from his friend Todd, who lives off-campus. Todd is 

on his way out the door, but tells Bryan to help himself to 

food and beer in the fridge. In assessing the risk, students 

learn that antidepressants should not be mixed with 

alcohol; people prone to depression should not be left 

alone in a crisis situation, especially with alcohol, which 

Frequent Flyer From Poland to Cuba, 

Russia to Argentina, and many places 

in between, Micaela Deming ’06 has 

already traveled to a dozen countries 

across the globe. Born and 

raised in Baltimore, she has 

been curious about other 

cultures since childhood. 

As a high school junior, 

she spent a year in Bolivia 

as an exchange student. 

“That adventure 

opened my eyes to the 

realities of life in Latin 

America,” she says. “The 

stark paradox between my 

life and the harshness of 

their lives sparked an interest 

in me to explore. I decided to 

find out why there is such a contrast 

and put myself in a position to make a 

difference. Bucknell was my next step 

in that process.” 

Art Foxall 

Majoring in Latin American studies, 

with a minor in dance, Deming is a 

dean’s list student and recipient of the 

President’s Award for Distinguished 

Academic Achievement. “Latin American 

studies incorporates all different 

areas of study, from economics to politics, 

language to literature, and even 

geography. There is always a new angle 

in looking at the subject material, and I 

never have to question how my studies 

apply to the real world,” she says. 

This past year, she was president of 

Le Cumbre, Bucknell’s Hispanic organization, 

and a leader of the university’s 

Nicaragua Brigade March 2003 delegation. 

Fluent in Spanish, she worked as 

a translator for many of the students 

and staff while in Nicaragua. “I really 

enjoyed my time spent in Nicaragua. 

I worked as a translator between the 

Nicaraguan doctors and our Brigade,” 

she says. “I was amazed at the economic 

Risk Assessment: Dean Campbell '08 and Nicole Ayala '08 show what they know 

about risky drinking behaviors during an alcohol education class. 

further depresses the body; and there’s a great deal of 

liability involved in serving alcohol, particularly to a minor. 

“Students are surprised to learn that they can be held 

accountable for someone else’s drinking,” says Ferraro. 

Faculty and staff are teaching the courses, with 20 

students per class. He says that the course was approved in 

May, and several groups, including the Parents’ Board, Phi 

Kappa Psi, Pi Beta Phi, and the Dean of Students Office, 

made the program happen. “Forty-six dedicated faculty 

and staff members came forth to teach the course on short 

notice. A core of dedicated staff members worked long 

hours this summer to develop the curriculum and implement 

the class,” Ferraro says. “With this preventative piece 

and the modified points system in place, we are cautiously 

optimistic that Bucknell can not only continue the general 

progress seen in the last few years with respect to the use 

and abuse of alcohol on campus, but even serve as a model 

to other colleges and universities that are searching for 

more effective practices in this area.” — Gigi Marino 

and medical conditions there. It is all 

so different from what we have here 

in America.” 

This past year, Deming also 

coached a local elementary and middle 

school “Odyssey of the Mind” team. 

She has written numerous articles for 

The Catalyst, a publication by Bucknell’s 

Caucus for Economic Justice, and 

other publications. 

“Once I found my niche at Bucknell, 

my options were endless. There are 

always activities going on that interest 

me and a group of people waiting to 

talk about the way the world turns,” 

she says. “I continue to grow here at 

Bucknell in my drive to learn more, my 

ability to apply what I learn, and my 

passion to go and make a difference.” 

Don’t look for Deming on campus 

this semester. She’s in Brazil studying 

dance and enhancing her Portuguese 

language skills. — Megan Gaines 


Terry Wild 

Five years ago, the devastation caused by 

Hurricane Mitch inspired a student 

to help the poor of Nicaragua. 

I 


New Life in 

Nicaragua 

constructed with zinc and other scraps of metal. Since 

a regime change in 1990, thousands of the urban 

poor in Nicaragua have suffered from soaring rates of 

unemployment, with no safety net to catch them. 

By the end of October, any hope Jazmina had 

for a better future was destroyed when Hurricane 

Mitch plowed through the region, causing an 

unprecedented $5 billion in damage. More than 

10,000 Nicaraguan lives were lost. This natural 

disaster was the catalyst for several unnatural events 

that unfolded in the days, weeks, and months 

following the storm. 

Days later, Jazmina and her family were brought 

to a treeless patch of dirt near Ciudad Sandino called 

Nueva Vida — New Life. But it is a life without access 

JAMIE CISTOLDI LEE ’99 

T IS EARLY OCTOBER 1998. SQUATTING ON A SMALL 

plot of land near Lake Managua, in the center of Nicaragua’s 

capital, Jazmina wakes before dawn to sell sealed bags of cold 

water at stoplights. The small change she earns barely supports 

herself and her two children. She lives in a small house 

to food, water, transportation, or work. This forsaken 

settlement offers Jazmina and 15,000 others no 

protection against the elements. The sun is so strong 

that it scorches the skin of the children. The wind 

whips through this flat land, burning the eyes of the 

young and old alike with dust. Months after 

Hurricane Mitch, the only shelters are make-shift 

tents constructed from USAID black plastic, each 

occupying a 10-by-15-meter plot. This shantytown 

was thrown together in days and soon became just 

another desperately poor barrio in Managua, one of 

the most deprived capitals in the region. It’s the first 

thing that the Bucknell Brigade found on its initial 

trip in 1999. 

Inspiration My first experience in Nicaragua 

occurred just 10 months before Hurricane Mitch hit. 

As a junior at Bucknell, I spent my second semester 

in Nicaragua with the School for International 

Training, developing a love and respect for the 

Nicaraguan people. But it was not without coming 

to terms with the economic and political problems 

afflicting Nicaragua. During the ’80s, Nicaragua 

suffered the ill effects of a civil war, which led to a 

reduction in or elimination of health, education, and 

social service expenditures that had been the backbone 

of the Sandinista and Nicaraguan society. 

During my first week, I visited one of the 

poorest barrios in Managua, the community of 

Acahualinca, which surrounds the municipal 

garbage dump. I met Daniel, a working 15-year-old, 

Bread, Egg, Family: Many Nicaraguan children do not go to school 

because their families can’t afford the cost of uniforms, books, and 

exams. During the March 2004 trip, Aimee Wolanski, former assistant 

professor of education, taught reading to children.

whose earnings from the garbage dump helped 

support some of his younger siblings so that they 

could attend primary school. He inaugurated me 

into the life of a working child. I observed the 

inhumane conditions under which Daniel and 

dozens of other children worked everyday — sifting 

through burning garbage and waste — selling recyclables 

for pennies. 

Because of Daniel and others like him, I 

returned to Bucknell a transformed person. A few 

weeks later, I watched the terrible destruction 

caused by Hurricane Mitch. I wanted to share my 

Nicaraguan experiences with the Bucknell community, 

explain what I saw, and justify why I was so 

concerned with the well-being of a people who were 

already so poor. 

Mobilization San Juan de Limay, in 

northern Nicaragua, was a rural community where I 

spent some time with a host family. CNN reported 

that Limay had been washed off the maps, and 

Managua was in shambles — millions of people left 

homeless overnight. I was numb with sadness, but I 

realized that coming from a place like Bucknell, I 

could assist the people of Nicaragua. 

I initially worked through the Cumbre Latin 

American Society to collect donations and spread 

awareness. Several students helped set up a table in 

the Elaine Langone Center, showing taped footage 

about Mitch and passing out homemade stickers and 

solidarity pins. A few professors invited me to their 

classes to discuss current events in Nicaragua and 

share with other students my research on child 

labor. The outpouring of support from the Bucknell 

community made it clear that we could do more. 

I observed the inhumane conditions 

under which dozens of children worked everyday 

— sifting through burning garbage and waste — 

selling recyclables for pennies. 

I wanted to go back to Nicaragua and help with 

rebuilding, and despite the fact that most 

Bucknellians had no direct relation to Nicaragua or 

even Central America, many other people also felt a 

connection to those who were in need. Bonnie 

Poteet, associate professor and co-chair of Latin 

American studies, had always been an inspiration to 

me in the classroom by instilling the value of 

activism in her students. With our knowledge and 

passion about the issues plaguing Nicaragua, we 

knew it was possible to make a difference. Thirty-six 

volunteers signed up for the spring-break trip — the 

Bucknell Brigade was born. 

Brigadistas Unite That spring, professors 

in the departments of economics and political 

science gave talks about Nicaraguan history and 

current events. Spanish language professors 

provided crash courses in conversation. John Peeler, 

Serious Scavenging: Many children dig through the dumps to find 

wood or paper to burn or recyclable plastic, glass, and aluminum 

to sell for a few cordobas. 

professor of political science and Latin American 

studies, who offers nontraditional study credit for 

students participating in the Brigade, says, “The 

films and lectures provide a background on 

Nicaragua and Nueva Vida and are essential for 

preparing people for the experience.” Additional 

preparation was also required. For months, we 

collected donations, solicited external assistance 

from local and national corporations, and began to 

educate Bucknell’s campus and greater community 

by shedding light on the social, economic, and political 

disaster that existed prior to Mitch. But it was 

not until we visited Nueva Vida for the first time in 

1999 that we could begin to understand the consequences 

of the complex combination of political 

wars, economic disparity, and social instability that 

plagued Nicaragua. We all learned that long-term 

solutions for countries like Nicaragua can begin with 

individual commitment towards global issues. 

During the Brigade’s first visit in 1999, we spent 

a week in Nueva Vida. Our host organization, 

Jubilee House’s Center for Development in Central 

America (CDCA), identified key activities — to 

provide basic shelter to a dozen or so families. 

University physician Don Stechschulte and two 

nurses set up a medical clinic in a dirt-floor, oneroom 

tin structure, diagnosing and treating nearly 

300 individuals for respiratory ailments, infections, 

malnutrition, and parasites. The Brigade visited 

Daniel, the boy from Acahualinca, and trekked 

through the burning garbage, as I had done the year 

before. We made connections with the people, not 

just the problem. The physical structures we 

provided were small in comparison to the social 

infrastructure we built on our inaugural trip. 

Among the faculty and staff participating that 

first year were Janice Butler, director of Service 

Learning; Gene Chenoweth, political science 

professor emeritus; Ian Oliver, university chaplain; 

Bonnie Poteet; and Don Stechschulte. These and 

other dedicated members of the Bucknell community 

paved the path for future Brigades. Butler, 


Terry Wild


Oliver, and Stechschulte have demonstrated exceptional 

dedication over the years to make the Brigade 

into what it is today. Dozens more staff and faculty 

have dedicated time and effort to the Brigade, with 

many volunteering at Bucknell and traveling to 

work alongside students and Nicaraguans. 

Changing Lives In the past five years, the 

Brigade has returned 10 times to Nicaragua, 

providing nearly 200 students and faculty an opportunity 

of a lifetime. The tasks grew exponentially 

impressive, from focusing on four-post temporary 

shelters to a full-fledged medical clinic. Bucknell 

students and faculty conceptualized, planned, and 

helped to build a working clinic, filled with donated 

medical equipment, instruments, and medications. 

The clinic, expected to open a second building with 

its own lab and women’s health center next spring, 

prominently stands in the center of the community. 

Bucknell has had an unparalleled impact on the 

community. But Nueva Vida also has had a 

profound effect on Bucknell community members. 

Hillary Billmyer ’01 met people from the CDCA 

when they visited Bucknell and showed pictures of 

Nueva Vida. She signed up for the Brigade. “While I 

was academically prepared,” she says, “I was 

mentally ill-prepared. It was all so shocking. And 

there is the realization that what you read about 

actually occurred.” She was torn when she returned 

to Bucknell, a sentiment that almost all Brigadistas 

feel on some level. “It is a horrible feeling, not sure 

where you belong and having the need to go back.” 

But for Billmyer, her Bucknell and Brigade experiences 

changed her path. Before the Brigade, she was 

focusing on business. Her experience changed her 

outlook, and she now wants to “do things that 

directly affect people.” She works at the Literacy 

Council ESL and says, “It’s a cliché, but the Brigade 

really is life-altering.” 

We have hope — our own vision as 

Nicaraguans and the vision that the 

students from the U.S. bring here to us. 

Melissa Smicker ’04 was not prepared for what 

she saw the first time she participated in the Brigade. 

“It was like being on a movie set,” she says. “You can 

never be prepared for what you see and experience 

in Nicaragua.” She decided to return a second time 

as a Brigade leader, this time “older, more experienced, 

more grown-up, and with a better understanding 

about the world after studying abroad.” 

Living through these difficult experiences was made 

easier because of the bond she formed with fellow 

Brigadistas. She says, “You want to continue sharing 

it with those who understand and talk to them 

about what you can do to save the world.” While 

Helping Hands: Jake Palley ’04 assists Dr. Don Stechschulte with an 

exam. Many children in Nueva Vida suffer from malnutrition, parasites, 

and infections. Palley and his fraternity, TKE, raised $1,000 for the 

Brigade, and he has since joined the Peace Corps. 

some expect the bond among students to be strong, 

she believes that the strongest bonds are formed 

between students and faculty and staff. “Students 

don’t always see professors as real people. At times 

in Nicaragua, they fill a parental role, but you also 

grow to love and respect them. Bucknell professors 

really are role models.” 

But not just students are affected by this experience. 

Bucknell staff and faculty are equally affected 

by what they see and experience. Mike Toole ’83, 

assistant professor of engineering, recommends that 

all students participate in the Brigade. “I embrace 

the concept of service learning and feel that engineers 

in particular would be enriched by it.” He 

formed bonds with members of the January 2003 

Brigade. “I was amazed how close I became to them 

in just a week. I was energized and inspired by them 

nearly every minute of the trip.” He returned a 

changed individual. “I wish that I had been able to 

participate in a Brigade-like experience when I was 

a student at Bucknell. I may have lived my life 

somewhat differently.” 

Gary Sojka, professor of biology, participated in 

a spring-break trip. Although the heat and conditions 

took a significant toll on his body, he says, “It 

was a most moving and rewarding experience. I 

wouldn’t trade it for anything.” Living and working 

in Nicaragua for a week also changed some of his 

Terry Wild

Terry Wild 

perspectives. He says, “It forever changed my views 

of the ‘institutionalized poor’ and gave me a new 

understanding and insight about the real world.” 

For Dawn Lonsinger ’98, Nueva Vida was her 

first experience with abject poverty. “Some 

moments are so heart-wrenching,” she says. Like 

most Brigadistas, she struggled with moments of 

despair about what could or couldn’t be done and at 

the same time experienced moments of hope and 

love for the people of Nueva Vida. “That is what 

they taught us, the children especially, the power of 

the human spirit through their smiles and triumphs 

amidst so much devastation.” 

Learning Communities Several 

Brigadistas have gone on to join the Peace Corps 

(Lindsey Rosenberg ’99, Dave Arnold ’00, and Sarah 

Rives ’02). Others have chosen to focus on careers in 

public health, public policy, and international development. 

Paul Susman, associate professor of geography, 

and Stechschulte, director of health services, 

hope to offer an expanded version of the Brigade 

experience next summer with a three-week course 

on grassroots development in Nicaragua emphasizing 

health and sustainability issues, where participants 

will learn and serve in Nueva Vida. According 

to Susman, recipient of the 2004 Presidential Award 

for Teaching Excellence, “Each Bucknell Brigade has 

been a wonderful service learning experience; they 

create a learning community for whom development 

issues and policy choices are no longer just 

classroom exercises, but are clearly about people’s 

lives and survival.” And so the Brigade continues to 

touch the lives of Nicaraguans and Bucknell 

students and faculty alike. 

On my most recent visit to Nueva Vida as part of 

my dissertation fieldwork, I conducted follow-up 

interviews with women from Nueva Vida. Many 

continued to suffer from the same things — poverty 

looks and feels the same whether you are a hurri- 

Construction Quick Course: These students are cementing prefabricated 

walls for the new women’s health clinic, which will have birthing rooms, 

exam rooms, showers, and a laboratory. 

I wish that I had been able to participate 

in a Brigade-like experience when I was 

a student at Bucknell. I may have lived 

my life somewhat differently. 

cane victim living in a resettlement community or if 

you live in an urban shantytown. Jazmina and the 

thousands of other single mothers continue to 

struggle to find work. Nueva Vida looks and feels 

like most poor urban neighborhoods with an overabundance 

of unemployed people. But there is 

something unique about this community. She says, 

“Life is hard here. We fight for food, we fight for 

freedom and for a chance in life. But we have hope 

— our own vision as Nicaraguans and the vision that 

the students from the U.S. bring here to us.” 

While it may be overwhelming to think that a 

small liberal arts university can help protect the 

Nicaraguan poor from foreign debt that has passed 

the $5 billion mark, the Bucknell Brigade offers 

much to Nueva Vida. Whether by playing soccer 

with children in Nicaraguan villages, wearing a 

t-shirt made by the worker-owned sewing co-op in 

Nueva Vida (sold at the Bucknell Bookstore), buying 

organic coffee from the small El Porvenir cooperative 

north of Managua, or fumbling in broken 

Spanish just to settle with a smile that speaks across 

all barriers, all Brigadistas have built cross-border 

and cross-cultural solidarity. 

Students, staff, and faculty have learned the 

importance of taking an already high standard of 

education at our institution to a new level through 

service learning — a form of pedagogy that 

promotes civic responsibility by using academic 

course concepts, theories, and knowledge to serve 

the public good while enhancing our own education 

with direct experience. It is one thing to read about 

life in the Third World. It is an entirely different 

thing to live it. Looking back, I can see that the 

direct progress that we brought to Nueva Vida was 

small in comparison to the changes that the Brigade 

has brought to Bucknell and to us all. W 

Jamie Cistoldi Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the 

University of Texas at Austin, focusing on gender and 

development in Latin America. She also is founder and 

president of School for All (www.schoolforall.org), a nonprofit 

charity that provides educational scholarships to 

women in Nicaragua. Jamie can be reached at 

jblee@mail.utexas.edu. Her husband, Andrew Lee ’99, 

was the construction leader on the first Brigade. While he 

completes a Ph.D. in physics, he is serving on the board of 

directors of Amigos de Las Escuelas, an Austin-based nonprofit, 

and spends his Thanksgiving and spring breaks in 

Mexico constructing health clinics and schools. For more 

information about the Brigade, go to www.bucknell.edu/ 

BucknellBrigade. 


A group of Bucknellians spent their summer vacation 

under a hot Mediterranean sun excavating a Greek 

site where Socrates and Plato argued. 

Marcie Handler 

S 


Digging into 

the Past 

Mediterranean sun crossed our site, turning the 

packed soil I was digging into a fine, flyaway dust 

and prompting my fellow diggers to randomly sing 

out snippets of “Here Comes the Sun.” My back and 

legs were stretched and sore from bending down 

and kneeling all week, but every time I tried to sit 

cross-legged in my trench, a supervisor appeared to 

ELISABETH HULETTE ’03 

weating and covered with sunscreen, I 

stared at the patch of baked dirt where I’d been working for 

two hours. It was only the end of June, not yet into the 

heat of the summer, and the nearby bell tower had only just 

struck 9 a.m. My water bottle was already empty. The hot 

“tsk-tsk” at my bad technique, sitting when I should 

be on my feet. 

“You have to look archaeological,” one supervisor 

had reasoned, when he corrected my posture 

during the first week of the dig. Pointing up to the 

sidewalk café that stood between us and the 

Acropolis, he added, “We have to give the tourists 

good pictures to take home.” 

My supervisor shouldn’t have worried. It’s hard 

to get more archaeological than we were at that 

moment, laboring as volunteer diggers in the 

ancient Agora, a site that the American School for 

Classical Studies at Athens has been excavating for 

the past 80 years. 

Imagining the Ancients “To my mind, 

this is the richest site in the world,” says Kevin Daly, 

assistant professor of classics, of the Agora excavations, 

“in terms of history, what’s here, and the 

people I get to see.” 

“Rich” is indeed the word. Having hosted 

Athenian commerce and politics for thousands of 

years, the ground in the Agora contains some of the 

most important buildings and artifacts of any 

ancient site. The world’s first democratic government 

met in the Bouleuterion, or Senate House, in 

the Agora, and when the architect/politician 

Perikles finished his building program on the nearby 

Acropolis in the fifth century B.C.E., visitors to the 

Looking Archaeological: Kevin Daly, assistant professor of classics, 

instructs diggers Mark Kampert ’06 and Elisabeth Hulette ’03 on how 

to excavate a layer of first-century fill in the Agora.

Agora did their shopping in the shadow of the 

Parthenon. And it was here that Socrates and Plato 

debated the foundations of modern philosophy with 

the youth of Athens. 

Today, the Agora presents visitors with a very 

different landscape from that known to the ancients. 

Where marble columns once stood, only foundation 

walls remain. And across the street, about six meters 

(approximately 20 feet) below street level, an area 

of active excavation rings each summer with the 

sound of 42 American diggers — a group composed 

of graduate students, a few undergraduates, and, 

this season, Daly, Mark Kampert ’06, and me, a 

recently graduated classics major. 

Daly, senior supervisor of the excavation and 

nine-year Agora veteran, came to Athens this year 

with his wife, Stephanie Larson, also an assistant 

professor in classics, and their five-month-old 

daughter, Maggie, who quickly became a favorite 

among the student diggers. Kampert, a math major 

applied to be an Agora volunteer after taking Daly’s 

Roman Civilization class, and I applied with an eye 

on learning more about archaeology. As a student at 

Bucknell, I was well experienced in armchair 

archaeology — researching published reports — but 

had never worked at a site. And just as I suspected, 

I had a lot to learn. 

Intrepid Archeology One day, after I 

cleared the dirt and debris from a Byzantine-era 

wall, my supervisor looked it over carefully and 

then told me to tear it down. My jaw almost 

dropped down to my dirt- and rock-filled tennis 

shoes, but she was right: We had to take off the 

newer layers of the wall to reach the Roman and 

then classical Greek levels underneath. 

“If you’re afraid to destroy evidence, you’ll 

never move on,” Daly told me, noting that this trepidation 

is common among rookie archaeologists. 

What is important, he added, is to record each layer 

so that later researchers can retrace each step of the 

excavation. The same goes for materials that are 

found at the site. Every morning, we pulled buckets 

full of pottery fragments out of the ground, and 

every afternoon, we scrubbed them with toothbrushes 

and laid them out to dry in the sun. Pottery 

is easy to date and important for identifying layers of 

sediment, but only a few handfuls out of every day’s 

pottery piles are important enough to be kept. The 

rest were thrown out, much to the dismay of diggers 

like me who would happily have taken them home 

were Greek antiquities laws less strict. 

Littered through rooms and under roads, animal 

bones were uncovered in patches, as were abandoned 

KFC picnics, fragile glass shards, terra cotta 

loom weights, oil lamps and, statuettes. One digger 

found the butt of a Greek marble statue firmly 

cemented in a wall — proving the ancients shared 

our sense of humor. Scarcely a day went by without 

someone unearthing at least one bronze coin, and 

although nearly all archaeologists bristle at the idea 

Striking Gold 

While rummaging through a layer of late-Roman 

rubble near the end of the Agora’s excavation 

season, Mark Kampert ’06 unearthed the edge of a 

small gold disc stuck sideways in the ground. 

Convinced he had found a 50-cent euro piece — a 

large, gold-colored coin — in his trench, Kampert 

was ready to consider the area contaminated by 

modern debris, an all-too-common hazard of urban 

archaeology. But upon closer examination, the coin 

turned out to be a gold solidus, dating to roughly 

470 C.E. 

John Camp, the director of excavations who 

has been digging in the Agora for 40 years, identified 

a bust of Emperor Leo I on one side of the coin 

and a winged Nike figure (the Greek and Roman 

goddess of victory) on the other. The coin’s date 

coincides with an attack on Athens by the Vandals 

in the 460s–470s C.E. The rarity of the find made 

Kampert’s coin the jewel of this year’s excavations, 

the kind of artifact that is only found every 15 to 20 

years, said Camp. 

“You wouldn’t usually drop a gold coin,” Camp 

explained to Kampert and the other diggers, “but if 

you’re being chased by Vandals, you might.” — E.H. 

of buried treasure, this year’s excavators found an 

unusual amount of gold, including a pendant and a 

gold coin. 

Every time somebody found an interesting artifact, 

a shout went up, and nearby diggers would 

abandon their picks, brooms, and dustpans to investigate. 

Small wonder, then, that tourists were almost 

always watching us, poking their noses and cameras 

through the perimeter fence. It would be flattering 

to think they came all the way to Athens to watch 

us excavate, but this year, there were bigger events 

in the works: the 2004 Olympic games. 

For the Greeks, the Olympics were all about 

taking pride in their country’s past, a link between 

the ancient world and the modern. In fact, the 

Greeks’ fascination with antiquity made anyone 

connected with archaeology — even diggers like us 

— minor celebrities on the streets, worthy of courtesies 

not usually granted to tourists. I found shopkeepers 

and restaurant owners eager to talk to me 

about excavating and about the history of their 

people. It is a history they are proud to display to the 

world, and with that kind of spirit, I think the 

Olympics will be back in Athens someday. I just 

hope I will be, too. W 

Elisabeth Hulette ’03 was Bucknell World’s first student 

intern. She resides in Lawrenceville, N.J. 

Craig Mauzy, Agora Excavations 


BuckWild, the university’s wilderness 

pre-orientation program for first-year students, 

is more than just a walk in the woods. 

Gigi Marino 


Oh, Wilderness! 

stranger, and the flexibility and balance to step over 

someone twice your size and not fall off the log. Okay, 

relatively easy. Or at least when compared to the next 

exercise called the “flying squirrel.” This involves being 

harnessed and clipped onto a zip line that is controlled 

by the same eight people, who are feeling more 

rambunctious now. They run together, pulling on the 

line, which propels the harnessed individual 40 feet 

straight up among the trees, where, the group has 

decided, you stay until you sing a snippet of some song. 

As both an observer of and a participant in the 

Bucknell Wilderness Experience — BuckWild — I was 

surprised at how quickly the group dynamics formed. 

There we were, out in the middle of the woods with no 

distractions. Cell phones, laptops, even wristwatches 

GIGI MARINO 

The first team-building exercise is easy. You 

stand on a log with eight people you’ve just met and attempt 

to completely reverse the order of participants. A simple goal 

— but one that requires cooperation, the letting go of ego, an 

ability to adapt to the awkwardness of holding hands with a 

were verboten. The more seasoned Bucknell student 

leaders, known as BuckLinks, stand back, make sure 

everyone is safe, and let things happen as they may. If the 

group says you stay up in the trees until you sing, so be 

it. Says Alex Mass ’07, one of this year’s BuckLinks, “Like 

Plato says, ‘You can discover more about a person in an 

hour of play than in a year of conversation.’ These trips 

bring out your character before orientation even starts.” 

A leap of faith is required to survive a week of 

BuckWild. In many of the situations, particularly in the 

high ropes courses that require you first to climb a tall 

tree and then walk gingerly on ropes connected to trees 

40 feet apart, you have to trust that the people holding 

the line will take care of you. Says Drew Musgraves ’05, 

“The relationships you establish with BuckWilders are 

much different than with other peers. A lot of your 

initial interaction is in team-building situations. You 

learn to trust them early because they are up there on 

the ropes courses with you, holding your hand while 

you’re 50 feet in the air or belaying you while you’re 

climbing up the face of a mountain. At times, your life is 

literally in their hands — and that is something that you 

may never experience with any of your other friends.” 

No Showers BuckWild, sponsored by the Dean of 

Students office, is the brainchild of a group of four 

Bucknell employees, including Jim Hostetler, director of 

construction and design, who is himself a wilderness 

aficionado and adviser to the Bucknell Outing Club. 

However, when the program started in 1996, it was 

known as FRIENDS, an acronym so forgettable that 

even Hostetler can’t remember what it stood for. “The 

first group of students came back and said they had a 

Survivor Style: Chances are that no college course will require knowledge 

of how to use ash, mud, and leaves to camouflage oneself, but these 

students are prepared for anything.

great time, but the name had to go,” he says. “They 

suggested ‘BuckWild,’ and the name stuck.” A proponent 

of challenge courses, he believes that “outdoor 

skills can be applied in the classroom or in the boardroom.” 

He says, “You have all the group dynamics — 

trust, leadership, risk assessment. You’re in a group and 

have to deal with problem solving. Leaders emerge, and 

you have cooperation and consensus. The process is 

exciting.” 

Since its inception, the program has been held at the 

Great Hollow Wilderness School in New Fairfield, 

Conn., and is based on the principles of Outward Bound. 

The philosophy of Outward Bound, founded in 1941 by 

Kurt Hahn, embraces challenge and adventure, compassion 

and service, social and environmental responsibility, 

and character development. 

At the beginning of each year, as a part of orientation, 

approximately 80 self-selected students participate 

in BuckWild, which offers three options: backpacking 

along the Appalachian Trail for the whole trip, backpacking 

and caving, or staying at base camp, as I did, 

doing ropes courses, caving, and rock climbing. On the 

last night of the trip, all of the groups stay at base camp, 

have a barbeque, and put on skits — usually with the 

backpacking teams poking fun at the base-camp teams. 

And, each year, it almost always rains at some point. For 

the backpacking teams, who sleep under flimsy plastic 

tarps on the trail each night, the trip is more intense. But 

no one in any of the teams gets to shower. 

You don’t often get to see people without the 

protective armor of material possessions. 

Says Kim Groff ’08, “When you're sitting in a circle 

of 13 people, where all of you are dirty, smelly, and 

completely reliant on each other, you begin to realize 

what’s really important in life. This trip really proved to 

me how much more I can do, no matter what I originally 

think. The joy of getting to the top of a mountain 

that you’ve been trudging up for three hours and never 

thought you would reach is absolutely unmatched. It 

gave me a real desire to continue to challenge myself 

once I returned to Bucknell, even though there were no 

more mountains to climb or caves to squeeze into.” 

More Than We Seek Although BuckWild is 

designed primarily for students, Hostetler believes that 

“challenge by choice” is a powerful way for individuals 

to learn how to overcome personal limitations and fears. 

He hopes that faculty and staff will also participate in 

and benefit from outdoor education. He recently 

oversaw the building of a challenge course at the Forrest 

Brown Conference Center at Cowan, which includes 

low elements, high elements, and a climbing/rappel 

tower and will formally open next spring. 

High Ropes Hopes: Having to get by one another on a single rope stretched 

taut, three stories high, gives a whole new meaning to trust. 

The new challenge course was funded by Ben ’69 

and Myles Sampson ’67, both outdoorsmen. Says Myles, 

“For years, Ben and I were aware that Bucknell owned 

a place called Cowan, but like most Bucknellians, we 

had never seen it. After touring it last year, we realized 

that this beautiful wooded property was the ideal spot to 

capitalize on the growing interest today’s students have 

in the outdoors. We were also impressed with Jim 

Hostetler’s passion and enthusiasm for BuckWild. Jim 

convinced us that a challenge course could really help to 

boost students’ self-confidence and enhance their abilities 

to work together as a team. Our hope is that the 

challenge course will be the first of many projects that 

will encourage the students to connect with the 

outdoors and each other in this great rural location.” 

Hostetler says, “The Cowan course presents great 

opportunities to foster bonding, trust, and leadership 

among students, faculty, staff, and alumni.” (Future 

BuckWild trips may be held at the new challenge course 

at Cowan, although that decision has not been finalized.) 

Much of the literature about Outward Bound 

courses like BuckWild focuses on personal gains and a 

greater sense of self-sufficiency, which is certainly part 

of the experience. But in addition, deep connections are 

made with people when you strip daily life to the essentials. 

Makeup and jewelry become superfluous, bathroom 

habits lose their embarrassing qualities, being 

warm and dry is more important than almost anything. 

You don’t often get to see people without the protective 

armor of material possessions. Such moments are 

humbling — made even more so by the beauty and 

wildness of nature itself. Perhaps John Muir, American’s 

most influential conservationist, said it best when he 

wrote, “Whenever we go in the mountains, or indeed in 

any of God’s wild fields, we find more than we seek.” W 

For more information on BuckWild, go to www.departments. 

bucknell.edu/dean_students/buckwild.shtm. 


Chad McGimpsey ‘05

History 

Backward Glance 



A Stadium Endures 

BRETT TOMLINSON ’99 

THE DATE OCT. 18, 1924, HOLDS A 

cherished place in college football lore. 

More than 55,000 fans at New York City’s 

Polo Grounds watched Notre Dame defeat 

Army in epic fashion, inspiring reporter Grantland 

Rice to compare the Irish backfield to the four 

horsemen of the apocalypse. But for Bucknellians of 

the day, another game held greater significance. 

Outlined against the same blue-gray October sky, 

15,000 spectators gathered to see the Bison face 

Lafayette on opening day at Memorial Stadium in 

Lewisburg, the culmination of a three-year project 

that had tested the perseverance and pocketbooks of 

alumni and the university. 

In the early years of Bucknell football, the 

Orange and Blue played on Loomis Field, where the 

Gateway Apartments now stand. With no permanent 

bleachers available, spectators stood or sat on 

the hillside and parked cars on the sidelines. Despite 

the spartan conditions, the games drew impressive 

crowds. At homecoming in 1921, 6,000 fans 

watched Bucknell challenge undefeated Lafayette, 

the season’s eventual national champion. That fall, 

inspired in part by the homecoming turnout, a 

group of alumni proposed building a more permanent 

home for the football team. By January 1922, 

the stadium committee had been formed and put 

into action. 

With assistance from the university administration, 

the committee hired the architecture firm of 

Carrere and Hastings to design a U-shaped concrete 

stadium. Pittsburgh businessman John T. Shirley 

took charge of raising funds for the 25,000-seat 

venue, an ambitious design considering there were 

only about 1,000 students and 30,000 residents 

within 10 miles of Lewisburg. 

Fundraising brochures promised that a new 

stadium would boost Bucknell’s prestige and 

upgrade its football team. “Every student coming to 

Bucknell ought to have a chance to develop physically 

as well as mentally,” said baseball star and 

alumnus Christy Mathewson 1902, who excelled in 

football as an undergraduate. The stadium was also 

billed as an investment that would generate revenue 

to fund both athletics and general expenses. 

Harvard, Princeton, and Yale were profiting from 

big-time football, and Bucknell believed it could do 

the same. The alumni quickly responded, buying 

stadium subscriptions. As the donations arrived, 

contractors began grading the land near Seventh 

Street, next to the cemetery. 

The flow of funds was unreliable, though, 

stalling the project in September 1922. The delay 

proved fortuitous. New York engineer Gavin 

Hadden was hired to reevaluate the plan’s scope. He 

viewed the stadium in a larger context — as the 

foundation of the entire athletics program. The 

stadium, he said, should be suitable for baseball and 

track and field in the spring. 

Bucknell’s baseball team had 

begun playing in 1886, three years 

after the football team, and the 

university’s runners had been 

winning banners at the Penn 

Relays since the 1890s. 

Hadden also noticed that the 

existing construction site was 

poorly positioned. Football stadiums 

typically align with the end 

zones at the north and south points 

of a compass, so that players 

do not have to look into the 

sun to catch a punt or a pass. An 

east-west design like the one on 

Seventh Street, Hadden noted, 

“might well cause an opposing 

team to refuse to play on a field 

so oriented.” Hadden proposed 

building the stadium on the George 

Barron Miller farm, a plot of land 

the university had acquired in 

Horses and Machines: Builders of Bucknell’s 

new football stadium took power in every form 

they could get it in the 1920s.


A Generation for Hats: Onlookers cheered the Bison on during the 

stadium’s inaugural game against Lafayette on Oct. 18, 1924. 

1920. The Seventh Street site, he said, could be used 

for a gym, a swimming pool, and additional playing 

fields for sports such as soccer and lacrosse, a suggestion 

that came to fruition with the completion of 

Davis Gym in 1939. 

With renewed financial support and the new 

location identified by Hadden’s report, workers 

broke ground 600 yards from the edge of the main 

campus in March 1924. In the seven months that 

followed, they excavated 80,000 square yards of 

earth and turned 26,400 bags of cement into an 

18,000-seat stadium. Trustee Charles P. Vaughan 

was the stadium’s greatest benefactor, contributing 

$50,000. The project cost $450,000, and when 

alumni subscriptions eventually came up short, the 

university bailed out the stadium committee, 

assuming $120,000 in debt in 1929. 

As the 1924 football season approached, players 

and fans eagerly anticipated the stadium’s opening. 

“It will be a pleasure to lead the team on the new 

field,” quarterback and captain Wally Foster ’25 told 

the Magnet, a newsletter published by the stadium 

committee. “You might add, too, that from all information 

available, I am confident of a winning team.” 

True to his word, Foster led the Bison to a 3-0 start. 

The team outscored Western Maryland, Gallaudet, 

and Muhlenberg (78 points to their cumulative 6 

points), setting up the showdown with Lafayette, 

which also was undefeated. 

Opening day began with a parade of students 

filing into the stands, and after a moment of silent 

prayer for the alumni and students killed in WWI, 

the teams took the field. Foster scored the stadium’s 

first points, drop-kicking a 43-yard field goal 

through the uprights in the first quarter. But 

Lafayette dominated the remainder of the game, 

winning 21-3. An account from the Bucknell Alumni 

Monthly took the loss in stride. “No one who was 

present at this initial game will ever forget the beautiful 

scene, the enthusiastic thousands in the stands, 

or the stirring game that followed,” the magazine 

reported. 

Since that opening loss, the stadium has seen 

happier days. In September 1931, Bucknell beat St. 

Thomas (Minn.) 34-7 under the lights in the 

stadium’s first night game. That Bison team also 

became the stadium’s first undefeated team; the 

1951 squad later duplicated the feat. In 1960, 

Bucknell’s Lambert Cup team allowed just six points 

at Memorial Stadium all season. And in 1996, the 

stadium hosted one of the Patriot League’s most 

thrilling games, when the Bison stopped Colgate 

28-27 in overtime to win its first Patriot League 

football title. 

This fall, almost 80 years to the day after 

Memorial Stadium’s inaugural game, Bucknell 

continued its football rivalry with Lafayette. The 

location had not changed, but the home of the Bison 

was noticeably different. For starters, it’s now called 

Christy Mathewson–Memorial Stadium, rededicated 

in 1989 to honor Bucknell’s most famous athletic 

hero. (The Mathewson Memorial Gateway came 

much earlier, in 1928, three years after the pitcher’s 

death.) The stadium rededication celebrated a 

$1.2 million renovation project that rescued the 

decaying concrete walls in 1988–89. Landscaping 

replaced seating at the closed end, red brick solidified 

the exterior, and new seats gave spectators an 

improved perch. 

Track and field and men’s lacrosse, the stadium’s 

primary occupants in the spring, have taken advantage 

of two other stadium renovations. An allweather 

track, first added in the 1988–89 

renovation, has improved training and competition 

for the Bison runners, and synthetic FieldTurf 

replaced the stadium’s grass in 2001, providing a 

durable and forgiving field for lacrosse and football. 

Although the playing surfaces have changed, 

today’s student-athletes continue to add to the 

stadium’s memories. And the foundation laid 80 

years ago remains. “The stadium is a representation 

in the concrete of the devotion of alumni and 

former students,” President Emory Hunt said at the 

1924 dedication. “It is substantial and enduring.” W 

Brett Tomlinson is a frequent contributor to Bucknell 

World and is an associate editor at the Princeton 

Alumni Weekly. 


News 

Alumni Association 


Westward Ho! 

As Bucknell’s Western Regional 

Office representative in San Francisco, Brad 

Ward ’90, associate director of admissions, 

covers 13 states. A year translates to six 

months on the road for high school visits, college 

fairs, student interviews, and receptions, plus three 

months working in Lewisburg. 

Ward covers a broad swath of geography by road 

and air — from the Rockies to the Pacific. And 

Hawaii, too. “Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, 

Seattle, and Portland are our traditional areas,” says 

Ward. “But we have emerging areas — Phoenix, Salt 

Lake City, Albuquerque, and Las Vegas — where the 

U.S. growth is. The population is skyrocketing there.” 

Launched in 1996, Bucknell’s Western Region 

outreach was designed to build a more geographically 

diverse student population, including more students 

from the Western United States, and enhancing the 

university’s growing national status, says Ward, a 

one-time San Francisco–area high school student. 

Students raised in the West often have a completely 

different background than do those from the mid- 

Atlantic states, a diversity that enriches the intellectual 

substance of the university. 

It’s paying off, too. Applications for the Class of 

2008 from Western states were more than double 

those in 1996. California is Bucknell’s fifth-largest 

alumni state, which increases Bucknell’s exposure to 

Western employers. Recently, two of Bucknell’s 

frame-of-reference schools — Lehigh and Cornell — 

have followed suit with their own Western 

admissions offices. 

This increased interest in Bucknell stems from a 

host of factors, including recognition of the university’s 

stellar academics, a community feeling not 

found at the larger Western state universities, and an 

appreciation of Division I athletics. It also derives 

from transplanted mid-Atlantic parents who want 

their children to have an East Coast academic experience. 

But much of it is word-of-mouth buzz created 

by current students and graduates. 

Western alumni volunteers help to extend the 

Western office’s reach by attending college fairs, 

meeting and interviewing prospective students (last 

year, more than 25 Western alumni conducted interviews 

with prospective students), hosting receptions, 

and even phoning and emailing students and parents 

who have questions about what airport to use to get 

to Bucknell and summer clothes storage. 

“It’s all about relating to students from their 

perspective,” says Ward. “Bucknell is a two- to threehour 

time difference or a whole day of flying for these 

Founded in spring 2004, the Western Student Association is as much about Western state 

student camaraderie as it is about dealing with the practical issues related to home being on 

the other side of the continent. Some of the members include, in the front row, from left to right, 

David Myers ’07, Phuong Nguyen ’07, Emily Thiel ’07, Nick Sotak ’07, Ashley Stanford ’07, and 

Karen Grabowski ’07. In the back row are co-founder Katherine Wallis ’07, Megan McWhinney 

’07, Stephanie Mirkin ’07, and Ashley Aiken ’07. 

students, and since not everyone can make it to see 

us, we bring Bucknell to them.” 

Successful recruitment involves volunteers like 

Paul Wythes ’90 and Jane Scott ’02. 

“I could never do this job without the help of our 

alumni,” says Ward. “They help to provide a local 

contact for these students. Jane works at one of the 

biggest high schools in Colorado, and she has sent 

many students our way. I get email from students 

saying, ‘Ms. Scott told us about Bucknell, and it 

sounds great. She had an awesome experience, and 

I’d like to meet with you.’ We have alumni who are 

passionate about Bucknell, and they want to help in 

any way they can.” 

Wythes, a member of the Bucknell Alumni Board 

who lives in San Francisco, has been a West Coast 

volunteer since graduation. “When I graduated from 

high school in 1986, there were few people [at 

Bucknell] from the West Coast at all. Now, nearly 10 

percent of each class is from the West Coast. I think 

its academic reputation is the primary motivation for 

students going to Bucknell from the West Coast.” 

Wythes enjoys volunteerism and working with 

prospective students. He, too, has a message: A West 

Coast high school student attending Bucknell gains 

personal perspective and exposure that studying close 

to home may not provide. “I had a very good experience 

at Bucknell. I want other people to know that 

the school is out there and they, too, could have a 

very good experience,” he says. “I didn’t have the 

benefit of speaking to someone like myself before 

deciding on Bucknell.” — Sam Alcorn

World’s End 

A Pin and a Promise 


JUDITH ESMAY ’54 

The discovery of a sorority pin at 

the bottom of my jewelry basket this year 

prompted one of those Bucknell moments 

when past and present clarify one another. 

It had begun, as things do, with a telephone call two 

years earlier. I had been a busy church lady for a couple 

of decades, ever since I had found a home in the liturgy 

and ethos and polity of the Episcopal Church, when a 

call came from the president of the standing committee 

of our New Hampshire Episcopal Diocese. The bishop 

has announced his retirement, he reminded me, and we 

have to choose a new one. A search committee will 

produce a slate of nominees; will you handle the election 

and the consecration service — and a retirement 

dinner, too? Sure, I said, and began studying canon law 

and drafting rules of order for an electing convention. 

Within the year, my small committee and I were 

welcoming nominees and introducing them to the 

people of our 49 congregations. On the appointed day, 

diocesan clergy and lay delegates elected, overwhelmingly 

and joyously, a priest of the diocese known and 

beloved for 18 years — a spiritual leader, skilled administrator, 

and loving friend whose first act as bishop 

would be to call us to “infinite inclusion and radical 

hospitality.” Gene Robinson is also the first openly gay 

man living in a committed relationship in the whole of 

the international Anglican Communion. 

Suddenly, our small diocese caught the world’s 

attention, and the world watched as deputies to the 

General Convention confirmed our election. 

Much of the world rejoiced with us. Thousands told 

us that Gene’s election signaled that the church really 

does welcome marginalized people to full fellowship. 

Many others, a few in our own diocese, took issue with 

our choice and told us we had so altered the church that 

it could no longer contain them. Even as we invited 

dialogue, we were accused of shattering unity. 

As we prepared a consecration service that would 

exceed all expectations for size and complexity, we 

happened on an economical plan for the bishop’s 

pectoral cross: It would be cast from gold contributed by 

the people of the diocese. I was searching for my contribution 

to that cross when I spied my Alpha Phi pin. 

Those gold Greek letters and the tiny chapter pin 

chained to them recalled another election 50 years 

earlier. In 1953, I was a Bucknell senior and president of 

the sorority. During the fall rush, we pledged a number 

of freshman women, one of whom was a charming 

African American woman, someone we wished to be 

part of our sisterhood. 

News of our new pledge must have reached the 

sorority’s national office in Illinois, for an Alpha Phi 

officer soon arrived to tell us that our disruptive action 

would damage the national organization. Admitting that 

our constitution did not prohibit the admission of any 

particular group, she reminded us that it allowed us to 

pledge only those girls whom we would welcome into 

our homes. The officer shrugged off our protestations 

and suspended our chapter. For the sake of chapters and 

alumnae unknown to us, we could initiate no one into 

full and permanent membership. 

I wished to spare at least the shame I felt at our 

betrayal of our African American pledge, and so I kept 

silent. Although Dean of Women Mary Jane Stevenson 

suggested I reach out to other Alpha Phi chapters, I did 

not. When the pledge transferred to another college at 

the end of her freshman year, the matter was resolved ... 

at least for the chapter. I left Bucknell resolved never 

again to belong to an organization that could deny a 

place to anyone who sought membership. 

I often wondered, as I walked in the civil rights 

marches of the sixties, how things might have turned 

out at Bucknell if I had protested the injustice more 

loudly. I’d had the chance to make a difference, and I 

failed it. My answer should have been then, as it was 50 

years later: We have lawfully made our choice, and we 

insist that you respect that choice. 

I found another piece in the jewelry basket that day 

— a tarnished silver barrette I bought in 1954 with the 

modest stipend accompanying a surprise graduation 

recognition as a “woman exemplifying qualities 

of Christian leadership.” I’ve long thought the award 

was Dean Stevenson’s way of telling me I hadn’t done 

so badly. 

I think I’ve finally earned the barrette, now that my 

hair matches it. The gold pin is in Gene’s cross; the silver 

is my treasure.W 

Judith Esmay, retired lawyer and food pantry volunteer, lives 

in Hanover, N.H., with her husband, Robert Strauss. She is a 

trustee of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire and member 

of the Hanover Planning Board and St. Thomas Church. She 

can be reached at judithesmay@earthlink.net. 

World’s End is a forum for opinions and experiences of our readers. Please 

send manuscripts of no longer than 750 words to Editor, Bucknell World, Judd 

House, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837 or gmarino@bucknell.edu. 

Geoff Forester, Forester Photography, Concord, N.H.

World - Bucknell University

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