Elinor (Herman) Reid, '37, wrote of her pleasant memories of professors Dr. Smiley and Dr. Mierow. After graduating from Carleton she took a Masters at Northwestern, and spent several years teaching High School Latin (and introducing her students to the joys of the Aeneid) in Glendale, Arizona and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the end of World War II, as she put it, she decided to fulfill another role, and married Morry Reid; they have two children and five grandchildren, and they celebrated their 53rd wedding anniversary this year.

Elinor Reid, '37

Edward Dodson, '39, also writes of fond memories of his studies at Carleton; he says he chose a major in Greek because his professor, Herbert Pierrepont Houghton, "was much the most outstanding" of his teachers, and although he knew that he would not make a career in Classics he felt it would be worthwhile to study with such an inspiring scholar. He completed the requirements for a major in biology while doing his work in Greek, and went on in that area. After completing doctoral studies at Berkeley, he taught first at University of Notre Dame before settling at the University of Ottawa where he is now a professor emeritus. His work has been in genetics and evolutionary biology of invertebrates, but he has also (in another strong Carleton tradition) been interested in the relationships of science and religion. He married Mary Kay Street '40 soon after graduation; they have six children and thirteen grandchildren.

Edward ('39) and Mary Kay (Street, '40) Dodson

Keith Silas, '58, writes that he has finally married his long-time college sweetheart, Carolyn Pfalz, '59, after "forty-odd years of courtship." Keith left Carleton a Greek major and promptly lost himself in the wilds of New Zealand as a photographer/sheep-rancher. He corresponded with Carolyn for over thirty years before returning to the states to take his current job with the USDA and beginning the "slow process of countenancing marriage." Keith and CArolyn live in Reston, VA with a flat-coated retriever and an Australian Blue Heeler.

Linda Fisher '75 works for a national promotions & marketing agency that develops product launch cam-paigns, promotions, merchandising, and print/online advertising for consumer technology companies such as Micro-soft, Symantec, AOL, and Lucent. She spends about 30-40% of her time in Seattle and Silicon Valley, but otherwise works out of her home office in Rockport. She's been married for 17 years and raised two stepchildren who are now in their mid-20's. Her husband is an avid gardener, and their water gardens, pet koi, and perennials keep him busy in the summer. Her last concerted effort at archaeological history was a day trip to an excavated Roman farmhouse on the Isle of Wight. She writes: "I had no idea that the "site" was a just a reconstructed mosaic floor accessible only by trekking through a field of nettles. A painful experience, needless to say!"

Debra Hammond, '78, is living in Chicago with her husband and six-year-old son. She has a MA from the Graduate Library School and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business, both at the University of Chicago. She was also (as she says) the "fortunate and grateful" recipient of the '92 Carleton College Lofgren Fellowship. Last December she began her own consulting business, assisting corporations with knowledge and information management initiatives.

Webster Hoener, ('83), went on to take Associate and Bachelor of Science degrees. He is working for a Consulting Engineering Firm in the "Environmental Division." He writes that he has recently "been involved with installation of sludge (poop) dryers to provide for the beneficial reuse (soil amendment) of 'Municipal Biosolids,' formerly known as sludge, formerly known as sewage (ah, the power of labels)!"

The response rate from the class of '84 was extremely impressive: Lisa Greenberg is living in Seattle with her husband Brad, whom she met in Sierra Leone as a Peace Corps volunteer. She is a certified Nurse-Midwife at a big HMO. Her sister and her family live eight houses down the street. The Editor thinks maybe Lisa's father (my favorite Classics professor ever) is headed out that way too. Peter Cole '85 and his family live a couple of blocks away; their kids play together. Uli Koester writes that he has "almost" achieved the wonderful music/classics combination that Jackson has modeled: he has 15 private cello students and serves as assistant conductor of the Valparaiso High School orchestras. Then Valparaiso University asked him to teach a second year Latin course in Roman Comedy! Although tempted, he decided that his responsibilities as part-time stay-at-home dad and the music were plenty. He also didn't seem so enthusiastic about Plautus... "Aristophanes would have been a different matter!" And finally Laurie McLaren, like Lisa, has been working in health care; she currently oversees all operational aspects of a managed care organization. She and her husband, Randy Gates, moved to Sonoma County almost a year ago. The closest vineyards are only a half a mile away. When she wrote (in late January) she was expecting her first child, a girl, in just four weeks! So we'll hope for some baby pictures in the next edition.

Lisa Greenbeerg ('84), her daughter, and her husband Brad's left foot.

Margaret Sullivan, '85, took an MA in Latin at the University of Minnesota in 1990. She married Jon Parshall '85 in February of 1991, and then spent the next three months teaching English in Hiroshima, Japan. Her daughter Anna was born in 1995, and son Derek in 1997. She is currently at home with the kids, and works part-time as bookkeeper for a small computer consulting firm. Julie Nishimura-Jensen, '87, spent the four years after graduation in Minneapolis living the life of a starving dancer, but decided in the end to go back to the wealth and job-security offered by a career in Classics! She since has taken an MA and Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin at Madison, and after a series of those difficult choices forced on two-career couples (for which she was featured in an article about academic couples in the Chronicle for Higher Education), she and her husband (Eric Jensen '87) ended up at Swarthmore College, where Eric teaches astronomy and Julie teaches part-time (mythology). She has also been doing some teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, where several of our more recent graduates are pursuing degrees (Catharine Platt '94, Andy Fenton '95, Dave Fundingsland '98 and Justin Norwood '99). The part-time teaching allows her to spend more time with Alex, their son, born in December of 1998 (on the last day of the semester). She has two articles out on the Argonautica and has hooked up with several other alums in the field at meetings (Kirk Ormand '85, Dave Guinee '86 and Chris Brunelle '88).

 Cori (Stine) Pearl, '94, is working in the Technical Support department of a computer training company called Productivity Point. She is learning Spanish in her spare time, which is limited due to her little girl Eliada, who was six months old when Cori wrote in January. Lisa Korytowski, '95, is finishing up some loose ends on her MA in Greek from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has entered the ranks of the gainfully employed via the Colorado Division of Wildlife. We're looking forward to seeing her soon at Reunion 2000! Josh Mitchell, '97, won the prize for the FIRST RESPONSE to the first edition of the newsletter! He moved to Atlanta after he graduated with the intention of pursuing an MDiv at Emory, but very soon he decided this was not for him. After a string of variously interesting temporary jobs he started his current position as technical writer for Shoap technical Services. He claims that he's waiting for the Vatican contract to put his Latin skills to good use, but we're sure that his Classics training is standing him in good stead every day of the week. He quit smoking as of November 1999, has added some tattoos and piercings, and is seeing a "lovely young lady" named Ari, a graduate student in Psychobiology at Emory. Agatha Beins, '98, finished her AmeriCorps position in October, and started immediately with Full Court Press, an anti-tobacco coalition in Tucson. She is still working with youth and schools, and still running into the same bureaucracy and challenges of the school system, but the students keep her coming back! Agatha has found her frisbee niche with a congenial group of women who were planning to bring a team to a big tournament in Phoenix in February. She has also been playing soccer, raising two funny kittens and hanging out with Dave Barbeau ('97). She claims to have found a good recipe for pumpkin cornbread, but didn't include it for testing; how about sending it in, Agatha? Ian Crawford, '98, spent a year at a prestigious law firm in NYC, where he claimed (at the time, anyway), he realized that he did not in fact want to become a lawyer, but did want to go to law school. So he returned to Oregon where he spent the past year doing volunteer work; he also applied to and was accepted at Yale Law School (congratulations, Ian!), where he will start this Fall. Katie Hines, '98, is now halfway through her program at the University of Chicago. She is working 15-20 (or 30) hours a week for her church internship placement at Augustana, which she loves. She translated all her own texts for her first sermon on the Parable of the Talents, and found a future passive participle! Leif Jensen, '99, spent the year in Minneapolis and has been accepted into the MPH program at the University of Minnesota. Justin Norwood, '99, has finished up his first year at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been taking courses with luminaries like Sheila Murnaghan. And finally Marcus Miles, '99, is enjoying the Spring in Edinburgh, where it is still light when he leaves the library at 10:00 p.m. He was planning last we heard from him to walk southeast along a local burn just to see where it went.

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Three students graduated this June (and therefore got to shake the hand of Bill Clinton, who delivered the commencement address):

Classical Languages

Eric Fanning

Caleb Nicholes

Classical Studies

Greg Rawn

In addition, 4 students graduated with concentrations in Archaeology:

Matthew Benoit

Kimberly Hanson

Emily Shirbroun

Liila Evan Woods

Eric will be starting the post-Baccalaureate program at the University of Pennsylvania. Caleb plans to travel in South America most of next year, while deciding whether or not he wants to pursue Classics in grad school. Greg will be spending a year doing Mission work in the South before starting seminary.

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Nancy Wilkie Timbuktu, Petra, Palmyra, Agra, Angkor Wat. These are just a few of the ancient sites I was able to visit for the first time this winter while leading an around the world tour sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America and UNESCO. One of the most memorable, non-archaeological highlights of the trip was the party that Cherif Keita and his family hosted for the travelers in our group and the students on the Carleton Off Campus Studies Program in Bamako, Mali.

However, most of my duties as President of the AIA have been somewhat less exotic. In April I was invited to participate in a conference at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University in New York City. The conference, entitled Reports from the Front Lines of the Art and Cultural Property Wars, dealt with one of the most intractable issues facing us today: who owns the past? The citizens of the world at large? Modern inhabitants of the nations where archaeological remains are found? Or public institutions and private individuals who can afford to collect antiquities? As the students in the Archaeology Capstone Seminar have discovered, there are no easy solutions to this problem, which I am certain will be with us for years to come.

From Jackson Bryce (an excerpt from perhaps his next set of "Letters from England"): I've really been enjoying Oxford very much once again... Last Monday I participated in a rite now about 500 years old that takes place at Magdalen College. On "May Morning," which is Oxonian for May 1st, the Magdalen choir greets the sun at 6:00 a.m. with a hymn and a couple of madrigals sung from the top of their glorious tower, and the chaplain offers a wonderful prayer combining the themes of the regeneration of mother earth and the resurrection of the Lord. (You can check it out at http://www.magd.ox.ac.uk/hymnus.html.) Then ringers ring the bells at Magdalen and in other towers around Oxford and Morris dancers go all over the city dancing. Undergraduates stay up drinking all night, and the pubs open at 4:00 a.m. on this day so a person can be well on the way by sunup. As it happened it was also the May bank holiday, so many thousands of people thronged the High Street to hear the choir in various states of inebriation. I saw everything from unshaven louts in athletic clothes swilling beer to elegant young folks in tuxedos and evening dresses drinking campagne from crystal flutes.

One very funny thing that happened had to do with the mounted police. The more tipsy among the revellers kept stepping in the horseshit, and as it was quite a big crowd they eventually had it spread all over the sidewalks and everything. At one point I found myself walking behind two young women in black evening dresses who had gotten it all over their fancy shoes, and were hanging all over each other trying not to step in any more as they lurched along. No place like Oxford, I tell you.

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It was a particularly eventful year for us in the Classics Department. As we wrote last time, we had the honor and pleasure of welcoming Cecil Wooten as a Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor during the Winter Term. Any of you who know Cecil will understand that his very presence on campus gave a feeling of festivity. In addition to the two wonderful talks he gave on the Carleton and St. Olaf campuses, he attended and hosted (!) countless dinner parties during his stay, and was the occasion for many a convivial lunch in the Department lounge. He is already missed sorely!

In the Spring Term we finally put on an event we have been discussing for some time: the first annual Classical Marathon. For the inaugural event we staged a reading of the Odyssey in English, which took almost exactly 12 hours (9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.; it was the urgent recommendation of the students involved that next year we shift this to noon until midnight. Negotiations are under way.). We set up in the Library's Athenaeum, where we had food delivered from time to time to sustain the readers and listeners. You can see pictures of the event here. Altogether the event was so successful that we are already planning next year's Marathon, which will be a reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses. We welcome suggestions for future Marathon events!

The other blockbuster event of the term was the Carleton Players' Production of Euripides' Iphiegeneia at Aulis. Rob Hardy (sometime Classicist, Departmental Historian, and spouse to your editor, Clara Hardy) wrote a translation for the production and functioned as dramaturg. Ruth Weiner directed, and co-taught with me a course on Euripidean tragedy linked to the production. This means that while auditions for the play were open to the entire campus, a requirement of the course was some type of involvement in the play. Perhaps the most striking feature of the production was the chorus, which consisted of four speakers and 18 dancers. The music was chosen and the dances choreographed by Devin Carey, an artist hired especially for the production. Rehearsal photographs are linked here. The course and production together was one of the most stimulating and satisfying experiences I've had here as teacher and Classicist. We plan to add a course in Ancient Drama to our regular offerings (to be taught next Spring by Keyne Cheshire, '94) and hope to incorporate production as much as we can. I will also be spending my upcoming leave doing the preliminary research on a general-audience book on Athenian tragedy which Rob and I are collaborating on; the book will trace both the original production and the Carleton production of the play. Watch this space for further details!

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