Kathryn (Mackay) Ringrose, '60 took Masters degrees in Classics at the University of Wisconsin and in Medieval History at Rutgers, followed by a PhD in Byzantine History also at Rutgers. She has had various part-time teaching positions around San Diego, and is currently a part-time lecturer in Byzantine/Medieval History at UC San Diego. She is working on a book called Transcendent Lives: Eunuchs and the Construction of Gender in Byzantium, which we look forward to seeing. A lot of us are interested in eunuchs around here, at at least one other alum to my knowledge has published on them.

Linda Clader, '68, responded to my request for updates on her life with the following: "I am the Professor of Homiletics at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, the Episcopal seminary in Berkeley, CA. I teach baby preachers to preach, and also teach in a doctoral program in homiletics at the Graduate Theological Union, a consortium of nine seminaries (three Roman Catholic, six Protestant) in Berkeley. I am married to Nick Ristad, a Lutheran pastor who has been a prison chaplain for thirty years. Now and then I play the piano for his service at Napa State Hospital, which is a prison for the criminally insane. We enjoy camping in the Sierras and along the California coast, travel, and hanging around our house, which is decorated with Italian pottery and a bear skin rug. Last year I finally got to Troy, and communed with Odysseus in Ithaca and John Chrysostom in Istanbul. I would welcome email from old classics scholars!" Her address is Lclader@aol.com.

Kevin Piron, '80 writes that he earned an M.S. in Architecture from the University of Minnesota in 1990 and has been working for Architectural Resources in Hibbing ever since. He and his wife Cheryl have two daughters, Dominique, who is 14, and Mollie, age 10. Dominique is a basketball player and a fine student, and Mollie loves horses and is also a very good student. His wife is a nurse at a local clinic. They have a dog, Wilbur, and two cats, Cicero and Smokey. He shared an anecdote about Jackson that I got such a kick out of that I reproduce it here verbatim: "I especially remember my very first Latin course - I'm pretty sure it was Latin 52, Cicero (?) - one day that fall of 1977 we sat outside on the bald spot for class and watched with a mixture of fascination, horror and mirth as the red fountain pen tucked away in Professor Bryce's breast pocket slowly released its contents in an ever-widening crimson circle!"

Julie Nishimura-Jensen, '87, wrote to correct an erratum in the last issue: her son Alex was born in December of 1998, not 1988. I was able to correct this instantly in the web version, but for the rest of you let me set the record straight. Her son is almost 3, not a seventh-grader!

Dan Ries, class of '89 brought us up to date on his post-graduate life: he went to medical school at the University of Minnesota, residency in internal medicine at Duke, and last August, at any rate, was in a fellowship in nephrology at the University of Colorado. (He says that his neighbors are convinced he is doing something horrible with dead bodies, not realizing that nephros has a different root than necros!) He's married to Heidi Nelson (not an alum) and lives in Denver. They were expecting a little girl around the beginning of October 2000. He wasn't sure at the time where he would end up, but said that Denver, Minneapolis, and Atlanta were all possibilities. Write again and let us know what happened! He also passed along valuable information on other alums: he ran into Chris Brunelle '88 (on whom see further below) in Durham; Amy Micallef '88 is a library science person in St. Paul; Tom Underwood, last he heard, is a psychiatrist now.

Heather Gruenberg, '91 sent lots of news about her adventures since Carleton. Most recently she has been subbing (Heather -- Rob has been doing that too, and loves it), although she also took three semesters of Greek at Wayne State and "aced" it; she was particularly proud of this having had a rough time with it at Carleton, in spite of the assistance of Christine Vellenga '88. Career counseling at one point identified FBI agent as a potential career for her. She called the Carleton Career Center if we had any alums in the FBI and was told "Three -- but we only have an address and phone number for one of them"! Heather added that she, like Josh Mitchell '97 from our last issue, has joined the ranks of the tatooed, with Medusa as the subject. She reports enjoying Nancy Wilkie's regular column in Archaeology magazine, and confesses to still being "obsessed" with the Medea myth.

Nat Wagner, '92 wrote to me a mere four days after the birth of his second child, Thomas, in September of last year. He was reminiscing about taking Greek 101 with me back when I had a small baby too, and remembering all the coffee we used to drink at those 8:30 classes! Nat and his wife Christy also have a little girl called Sam. The pair met at Michigan where they both earned MA's and then went out to Hebron Academy in Maine to teach Latin. When this idyllic life was disrupted by the firing of the popular headmaster by trustees, they moved back to Ann Arbor, where Christy is working on a Latin text book with a former professor a the U of M and Nat is teaching Latin I through IV at a day school in Detroit - University Liggett School. He is currently working on a second MA through Middlebury College's Breadloaf School of English, and though he has not completely given up on the possibility of finishing a Ph.D. he says that he is "happiest devoting myself to teen-agers 24-7 and doubt I would ever have time or the desire to leave it". Lucky teenagers, I say.

Also from the class of '92, Chad Turner passed along the news that he has finished his dissertation at Loyola (well-timed escape, Chad!) and was off to Syracuse for a one-year replacement gig. He has been awarded both second and first prizes at CAMWS' grad student paper competition over the last few years, and has "had a fistful of articles rejected by some of the finest journals in the United States and Canada." He is now an uncle and godfather to his sister's first baby, and is experiencing some pressure from the folks to get busy in that direction himself. I'm sure nobody else from the class of '92 has had THAT experience.

The "first response" prize this year goes to Andy Fenton, '95, who e-mailed me almost as soon as the web version of last year's newsletter was posted. He had finished up his PhD exams at the University of Pennsylvania and was, last summer, writing his proposal for a dissertation on the Eclogues. But much more exciting than that was the news that he was getting married to a "recovering classicist" and current lawyer whom he met at the Centro back in his college days. Beth and Andy have bought a condo in Philadelphia and I'm assuming they are still there.

Agatha Beins, '98 was kind enough to share with me the e-mails she sent her friends while walking a sizable chunk of the Appalachian Trail this Spring. She didn't complete the entire trail, but did walk an impressive 700 miles. She hooked up with an interesting hiker who went by the name of Scatman; his pictures of the Trail (including some of Agatha) are posted (in the set "AT Drop 5") on the web. Agatha is starting a graduate program in Feminist Studies at the University of Arizona this fall.

Marcus Miles, '99, was studying last year for an M.A. in Toronto. He wrote in December that it was an interesting change from the small worlds of Carleton and St Andrews. He was living in a residence primarily established for Presbyterian divinity students, all of whom are women. More recently, though, I received a cryptic e-mail from him refering to his department at San Francisco State... so what are you up to now, Marcus?

Justin Norwood, '99, allowed as how the end of his second year at University of Pennsylvania "wasn't terrible." He has spent this past summer studying for his exams, and in June he was particularly enjoying learning about non-extant literature (typical classicist that he is).

I take the liberty of adding the following information, gleaned from the most recent APA Newsletter, even though these delinquents didn't actually write to me personally: Kirk Ormand, '85, is starting a tenure track position this fall at my alma mater, Oberlin College; Chris Brunelle, '88, will spend this year living right here in Northfield and teaching at Gustavus Adolphus College; Keyne Cheshire '94 has successfully defended his dissertation and gotten married, (although that wasn't reported in the APA newsletter), and Matt Semanoff '96 has a dissertation in progress.

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Just as we were going to press with last year's edition of this Newsletter, John Rouman '50 was being presented with the 2000 Alumni Award for Distinguished Achievement. Professor Rouman was kind enough to send along his "thank-you" remarks, which he had not had the chance to read at the time. The Alumni Office sent me a copy as well, and I would like to reproduce them here because they are such an eloquent testament to our predecessor Herbert Pierrepont Houghton and the joys of Greek in general! Thank you, professor Rouman.

During my youth, meeting someone who had been to the South Pole was akin to speaking to a person who had walked on the moon. And so it was when I met Carl Ecklund, a strapping young Norwegian from my hometown of Tomahawk, Wisconsin&emdash;a Carleton graduate and a student of geology, who had been with Carleton President, Laurence Gould, on their famous Antarctic expedition. It was from this big Scandinavian that I first heard of a certain college in Northfield, Minnesota&emdash;and of the important role it played in the world exploration of that time. It was he who urged me and my brother Jim, both of us in the U.S. Navy during World War II, to apply to Carleton, where we were accepted&emdash;but where only I was able to attend, since he was not discharged in time for the fall semester. As with the Simensted brothers of our class, we had both aspired to become physicians. Jim, along with my other brother, bill, achieved that goal, but something happened to me on the way to medical school. I met Dr. Herbert Pierrepont Houghton.

Coming from an isolated Greek family in the middle of Northern Wisconsin, I had always had a longing to know more of my roots and of my heritage, and so I enrolled in an elementary Greek course during my sophomore year and thus became hooked for life on a discipline newly discovered. And what a glorious addiction and a passion it became! Here is where for me it all began&emdash;all due to the magical, to the awesome and incomparable pedagogy of Dr. Houghton, who, for those of you who have forgotten, was not only the distinguished professor of Classics, but who was once a college president, an ordained Episcopal priest, and a philologist who had written grammar texts and studies in scores of languages. Where else but on this campus could one have been exposed to such a teacher?

My subsequent studies took me to Columbia University, to Rutgers, to the Universities of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Kiel, Germany, and to the Institute for Advance Studies at Princeton. Nowhere&emdash;nowhere did I encounter a teacher of similar stature nor one better versed in Greek than our beloved Dr. Houghton, whose legacy I, in some small way, have attempted to carry on. To him, and to this great college, I owe my career and any success I may have had in my academic life.

And so I accept this award with gratitude and humility from the school that gave so much to me. But, in truth, this award belongs not just to several distinguished alumni, but rather to a distinguished class of which I am proud to be a part.

We were by-products of a great war, of a unique generation, of a cohort to which loyalty, citizenship, and hard work were thought of as ways of life. We saw ourselves as being at the threshold of a new day. We saw opportunities and moved forward. And as we chronicle, one by one, the accomplishments of this class of 1950, let us share in this award, which belongs not to me alone, but to all of us here present.

Thank you again and God bless you all!

John C. Rouman

Two students graduated this June with majors in Classical Languages. Melissa Battis will be teaching Latin and Math at a high school in Florida this fall. Geoffrey Claussen is spending the year in Jerusalem, "studying and enjoying himself" at the Conservative Yeshiva there. All three of our juniors, Shane Ewert, Jonathan Koffel, and David Raczek, spent their fall term abroad: Shane and David at the ICCS program in Rome, and Jon with the Beaver College (now Arcadia University) program in Greece. And six new sophomores declared majors in the Spring (three in Classical Studies and three in Classical Languages). You can look forward to reading more about their exploits in future editions.

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Our biggest news, of course, was the move into our new space in the glitzy and technology-filled new Language and Dining Center, pictured above. On the penultimate day of Winter Term classes, as we scrambled to write our final exams and grade papers, a redoubtable team of movers (headed by Carleton's famous Bob and Mike) loaded up our books, computers and general office detritus (including various suspicious bones in the case of Nancy Wilkie) and unloaded them soon after in our new department suite. Our spacious new offices boast windows you can actually see out of, with beautiful views of Lyman Lakes and the Upper Arb, as well as space-age furniture and capacious shelving. We have a cozy faculty gathering space conveniently located directly outside of Chico's office. But the most exciting innovation is the new Laura Winkel student gathering space, a small library with study table, comfy chairs, and glass cases for the display of our legally-acquired-before-1970 antiquities.

We can't, in all honesty, say that life in the new building has been entirely utopian. The lounge furniture and color scheme generally is a rather depressing palette of industrial browns and greys. The lights in both offices and classrooms operate on motion sensors, which means that one risks being plunged into darkness if students aren't sufficiently fidgety. We had convinced the architect to insist on windows that actually opened, but we discovered upon opening them that there was no way to close them again! But the glitches are gradually being taken care of, and we're working on sprucing up the place with some more colorful decorations. Please come visit and see for yourself!

In the Spring term we were once again treated to the stay of a Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor, this time Donald Lateiner from Ohio Wesleyan University. Don taught a bulging section of Greek History with over 40 students, as well as an upper-level Greek course on Herodotus. He gave wonderful lectures both at Carleton and St. Olaf, participated fully in the life of the college, and made friends across the faculty.

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First Annual Latin Investiture

We instituted a new yearly ceremony this spring, aided and abetted by Keyne Cheshire '94, who is back on a two-year position teaching in our department. At the end of Latin 204 (known, in other times, as Latin 24), the fourth term of the Introductory Latin sequence and the final term of Language Requirement, we decided to celebrate and reward those students who had stuck out the full four terms. The department designed a handsome t-shirt, sporting on the back a Janus-head surrounded by a quote from Ovid: nec levis ingenuas pectus coluisse per artes/ cura sit et linguas edidicisse duas, and on the front an additional quote: ingenii dotes corporis adde bonis.

Keyne, who had taught Catullus and Virgil in Latin 204, dreamed up a fine Investiture Ritual, in which deserving students, having presented their own poetic translations of selected passages, were Invested with their well-earned t-shirts and celebrated for their accomplishments. We plan to repeat the ceremony each year at the end of the Winter Term, so if you're ever on campus around the beginning of March stop by and participate. We also hope to institute a similar ceremony for survivors of Greek 204, and will be designing a Greek t-shirt for them this coming fall. Any ideas about quotes for that one?

Second Annual Classical Marathon

Following up on the success of our marathon reading of Homer's Odyssey last Spring, we arranged a second event this year of rather shorter duration. To coordinate with Keyne's new course on Ancient Drama ("Truth in Performance") we held a dramatic reading of Ted Hughes' nifty new translation of Aeschylus' Oresteia. The show was stolen by Don Lateiner, who recited the Hymn to Zeus in Greek from memory, whipping off his outer jacket at the appropriate moment to reveal his bright red t-shirt emblazoned with PAyEI MAyOS. Students brought various icons to distinguish the characters (primarily peculiar headgear, which I leave to your imagination), as well as a giant stuffed olive which designated the Omphalos during the scene at Delphi. A delightful time was had by all.

Winkel Gathering Space Dedications

We held two festive celebrations of our new space. The parents of Laura Winkel '94, who died of cancer in 1998, were in town for the official building dedication in May. Their very generous gift to the college made the space possible, and additionally they donated to the department much of Laura's collection of Classics books. These, added to the collection of Charles Raiment (emeritus) and Bill McDonald, form the core of a small but growing collection of texts, commentaries, and reference books housed in the student gathering space. We had the first of our dedications in May with the Winkels as well as faculty and students. In June at reunion, when Charles Raiment's neice and Carleton alum Bess Raiment-Eisenstadt was present, we staged another festivity, replete with champagne, strawberries, and hilarity. David Porter was in attendance, as well as the following alums (Classics and otherwise): Mark Lofstrom '76, Karen Peterson '76, Kathleen Villas-Horns '81, Joel Super '81 with his non-alum spouse Madeleine, Mike Gentile and Denise Harden '86, Rolf Peters '86, Chris Brunelle '88, Jennifer Yeaple '91, and Andrew Barber '96.

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