Category: Spring 2019

Writer: Randall Schau

Photography: Larry Bouterie • Ron Leifeld

Sometime around the year 1830, somebody, most likely a slave, dropped a tobacco pipe on the grounds of Montpelier, the Virginia plantation of James and Dolley Madison. The pipe’s bowl featured a drawing of Lady Liberty and the word “Liberty.” The next nearly two centuries covered the pipe with dirt and debris, and it remained vanished until it was unearthed in 2017 by, among others, Terry Brock ’04, assistant director of archaeology at the Montpelier Foundation, which is located on the grounds of the Madison plantation, near Orange, Virginia.

Brock finds the pipe bitterly ironic: “The last person to touch that bowl, festooned with its celebration of freedom, was almost certainly an enslaved African-American, one of the more than one hundred slaves owned by James Madison, who was considered a foremost authority on liberty at the time.”

Brock has been involved with excavations at Montpelier since 2010. In the early years, most of his time was spent in the dirt, shovel in hand. More recently he’s transitioned to management. “It’s my job to decide the location and duration of a dig, that sort of thing. And when we find things, I help interpret them.”

While Brock has a full-time crew doing excavations, he also coordinates a variety of other archaeological programs, including a field school where college students from across the country come for ten weeks to assist in the digs. Another program is a series of week-long operations, where folks from all walks of life can live on site and participate in an excavation. “It’s a type of citizen science, and I just love it.”

It is not coincidence that much of Brock’s unearthing efforts are amidst former slave quarters; he’s long been passionate about social justice.

“When I was at K, I was active with gender violence prevention activities,” he says. “I worked with children as an intern at the YWCA Domestic Assault Shelter. I remember an eleven-year-old boy telling me how he had used a knife to help defend his mother from her boyfriend. That’s when I realized that some kids live very different lives than I had.”

Brock’s passion for social justice was evident in his Ph.D. work at Michigan State University.

“My dissertation explored the transition from slavery to freedom experienced by African-Americans in Maryland after the Civil War.”

Today Brock works to locate people in his area who are the descendants of Madison’s slaves. One such person, for example, is descended from a famous male slave who helped Dolley Madison save the famous George Washington portrait when the British burned the White House in the War of 1812.

“That’s an example of how archaeology has relevance to today. Finding an item in a slave quarters, then having it held by someone whose ancestor was a slave: That’s really powerful. And it’s one of the ways to show the humanity of the individuals who were dehumanized by an inhumane institution.”

Another way was the 2017 opening of an exhibition at Montpelier titled “The Mere Distinction of Colour.” Located in the basement of the plantation house, it brings to life the day-to-day lives of slaves, and how their labors allowed the Madisons to prosper. “We put a great deal of work into that exhibition,” Brock says.

Although archaeology has been Brock’s academic and professional focus for the past 15 years, it wasn’t even on his radar when he first arrived at K in 2000.

“Many archaeologists knew that’s what they wanted to do since childhood,” he says. “Perhaps some were inspired by the Indiana Jones movies,” he smiles. “That wasn’t me. I didn’t have any exposure to the field until I came to K, when I went to Rome for foreign study, and when I took classes from [Senior Instructor in Classics] Anne Haeckl. K was my Indiana Jones.

“And the field has been a perfect fit for me. Every day there’s the chance we’ll find something amazing. And I love how archaeology is a team effort. You can’t do it by yourself. As an athlete, its physicality appeals to me. But it is also intellectual: You have to use both your body and your brain.”

He questioned his brain, in a sense, during his K orientation. “The speaker implied that almost everyone coming in had a 4.0 high school GPA and that K would prove even harder. Well, I sure wasn’t one of those high school four-pointers, so that was a little unsettling. But I ended up doing fine.”

Brock also credits the later-in-life influences of two decidedly non-academic K experiences. One was Hornet baseball, which had not yet ascended to the heights of the current program. In fact, says Brock, “We were pretty bad. We had lost 21 games in a row at one point. And yet that long losing streak taught me how to persist despite setbacks, and it taught me a lot about leadership.”

After Brock’s senior season he was voted the MIAA’s second-team, all-conference first baseman.

The second experience was a summer babysitting job for the 8-year-old twins of a K anthropology professor. “We had a lot of fun,” says Brock.

Fast forward to 2015, when Brock and his then-pregnant wife, Ashleigh, went in for an ultrasound. “I remember wanting to know if the baby was a boy or a girl and thinking, ‘Either way, I’m ready for this.’ But then the technician said that he was seeing two babies and we were going to have twins. For only a moment I thought, ‘Oh, I am not ready for that!’ But having spent the summer babysitting those twins really did help prepare me.”

Brock and his family live just outside Richmond, a 75-minute drive to Montpelier.

“I’m up early, about 4:30, but that allows me to be home with the girls by six.”

Although he lives in the South, one of Brock’s most intense passions remains north: the Chicago Cubs.

“Until 2016 one could argue that making me a Cubs fan was the worst thing my dad ever did to me,” he jokes. “I grew up a huge Ryne Sandberg fan. We went to a game last summer for my birthday. I think Wrigley Field is the most beautiful place on earth.”

Looking back, Brock credits K for much of his success and happiness.

“My wife works in higher education, and we’ve both seen how other schools do things. That’s made me appreciate K’s programs and activities and the academic culture there. If we went in to talk to a prof during office hours, we often gained the chance to rewrite a paper, which became an opportunity to get a better grade and, importantly, to learn from mistakes.

“And I got such detailed feedback from my professors, particularly Anne Haeckl. She is the one who convinced me I was capable of getting a Ph.D. She’s been tremendously influential on me, including the chance to work in archaeology.

“Jobs like this one at Montpelier are really hard to find. I can’t imagine how my life would have turned out if I’d have gone to another school.”

For more about Terry Brock, check out TerryPBrock.com and montpelier.org

Vice President for Advancement Al DeSimone • Associate Vice President for Marketing and Communication Kate Worster • Editors Sarah Frink and Jim VanSweden ’73 • Creative Director Lisa Darling • Project Manager Lynnette Pryor • Design and Animation Craig Simpson

Reunion Visit Inspires Creative Donation

Photographer: Keith Mumma

Last October, Larry Banta ’73 (pictured above) drove to Kalamazoo from his home in West Virginia to attend his 45th homecoming class reunion. During the visit, President Gonzalez spoke to Larry’s class about the state of the College, his vision for its future and the need for some significant investment in the infrastructure of the institution. “Pipes are breaking, we are having floods in the buildings,” he said, and he made a (partly joking) pitch for someone to donate a new chiller for the campus air conditioning system. His words struck a chord with Larry—a recently retired professor of mechanical engineering. “I couldn’t afford to donate a chiller,” he said, “but I do know a good bit about energy systems and controls. I could donate time and expertise, if that would be helpful.”

He shared this idea with classmate (and recent K retiree) Liz (Sloan) Smith ’73, who provided him the contact information for Susan Lindemann, the College’s director of facilities management and chief sustainability officer. Larry wrote to Susan offering his services pro bono as an energy systems consultant. Susan accepted the offer, and in the three months since homecoming Larry has made two trips to campus to meet and consult with Susan, her facilities management colleagues, and the engineering firm HDR. “Susan has inherited a challenge,” Larry said, “but she and her team are very capable and are making progress. Still, it will take several years and a lot of money to make it all whole again. I hope to help with some of the planning and to provide advice concerning both conservation and the integration of solar and other energy technologies into the overall energy plan.”

The development of an energy infrastructure master plan and the upgrade of campus spaces are key elements of the College’s strategic vision.

Energy conservation and energy systems have been a lifelong passion for Larry. After graduating from K with a degree in physics, he and his wife (Connie Bostwick ’75) moved to Atlanta. “I wanted to become a solar energy engineer,” he recalls, “but my timing was a bit off.” By the time he completed his M.S. degree in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, the “energy crisis” of the early 70s was over, and solar energy research was taking a back seat to manufacturing and robotics. Still, Larry was able to amass a great deal of experience in industrial energy conservation and management. He worked for several years for Georgia Tech in an Industrial Energy Extension Service, providing technical and economic analyses to a wide variety of Georgia industries about energy conservation. He also taught workshops to plant engineers, engineering professors and industrial managers in several Caribbean countries, eastern Europe and Africa on how to perform detailed energy audits and how to calculate economic return on energy conservation investments. Along the way he became interested in automatic controls. He eventually returned to the classroom and completed a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, specializing in control systems and robotics.

“The Ph.D. was the union card,” he said. “Since literally our first date, Connie and I had talked about someday having a homestead with a solar house and a place for her to have a horse.” That wasn’t going to happen in suburban Atlanta, so Larry decided that one way to live a rural life as a scientist was to teach engineering at a university. In 1986, they moved to Morgantown, West Virginia, and bought a 50-acre farm. Larry got his solar house, Connie got her horse, and Larry taught in the mechanical and aerospace engineering department at West Virginia University for 29 years, retiring in 2015. Larry’s research was largely centered on industrial energy conservation and controls. He worked extensively with the National Energy Technology Lab on hybrid electric generation systems, combining solid oxide fuel cells with gas turbines to generate electricity with a thermal efficiency above 70 percent. In 2013 he spent six months in Italy on a Fulbright fellowship to work on advanced controls for a lab called the “Energy Hub” at the University of Genova. Larry helped develop control strategies to optimize an integrated system of solar panels, an internal combustion engine/generator, a gas turbine generator and a simulated fuel cell. The system was integrated into a campus microgrid and supplied electricity and hot water for space heating to several campus buildings.

Asked why he feels motivated to give his time and resources to the College, Larry says, “K was an incredibly important influence on both me and Connie in many ways, and we want it to thrive and prosper. In addition to finding each other at K, Connie and I developed deep and lasting relationships with our classmates that have been important to us over the years. K taught me a lot about both self-confidence and humility. I learned to write persuasive prose there, and that was critical to my career as a professor. The foreign study experience was transformational. Everyone knows as an intellectual concept that humans share common fears and hopes and dreams. But living abroad, I got it, deeply, here,” he says, touching his heart. “That wouldn’t have happened had I gone to Purdue.

“We give K money, and will continue to do so,” he says. “But I hope by volunteering in this way, I can help K in a more impactful way than I am able to do with a check. I can help K to significantly reduce its carbon footprint and to save tens of thousands of dollars each year on its energy bills. I can help the College plan for and integrate solar energy, fuel cells and emerging energy technologies into its energy infrastructure. I can help K to be a leader and an example to its students and community. I want to give back to K a bit of what it gave to me: transformation.”

Homesteaders

Connie (Bostwick) Banta ’75 earned a major in English and a minor in French. She studied abroad in Clermont-Ferrand, France. After the couple moved to Atlanta, she taught English and French in a private junior high, then entered graduate school and earned an M.A. in teaching at Georgia State University. She then taught French in public high schools. After moving to West Virginia, she taught English and did technical and PR writing at West Virginia University, where she earned two more master’s degrees—a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry and a Master’s in Counseling. She retired in December 2018 from her favorite job as a clinical therapist.

Larry and Connie have a daughter and a foster daughter living in Florida and Ireland, respectively, so there is travel (with destinations other than Kalamazoo) in their future.

Vice President for Advancement Al DeSimone • Associate Vice President for Marketing and Communication Kate Worster • Editors Sarah Frink and Jim Vansweden ’73 • Creative Director Lisa Darling

Project Manager Lynnette Pryor • Design and Animation Craig Simpson

Writer: Chris Killian • Photographer: Paul Cheney, Jr.

Barbara Meierhusby ’68 has a unique connection with the country’s 16th president that still brings chills.

Here’s the backstory. In 1937, a simple package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string was delivered to Herbert Putnam, then the Librarian of Congress. The package, from Abraham Lincoln’s granddaughter, was left untouched in a safe for nearly four decades, until the decision was made to open it.  

Daniel Boorstin, who headed the Library of Congress in 1976, made the call to reveal the contents of the package that year. When unwrapped, it contained a black leather box with a key tied to the handle. Inside the box was a smaller blue cardboard container with a label that read: “Contents of the President’s pockets on the night of April 14, 1865,” the evening Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre.

Meierhusby, who was employed in the rare book conservation laboratory at the Library of Congress, was put in charge of preparing the items for exhibition, as well as the development of a conservation housing design to preserve the items while still allowing them to be seen. 

The inventory of that box: an Irish linen handkerchief; a pair of folding glasses with a case; a $5 Confederate banknote; a brown leather wallet; eight newspaper clippings; a pocket knife with an ivory handle; a pair of string-mended, gold-rimmed glasses with a case; a padded eyeglass cleaner; a watch fob of gold-bearing quartz; and a shirt button with a gold “L” emblazoned on it. 

About handling personal belongings that had been handled by one of the nation’s greatest presidents, Meierhusby says, “It was one of the most memorable experiences I’ve had. To this day it still gives me chills.”

Growing up in Silver Spring, Maryland, Meierhusby loved painting, and her mother often took her to visit the galleries and art museums of Washington, D.C., as well as the Library of Congress. The Phillips Collection and the Freer were particular favorites, she says. While on these trips she was fascinated by the works on paper and “the dance of freedom and control”—as she describes watercolor painting—of the watercolors on various types of paper.

“I was forever beguiled by seeing what I saw when I was young,” she says.

While at K, Meierhusby worked with art professor Marcia Wood, who retired in 1998 and has since passed away. Wood was “a great source of inspiration in my painting and teaching aspirations,” Meierhusby says. She credits Wood with pushing her toward pursuing her M.F.A. with Robert Ross, a well-known watercolorist who taught at the University of Arkansas. She earned her degree in 1971.

The level of support provided by professors like Wood makes K a great place to learn, she notes. “The close interaction between student and teacher creates an atmosphere that often leads to long friendships after graduation. I was close with Marcia until she died.”

The preservation of curated items of great historical import was a discipline Meierhusby had been working toward for years, inspired by her early experiences with her mother, she says. Meierhusby was always attracted to the dovetailing of art and history, and that interest was furthered by the experience of meeting John Krill, paper conservator of the National Gallery. Meierhusby applied for a job in the Library of Congress’s Paper Conservation Lab, and was hired.

The lab, established by three master rare books craftsmen, had been founded for the care and preservation of the library’s collections. Initially, Meierhusby concentrated on work with art on paper, developing expertise in long fiber mending, a process that uses archival methods and materials (including fiber strands of handmade Japanese paper tissues and wheat starch paste) to repair a tear or loss in paper. Eventually, she went on to teach conservation mending workshops with this specialized expertise. After years of being fascinated by the challenges of designing and developing protective housings for rare book collections, she studied further to develop knowledge in rare book structures and their special conservation needs and issues.

She was particularly interested in the problem of finding handmade papers that were as identical as possible—both in appearance and structure—to the volumes of early books of the 15th through 18th centuries. She participated in the development of the Endpaper Project, which united papermakers and conservators in a quest for currently produced handmade papers that approximated their centuries-old forebears. Endpapers are the extra, unprinted papers placed at the beginning and end of a text, a sheet of which is pasted on the inside of the front and back covers. According to Meierhusby, “The handmade papers of these early books had a rich luster, surface texture and color, a balance of opacity and translucency, and a toughness and supple drape that are not common in papers currently available.” The Endpaper Project resulted in a standardized specification for ordering handmade papers from a group of hand papermakers interested in participation. The project was written up and presented at the American Institute for Conservation meeting in 1993, and Meierhusby was one of the paper’s co-authors.

“Any archival care must be reversible and consider the life of materials while retaining all historical information,” she says. “This was an early problem in the care of artifacts when restoration rather than conservation was taking place. Some information was lost early on before the procedures and materials were perfected. You have to get it right the first time, because once that information is gone, it’s gone forever.”

Throughout her conservation career, Meierhusby found time to paint and exhibit her work. Now she has the freedom to devote herself completely to her passion for watercolor painting. 

These days she lives on Daniel Island, a residential community off the coast of South Carolina, where she has been since 2006. She lives with her work, surrounded by her watercolor projects. You can find her painting every day.

“It’s more of an art studio than an apartment,” she says. “Art gives me a reason to get up in the morning. It’s my love and the way I can give back to the world. The collectors who have my work remark how it comes from my heart. My paintings are my way of sharing my appreciation of living.”

Vice President for Advancement Al DeSimone Associate Vice President for Marketing and Communication Kate Worster • Editors Sarah Frink and Jim Vansweden ’73 • Creative Director Lisa Darling • Project Manager Lynnette Pryor • Design and Animation Craig Simpson

Writer: Zinta Aistars

Photography: Ron Leifeld, Samantha Pergadia, Katherine Simone Reynolds, Siyabonga Sikhakhane

Abandon all stereotypes, ye who enter poetry. Football players, like Aaron Coleman ’09, write it. He even translates it. Why? Because you don’t want to “deny yourself anything that makes you feel alive,” he says. And he doesn’t. Poetry, for him, means capturing those moments of surprise encountered every day in life, moments that enrich life and give it meaning.

The West Bloomfield (Michigan) native has had his first collection of poetry, Threat Come Close, published by Four Way Books (March 2018), and attention is coming fast.

Coleman has won the Tupelo Quarterly TQ5 Poetry Contest and the Cincinnati Review Robert and Adele Schiff Award. He has been a two-time semifinalist for the 92Y Discovery Award, and his chapbook, St. Trigger (Button Poetry, 2016), won the 2015 Button Poetry Prize.  Coleman is currently a chancellor’s graduate fellow in the comparative literature Ph.D. program at Washington University in St. Louis, but his journey to poetry began at Kalamazoo College, which began with football.

“Jamie Zorbo, at that time an assistant football coach at K [and now the head coach], came to my high school,” Coleman says. “I played football, basketball and track in high school. When I learned more about K, it got me excited—Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran was president, and there were changes happening. I wanted to be a part of that change, part of that growing inclusiveness and diversity. I take pride now in that.”

Mononucleosis sidelined him his freshman season.

“I couldn’t play again until my sophomore year, but by then I found my interests were changing,” Coleman says. “I decided to study abroad and went to Spain as a junior—it was everything I needed and more.”

During study abroad, Coleman began to see himself differently, and he began to consider writing more seriously.

“I saw myself in a different way. Not necessarily better or worse, but from a different angle,” Coleman says. “I was the only black kid in the student group. I had felt constricted back home by American racism. In the U.S., racism can tend to mean being seen as something less than fully human, less smart, less valuable. But in Europe it was more like xenophobia. In Spain I saw the white students experience what it was like to not be the majority voice anymore.”

Coleman’s coming to see himself differently included an epiphany on the power of words. He was immersed in the Spanish language, soon becoming fluent, and he also began to look at his native language in a new way. Coleman was a psychology major with an anthropology/sociology minor, but the call of poetry intensified. He began to share poems with Diane Seuss, the College’s Writer-in-Residence (now retired).

“She’s still an incredible mentor,” he says. His growing interest in poetry was part of a very busy final two years at K.

Coleman engaged in service learning at HYPE (Helping Youth through Personal Empowerment), a Kalamazoo Juvenile Home mentorship program, where he organized and led workshops; he led a poetry workshop at Kalamazoo Central High School, called Heartbeats; he was a teaching assistant in a program called Building Blocks, a community organizing project; and he traveled abroad for a second time on a K research grant, the Isabel Beeler Fellowship, that took him to Durban, South Africa, where he was a facilitator for a bilingual poetry project at the Mazisi Kunene Foundation.

After graduation, Coleman returned to Spain, this time as a Fulbright scholar, and he worked in Madrid for the next two years as a teaching assistant in English and poetry, starting a bilingual poetry festival for his students at IES Manuel de Falla.

“That incredible experience provided one of my first translation opportunities,” Coleman says. “An MTV crew came around for the 2010 European Music Awards, and they were looking for English speakers to translate in real time for the behind-the-scenes staff producing the show.”

Coleman gained a new, deeper respect and understanding for the challenges of translation.

“If I try to create a translation of a poem that is a clear-cut reproduction of the original, I will fail. It’s really a process of transformation,” he says. “Nearly equal amounts of creativity go into writing and into translation.”

Now a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University, where he earned a master of fine arts degree in poetry in 2015, Coleman has devoted his Ph.D. dissertation to translating the work of Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, a contemporary of Langston Hughes.

“I’ll also be teaching a class at Washington University in the spring of 2019,” Coleman says. “It’s called ‘Black Constellations: Mapping Trajectories in 20th Century Black Poetics from Harlem to Millennium.’”

Coleman works hard to find a balance between teaching, translating and writing. Threat Come Close was a result of his conscious effort to keep his own writing at the forefront of his life.

“It deals with what Americanism and blackness are and can be, what masculinity is and can be,” he says. “It’s about what is possible when we invite a threat, or a risk, to come closer, rather than run away from it. Black men are often seen as a threat. I’ve tried to create a deeper connection and awareness of our history—the poems are a collection of reimaginings as I grapple with history. Poems don’t provide answers, but they do help us ask better questions.”

Writing poetry is not so very different from athletics, after all, Coleman says. On a football field or the blank page, Coleman says, “I’m pushing myself to an extreme in order to better know myself.”

Threat Come Close by Aaron Coleman

“Risk a bridge,” Aaron Coleman writes in his new poetry collection, Threat Come Close. Building bridges isn’t an easy task, but it is a necessary one. It requires “sheet rock cut open with explosives to force through/byways and sow man-high seas of crops, to make space for/interstates, for cold emergencies and tanks, and touch” (from “Very Many Hands”).

Coleman has been risking and building bridges most of his life, in seeking the meaning in his own life, in being black (in America and elsewhere), in masculinity, in history, in language. Although he was an athlete growing up (football, basketball, track) poetry entered his psyche early and grew in importance steadily, especially in college.

For Coleman, poems grew from the confluence of three major influences: First, an album by the hip-hop group, Outkast. Hip-hop introduced Coleman to the rhythms and musicality of language. Second, by reading and then writing a book review in high school about Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Coleman began to think about race, history, coming of age and violence. Third, he watched a TV poetry series called the Def Poetry Jam, which exposed him to spoken word slams and the communities behind these slams.

All three of these early influences appear in Coleman’s poetry collection, written in his 20s, by which time poetry was a serious pursuit for him.

He explores his identity as a black man from multiple angles, from the fear he feels while moving through the world to the fear he inspires, as a black man, in others. The poems express the beauty of being black, the strength it gives him, its history that has become a part of him, and the threats and desperation it invites.

His work weaves a lifetime of youthful impressions that come together to form the adult man: the pain, the joy, the loneliness, the connection, the contradiction, the way forward. “…I am what was taken from me/and I am what was given back,” he writes in his poem, “These Miles.”

As with all great journeys, Coleman’s collection, Threat Come Close, unveils old and new scenery with each passing. It is the kind of journey a reader will want to traverse more than once, maybe even many times, making a new connection and deepening understanding with each passage. These are poems rich enough to give something new every journey.

Vice President for Advancement Al DeSimone • Associate Vice President for Marketing and Communication Kate Worster • Editor Sarah Frink and Jim Vansweden ’73 • Creative Director Lisa Darling • Project Manager Lynnette Pryor • Design and Animation Craig Simpson