minnesota magazine spring 2015

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ALSO

Thriving in Sioux Falls / The Great Bird Shower / The Brothers Grimmer

How Fouzia Saeed changed Pakistan

GLOBAL ALUMNI

TAKE ACTION

WE PAY JUST AS MUCH ATTENTION TO THE BREAKTHROUGHS THAT

CHANGE PATIENTS’ LIVES AS THE ONES THAT CHANGE THE WORLD

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Features

18 No BoundariesHow Fouzia Saeed changed Pakistan and other alumni who are making a difference from Guatemala to Uganda.BY GREG BREINING, ERIN HINRICHS, LYNETTE LAMB, MELEAH MAYNARD, AND CYNTHIA SCOTT

30 The Great Bird Shower of 1904It was up to the University of Minnesota to find out why more than 750,000 birds fell from the sky one night in southwestern Minnesota.BY TIM BR ADY

34 Thriving in Sioux Falls University of Minnesota alumni are contributing mightily to Sioux Falls, a city on the rise.BY RICK MOORE

Volume 114 • Number 3 / Spring 2015

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

page 34

4 Editor’s Note

6 Letters

8 About CampusThe hand painting’s on the wall, watt goes around comes around, and bragging

12 Alumni StoriesBobby Bell proves it’s never too late, Cheryl Strayed is Wild, and more.

16 Gophers ForeverWe welcome our new life members. Plus, the Alumni Association’s forecast.

38 Gopher SportsOn balance, Ellis Mannon is elite.

40 Off the ShelfThe Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm by Jack Zipes

46 Gopher ConnectionsMake the most of your member benefits: the University of Minnesota Opera Theater and Friends of the Libraries

48 Campus SeenOur photo finish

ON THE COVER: Fouzia Saeed, photographed by Matthew Rakola PHOTOS THIS PAGE (clockwise from top): Belinda Shi, Harper McConnell, Jason Dailey

page 24

page 14

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Chair Jim du Bois, ’87

Chair-elect Alison Page, ’96

Vice Chair Dan McDonald, ’82, ’85

Secretary/Treasurer Sandra Ulsaker Weise, ’81

Past Chair Susan Adams Loyd, ’81

President and CEO Lisa Lewis

Judy Beniak, ’82, ’10Wendy Williams Blackshaw, ’82

Natasha Freimark, ’95Gayle Hallin, ’70, ’77

Randy HandelLinda Hofflander, ’83Douglas Huebsch, ’85

Janice Linster, ’83Laura Moret, ’76, ’81Alex Oftelie, ’03, ’06

Amy Phenix, ’08Roshini Rajkumar, ’97

Clinton Schaff, ’00Kathy Schmidlkofer, ’97Alfonso Sintjago, ’14, ’15

Joelle Stangler, ’16Dave Walstad, ’88, ’91

Jean Wyman

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA GOVERNANCE

PresidentEric Kaler, ’82

Board of RegentsRichard Beeson, ’76, chairDean Johnson, vice chair

Clyde AllenLaura Brod, ’93

Linda Cohen, ’85, ’86Tom Devine ’79

John Frobenius, ’69Peggy Lucas, ’64, ’76

David McMillan, ’83, ’87Abdul Omari, ’08, ’10

Patricia Simmons

The University of Minnesota Alumni Association is committed to the policy that all persons shall have

equal access to its programs, facilities, and employ ment without regard to race, religion, color, sex, national origin,

handicap, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation.

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President and CEOLisa Lewis

Vice President of CommunicationDaniel Gore

EditorCynthia Scott

Managing EditorMeleah Maynard

Copy EditorSusan Maas

Contributing Writers Greg Breining, Jennifer Benson,

Pat Borzi, Tim Brady, Nicole Etter, Erin Hinrichs, Mary Hoff, Marla Holt,

Shannon Juen, Lynette Lamb, Rick Moore, Laura Silver, Chris Smith, Claire Sykes

Art DirectorKristi Anderson, Two Spruce Design

Media PartnersAccess Minnesota and Gopher Sports Update

Advertising Rates and InformationKetti Histon

612-280-5144, [email protected]

Minnesota (ISSN 0164-9450) is published four times a year (Fall, Winter, Spring, and

Summer) by the University of Minnesota Alumni Association for its members.

Copyright ©2015 by the University of Minnesota Alumni Association

McNamara Alumni Center 200 Oak Street SE, Suite 200

Minneapolis, MN 55455-2040 612-624-2323, 800-862-5867

fax 612-626-8167 www.MinnesotaAlumni.org

To update your address, call 612-624-2323 or e-mail [email protected]

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ALUMNI ASSOCIATION SINCE 1901

Editor’s Note

No foreigners among us

The word “foreigner,” with its vaguely pejorative connotations, kept coming to mind during production of this issue on alumni making a difference globally. I grew up at a time and in a place where “foreign-

er” was part of our lexicon. It didn’t just describe someone who came from a different country; it described someone who was fundamentally different from “us” and was part of an amorphous conglomeration called “them”—and therefore a bit suspect. Suspicion was heightened if the foreigner did not speak English and/or was nonwhite or non-Christian. The rules about interacting with foreigners, though largely unspoken, were clear: Be polite but be watchful and keep your distance.

Moving to Minneapolis in the late 1970s was a rude awakening. I discov-ered how fearful I was around those I perceived as different from me, and how ill equipped that mindset had left me to navigate the big, new, multihued world of the city. I was lucky to encounter situations and people who helped me grow beyond the crippling parochialism I had inherited. Being a graduate

student at the University of Minnesota was one such opportunity to grow.

The word foreigner is not used much these days, but the tendency to regard difference as a threat is alive and well—alarmingly so. Thus I found it poignant to comb through the list in this issue that begins on page 18 and ends on page 22. It is rare that something in the magazine thor-oughly captivates my attention all throughout the weeks-long process of writing, editing, rewriting, editing, and editing again, but such was the case

with that list. It’s a roster of the 167 countries outside of the United States where University of Minnesota alumni live. Reading it is an education and a meditation: Christmas Island—where is that? Tonga—how does life differ in that Pacific nation from the life in Minnesota those two alumni led when they were students? Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine—what is happening to the 56 alumni who live in those war zones? Have they and their families survived? Are they living in displacement camps? Have their lives and careers been upended or have they avoided the turmoil? Twenty-six alumni live in Tunisia, and one of them is the new prime minister of that frag-ile and hopeful democracy (see story on page 24). Suddenly, I’m interested in following that country’s progress.

At the Alumni Association we talk about being a global community. It’s not mere marketing jargon. Our connections to each other through the University we share are an invitation to continue to grow and to expand our worldview in much the same way we did as students. In connect-ing with the global community of alumni, we’re likely to discover that there are no foreigners among us. n

Cynthia Scott (M.A. ’89) is the editor of Minnesota. She can be reached at [email protected]. S

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Letters

READERS REMEMBER SHELLYMy deepest sympathies on the loss of Shelly Fling [Winter 2015]. Thank you for your wonderful article honoring her. I share your pain. I lost my wife, Lynne Sater (B.A. ’87), to bile duct cancer three years ago. I have been intending to write to Minnesota about Lynne because I’m so very proud of her and she loved her time at the University of Minnesota. She also died when she was 49 years old. She was a Hal Leonard choral composer whose creation, “Blazing Star,” is sung by choirs during the Christmas season. She was a proud Gopher who was first an award-winning reporter for KARE TV and WESH TV in Orlando before becoming an incredible mother of three daughters. Lynne also served in education for several years, dis-covering her gift with children and music in her later years. It’s important to honor those we lose as a way of processing our grief and because we must celebrate life while we have it.

Terry Sater (B.A. ’83) Oconomowoc, Wisconsin

I was heartbroken to read of Shelly’s death. I was so hoping she would beat the can-cer—and, needless to say, 49 is entirely too young. I respected what she did with Minnesota and enjoyed seeing her at our Big Ten and national editors’ conferences. We’d call each other or email from time to time, to talk shop or to commiserate about some job-related frustration that no longer matters in the scheme of things. She was a sweet, gentle, funny person and a fine colleague. I miss her.

Tina Hay, editor The Penn Stater State College, Pennsylvania

I was saddened to read of the death of Shelly Fling. I only knew her through the Editor’s Note, but I always appreciated what she wrote. I noticed that she had been editor a fairly long time in compari-son to other magazines. I always thought that she must really like her job and that whoever oversaw her must have held her in high regard. My sympathies to her fam-ily and to the Alumni Association staff.

Colleen Gengler (B.S. ’73) Iona, Minnesota

You captured all that talent, compassion, humor, dedication, and editorial prowess that was Shelly. Would that each of us have such a commentary on the beauty of who we were and the contribution we made. Shelly deserved nothing less, but without you too many wouldn’t know who she was and what she did.

Mary Small (B.A. ’75)Bloomington, Minnesota

I’ve been catching up on reading this weekend and came across your Editor’s Note on Shelly. I never met her, though we did exchange emails a few years ago about magazine matters. Your column gave me and I’m sure many other readers

EXCLUSIVELY FOR MEMBERS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

SPRING 2014

The restored proscenium,

ceiling, and new upper balcony

in the revitalized Northrop

The new Northrop

takes center stage

(HERE’S YOUR BACKSTAGE PASS)

WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE? PLENTY.

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Bohemian Flats Come to Life

PAGE 32

Rappin’ with Tall Paul

PAGE 12

Gophers Working M.A.G.I.C.

PAGE 34

Seven University researchers

share their action agendas

CELEBRATE 100 YEARS GOLDY STYLE

HOMECOMING 2014

ALSO:Greek RevivalGenerations of AlumniIn the MOOC

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Submit a letter at www.MinnesotaAlumni.org/opinion or write a Letter to the Editor, Minnesota Magazine, McNamara Alumni Center, 200 Oak St. SE, Suite 200, Minneapolis,

MN 55455. Letters should be fewer than 300 words and may be edited for style, length, and clarity. The number of letters published on one subject may be limited. Priority will be

given to timely letters that directly relate to the content of the magazine. Publication of letters from one letter-writer will be limited in frequency.

MADE POSSIBLE BY THE MEMBERS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA ALUMNI ASSOCIATION | WINTER 2015

• PLUS •

WINTER READING

page 40

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S p r i n g 2 0 1 5 M I N N E S O TA 7M i n n e s o t a A l u m n i . o r g

a heartfelt glimpse of Shelly and what she meant to you and the magazine.

I’m sorry for your loss. May your own words comfort you: “Shelly isn’t finished yet.”

Robert Mendelson, executive editorCarnegie Mellon TodayPittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Thank you so much for your loving remembrance of dear, dear [sister-in-law] Shelly in all her humanity and wondrous complexity. And thank you for reminding me of Shelly’s wisdom. A loss of a loved one can be a “chain” but Shelly would counsel to shake it off because our work isn’t finished.

As her brother Steve eulogized her: “Words . . . words and sisters . . . words and Shelly. What does one say when there are no words? We try.”

Lee Sheehy (J.D. ’77) Minneapolis

Your editor’s column was a terrific tribute to Shelly and her passion for Minnesota and the U.

Margaret Sughrue Carlson (Ph.D. ’83) Minnetonka, Minnesota

CORRECTIONSIn the Winter 2015 issue, Marie Johnson (M.S. ’99, Ph.D. ’04) should have been included in the list of alumni Minnesota Cup winners for AUM Cardiovascular, Biosciences Division and Grand Prize winner, 2011.

We neglected to name Mary Kosir (M.A. ’00) as an alumna and cofounder of the company WholeMe. The editors regret the errors.

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About Campus

The Hand Painting’s on

the Wall

The area in and around the University’s West Bank is home to several eye-catch-ing murals, but one in particular vividly combines elements of the area’s past and present. Designed by Sara Kelly (B.A. ’10), the 40-foot by 60-foot mural on the south-facing wall of the Keefer Court Bakery & Café at Cedar Avenue and Riverside pays homage to the Chinese immigrants who once lived on the West Bank by incorpo-rating cultural symbols, including a cat and a dragon.

Kelly worked with Somali and Oromo teens from the neighborhood using pri-

marily aerosol spray paint to create the mural. To give it a distinctly Cedar-River-side feel, the color of the dragon matches that of the nearby Green Line light rail and its tail is dotted with bus lights. The wrap-per on the bakery’s famous cherry nest cake depicts the 35W bridge with the Mis-sissippi River swirling above and below it.

Kelly has been designing and creating murals in collaboration with communities since she graduated from the University with a degree in fine art. After graduation she started teaching hip-hop and volun-teering at churches to develop hip-hop K

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curricula for youth. In 2012, Kelly formed Hip Hope, through which she teaches an array of arts, including dance, rap, draw-ing, painting, and music video making. She loves being an artist, but she’s also keenly aware of her role as a mentor. “I always tell them it’s good to have dreams and stick with them, but the heart has to come first, and then the art, and then the money part,” she says. “As long as things stay in that order, you’ll be happy and have peace.”

Kelly is pictured here in front of the mural with Salah Oromo.

—Meleah MaynardKE

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DISCOVERIES

Inventing a New Magnet Permanent magnets are increasingly important—they do everything from help power electric cars to make recording devices work. But they also are a big environmental burden because they depend on mining rare earth minerals, an energy-intensive process that requires the use of toxic chemicals with potential harm to agriculture, human health, and ecosystems. That picture could be changing soon: With funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, a team from the College of Science and Engineering led by professor of electrical and computer engineering Jian-Ping Wang is developing a permanent magnet made from iron and nitrogen that is not only environmentally friendlier but also twice as strong as its conventional counterparts. Ph.D. student Md A. Mehedi recently won a $10,000 award for his work on the project from the Dow Sustainability Innovation Student Challenge Award competition, a program of Dow Chemical Company and the U’s Institute on the Environment. A start-up company, Niron Magnetics, has come on board to help move the innovation to market.

—Mary Hoff

Raise your hand if you think you won’t need elder care! Middle-aged Americans underestimate their future health care needs for long-term care services and support, according to a study by researchers at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. The study found 60 percent think they are unlikely to need care, while in reality only 30 percent will not need care. Expectations around future care needs varied by respondents’ current living situation: Those who live alone were most likely to believe they will need care, whereas respondents living with minor children were the least likely to expect they will need care in the future. The study was published in the January issue of Health Affairs.

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About Campus

A new film telling the story of the 40-day, 40-night continuous occu-pation of Dinkytown at the height of the anti-Vietnam War demonstra-tions in 1970 will premier at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival April 9 through 25 at St. Anthony Main Theater in Min-neapolis. The 95-minute film, “The Dinkytown Uprising,” highlights the takeover of Dinkytown in protest against the war and the proposed Red Barn Restaurant. It was shot by alumnus Al Milgrom (B.A. ’47) and is narrated by playwright and actor Peter Moore.

The Minneapolis campus now has 13 charging stations for electric vehicles with the addition of a new fast-charging option that’s one of the first of its kind in the state. Installed in January at the corner of Washington Avenue and Harvard Street, the station typically recharges a vehicle’s battery to 80 percent in about half an hour. Other stations average four hours for a full charge. To see where campus charging stations are located, visit the University Parking and Transportation Services website.

It’s Unseemly to Brag, but . . .

The U exceeded goal on five performance measures set forth by the Minnesota Legislature for fiscal year 2014—some by a long shot. As a result, the U earned 5 percent—approximately $26.5 million—in state funding that was held from its fiscal year 2015 appropriation pending the achievement of at least three of the five goals. The results in red below are for 2014 increases over fiscal year 2013.

GOAL: Improve overall graduation rates by 1%

4-year rate up 4.5% to 52.5%5-year rate up 4% to 69.5%6-year rate up 4% to 71.5%

GOAL: Improve graduation rates for low-income students by 1%

4-year rate up 8% to 47%5-year rate up 7% to 61%6-year rate up 6% to 63%

GOAL: Increase the total number of undergraduate STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) degrees by 3%

Undergraduate STEM degrees up 10%

GOAL: Increase invention disclosures 3%

Invention disclosures up nearly 4%

GOAL: Decrease administrative costs by $15 million

Nearly $19 million savings through staffing changes and operating reductions

Watt Goes Around

Comes Around

Dinkytown History on Screen

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Out of the Classroom and into the Schools

Minneapolis has one of the highest achievement gaps in the nation, and some students at the University of Minnesota decided to do something about it. Under the leadership of the University Honors Students Association (UHSA), students at Ramsey Middle School in Minneapolis began pairing up with exceptional Uni-versity undergraduates last month as part of a new tutoring partnership with Min-neapolis Public Schools.

About 24 tutors from the University Honors Program will work closely with the middle school students using a cur-riculum focused on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Honors student Joelle Stangler is one of many

UHSA members who collaborated with Minneapolis Public Schools to develop the program. “The project is important because it allows University of Minne-sota students to provide mentorship to stu-dents, promote STEM fields, and give back to the surrounding community,” she says.

Currently, the plan is to expand the program after this pilot year. “We are in a unique position,” says Ryan Olson, UHSA’s president. “We attend a world-class institution positioned in a city with one of the highest achievement gaps in the nation. This is an opportunity for college students to confront a very important issue in their community.”

—M.M.

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University of Minnesota student Leah Soykan

works with a student at Ramsey Middle School

in Minneapolis.


Alumni Stories

When Jesse Ilhardt (B.A. ’08) enrolled in the journalism program at the University

of Minnesota, she intended to become a public relations professional or a journal-ist. But two experiences during her senior year converged to change her path. Ilhardt is the cofounder and director of education at VOCEL, a language-focused preschool on Chicago’s west side that serves some of the city’s most impoverished neighbor-hoods. VOCEL stands for Viewing Our Children as Emerging Leaders.

Ilhardt credits an assignment for a literary journalism class, along with her part-time job as a nanny for an upper-income family, for opening her eyes to language development disparities in children of differing backgrounds. The assignment required spending time at

a Head Start preschool in Minneapolis, where she observed what studies have confirmed: that by age 4, children grow-ing up in poverty have heard 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers. “Those experiences ignited in me a curiosity about how children develop language skills and really set me on a path to learn more about child psychol-ogy and early childhood education,” Ilhardt says.

Teaching preschool, training other educators for Teach for America in her native Chicago, and earning a master’s degree in early childhood education from Dominican University in suburban Chi-cago deepened Ilhardt’s desire to work toward greater parity in the early child-hood experiences of all children, regard-less of family income.

VOCEL is a full-day, year-round pro-gram with 17 students and three teachers. It takes a fresh approach to language acqui-sition by using every minute of the day for conversation and interaction with peers and teachers. “We talk while we stand in line for the bathroom, while we’re reading stories, and while we eat,” Ilhardt says. It can be noisy and a bit chaotic, she says, but it’s all in the service of language develop-ment and helping children build commu-nication, social, and critical thinking skills.

To raise the $250,000 needed to open VOCEL’s pilot classroom last September, Ilhardt and her founding partner, execu-tive director Kelly Lambrinatos, turned to a variety of funding sources. A crowd-funding campaign on Crowdtilt includ-ed interacting with potential donors on social media and hosting live events to

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raise more than $86,000 from 275 donors in 75 days. The remainder of the $250,000 first-year bud-get has come from more traditional sources, such as grants and large gifts raised by the preschool’s board of directors.

VOCEL’s first year is key to its success. “Once we have proven results, we hope to open addition-al classrooms in other neighborhoods,” Ilhardt says. “Our goal is that quality early childhood education becomes an expectation—not a lux-ury—for all children.” —Marla Holt

A Career on the Rise

It took two years and four recipes before Geoff Trenholme (B.S. ’99) was satisfied with his French baguette. His custom-ers weren’t complaining—they often line up outside of Rocket Baby Bakery, his European-style bakery in the Mil-waukee area, before the doors even open—but Trenholme was convinced he could do better. “You want that crispy crust and that nice open crumb that is moist, and that yellowness you get is because the ingredients are mixed so gently that it preserves all the natural flavors,” explains Trenholme.

Trenholme has a degree in computer science from the University of Minne-sota. He spent a few years working tech jobs, then taught high school math in the Los Angeles area before deciding that he was more interested in pie than pi. Or, to be more exact, bread. “I’ve always found food very satisfying,” Trenholme says. “It’s actually a very basic human pleasure to make food for somebody.”

Trenholme trained at the San Francisco Bak-ing Institute and interned at a few bakeries before he and his wife, Shannon, moved to Wisconsin to launch Rocket Baby, a moniker inspired by the nickname of their first son. Since opening in 2012, Rocket Baby’s reputation has taken off. The couple recently added a second storefront and also serve around a dozen Milwaukee-area restaurants.

As chief baker, the 46-year-old Trenholme is usually at the bakery by 4 a.m. and his days can stretch to 16 hours. He prides himself on using premium ingredients, locally sourced whenever possible, and the best techniques in artisan baking. That means taking it slow.

“As with anything that involves fermentation, time adds flavor,” he says. “Most commercial bakeries take shortcuts. We’re trying to do everything the hard way. We don’t cut corners. You have to be patient, and you have to have respect for the process.”

Trenholme and Rocket Baby are tasting suc-cess at a level they didn’t expect. “I expected to make good bread and pastries, but the quality is beyond what I had thought we would achieve, [as is] how well we have been received by customers,” Trenholme says. “To be here, two-plus years into the business, and know that we’ve exceeded our original expectations—it feels really great.”

—Nicole Sweeney Etter



Alumni Stories

Being called Skipper is taking some getting used to for Paul Molitor. The

former Gopher, who led the team to its last College World Series appearance in 1977, and seven-time Major League All-Star player is the new manager of the Minnesota Twins. He kicked off his managerial career going head-to-head against a familiar face, Gophers manager John Anderson, as the Twins and Gophers met for the first time ever on March 4 in Fort Myers, Florida, in a spring training game.

Molitor talks about launching his career as a major league manager with Matt Nelson (B.A. ’09) at GopherSportsUpdate.com.

Never Too Late

When Bobby Bell crosses the Mariucci Arena stage to collect his bachelor’s degree on May 14, the 74-year-old for-mer Gopher star defensive lineman will complete an unlikely dream and fulfill a promise he made in 1958. “I want to show kids that it doesn’t matter where you come from, what color you are, how old you are, you can do it, man,” he says.

Just making it to Minnesota at all was “doing it” over long odds for Bell. Growing up in Shelby, North Carolina, he lived a childhood of segregated schools and businesses and limited opportunity, including for sports. Bell chose to pur-sue a recreation, park, and leisure studies major because of the difference a few dedicated men made in his life, building the first parks and pool for African Ameri-cans in Shelby and teaching him to play team sports. Encouraged by his father, Pink, Bobby set his sights on college. “Very few blacks in Shelby went to college,” he

recalls. “But my father always told me it was possible.” Bell worked several jobs, including mowing lawns for white cotton mill owners. “They were sending kids to big colleges,” he says. “I wanted to have my opportunity to go to a big school.”

Football provided the opportunity. Minnesota’s Murray Warmath, one of the few major-college coaches then recruiting black players, offered Bell a scholarship. As he stepped onto an airplane for the first time, heading for a place that could

not have been more different from Shelby, Bell promised his father he would not quit. “It wasn’t just for me,” Bell says. “It was for him, for my mom, my family, all the blacks in Shelby.” He and fellow trailblaz-ing black players like Sandy Stephens and Carl Eller, who had their own families and hometowns to represent, held each other accountable. “We pledged that we would stick it out and leave as winners,” he says.

They did, winning a 1960 national title and the 1962 Rose Bowl. Bell finished third in the Heisman Trophy voting that year, an astonishing feat for a defensive player. Following a Hall of Fame career with the Kansas City Chiefs, he worked for General Motors and opened a string of restaurants. “I was so busy,” Bell recalls. “But I never forgot that I promised my father that I would finish.”

Only three classes short of his degree, Bell arranged to take online courses from his Kansas City home. While easier logis-tically than coming to campus, it present-ed other challenges. “It all used to be in the library, but now it’s on the computer,” Bell says. “When I had to create a PowerPoint, first I had to learn to use PowerPoint. . . . It was double hard for me. But I just really started to enjoy it.”

In a lifetime of “you can do it” moments, earning his degree is right up there, Bell says. But having his father in the stands in Minneapolis to watch him play, he says, “is at the top of my list. It was the dream we had together that he would see his son play just like everybody else. That’s why I love this University. Can you imagine all this coming from where I did? Minnesota gave me the opportunity to have all this happen.”

—Chris Smith

The Skipper


Talk about wild. In 1995 Cheryl Strayed (B.A. ’97) trekked solo nearly half the 2,650-mile Pacific Coast Trail, without experience and lugging an overloaded backpack. In December 2014, nearly 20 years later, her adventure flashed onto movie theater screens worldwide as Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon as Strayed.

Watching Witherspoon portray her onscreen was, she says, “moving and bizarre, not a normal experience. She gives a beautiful performance, and I feel honored by it,” says Strayed, 46, who lives in Portland, Oregon, with her filmmaker husband, Brian Lindstrom, and their two children.

It wasn’t until years after her trek that Strayed realized she had a story to tell, of grief and gratitude, each step of the trail taking her closer to healing from her divorce, her recovery from addiction, and, especially, her mother’s death from lung cancer. Her literary memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (Vintage Books, 2013) landed at the top of the New York Times bestseller list and made first pick for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0.

Strayed’s mother looms large in her life as a writer. “My mom always read to me. I have a distinct memory, not yet 4, of leaning against her pregnant belly. And I always loved to write, but it wasn’t until I was grown up that it occurred to me that

someone like me could be an author.” Strayed says her world opened up

when she came to the University of Min-nesota. “I took my first creative writing class with Michael Dennis Browne. Here was a man who wrote books that did for him what books did for me—make my hair stand on end. Paulette Bates Alden was also a huge influence. She was my most important mentor during those years, and she’s still a dear friend,” she says.

Strayed is also the author of Torch, about a family’s grief after an unexpected loss, and Tiny Beautiful Things, a collec-tion of her “Dear Sugar” advice columns for the website the Rumpus. She’s work-ing on another memoir and a novel. She bluntly admits that writing can be misery. “I struggle with it, but then I remember: I love this. And I love the feeling of liv-ing inside a book, not wanting to put it down and staying up all night. I always hope people are similarly enthralled by my books.”

Certainly, millions of Wild readers are. “The writer’s job is to find what’s uni-versal, and Wild is connected to those ancient stories of journey that have been told throughout time. I never wrote the book for people to receive a message, but I’m glad they’re inspired, making them think of their lives in a new way.”

—Claire Sykes

Cheryl Strayed and Came Back Wild

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Gophers Forever

Uldis AdamsonsSusan Allison-HatchEric M. AlterKaren B. AlwinAnna E. AndersonLorinda L. AustinLynn H. BachThomas M. BaumgartnerScott D. BeedeMichael J. BellDonald A. BergerDonald F. BibeauThomas L. BissonettJudith W. BondJudy G. BorgenRichard G. BorgenCharles M. BradfordJerry A. BrinksKristine S. BruhnTom A. BruhnRichard L. BuehlerRio R. BuehlerMisha R. BurichBenjamin D. ButlerBruce F. CampbellCathleen Campbell

Jonathan L. CarterRoger W. ChallmanSusan M. ChamberlainCheng-Khee CheeKathy A. ClaussenCharlotte W. CohnVirginia S. CraigWilliam J. CraigCarl F. DarlingStephanie J. DeckerLia M. DikigoropoulouJonathan P. DorffShanda R. DorffDarol D. DucaGerald S. DuffyJudy C. DuffyJoan M. DwyerRobert T. DwyerRebecca Egge MoosSharon A. EngelsThomas R. EngelsLisa D. EricksonHeidi J. EschenbacherDavid G. FellnerEdward A. FoegedingRaynold O. FollandTodd E. FrankJames R. FrelichUri GebergerJames A. GinsburgMary M. GnatzLori A. GracePatt GrazziniWayne T. Grazzini

Glenda L. GreeneAndrew D. GreenshieldsMary Beth S. GreffinJohn S. GutreuterAnn M. HamannWilliam P. HamannLinda D. HancherKay L. HansenDarlene K. HaskinDavid W. HaskinJean A. HaspeslaghFrank C. HathawayChristopher H. HawleyGina R. HawleyAndrew M. HeldLarry D. HelliksonDavid J. HessKevin D. HicokMichael E. HillElfrieda H. HintzeChristine A. HobroughCarl E. HolmgrenJoel D. JacobsonPeter C. JarnbergJonathan J. JaroscakEugene N. JasterAnne L. JohnsonDarryl A. JohnsonDave C. JohnsonDennis A. JohnsonJeffrey S. JohnsonJonelle C. A. JohnsonPatrick M. JohnsonWilliam S. Joynes

Daniel G. KaufmannDiana D. KiffmeyerGyung A. KimJordan KimballLarry L. KinneyBradford E. KinsmanJerome H. KlevenMichael N. KorfGail A. KorfhageGlenn H. KorfhageDiane S. KruegerRichard A. KruegerRuth G. KruegerStanley R. KruegerDaniel C. KruseSarah J. KumagaiSteven C. KumagaiMarlene J. LawsonAriane N. LaxoVadym LepetyukBruce C. LibbyRuth Ann LibbySheryl D. LindholmJohn R. LindlanEllen D. LinseThomas J. LippiJianjun LiuGreer E. LockhartMary M. LockhartSteven D. LondonPaul A. LucasDaniel D. LunzerPeter L. MalenScott A. Markel

Sarah J. MartenPamela A. Mc CabeInez D. Mc ChesneySheryl A. Mc CurdyPatrick C. McCaskeyHarriet C. McClearyMary Beth MegarryRichard C. MegarryEdmund M. MellgrenRod C. MobergKristin M. MortensonDavid P. MurphyNancy L. MurphyStacey L. NessCaroline E. NobleAnn L. NorquistStanley R. NorquistMatthew P. NovakNadine N. NovakKeith H. NuechterleinAlice S. OddenKirk M. OddenDavid A. O’DeniusTrisha E. O’HehirDaniel J. OwenAlison H. PageGraydon T. PageShelley J. PageElizabeth M. PaulyTony A. PelzelThomas V. PenceNathaniel J. PetersonAlbert L. PoolerStephen J. Priester

Lawrence QueSusan L. RasmussenJames M. ReillyRonald A. ReinhartCraig E. RethwillJohn E. RodeTerry A. RodgersDavid L. RogersMichael C. RogersSheila D. RogersGary M. RohrerJane L. RollinsPhillip F. RollinsKelly L. RoodWayne J. RothschildChad B. SaylesLaura S. SaylesBruce A. SchelskeSharyn A. SchelskeBobbi L. SchroeppelTimothy J. SchroeppelThomas B. SedgwickJonathan C. SellBarbara L. ShielsAtul K. ShroffThomas D. SimpsonNancy L. SkophammerRichard D. SlagerVeronica SlagerJulie C. SmithJane D. SpencerMichael J. SpencerDaniel J. St MartinKristy S. Stanton

The Alumni Association welcomes these new life members

The Alumni Association’s Annual Celebration is just one of the ways we bring alumni together. This year’s celebration, A Toast to Every Season, is April 17 at 5:30 p.m. and features hazardous weather research expert Kenny Blumenfeld (B.S. ’01, M.A. ’05, Ph.D. ’08). Sip your way through the evening with four seasonally inspired cocktails followed by an entertaining conversation with Kenny. His larger-than-life personality and energetic style make chatting about the weather worthy of cocktail parties.

The April Forecast Calls for Mingling


Robert W. SteventonIngo S. StolzThomas H. StoneMichael A. StrobelShelley D. StrobelChristopher A. SwansonRod K. ThompsonStephany L. ThompsonDiane E. TinsleyHoward Elija A. TinsleyMary C. TreriseRobert E. TreriseStephen F. TroutnerJames J. UrbanekRita S. UrbanekLinda J. VanderwerfAndrew E. VanoBrady R. Vant HullBruce A. Ver SteegJoan A. Ver SteegWilliam WaddingtonThomas E. WaldJames A. WalzJing WenLee D. WestNancy M. WestAdam M. WicklundDavid P. WicklundJulie H. WicklundRolf M. WidstrandJanet K. WiigJulianne C. Wood-RethwillChiao YehEdgar F. Ziegler

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTAALUMNI ASSOCIATION

WITH OTHER RECENT GRADUATES in the Emerging Professionals Network, usually held at Twin Cities taprooms. Socialize, connect, and learn how to navigate the early career years.

WITH STUDENTS through the Alumni Association’s Mentor Connection. Play a unique and vital role supporting students on their journeys to personal wholeness and professional excellence. WITH YOUR GLOBAL COMMUNITY through our popular free Alumni Webinar Series, which features expert insight on career and lifestyle topics. Join in live or listen when you want, where you want. Upcoming conversations include:

March 12, navigating the mid-career years April 10, pet wellness April 30, enhancing early career success

For more information: MinnesotaAlumni.org Members Make it All Happen. Thank you!

Alumni Association life member Scott Hasbrouck of Thompson, North Dakota, pictured here, and thousands of other Gopher fans traveled to Orlando for the Citrus Bowl festivities and game on January 1. Though the Gophers lost to Missouri, pride and spirit were unflagging. Thank you to the more than 500 alumni and friends who traveled with us!

. . . and the Extended Outlook Brings More Mingling:

Afghanistan 6Albania 1Algeria 9Andorra 1Angola 1

Antigua and Barbuda 1Argentina 45

Armenia 4Australia 132

Austria 186Azerbaijan 3Bahamas 18

Bahrain 8Bangladesh 10

Barbados 2Belarus 3

Belgium 38Belize 1

Bermuda 2Bhutan 1Bolivia 11

Botswana 4Brazil 98

Bulgaria 18Burundi 1

Cambodia 3Cameroon 11Canada 1217

Cayman Islands 2Chad 1

Chile 62China 1198

Christmas Island 1Colombia 37

Costa Rica 23Cote D’Ivoire 3

Croatia 12Cyprus 22

Czech Republic 13Denmark 27

Dominican Republic 6Ecuador 20

Egypt 82El Salvador 5

England 10Estonia 4

Ethiopia 12Fiji 1

Finland 17France 122

Georgia 3Germany 154

Ghana 25Greece 82Grenada 1

U alumni living outside of the U.S.

S p r i n g 2 0 1 5 M I N N E S O TA 1 9w w w . M i n n e s o t a A l u m n i . o r g

RainmakerA unique drip irrigation project promises to benefit small-plot farmers in India

In 2012 Steele Lorenz (B.S.B. ’10) stepped off a plane in Bangalore, India. He had just quit a job as a retail consultant. Taking a taxi on the sweltering, teeming streets, he realized what a step he was taking. “I was starting a business to sell things to people I’d never met before in a country I had never traveled in before,” he recalls.

Lorenz and his business partner, University of Minnesota gradu-ate student Sri Latha Ganti, had been polishing their business plan for two years—as if by making more and better preparations they could put off the inevitable. But they couldn’t wait any longer. “It just seemed like this incredible opportunity and I really wanted to give it a try,” he says. “We had to actually start the business or we had to let the dream go.”

The dream is MyRain, a social venture that grew out of the Acara program, an entrepreneurship program cosponsored by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, Carlson School of Man-agement, and College of Science and Engineering. Through Acara’s courses, workshops, and field experiences, students develop business plans for ventures that address societal and environmental challenges.

MyRain designs customized drip irrigation systems and sells irriga-tion components to mom-and-pop farm stores in southern India.

Indian agriculture is made up of a lot of small-plot farm-ers—approximately 41 million of them—growing crops such

as onions, eggplant, bananas, jasmine, coconut, and guava on less than 10 acres, sometimes less than a single acre. Many

rely on flood irrigation. But flooding stunts crops, washes away soil nutrients, and wastes water. “A smaller scale

problem is that small farmers are also fairly inefficient in their use of water, which means they’re not making

as much money as they could,” Lorenz says.When looking at how to make watering more

efficient, drip irrigation jumps to the forefront, Lorenz says. Compared to traditional flood

irrigation, MyRain enhances water effi-

Steele Lorenz in a 3-acre drip irrigated plot of red banana

ciency by up to 50 percent, increases crop yields by at least 30 percent, improves farmers’ incomes, and creates a more efficient distribution network.

Despite its advantages, this well-established technology, which is common in much of the world, is used by as few as 5 percent of Indian farmers. The problem is not that drip irrigation doesn’t work in India, but that small farmers are unfamiliar with the technology and unsure how to set up a system and buy the necessary com-ponents. “If you were going to design a product that you thought every American should have, you have ready-made channels that can carry products to achieve mass distribution, such as Amazon, Home Depot, Target,” says Lorenz. “India struggles with that kind of ready-made distribution channel. The problem that we saw was purely a distribution challenge.”

Since making its first sale in early 2013, MyRain now has 30 employees, most of them in India. Last year, the company sold irri-gation equipment for more than 1,000 acres of farmland, and is well on its way to fulfilling the goals Acara looks for from its participants. “We want to create ventures that will allow people to make a living but also address some larger sustainability challenges,” says Fred Rose (M.S.E.E. ’83), Acara program director. “MyRain is a good example of that.”

MyRain’s story began in 2010 when Lorenz, a Carlson School of Management undergraduate student with the intention of entering law school, joined the Acara program. There he met Ganti, an elec-trical engineering graduate student from India. They were part of a group of five University of Minnesota students who teamed up with five students from the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India, to take part in the Acara Challenge, a competition that judges participants’ business plans and awards seed money to winners. As Lorenz learned about the challenges of water conserva-tion, water security, and the promise of drip irrigation, his focus and aspirations began to change away from a career in law and toward social entrepreneurism.

Lorenz, Ganti, and their teammates designed a business that would evaluate irrigation components, most of them manufactured in India, and sell them through nonprofits already working in the countryside. Their idea, which they dubbed MyRain, made the finals of the competition. It didn’t win, but the competition inspired Lorenz and Ganti to pursue the business even as they took jobs—Lorenz as a retail consultant and Ganti as an engineer with Seagate, a worldwide data storage firm.

Ganti took two trips to India, partly to gather information about drip irrigation from small farmers. As she spent time there, she con-cluded that farmers and retailers wanted what she and Lorenz had to offer. “We were convinced that we were right, that we could create not just a viable business, but a business that would thrive and could have substantial impact in India,” says Lorenz.

Initially, Lorenz and Ganti tried reaching farmers through a nongovernmental organization (NGO) in the state of Tamil Nadu that had a relationship with Acara and was already working in the countryside. “That was a disaster,” says Lorenz. The nonprofit wanted to conduct long-term field tests. MyRain wanted to sell products and saw no need for testing, since drip irrigation is a widely proven technology. But in working with the NGO, Lorenz

Guam 1Guatemala 7

Guyana 3Haiti 3

Honduras 14Hong Kong 211

Hungary 12Iceland 61India 457

Indonesia 125Iraq 6

Ireland 35Iran 22

Israel 78Italy 70

Jamaica 18Japan 437Jordan 15

Kazakhstan 34Kenya 48Kuwait 18

Kyrgyzstan 3Lao 1

Latvia 1Lebanon 7Lesotho 1Liberia 2

Libya 5Lithuania 5

Luxembourg 8Macau 5

Macedonia 1Madagascar 1

Malawi 4Malaysia 320

Mali 1Malta 2

Mauritius 4Mexico 143

Micronesia 1Moldova 3

Mongolia 4Montserrat 1Morocco 56

Mozambique 1Myanmar 4

Namibia 3Nepal 15

Netherlands 61New Zealand 34

Nicaragua 7Niger 3

Nigeria 102Norway 119

Oman 2Pakistan 64

Steele Lorenz shows smallholder farmer, Mr. Subash, MyRain’s mobile application, Rainmaker.


says, he and Ganti learned a lot about farmers’ habits, needs, and preferences. So he and Ganti decided to stay in Tamil Nadu and reach farmers through small agricultural retailers. Says Lorenz, “If I can make a retailer more able to deal in drip irrigation products, that means I can likely reach 1,000 farmers through one well-trained agricultural retailer. We believe it’s through these retailers that we can make a substantial impact.”

MyRain located, evaluated, and distributed components—pipes, tubing, coupling, valves—as it built a network of farm stores. But a big problem remained: drip irrigation systems are simple in concept—a system of pipes and hoses with small holes to leak water. But to design a system that delivers water from the wellhead, usually a diesel-driven pump sucking groundwater, to the farthest reaches of the system without excess pressure elsewhere requires an understanding of fluid dynamics. Each plot requires its own design, a task beyond the abilities of farmers and retailers unfamiliar with drip irrigation.

Enter Ganti, who worked with an Indian company to devel-op a mobile app dubbed Rainmaker. A store owner can work with the farmer to enter pertinent details about pump pressure, acreage, slope, and crop. Rainmaker spits out a blueprint of an irrigation system specific to a particular field and provides a complete list of required materials. Using the app, the store owner can place an order for components not in stock. Says Ganti, “We’re bringing in the sophistication that a distribution company here in the U.S. would have.”

Last fall, MyRain was one of 17 innovations receiving a Secur-ing Water for Food challenge award, sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Swedish Interna-tional Development Cooperation Agency, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The awards go to projects considered “game-changing innovations that can produce more food using less water.” The award guarantees MyRain $100,000 over the next year and possibly more depend-ing on various benchmarks.

In the months ahead, MyRain will rely on its retailer network to expand from irrigation equipment into other hardware and agricultural products such as small machinery, fertilizers, and farm equipment. “When you look at what we’ve built as a distri-bution channel for drip irrigation, there are actually a number of products across a number of categories that we can move through this network,” says Lorenz. The company also hopes to increase its dealer network into the thousands and reach beyond the bor-ders of Tamil Nadu into southern India and beyond.

That will reap benefits not only for MyRain, but also for small farmers and their communities in southern India. Greater adop-tion of drip irrigation will mean potentially greater farm income, better use of valuable groundwater, and jobs along the distribu-tion network.

“Are we trying to do social good or are we trying to turn a profit? The answer is both,” says Lorenz. “You can’t separate the two. They are critically linked. We believe that they are one and the same.”

—Greg Breining

“As a girl my birth was a scandal,” says former Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow Agnes Igoye, staring straight into the camera. As the third baby girl in a row, her birth brought shame upon her family. But, unlike many in Uganda, her father, a teacher, believed in education for girls. “My father did not give up on me or my potential,” she says in the interview with the Women in Public Service Project, a program of the Global Women’s Leadership Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

Education remained a priority even when, in 1985, Igoye and her family fled to escape Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony’s advancing army. After living in a displacement camp, the family moved to Kampala, where, in 1995, Igoye earned her undergraduate degree in social studies. She then joined the country’s immigration service and began researching the abductions that were taking place in parts of Uganda. She is currently senior immi-gration officer and training coordinator for Uganda’s Ministry of International Affairs.

Last year Igoye received the Humphrey School’s Distinguished Leadership Award for Internationals for her leadership on human rights and her efforts to improve the lives of impoverished women and chil-dren. She has founded many organizations, including Huts for Peace, which builds shelters for women in war-torn communi-ties. She also works with Coming Home, a project to help orphaned children who have survived abduction and violence, and has helped send thousands of books to Kampala in collaboration with Minneapolis-based Books for Africa.

Igoye has maintained her connection to the University through the Global Men-tor Program and in helping to select the 2012 and 2014 Fulbright Humphrey Fel-lows. “I’ve been able to take what I’ve been through and use it to be a force for positive change,” she says. “Because of what I’ve been through I have the strength now to do anything.”

—Meleah Maynard

A Survivor and Leader

After three years, Fouzia Saeed had had enough. It was the mid-1990s and Saeed (B.S. ’82, M.S. ’84, Ph.D. ’87) was working for the United Nations in Pakistan, her native country. “It was a dream job,” she recalls in the documentary I Was Not Alone: A Pakistani Activist’s Journey for Change, created by the World Movement for Democracy and released last fall. “And then I realized that in addition to all the fun parts of the job there was this streak of frustration, painful expe-rience, and harassment from one of my colleagues. I got really tired.

It took me about three years to finally speak out.” But once she did, she gave voice to tens of thousands of women who, over the course of a decade, changed a country.

“When I raised my voice in a very hush-hush manner, quietly, I found out that actu-ally every woman in that office was experiencing the same thing,” she recalls. Together, the 11 women filed a complaint against the colleague for sexual harassment and won their case after a two-year fight. In 2001, once the case ended, Saeed started wondering what she could do so other women did not have to go through what she and her colleagues had suf-fered. In collaboration with other activists, she founded the Alliance Against Sexual Harassment (AASHA), a broad-based movement to end sexual harassment in the workplace.

In 2010, after nearly a decade of activism that mobi-lized the Pakistani people in support of the movement, the nation’s parliament passed

landmark legislation making sexual harassment a criminal offense. “AASHA led to the change in the law, which was a graphic and very clarion warning to all males in a very male chauvinistic society,” Paki-stani Senator Aitzaz Ahsan recalls in the film (available on YouTube). Shahida Yasmeen, a Pakistani policewoman who joined AASHA in 2010, 20 years after joining the police, says, “The sort of fear in which I spent those 20 years—if this movement had started earlier, I wouldn’t have spent all this time with that fear,” she says.

Saeed, who won the Humphrey School’s Distinguished Leader-ship Award in 2008 and the University’s Distinguished International Alumni Award in 1998, is currently the Pakistan Fellow at the Wood-row Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., where she is documenting and analyzing women’s exertion of power in Pakistan. Though her research goes back to 1940, she is focusing on the last 15 years, honing in on a handful of movements in detail. “I

Panama 4Papua New Guinea 6

Paraguay 3Peru 36

Philippines 59Pitcairn 1

Poland 437Portugal 12

Puerto Rico 6Qatar 7

Republic of Korea 1046Republic of Serbia 1

Romania 7Russian Federation 32

Rwanda 2Saint Lucia 2

Samoa 1Saudi Arabia 83

Senegal 5Serbia 1

Sierra Leone 2Singapore 107

Slovakia 14Slovenia 2

South Africa 36Spain 88

Sri Lanka 13Sudan 6

Suriname 1Swaziland 7Sweden 49

Switzerland 87Syria 2

Taiwan 516Tajikistan 1

Tanzania 32Thailand 266

Togo 1Tonga 2

Trinidad and Tobago 17Tunisia 26Turkey 92

Turkmenistan 1Uganda 18Ukraine 15

United Arab Emirates 34United Kingdom 248

Uruguay 23Venezuela 39

Vietnam 36Virgin Islands (British) 1

Yemen 2Yugoslavia 6

Zambia 2Zimbabwe 11

Changing Lives in

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want people to know that Pakistani women are very strong and have taken organized, strategic action,” she says.

Saeed holds three degrees from the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development. She credits the U, particularly her adviser, Professor Emerita Jerry McClelland, with helping to shape her ethics and professional standards. “Jerry was extremely ethical and she taught me well how to be professionally honest,” Saeed recalls. “I will always appreciate that.”

While Saeed may be best known for her activism around women’s issues, as well as her 2001 book, Taboo: The Hidden Culture of a Red Light Area, an ethnographic study of prostitution in Pakistan, the scope of her work encompasses a broad range of social issues. During her fellowship in Washington, she has

continued to run Mehergarh, a center for learning she founded in Pakistan that focuses on gender, youth, and human rights

As a principal scientist at Merck & Co. in Philadelphia, Agam Sheth (Ph.D. ’04) can usually be found in the lab developing innovative medicines for the healthcare company. Recently, though, he traveled to Delhi, India, to help improve maternal health.

India is one of 30 countries where Merck for Mothers, a 10-year, $500 million global initiative, is working to reduce maternal mortality. Sheth was assigned to the project after being accepted for Merck’s Fellow-ship for Global Health, which matches the expertise of a select number of employees with the needs of partner organizations. “It’s quite an honor to be selected, and it’s a cause I feel pas-sionate about, so I was really happy to have the opportunity to help with this project,” he says.

During his three-month assign-ment, Sheth and another Merck fellow worked closely with Delhi-based staff from the Centre for Development and Population Activities (now the Centre

for Catalyzing Change), a nonprofit organization dedicated to improv-

ing the lives of girls and women in developing countries. Sheth

and his colleague’s mission: to help build a voice response

mobile phone system that would allow impover-

ished women in remote

villages who were pregnant, or had just given birth, to report their expe-riences. Ultimately, the goal is to hold the healthcare system accountable through peer and community report-ing, thus improving health care deliv-ery. “Many women in rural India don’t access institutions for care or child-birth, but even when they do, the qual-ity of care is variable,” Sheth explains. “The phones give voice to the voiceless by allowing them to call a number and have their experiences recorded, so they can provide important feedback about the quality of their visit.” Feed-back from the women will be used to create a rating system that, once made public, may spur health care providers to improve their practices. It will also help families make more informed choices about care.

Working in Delhi helped Sheth put a human face on what he does every day. He and other members of the team made trips to the villages and talked with women one on one. “In the region we visited, almost every-one is illiterate, poverty is widespread, and you have to wonder what keeps them going,” he says. “It really made me think about how important it is to understand what people need and to continue to put patients first.”

—Meleah Maynard

issues. Its current project is a documentary about violence against women, but the center has also worked on issues related to ending sectarian violence and strengthening democracy. She will return to Pakistan and Mehergarh at the conclusion of her fellowship in September.

Through her work, Saeed aims to make the world aware that Pakistan is changing and behind the frightening headlines, there are positive stories to tell. “The image of a nation really makes an impact on its future,” she says. “The world doesn’t see us strug-gling against militancy, they see us as militants. They do not realize that Malala [Yousafzai, the young Pakistani activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014] is a product of the struggle of a country where people are ready to sacrifice their lives against militancy. Change takes time.”

—Meleah Maynard

Giving Voice to Indian

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Devoted to Congolese FarmersWhen Harper McConnell (B.A. ’06) met actor Ben Affleck and nonprofit executive Whitney Williams in 2007, she was hooked up to an IV, recov-ering from a bout of malaria inside a hospital in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The two philanthropists had stopped by McConnell’s bed to wish her a speedy recovery.

The meeting turned out to be fortuitous. A couple of years later, Affleck and Williams recruited McConnell to jumpstart a nonprofit called Eastern Congo Initiative (ECI) to support community-based economic and social development initiatives—everything from small-scale coffee and cocoa production to child soldier demobilization and reintegration.

Many view DRC as a nation lost to war and extreme poverty, but McCo-nnell has spent the last eight years focusing on its potential. “I really believe in building capacity in Congo,” she says. “I believe anything worth doing is going to take a long time and is going to be an arduous route.”

McConnell’s current focus is helping smallholder farmers—those who support their families with a mixture of cash crops and subsistence farming—become more competitive in the global marketplace by build-ing relationships with buyers who will pay them a fair price. McConnell helps farmers increase both the quality and quantity of their crops and she negotiates with international buyers like Falcon Coffees, which sold 40 tons of Congolese coffee to Starbucks last year. “This is a much more sustainable way to work, rather than just giving business out in aid [funding],” McConnell says.

According to the World Food Programme, the DRC currently has about 197 acres of arable land, only 1 to 3 percent of which is being utilized. In McConnell’s estimates, all the ingredients for success exist.

McConnell now lives in Washington, D.C., and travels to DRC every couple of months. Visiting with the beneficiaries of her work, however,

takes her back to the intensity of her first encounter with the African nation she came to love. “Every time I sit down and hear their stories,

it feels like I’ve come to the Congo for the first time,” she says.—Erin Hinrichs

Mabrouk, Habib Essid!Alumnus Habib Essid (M.S. ’75) was named the prime minister of Tunisia in December following that coun-try’s first-ever free elections. Essid, 65, earned a degree in agricultural economics at the U. Fluent in Arabic, English, French, Italian, and Span-ish, his academic focus was on using and managing natural resources efficiently, particularly water. Min-nesota featured him in “For the Love of Olives,” the cover story of the Jan-uary-February 2008 issue, when he was head of the technical division of the International Olive Council, a Madrid-based organization that oversees the multimillion-dollar olive industry. That article described him as “equal parts diplomat, techni-cal adviser, and educator.”

Tunisia is considered a model for peaceful transition to democracy. The Economist magazine named it its 2014 country of the year. “The ide-alism engendered by the Arab spring has mostly sunk in bloodshed and extremism, with a shining excep-tion: Tunisia,” the editors wrote. “Its economy is struggling and its polity is fragile; but Tunisia’s pragmatism and moderation have nurtured hope in a wretched region and a troubled world.”

—Cynthia Scott

Harper McConnell, second from right, walks with Richard Kabala, Christine Musaidizi, and Ben Affleck. Musaidizi is the founder and director and Kabala a staff member of Children’s Voice, a partner organization of Eastern Congo Initiative.

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Habib Essid was featured in the January- February 2008 issue of Minnesota

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A deadly virus that infects an animal halfway around the world could

one day become a global outbreak that threatens millions of people.

But no matter where the source, we’re finding a way to prevent global

pandemics right here at the University of Minnesota. Bringing together

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solutions to stopping outbreaks before they start. It’s one more way

the future is being Made in Minnesota.of emerging infectious diseases

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Filling NeedsGuatemalans aren’t the only ones who benefit from Stephen Humbert’s dedication to them. His students do, too. By Lynette Lamb

By 8 a.m. the line of patients stretches down the dusty street of the small Mayan village of San Rafael, Guatemala. The crowd of mostly women and children, wearing the typical colorful embroidered Mayan blouses called huipil, wait patiently—sitting, standing, leaning, holding babies—for the clinic to open. Chickens and dogs run by; in the distance are the foggy outlines of volcanoes.

Inside a one-story stucco building, three University of Minnesota dentists scurry to ready the tiny makeshift room that serves as their clinic. The instructor, Dr. Stephen Humbert (D.D.S. ’79), along with fourth-year students Erin Scherer and Gang Li, organize piles of toothbrushes, drill burs, floss, and dental tools onto one old plastic dental chair while hooking up a new portable dental unit—a one-piece suction, water, and power supply source.

This is Humbert’s 17th dental service trip—the fifth in 2014 alone. When he’s not in Guatemala or running his Hastings, Minnesota,

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Dental patients wait outside the Clinica Dental in San Rafael, Guatemala.


clinic, Humbert teaches part-time at the University of Min-nesota’s School of Dentistry. On most of his trips to Guatemala, which he does under the auspices of St. Paul-based nonprofit Common Hope, he takes along some of his fourth-year dental students. Founded nearly 30 years ago, Common Hope partners with impoverished Guatemalan children, families, and com-munities to provide opportunities in education, health care, and housing. The organization serves more than 11,000 children and adults in 26 communities through three main sites near Antigua and Guatemala City.

Many impoverished Guatemalans endure the agony of what are mostly rotten and infected teeth—ruined through a combination of poor diet, bad water, spotty dental hygiene, and a serious soda pop habit. The dire state of many Guatemalans’ dental health means extractions are common, even for kids. One 7-year-old girl, for instance, stoically sat through three extractions, with more likely to come, says Humbert. “We can’t take care of everything on the same

day,” he says. “We determine the chief complaint and the top prior-ity and take care of that. There can be some tough calls to make.”

Even 3- and 4-year-olds often arrive with terrible draining infections that require their teeth to be pulled, Humbert says. San Rafael clinic interpreter Karen Leier, a Canadian expat who has worked at the remote clinic for many years, is optimistic about the future, however. “I think it’s getting better,” she says. “Some of the teenage girls we’re seeing are taking better care of their teeth. One of the problems is that candies and colas are quick, cheap sources of energy. Milk is expensive here and the water is polluted.”

Students often say that the week they spend in Antigua and San Rafael, always turns out to be one of the most intense and instructive of their young lives. “I was not expecting their teeth to be so bombed out,” says Scherer, who hails from East Lansing, Michigan. “I was shocked it took them so long to ask for help. They must be in serious pain. It’s so different from the U.S. In the States, as soon as the pain starts, people show up.” Many R

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Guatemalans walk for up to five miles and wait for as long as six hours to be treated.

A woman holding a tiny kitten in a box, which she feeds with a diminutive bottle of milk, is waiting in line at the San Rafael clinic. Next to her a little girl, her niece, smiles shyly. Across the room a young woman holds a baby, a toddler clinging to her long skirts.

It’s a scene that’s familiar to Humbert, a second-generation dentist who worked alongside his late father, Melvin Humbert (D.D.S. ’54), at their Hastings clinic. He now works there with his older daughter, Stephanie, a dental hygienist. Humbert has been a Common Hope volunteer for more than 20 years. He began his connection with the nonprofit by sponsoring a child, followed by a stint working in the organization’s St. Paul warehouse. Then came several trips to Antigua leading teams of volunteers in home and stove building. He led his first dental trip in 2008.

Humbert and a handful of other dentists, most of whom make annual trips, provide the only dental care the organization’s clients ever see. “We’re incredibly reliant on Steve,” says Rachel Stone, Common Hope’s medical volunteer director. “His work makes a huge difference in a short time. It has meant a lot to us and our families that he keeps coming down here.”

In her 18 months on staff, Stone has had occasion to watch Humbert on half a dozen visits. “He really sees the patients—their lives and hopes and fears,” she says. “Not all dental or medical team members do. He will take the harder route to avoid extrac-tions, and that can really mean the world to the patients.”

Case in point: A few years ago, Humbert decided to draw the line at pulling front teeth, especially for young women, because of the unsightly consequences. Instead, he’ll spend an hour and a

half doing a root canal, or take impressions to have a fixed partial denture fabricated, which he will then bring along on his next trip.

At the Antigua clinic, inside Common Hope’s airy Familias de Esperanza center, another long line of patients wait. Christian, a small 9-year-old boy wearing a Star Wars T-shirt and blue jeans, is teary-eyed. “He’s really scared,” says Humbert. “I’m going to have him come in and watch his mom get worked on so he can get familiar with it.”

“Dr. Humbert is great at communicating with patients,” says Seth Huiras, a student who traveled with him last summer. A bag of small giveaway toys helps relax the kids, says Humbert, but just as effective are his gentle manner, warm smile, and his way of kneeling down to their level, thus reducing the intimidation fac-tor of his six-foot frame. Humbert is equally gentle and effective with his students, they say. “He’s helpful, encouraging, and sup-portive,” says previous student participant Nick Bussa. “But the best thing about working with Steve is the level of trust he puts in us as student clinicians. He really fosters confidence in us.”

Back in Antigua, that confidence is clear. Scherer and Li assess their patients’ needs, then briefly consult with Humbert before proceeding on their own to clean, fill, or extract teeth. Occasionally he pops over to make a suggestion: “With that one you can just take a forceps and tug. Okay, now hold it down and keep holding it.” Mostly, though, he just strolls around refilling equipment, holding suction tubes, and chatting with patients.

He also takes a lot of x-rays using the compact portable unit he bought for Common Hope several years ago after being continually frustrated by the lack of a working x-ray

Stephen Humbert, second from left, with students in Guatemala. Left to right: students Jamie William, Colleen McShane, Kirsten William Kennedy, Seth Huiras, Amber Kroke, and Nicholas Bussa

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machine. “Trust me, you don’t want to know how much it cost,” he says, laugh-ing. That’s not the only equipment he has paid for for over the years, say his students. “I couldn’t believe the amount of equip-ment Dr. Humbert has purchased, donated, and taken down there,” says Bussa.

Both dental chairs in the Antigua clinic are full, the drills and water and suction whir-ring away, when suddenly Scherer calls out, “I’ve got no air or high speed here! What’s going on?” Humbert, ever relaxed, walks over and takes a look. “It might have overheated,” he says, fiddling with the controls.

Humbert isn’t easily rattled. “Steve works like we do,” says Stone, referring to Common Hope’s permanent staff. “Some volunteers get upset at the smallest things, but he rolls with the punches. If he runs out of water or can’t find a piece of equipment, he doesn’t let it get to him. He works hard and lets the small stuff go. He sees the big picture.”

Humbert’s attitude must be catching because the students, too, adjust easily to set-backs and unusual conditions, steadily work-ing their way through the long line of patients. “They’re young and motivated and want to help,” says Humbert. “They jump right in and do what needs to be done.”

The learning curve is steep in Guatemala, he says, in part because each student sees eight to ten patients a day—four times the number they’d treat back home at the U dental clinic. But sheer numbers aren’t the only reason this week in Guatemala provides such an intense education for students. Humbert’s hands-off attitude also helps. “I’m there as a resource only,” he says. “They make the decisions, draw up the diagnosis and treatment plan, and carry it out. As fourth-year students, they’re ready to make those decisions—and in a few months, when they graduate, they’ll have to anyway.”

One additional result of those transforma-tive days in Guatemala: Humbert’s students are very likely to come back and help again. Bussa spoke for many of his fellow students when he said, “Most dental students never get the opportunity to have such a valuable interna-tional clinical experience. This trip opened my eyes, and I came home hoping to return soon.” n

Lynette Lamb (M.A. ’84) is a Minneapolis writer and editor.


The birds were all of a single species, the Lapland longspur, a songbird that sum-mers in the Arctic tundra and winters in the midsection of the North American con-tinent, where it feeds on seeds left in open farm fields. Lapland longspurs are known to migrate in flocks that sometimes reach into the millions. All the dead birds were apparently from the same massive flock. They fell in a dozen different towns and villages. Newspaper reports of the incident, called “the great bird shower” in at least one account, were found in towns in southwest-ern Minnesota, northwestern Iowa, and southeastern South Dakota. The two towns hardest hit by the birds were Worthington and Slayton, about 30 miles apart.

Aside from the obvious question—what happened?—the townspeople of south-western Minnesota soon pondered a corol-lary matter: Whom do you call to answer a question like that? A physician from Slay-ton took it upon himself to begin the pro-cess. A day after the shower, he gathered seven or eight birds and sent them off to the University of Minnesota, where they soon arrived at the office of Dr. Thomas Sadler Roberts.

Though not yet head of the Bell Muse-um of Natural History, a position he would assume in 1915, Roberts was already a fairly well-known figure in the state and one of its most accomplished citizens. He had attended the young University of Min-nesota for a couple of years beginning in 1877 before earning a degree in medicine from the University of Pennsylvania. He returned to Minneapolis after graduation and began a medical career that would take him back to the University of Minnesota, where in 1904 he was serving on the medi-cal school faculty as professor of pediatrics.

For years, along with his academics and medical studies, Roberts had made a study of natural history, particularly ornithol-ogy. From the time he was a boy, he had explored Minnesota wildlife with his father and a like-minded group of Minneapolis friends who called themselves The Young Naturalists’ Society. He learned how to care-fully skin birds for mounting, and later, as an adult, became a pioneer in the skills of bird photography and wildlife filmmaking. With the assistance of his office secretary, Mabel Densmore, he assembled notes for a definitive book on Minnesota birds; his notes became the basis for his landmark work The Birds of Minnesota. Roberts was

acknowledged as the state’s most accom-plished ornithologist, which is why the birds ultimately landed on his desk.

One of the great purposes of the nation’s state university systems in the latter half of the 19th century was to provide scientific answers to questions that arise in commu-nities like Worthington when, for example, thousands of birds suddenly fall from the sky. In ages gone by, bird showers in distant settlements, if they happened at all, were viewed as simply one of the many myster-ies of the universe. In turn-of-the-20th-century-Minnesota, however, a doctor in Slayton could package up a handful of birds and send them via train to the University of Minnesota, confident that if an answer existed, it would be found there.

Examining the birds at his desk at the medical school, however, Roberts could find no discernible reason to explain the fantastic story of the bird shower. It was obvious from their battered and bruised bodies that they had all suffered serious trauma. But what caused them to fall from the sky was another matter. Roberts needed more information. So he sent Dr. L.O. Dart, a trusted assistant, to investigate.

Dart, another physician with a serious interest in ornithology, arrived in Worthing-ton eight days after the incident and imme-diately began interviewing townspeople. Birds still lay thick around town and on the lakes, where they remained most conspicu-ous. Dart went out on the ice to the middle of both lakes and marked off a number of 20-foot squares on each. Then he counted the dead birds within each 400-square-foot measure, averaged them, and extrapolated the number of dead birds. His count, in both lakes combined, came to the phenomenal death toll of 750,000 Lapland longspurs in one fell swoop—just on the lakes. Get-ting a precise tally of how many died in the great bird shower was impossible then and remains so today.

More birds were found living and dead in towns around the area, including Avoca, Luverne, Heron Lake, and Sibley, Iowa. None were found in Pipestone, which sug-gested the western limit of the great bird shower. In all, about 40 towns and villages within a 1,500-square-mile area reported dead birds in the streets. Dart conducted post mortems on about 150 of the animals and found most had suffered skull frac-tures, various broken bones, broken necks, and cerebral and internal hemorrhaging—


all injuries consistent with smashing from a height into a solid object.

By the time Roberts sat down to ponder all of the information Dart had gathered and write a report that would later be pub-lished in the Auk, the premier ornithology journal of the day, the surviving Lapland longspurs were back home in the tundra. As for his explanation of what happened to thousands of their fellow travelers on that fateful day in March 1904, Roberts’s conclusion was simple:

“It is plain enough that on that fateful night,” he wrote in the Auk, “there was an immense migratory movement of Lapland longspurs leaving the prairies of Iowa where they had passed the winter months for their summer homes in the Northland, and that becoming confused in the storm area in the darkness and heavy falling snow they were attracted by the lights of the towns and congregated in great numbers over and about these places. In their bewildered condition great numbers flew against various obstacles and were killed or stunned while many others sank to the ground exhausted. It would seem

probable that a considerable number became wet and snow-laden by reason of the character of snow, and thus, unable to fly, were forced downward to the earth to be dashed to death . . . .”

The explanation still holds up. While rare, birds of many different feathers fall from the sky for seemingly unexplained reasons that turn out to be weather-related or related to bright lights, loud sounds, electrical currents, or disorien-tation. Because of the large numbers in which Lapland longspurs migrate, the fact that they move to the far north dur-ing unpredictable spring weather, and the fact that they are known to be attracted to lights, Lapland longspurs are particularly

vulnerable to massive crash landings. In 1904, it was the warm villages of south-western Minnesota that invited thou-sands of birds to their deaths on a dark stormy night in March.

—Tim Brady

Tim Brady is a writer living in St. Paul and a regular contributor to Minnesota. His book Gopher Gold: Legendary Figures, Brilliant Blunders, and Amazing Feats at the Univer-sity of Minnesota is a collection of history stories that have appeared in Minnesota. He thanks Rebecca Wilson, project manager and metadata specialist at the University of Min-nesota Archives, for uncovering the story of the great bird shower of 1904.

In all, about 40 towns and villages within a 1,500-square mile area reported dead birds in the streets.


U ALUMNI CONTRIBUTE MIGHTILY TO SIOUX FALLS, A CITY ON THE RISEBY RICK MOOREFALLS PHOTOGRAPH BY BELINDA SHI

PORTRAITS BY AARON PACKARD

Thriving in Sioux Falls


n the summer of 1975, Ron Moquist (B.A. ’70, M.B.A. ’75) was working at Graco Inc., just a stone’s throw from the Mississippi River in Northeast Minne-apolis. He had just earned his M.B.A. at the University of Minnesota when a recruiter came calling with an intriguing, albeit stealthy, proposition.

He had a job he figured Moquist would like, but the pitch came with a catch: “I’m not going to tell you what city it’s in because I know how much

you love the Twin Cities,” he told Moquist. “But let me tell you a little bit about the company.”

Moquist took the bait and soon found himself in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to check out Raven Industries—“a small company but with great values and products,” he says. He even commuted each week for three months because his wife, Joanne, “knew I wasn’t going to stay there.”

He made it at Raven Industries, which specializes in precision agri-cultural technology and high-performance films, for 35 years. In 2000 he became the company’s president and CEO until his retirement in 2010.

Moquist is one of several University of Minnesota alumni who have become corporate leaders in Sioux Falls in recent decades. T. Denny Sanford (B.A. ’58) is decidedly the best known; he’s the owner and founder of First Premier Bank, and the billboards and commercials for his namesake Sanford Health System stretch into much of Minnesota. Sanford is also renowned as an extremely generous benefactor in Sioux Falls and beyond. His $6 million gift put the University over the top in its private fund-raising efforts for TCF Bank Stadium.

Jim Winker (B.S. ’52)—the first-ever salaried employee at Raven Industries, eventually its vice president, and a leg-endary figure at the vanguard of hot air balloon flight—is a U grad. So is Dan Rykhus (B.I.S. ’88), Moquist’s successor as CEO at Raven.

In fact, some 1,400 U alumni live and work in the greater Sioux Falls area. So while Minnesota is still the primary beneficiary of the U’s output—two-thirds of graduates remain in Minnesota—Sioux Falls has found itself in the midst of a nice talent and brain gain, courtesy of its neighbor to the northeast.

The Big Sioux River meanders through Sioux Falls (population 164,676) much like the Mississippi weaves through Minneapolis and St. Paul. In Falls Park at the north edge of downtown, the city’s namesake falls tumble in waves over the bedrock of Sioux quartzite.

A few blocks away in the art deco City Hall building, Sioux Falls Mayor Mike Huether kicks back in his stately, sun-drenched office and beams about the town he’s helped guide for almost five years. “We are certainly garnering the attention of not only America but also the world

Steve Hey, CEO of School Bus, Inc.


right now,” says Huether. “We are growing up as a city and as a state, and some of the leaders that have come from the University of Min-nesota helped us get there.”

Similar to the Twin Cities, Sioux Falls is finding its way on to more and more lists of com-pelling places to live: second best small metro for successful aging; fourth best in the nation for the 2015 job market; on the New York Times map for its “emerging food culinary scene;” and, surprisingly, a runner-up for the best place to retire.

“We were the only one of the [top] five that actually has snow,” Huether laughs. “We were able to overcome the cold temperatures and all that white stuff and still make the top five list for retirees. . . . And I think it’s reflective of our city right now.”

The city boasts an eye-catch-ing unemployment rate of 2.5 percent and an increasingly diversified busi-ness climate strong in financial services and health care. And in case you haven’t heard in the ads meant to further pilfer Minnesota talent, South Dakota has neither a corporate income tax nor a personal income tax.

In the southwest corner of the city, Bobbi Schroeppel’s office at North-Western Energy overlooks a suburban neighborhood dotted with newer, sprawling homes. Like Moquist, Schroeppel (B.A. ’93, M.B.A. ’02) took “a leap of faith” by taking a job in Sioux Falls. “I had never been to South Dakota in my life,” she says. But by the time she settled in, she found a new home, personally and professionally. In 2002 she became the vice president of customer care for NorthWestern—a mid-sized utility with 1,600-plus employees—and is now the vice president of customer care, communica-tions, and human resources.

“This is such a progressive, business-friendly city, and it’s starting to get the sophisticated loft apartments and wine bars and boutique stores,” Schroeppel says. “It’s kind of like a mini Minneapolis without some of the

Sioux Falls finds itself the beneficiary of its neighbor to the northeast. Some 1,400 U alumni live and work in the area, including top corporate leaders.

Jim Winker, retired vice president and the first paid employee of Raven Industries


problems of a bigger city. And I think that’s because it’s so close to Minnesota and it’s almost hard to differentiate when you cross the border.”

That distinction is even blurrier for Steve Hey (B.A. ’84, J.D. ’87, M.B.A. ’01), who grew up in Jas-per, Minnesota, a small town just a few miles from South Dakota. Hey is a Gopher alumnus to the third degree, literally. He received a B.A. in political sci-ence and a J.D. from the U three years later. After practicing law for 10 years, he decided to join his father at School Bus, Inc., a motor coach and school bus operation—by far the largest in the state—in Sioux Falls. And that led him to complete the Executive M.B.A. program at the Carlson School of Management.

“I’m the U through and through,” says Hey. “And I’ve been a Gopher fan since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I can remember as a kid tossing a football over the clothesline and hearing Ray Chris-tensen’s voice” while listening to football games.

“Sioux Falls is a wonderful place to live and a wonderful place to raise a family,” Hey says. “It has a very solid and strong business community. We’ve got a business-friendly environment from a city and state perspective. It’s a great place to be.”

Alumni have also brought with them to Sioux Falls a strong sense of philanthropy. Per capita it’s the second most giving city in the United States for United Way donations, says Moquist. He credits his own ideas on philanthropy to what he gleaned at Graco from David A. Koch, the company’s long-time CEO who recently passed away. “He showed me what giving is all about, and I brought some of those ideas back to Raven when I moved here.”

Mayor Huether is quick to note the generous spirit of Minnesota imports. “The leaders that we’ve talked about that have come from the U of M—not only are they good business people, but they’re very, very won-derful stewards,” he says. “They’re not only giving their own time, talent, and treasure to important causes in Sioux Falls, but they’re teaching oth-ers to do the same thing. To me, that’s just as important as creating good jobs; you’re also giving back to your community in other ways.”

Despite their affection for Sioux Falls, Moquist, Schroeppel, and Hey make regular trips to the Twin Cities and have stayed close to their alma mater.

“There’s no question that the Twin Cities offer advantages that you don’t have in Sioux Falls,” says Hey, who remains a devoted Gopher sports fan. “It’s easy enough to make a weekend trip. But it’s not as easy to get to as many games as I’d like to.”

Schroeppel can relate. In college she and her husband were diehard, camp-out-for-season-tickets men’s basketball fans during the Clem Haskins era. Now they have season tickets for football. “We don’t make every game; we give some tickets away to family members,” she says. “And we usually just stay at The Commons, right on campus. Then [my husband] Tim usually makes poor Jackson [their 14-year-old son] get out of bed at five o’clock in the morning to go to Al’s Breakfast.”

After all, Sioux Falls may be a mini Minneapolis, but it’s no Dinkytown. n

Bobbi Schroeppel of NorthWestern Energy


DepartmentDepartmentSports

earning can be a two-way street in the chalk-caked gymnastics room on the third floor of Cooke Hall.

That’s especially true when senior Ellis Mannon is in the room. The defending NCAA pommel horse champion is a dual degree candidate in chemical engineering and economics.

Last fall, Mannon attended a lecture on inflation by former University of Minnesota professor Chris Sims, now at Princeton Uni-versity, who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in

economics with Thomas J. Sargent of New York University. The next day, Mannon dis-cussed the lecture with assistant gymnastics coach Russ Fystrom (B.S. ’73, M.Ed. ’87). As usual, head coach Mike Burns treasured Mannon’s mastery of a complicated topic.

“I’m sort of listening in on this conversa-tion and I’m like, ‘holy smokes, Ellis,’” Burns says. “He’s warming up to do pommel horse and he’s talking economic theory. I’m like, he’s killing me here. I learn things when I talk to Ellis.”

On Balance, He’s Elite

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In gymnastics, as well as in his demanding coursework, Mannon relies on an analytical mind and creative bent. His long arms and upper body strength allow him to perform skills he created with Fystrom’s help, such as his signa-ture: spinning on the horse with his legs split—the flair position—while shifting his hands on and off the grips. It helped Mannon win the first NCAA title by a U gymnast since Clay Strother (B.S. ’04) took pommel horse and floor exercise in 2002. “He does a couple of things that nobody else in the world can do,” says Fystrom, the former Gopher and 1973 Big Ten pommel horse champion.

“I’m an engineer, and the job of an engineer is to solve problems a lot of the times,” Mannon says. “Figure out the root of the problem, analyze it, and fix it. Same with gymnastics. Maybe some people don’t really go about that approach and they’re still successful, but that’s the approach that works for me.”

That’s an understatement. Matthew Neurock, one of Mannon’s chemical engi-neering professors who was also a gym-nast as an undergraduate at Michigan State, is amazed at his elite performances in and out of the classroom.

“The third and fourth years of school are very involved. He has design and lab classes and many projects. You can’t take a whole weekend off. He’s doing this with two majors, which is incredibly difficult, and he’s competing in every event. I have the utmost respect for him,” Neurock says.

Heading into his final season, Mannon put aside the violin, one of his passions, to pursue several goals: defend his NCAA and Big Ten pommel horse titles; make All-American in the all-around with a top-eight finish at the NCAA Champi-onships (he was 11th last season); and qualify for U.S. nationals this summer in Indianapolis, his hometown.

“There’s so much more to him than athletic performance,” Burns says. “He’s a great student, a great violin player, a great orator. He can have a really logical and educated debate on pretty much any-thing. He’s the kind of guy who is going to be successful in whatever he does.” n

—Pat Borzi

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Off the Shelf

Jack Zipes says he often feels like he is one of the brothers Grimm. ILLUSTRATION BY PATRICK ARRASMITH


Teen pregnancy. Self-mutilation. Fratricide. These sound like themes from reality TV, but in fact

they run throughout The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, the new, first-ever English translation of all 156 tales from the earliest edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Translated and notated by University of Minnesota pro-fessor emeritus of German and compara-tive literature Jack Zipes, this collection will be a fascinating, albeit grisly, revela-tion for those familiar with later versions of such Grimm classics as “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” and “Sleeping Beauty.”

Ja c o b a n d Wi l h e l m Grimm, brilliant but impov-erished scholars, loved literature and had a deep interest in preserving and celebrating German cul-ture. They began collecting and recording folk tales and in 1812 and 1815 published Children’s and Household Tales, two volumes of sto-ries that would make them famous. Yet, over the next 40-plus years, they radically revised and edited: Out went stories deemed too violent, too erotic, or not sufficiently Christian, resulting in a seventh and final edition that, according to Zipes, had relatively little in common with the first.

Zipes’s translation reveals a young girl impregnated by her secret lover (“Rapun-zel”); a boy whose offhand killing of his little brother sets off a murderous frenzy (“How Some Children Played at Slaugh-tering”); and a mother so deranged by

hunger she plans to kill and eat her own daughters (“The Children of Famine”).

The collection has become a surprise hit after a favorable review in the Guard-ian piqued readers’ interest in these lurid, funny, sometimes Kafkaesque tales. Zipes recently talked with Minnesota about all things Grimm.

Why wasn’t the first edition translated into English sooner?There’s a tendency among scholars to revise, and the final edition is always con-

sidered authoritative. My translation [The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Bantam, 1989] was the first American transla-tion of the seventh edition, and I had no thought at the time that it would be a good idea to have a trans-lation of the first edition. And then the bicentenary of the first edition hap-pened in 2012, and I woke up! I realized that, really, in order to understand the Grimms’ intentions, in order to understand the tales that were closer to the oral tradi-

tion and the history of how they collected them, you had to know the first edition. So I said to myself, put your nose to the grindstone and get to work!

How did the tales come to be altered over time? The first edition [1812] was published in two volumes, with footnotes for scholars and adults and two scholarly prefaces—there were no illustrations—and it did

The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

Translated by Jack ZipesPrinceton University

Press, 2014

The Brothers Grimmer

To listen to Jack Zipes talk about the Grimm Brothers and his translation of their work, go to accessminnesotaonline.com

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DepartmentOff the Shelf

not sell well. Even some of their closest friends said these are too blunt; they’re really not for children or families, and some of them are really not all that inter-esting. The Grimms were disappointed, but they kept collecting. In 1823, they received, to their surprise, a book called German Popular Stories, sent to them by Edgar Taylor, a British lawyer who, with-out their knowing about it, had adapted about 80 tales from the second edition of 1819. This book had illustrations by George Cruikshank, the most famous car-icaturist in England at that time, and the tales were greatly changed, more comic and more acceptable for a middle-class audience. The book took off.

There was a difference between the Grimms. Jacob was more the scholar; Wilhelm was a better writer in some ways, and he really wanted to get these tales out. He basically said, “Let me take over. We’ll make the tales more popular,

and we’ll get people interested in our heritage”—that’s what I think he was saying. And Jacob, who was off and run-ning on many different projects, basically gave in. He probably said, “Just don’t do too much!”

You’ve said these tales were not meant to be bedtime stories. Should children read these early tales, given how gory and disturbing they are? Yes. I think that parents are either hypo-crites or ignorant [if they shield their chil-dren from them]. Children are exposed to these types of tales practically from the time they’re born, in some way or another. To think that we have to cen-sor these tales, well, we don’t. To think that children—even babies—are dumb, well, they’re not. They can decide for themselves; they will discard or pick up things that appeal to them and work that through in their own way.

A book like this interests so many peo-ple because fairy tales are with us day in and day out and people don’t realize the extent to which they inform our lives. They’re in commercials practically every day: If you buy Nike sneakers you’ll fly through the air; or if you use the right shampoo it’s like a magic lotion, and men will drape themselves on your body. Then there are fairy tale films and operas. They’re around us all the time.

What can the tales offer us today?Metaphorically speaking, these tales work through very common human prob-lems that still exist in the world. They work them out so that, somehow, social justice occurs. Since there is no social justice in this world—that’s my interpre-tation—and since the world has become so perverse, we need hope; we need these tales because they give us a sense of hope.

—Laura Silver

2014 // 15 NORTHROP SEASONCCN de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne / COMPAGNIE KÄFIGTue, Mar 10

MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANYFri, Apr 10 & Sat, Apr 11

EIFMAN BALLETTue, Apr 28 & Wed, Apr 29

Northrop is always buzzing with both free and ticketed events. Visit our website for a full list of events.

U of M alumni receive $4 o� all Northrop Dance Season performances.

Martha Graham’s Miki Orihara in Errand into the Maze. Photo © John Deane.



Excerpts from The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

By the Brothers Grimm Translated by Jack Zipes

There once was a father who slaugh-tered a pig, and his children saw that.

In the afternoon, when they began playing, one child said to the other, “You be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.” He then took a shiny knife and slit his little brother’s throat.

Their mother was upstairs in a room bath-ing another child, and when she heard the cries of her son, she immediately ran down-stairs. Upon seeing what had happened, she took the knife out of her son’s throat and was so enraged that she stabbed the heart of the other boy, who had been playing the butcher. Then she quickly ran back to the room to tend to her child in the bathtub, but while she had been gone, he had drowned in the tub. Now the woman became so frightened and desper-ate that she wouldn’t allow the neighbors to comfort her and finally hung herself. When her husband came back from the fields and saw everything, he became so despondent that he died soon after.

From “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering”

So the eldest sister went into the chamber and tried on the slipper. Her toe slipped

inside, but her heel was too large. So, she took the knife and cut off a part of her heel until she could force her foot into the slipper. Then she went out of the chamber to the prince, and when he saw that she had the slipper on her foot, he said that she was to be his bride. Then he led her to his carriage and wanted to drive off. However, when he came to the gate, the pigeons were above and called out:

“Looky, look, lookat the shoe that she took.There’s blood all over, the shoe’s too small.She’s not the bride you met at the ball.” . . . so he brought the false bride back to the

house. The mother said to her second daugh-ter, “Take the slipper, and if it’s too short for you, then cut off one of your toes.”

From “Cinderella”

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INDULGE IN A CRAZY DAY

The University of Minnesota Opera Theatre will present W.A. Mozart’s immortal comedy, Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) April 16 through 19 at Ted Mann Concert Hall. Set in Count Almaviva’s castle in Seville, Spain, in the late 18th century, this opera takes place on a single folle journée—a crazy day. Complete with counts and countesses, scheming maids, an amorous teenager, a silly young girl, and a drunken gardener, Le Nozze di Figaro is long on memorable characters. With Mozart’s masterpiece of a score, the result is a witty yet profound tale of love, betrayal, and forgiveness.

Tickets are $20 and Alumni Association members receive two for the price of one. Learn more at MinnesotaAlumni.org/schoolofmusic.

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To join the Alumni Association, renew your membership, change your address, obtain benefit information, register a complaint, praise us, or say hi, give us a call at 800-862-5867 or 612-624-2323. Or visit MinnesotaAlumni.org or contact us at McNamara Alumni Center, 200 Oak St. SE, Suite 200, Minneapolis, MN 55455-2040 or [email protected].


FRIENDS HIGHLIGHT VEGETABLE LITERACY

Noted cookbook author Deborah Madison will make her first Twin Cities appearance on Tuesday, May 5, at the Friends of the University of Minnesota Libraries annual celebration. Known as an internationally acclaimed proponent of vegetarian cooking, Madison has a long-abiding passion for local and regional foods and those who produce them. Formerly the manager of the farmers’ market in Santa Fe and cofounder of the Monte del Sol Edible Kitchen Garden, she has authored 14 books, including Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets and Vegetable Literacy. The program begins at 5:30 p.m. with dinner to follow. Purchase tickets by

April 28; $48 for Friends members and $58 for the general public.

The Friends of the University Libraries play a special role in linking the University Libraries to the greater community and enriching the campus and community through thought-provoking, entertaining, and intellectually engaging programs. Membership dues help continue the Friends’ important role in supporting University Libraries outreach, creating innovative programs, and encouraging use and appreciation of its remarkable resources. Alumni Association members receive a $40 savings on Friends of the Libraries membership. Learn more at MinnesotaAlumni.org/libraries. M

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Campus Seen

The University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies observed the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 26 at the Weisman Art Museum with an unveiling of the eight Minnesotans’ portraits in the “Portraits and Conversations with Survivors of the Shoah” project by Spanish artist Félix de la Concha. In all, de la Concha painted 40 Holocaust survivors. Pictured here with his portrait is Walter Schwartz of St. Paul.

PHOTOGRAPH BY SHER STONEMAN

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