Barbara Zucker
Going Strong
Catching up with the latest endeavors of a number of UVM’s emeriti faculty
Barbara Zucker, Art
Barbara Zucker says she’s either “in thrall” to whatever she’s working on or terrified, “waiting for lightning to hit,” when it’s over. She’s looking for that strike now as she nears completion of an eight-year project called Time Signatures, in which she’s mapped women’s wrinkles—her own and women, famous and not, who have influenced her—first, photographically and then in a wide variety of structural media. “I take abstract forms from nature that exist also in older women’s faces as patterns,” she says. Her work is exhibited widely and has been collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.
Charles Houston, Medicine
Charlie Houston at 94 maintains his passion for life, especially for medicine, research, and family. A foremost authority on altitude medicine, he has scaled some of the world’s highest mountains, including K2, and documented his experiences in articles, books, photographs, and movies. He recently completed the fifth edition of his award-winning book Going Higher: Oxygen, Man and Mountains, although halfway through those revisions he lost his eyesight. He has traveled extensively to lecture and show his films and still lectures locally. “My favorite film” he says, “is my most recent, Brotherhood of the Rope.” In 1997, he received the King Albert Medal of Merit for his contributions to the understanding of altitude illness and adaptation.
Malcolm Severance
Malcolm Severance ’49, Business
Alumnus, professor, chair of business, assistant dean of arts and sciences, assistant to the president—all positions held by Malcolm Severance, who was just a “kid from a farm in Colchester” in 1942 when he first stepped on campus. Add his six years on the Board of Trustees in retirement, and he likely tops anyone for most UVM titles. In addition to decades of service on banking and other boards, Severance served four terms in the Vermont legislature. Current projects focus on the sale, protection, and development of some of his acreage at Severance Corners and renovating the master bath in the house he built. Next up might be writing a history of the UVM business school.
Robert Ullrich, Botany
Robert Ullrich’s first retirement ended after eighteen months, when he answered his dean’s call to return as director of the biological sciences program. The second one “took,” and led Ullrich, unexpectedly, to the End-of-Life- Choices Vermont program; he is now its president, overseeing the “patient-directed dying bill” in the state legislature. “I believe if we have this law, it will increase the years Vermonters will live…. improve health care for all, and everyone will be informed about hospice care,” he says. He and his wife live in Charlotte and especially enjoy running and cross-country skiing, as well as gardening and putting up the fruits of their harvest.
Larry McCrorey, Allied Health
“Old age isn’t fun,” Larry McCrorey says, a reference to his serious heart attack in 2005. Pausing just to sing the praises of UVM’s Cardiac Rehab staff, he then reels off activities that could exhaust a gaggle of kindergartners. He speaks worldwide on racism and jazz history, plays sax weekly at Halvorson’s Cafe, sails the Caribbean. In February, he headed for Brazil while planning his next visiting-professor gig at Otago University in New Zealand. “Antarctica is the best trip I’ve ever taken,” he says, but Cuba holds a piece of his heart. At home in Grand Isle, he’s “a train nut,” with an extensive railroad set-up indoors and a real locomotive in the yard. One regret: “I wish I’d retired sooner.”
Toby Fulwiler
Toby Fulwiler, English
Toby Fulwiler describes retirement succinctly: “It’s reversed the three-quarters head work and one-quarter physical life.” A move to a wood-heated home on ninety acres in Fairfield helped insure the physical—chopping and hauling wood, selecting in favor of sugar maples for Vermont’s Current Use Program, and cross-country skiing. His woodshop is his winter center, where he builds furniture and tools. He and his wife, Laura, also retired from UVM, regularly take trips on his BMW motorcycle, often with a local club. He taps into the cerebral through teaching graduate students in the Field Naturalist Program how to convert technical papers to popular articles; they are proving to be, Fulwiler says, “very good writers.”
Jane Ambrose, Music
Music lover and flutist, Jane Ambrose began attending Lane Series events as a grad student in 1962, eventually taking center stage as its director, a role she continued to perform after retirement from teaching. Her two goals are “maintaining the series’ high standards and balancing the performance genres of classical, jazz, and folk music.” Audiences are growing, especially since she and Bob Taylor, dean of the Honors College, created a course to bring students to the concerts. Ambrose energizes her challenging tasks (bookings, fee negotiations, fundraising among them) with daily water aerobics at 5:45 a.m. and outings with her three grandchildren, one of whom,—a three-year-old— “loved the recent performance of Figaro.”
Ron Savitt, Business
Ron Savitt thinks retirement is a license to change. His research and publications now center on polar exploration history, and home is Portland, Oregon, a place “less reserved [than New England] and more open to new ideas,” he says. He still gives seminars on marketing (Duke and Ohio State are next on the list), but more often he’s volunteering with Salmon Watch, teaching middle and high school students about water quality (he completed work at Portland State in stream ecology). Trout fishing calls him, when he isn’t white-water rafting, painting in watercolors, or working in the darkroom with black-and-white film and planning for a photographic show later this year.
Michael Strauss, Chemistry
Mike Strauss called from a mountain retreat in Mexico, in February, where he was escaping the obvious, but hardly resting on his accomplishments. A chemist with an artist’s soul, (see his watercolors and molecular landscapes on his website: www.uvm.edu/~mstrauss/), Strauss recently converted to oils. In Mexico, he was practicing his drawing and prepping for his fall TAP courses alfresco. He also teaches in the Honors College (Drawing as a Way of Knowing) and as an adjunct in the art department.
Jean Davison, Classics
Jean Davison stayed in the classroom teaching evening courses for five years after retirement, teaching ancient archaeology and history and the etymology of Greek and Latin roots of English words. For the past several years, she and Bob Arns (physics) have been jointly researching acoustics in Greek and Roman theatres, focusing on the work of a Roman architect and military engineer under Caesar. “Our UVM library is wonderful at getting things for us,” she says, “even very obscure” references. In November, she’ll travel again to North Africa for archaeology research. Happily living at Wake Robin, she’s traded skiing for snowshoeing and loves it.
Kenneth Rothwell, English
Ken Rothwell, a world-renowned Bard scholar and A-list guest, bemoans recent health setbacks, but still says “yes” to numerous invitations. He’s chaired international Shakespeare on Film seminars, produced a Shakespeare on Film Festival in Los Angeles, and, recently, lectured on Shakespeare in New York, France, and Spain. In 2004, he oversaw the second edition of his book written in retirement, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television. A new essay on the topic will appear in the brochure for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Folger Shakespeare Library Exhibition in Washington, D.C. He’ll be using a walker, but Rothwell will be there, subscribing to Woody Allen’s philosophy that “the secret of success is showing up.”
Helene Lang, Education
In December 2005, Helene Lang ended a fifty-year teaching career—in U.S. public schools, in Cuba and Sicily, and, primarily, at UVM before and after retirement. The teacher-turned-actress now teaches informally. She can be seen and heard in Vermont Humanities Council venues, leading book discussions and presenting living histories of Beatrix Potter, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and Agatha Christie. This year, she will be a literary guide for Notch Above Tours on Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. She leads the emeriti board, lectures in the Osher program, and travels extensively, including to South Africa, where she continues her interest in race and culture.
Sam Hand, History
Sam Hand, Vermont historian and prolific author, enjoys penning the occasional “facetious op-ed or article about the past,” but, more often, he’s documenting the state’s history. Published since his retirement: The Essential Aiken (with Stephen Terry); The Star That Set: the Vermont Republican Party; Vermont Voices (with Kevin Graffagnino and Gene Sessions); and the Vermont Encyclopedia (with Harry Orth and John Duffy). Soon to be in print, a Vermont History article, co-authored with Terry, on Gov. Phil Hoff’s first election. Hand also has a biography of Hoff in the works.
Carl Reidel & Jean Richardson, Environmental Program
We couldn’t find anything of note that Carl Reidel and Jean Richardson don’t do. They run an environmental policy center, and they’ve testified on environmental legislation. “It’s a thrill to see your own words written in law,” says Richardson, who’s working in zoning and planning for Ferrisburgh. She’s a certification inspector for the Northeast Organic Farming Association, and, as a justice of the peace, marries “about a dozen couples a year.” He’s been board president for Northern Woodlands magazine and Forest Watch, heading the campaign to add 42,000 acres of wilderness to the Green Mountain National Forest. When they’re not traveling (a month-long exploration of Patagonia and up the coast to Costa Rica was “astounding” as were Jordan and Petra, the pyramids, and there will always be an England). But their home on Lewis Creek draws them equally—where they’ve created many gardens, tap maples for about 40 gallons of syrup yearly, and run a small antique business.
Dan Higgins, Art
Dan Higgins welcomed the digital video revolution, happy to abandon the “old VHS editing days—I love the fluidity of the medium,” he says. In addition to making videos, he regularly gives training workshops in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, Burlington’s sister city, where residents document life in their communities on video, some of which appear on local cable. Higgins recently trained students in Grenada, St. Albans, and Craftsbury. The Vermont and Grenada schools will exchange videos as a way to learn about one another and possibly lay the groundwork for a future student exchange. His photographs of Winooski over thirty-five years are collected in his online book, Vacancy, Art, and Transformation: www.lulu.com. Higgins’s latest project—these portraits of his fellow emeriti.
(for UVM staff)