ALUMNI PROFILES
Alumni retrospective
I WANT TO TELL YOU THAT I LIKE VERMONT
During World War II, the senior staff of the Vermont Cynic published Wartime College: Vermont. “College isn’t what it used to be; neither is the world,” the editors wrote in the booklet’s introduction. “Everything has been influenced by the war, and the University of Vermont is no exception, but there is much about UVM which makes college life as full,
as interesting, and as wonderful as it has ever been.”
The following essay by Alison Carr ’44 was originally published in the November 5, 1943 edition of the Cynic and reprinted in Wartime College.
i want to tell the reasons why i love our school, and why I’m so glad I’m here, just as glad this week as I was last week, every one of those weeks that came before the seventh of December, nineteen hundred and forty-one. And maybe you’ll have reasons that are like mine, and you’ll certainly have a lot of completely different ones, too.
I LIKE THE CAMPUS
I like the way this campus looks. I like the green lawn of Redstone in the springtime and I like it when yellow leaves are sprinkled on it at the Big and Little Sister picnic in September. I love the way Southwick looks at night from the road, lighted and sparkling and no more permanent looking than a doll house. I like the view of the mountains behind Southwick, to my right and my left and ahead of me, and the feeling I have when I look at them, because there’s always a wind from them that blows on my face. I like the way the short cut on the way home from Redstone campus doesn’t show the break between the bush and the elm tree till you’re almost on top of it. I like the way South Prospect looks in the daytime with its well-groomed houses, and I like the way it looks at night in a fog with fairytale light rays coming down from all the telephone poles. I like the way you can tell what time it is by the crowds of people that go across the campus walks at 8:10, 9:10, and 10:10, and then leave them deserted for the next hour. I like the way the campus dining rooms look at the start of dinner, when everyone is standing behind their scraping chairs, and “Be present at our table, Lord” begins. I like the way the kitchen in Allen House looks just before dinner, with waitresses rolling down their smock sleeves and cooks with flushed faces and disheveled aprons poking at soufflés that aren’t done. I like the way you can look out the window, toward the end of fall, and not see the street or the trees, and know that there isn’t snow on the ground, yet know that that light is a winter light, the kind we’ll have from now till spring. I like to look up at the Chapel tower and see its whiteness against the sky whiter than the blue clouds behind it.
I LIKE VERMONT
I like the way Vermont gives us the opportunity to learn, too. I like the library, with its piles of yellow newspapers downstairs, and its musty smell in the alcove where the Latin books are, and the quiet hum all over the rooms when people are studying for mid-years. I like the way professors will talk to us after class when we want them to, and I like the way our questions are almost never disregarded. When I look at it, I like the moment after we have been handed a test paper and we are turning it over to see the questions that we’ve been asked. I like the glow that Vermont puts on the faces of its students when they know that they have done a good job. I like the way everyone gets indignant when their hour tests are clumped together, and the way loose-leaf notebooks become the most important things we own when they have two months’ worth of notes in them. I like laboratories in Science Hall, and the way all the teachers I have had seem truly to love the things they teach.
I LIKE THE PEOPLE
And most of all, I like the people in our school. I like the way people who take the same courses have a bond of friendliness when they meet outside. I like the clatter and infant roar of Coffee Corner that comes not only from the talking of friends, but from casual greetings of people that don’t know any more than each other’s names. I like professors who remember me from last year when they see me, and I like members of the faculty who are so willing to help with student organizations. I like to listen to Miss Simpson talk, because she seems to be the voice of wonderful people and fine things. I like the faces of the choir in Chapel, not because they are particularly reverent, but because they are all clean and straight-forward looking. I like the attitudes of incoming freshmen who have come here not for fun, but for something else broader than textbooks if not so broad as complete knowledge. I like the spirit that keeps study lights going at two o’clock in the morning even when it isn’t an hour test that is in the foreground, but instead the shadowy halfspun threads of the futures of three or four nodding heads. I like the people I know. I like my own friends, the ones I hope to know all my life, and I like the people who won’t remember my name ten years from now, even though we don’t realize it now. I like the things people laugh at here, and I like the things they cry out about, like the need for an honor system that they will someday make work. I like the people here, I like them more than anything else about the place, even though I can’t quite put it into words.
So, these are a few of the reasons I love our school. There are others, just as strong and twice as many, but these are some of them.
—by Alison Carr ’44
Six Decades up the Road
On a Thursday morning in February, Alison Carr Wood watches the woodpeckers flit through the woods outside her window in Oswego, New York, and remembers back across half a century to the views she loved at the University of Vermont. She’s pleased to hear her essay “I Want to Tell You That I Like Vermont” will be shared with her classmates once again, recalling that the emotion of the time and place made it one of the easiest things she’s ever written. “It just fell out of me,” she says.
From the sound of it, writing came to Carr Wood naturally during her student years. She took great pride in the day Professor Julian Lindsay’s daughter, a friend, told her that the venerable faculty member had complimented her writing. The words in praise of her prose are still fresh in Carr Wood’s mind: “Look at that!” he said. “That’s what I mean!” She chuckles at the memory; professorial approval was hard-earned in those days.
Post-UVM, Carr Wood put her nimble words to work for Seventeen Magazine, where—like a scene from an old movie—she walked in the editorial offices without an appointment, landed a job, and was soon rapping out the “Letters to the Girls.” She would also pursue social work and newspaper journalism during her career, in addition to raising four children with her husband of sixty years, Bob, an MIT-educated engineer.
Carr Wood says life is good in the senior community where she and her husband live near Lake Ontario. She mentions a recent Today show broadcast from Vermont and the treat of again “spending a couple of hours up there” even if it was via television. Sixty-four years later, her estimate of the University still holds strong. “UVM was a wonderful school,” she says.
—Thomas Weaver
A growth market
Bob Sickles '78
Growing up on a farm leaves no illusions. Bob Sickles knew all about hard work, recalling that he helped with chores up until about two hours before he left home for college. He’s honest about the fact that he wasn’t certain farm living was the life for him, but family ties to the land on Rumson Neck in New Jersey were strong. The acreage just a few miles from the Jersey Shore traced all the way back to 1663 and a land grant from the King of England.
After Sickles earned his UVM degree from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in 1978, the immediate plan (of sorts) was for one of those epic cross-country road trips with a friend. But the friend decided to get married and Sickles decided to return to the farm and farm stand business in Little Silver. “It was my best decision ever,” he says.
From his years growing up and pitching in on the farm and his studies in ornamental horticulture, Sickles was sure of two things—“I loved to grow stuff and I liked to sell.” Over the past three decades, he’s added entrepreneurial chutzpah and managerial acumen to that skill set as he’s helped grow Sickles Market, once a seasonal farm stand, into a year-round gardening center and specialty food store that has garnered national awards as a leader in both branches of the business.
This year marks the one-hundredth anniversary since Bob’s grandfather began farming the family land, a milestone Sickles Market is celebrating with events throughout the year. It’s doubtful his grandfather would recognize this stretch of New York City suburbia; the few acres where Bob’s father still grows raspberries and blackberries are the only farmland around. Over the past decade, the family market has changed dramatically as well. Today, Sickles is a 20,000-square-foot retail facility with an additional 13,000-square feet of greenhouse and nearly one hundred employees.
As Sickles morphed from a farm and produce stand to a diverse retail business riding a burgeoning “food movement,” they found a ready clientele of people in the area with the income and the taste for good bread, artisan cheese from Vermont, and the brave new world of arugula. The corner of New Jersey near Sandy Hook has grown in wealth in recent decades with the introduction of ferry service to Wall Street. The family re-built and built larger after a 1983 fire, then kicked it up another notch in 1998 with more space and the move to year-round operation. Change isn’t easy for any business, and a family venture comes with its own challenges. Sickles remembers calming the worries of his father—“We gotta stop spending money!”—a child of the Depression. But it’s an investment that has paid off.
These days, Bob Sickles is in an executive role, spending a good deal of his time “watching the numbers,” but he’s also out on the floor mentoring employees, stacking produce, and greeting customers. And though he’s optimistic about beating his work week back to five days at some point, this guy who loves to grow stuff, still takes the Sunday morning watering detail in the greenhouse.
More information: sicklesmarket.com
—Thomas Weaver
Beyond cancer
Cindy Blood '94
People expect a lot from those who have faced down cancer. After enduring one of life’s most harrowing trials, shouldn’t it be easy to pick yourself up, dust off your Livestrong bracelet, and start all over again?
“Society wants cancer survivors to be these smiling warriors,” says Cindy Blood ’94. “And I was, for the most part, during my treatments because I felt like I was fighting. There was something tangible I was doing. I was going for this appointment; I had this treatment; and we were getting it. Then, all of a sudden, it was, ‘Well, now what am I doing?’ Just kind of waiting to see if it would come back or not.”
It’s been five years since Blood, a breast cancer survivor, and her husband, Phil, found their way through that foggy passage from illness to health. The couple’s experience with that transition put them on a course to help others in the same situation. The Bloods are co-founders of Forest Moon, a non-profit organization based in southern Vermont that is dedicated to helping cancer survivors, and their families and friends, move forward with their lives.
Through single-day and overnight retreats, Forest Moon teaches tools to build survivors’ sense of hope, strength, and confidence with a range of activities from meditation to writing to snowshoeing. The organization strives to reach out to rural residents in the northeast in particular, giving them skills they can practice at home, and creating a circle of connections among fellow survivors. Though events are currently held at various locations in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, Forest Moon plans to build a retreat facility in the woods of Whitingham in the future.
Looking back on her own experience in the immediate aftermath of cancer treatment, Cindy Blood says connecting with a national group of women under age forty who had survived breast cancer was a great boost in moving forward mentally and emotionally. If she can help the Forest Moon survivors toward the better place she found, then all of the risk and hard work of starting up a non-profit will have been worth it.
“I knew I couldn’t get rid of the fear,” she says. “But I knew I could learn to take some control over it.”
More information: forestmoon.org
(for UVM staff)