My picture of Colgate


The image for this Colgate reunion poster was painted by Dick LaBonte ’43 in 1988 as a reunion souvenir. In his book Dick LaBonte: Paintings of the Jersey Shore and More, he recalled: “We’d get up at 6:00 a.m. daily and march around, led by some Navy Air Corps officers from a nearby airfield. The civilians reviewing the troops are Everett Case, who was president of Colgate then, and Dean ‘Kal’ Kallgren. Hup-two-three-four!”
    LaBonte, who created more than 175 paintings in his 30-year career as an artist, died on April 26. For more on his life, see In Memoriam.

Share your own favorite “picture” of Colgate — verbal or pictorial: scene@colgate.edu or Colgate Scene, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346.


Surviving the Tween Years

The Scene recently chatted with David Celio ’65, author of Twelve Principles of Effective Parenting: Surviving the Tween Years (Paulist Press). A clinical psychologist for more than 35 years who practices in Seattle, Celio and his wife of 41 years have raised five children.

How has parenting changed in recent years — what new challenges do parents face?
I think parenting is more difficult today because the popular culture emphasizes heroic accomplishments without noting the day-to-day work it takes to achieve them. And our technology can instantly inflate even a minor social error into a public humiliation or dissatisfactions into cyber bullying. There are more challenges for parents to create supportive emotional conditions within the family, as well as to support stimulating activities in and out of school.

So, what’s a parent to do?
Build trust and confidence in your child by establishing a continuous dialogue that provides guidance and encouragement. With confidence, your child can strive to achieve in school, establish trustworthy relationships, and make healthy choices. If parents follow some basic healthy principles, they can guide their children through the maze. It means close supervision and sensitivity in responding to your child; although high expectations are good, “tiger parenting” will fail with most kids. It’s better to listen and guide with encouragement. Realize peers have a big influence, so be in the know of what is valued and apply healthy principles within that framework.

Many parents are in two-career families and have lots of demands on their time.
Yes, we take on a lot, but we have to ask ourselves, where is the balance in our lives? How can we achieve in a career, maintain a healthy marriage, and be a conscientious parent? It’s a matter of priorities, and couples have to discern their values and order their lives to meet their decisions. Sometimes it means deferring some opportunities in careers or at least considering the impact of these decisions on each family member.

The book includes 10 situations to which parents can apply your 12 principles. Which drew the most response?
One involves middle school girls expressing aggression by gossiping and excluding a girl from their sleepovers and parties. The parents are faced with how best to help their excluded daughter. So much of parenting is teaching; hopefully, parents can anticipate social challenges by establishing a foundation of unshakable love and loyalty in the family. Developing a daughter’s confident sense of self as a caring and understanding girl can anchor her against a tide of vagaries. Although she will want close friends, she need not totally depend on them for validation. Parents should encourage their daughters to develop multiple groups of friends — from school, extracurricular activities, and religious groups — to socialize with. Fallings out are usually temporary, but like so many family problems, they provide useful lessons for later life.


From roughneck to rig boss



Oil-drilling engineer George Lattimore ’73 likens his projects to building a house. But instead of hiring a carpenter, clearing the land, and pouring a foundation, he assembles up to 30 contractors, takes a drilling rig out to sea, and plans the trajectories for holes to be bored more than a mile into the Earth.
    This spring, Lattimore, who is based in Indonesia, was preparing to drill 40 wells in the southern Java Sea, about 90 miles from shore. He’s helping lead the $500-million project for Kodeco Energy, a Korean firm looking to meet the growing Asian demand for fossil fuels.
    What lies beneath the Earth’s surface has long intrigued Lattimore. At Colgate, he studied archaeology, discovering how society has developed by unearthing artifacts left behind eons ago. He spent his junior year at the American University in Cairo, where he worked on an Egyptian archaeological dig, and savored the overseas life. In the hot African sun, however, he decided that archaeology wasn’t his professional destiny.
    But he still was intrigued by the science of the earth, and returned to Colgate to major in geology. After graduating, he was broke — and had college loans to repay. So he headed south to work as a roughneck (a laborer) in the oil fields of Texas.
    “I got interested in drilling, and never left,” he said. The work has taken him around the world — from the Colombian jungles to a remote outpost in Mozambique, where his 42-man crew included workers from 19 nations.
    Drilling for oil is a highly technical operation, as the tungsten-carbide bit chews up rock, and a pressurized viscous material called drilling mud gets pumped down to collect the chipped rock and bring it to the surface. The drilling team is also assembling steel pipe, in 30-foot increments, to line the hole, which can be as wide as 26 inches, and then narrow in concentric circles to 7 inches thousands of feet below the surface.
    Lattimore has drilled his share of dry holes, such as a recent attempt off the coast of Borneo, where the ocean floor was 1,000 feet deep, and he drilled 3,200 meters into rock before calling it quits. “That’s always a disappointment to people when it comes up dry,” said Lattimore.
    Oil extraction also has its environmental dangers, evidenced by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Lattimore, who prides himself on running a safe operation, said his crews follow extensive protocols, which include emergency drills and periodic testing of safety equipment, including a series of hydraulic rams called a blowout preventer that can close off a well before an explosion.
    There’s personal danger, too. In 2008, Lattimore was drilling in a region of Colombia contested by guerilla forces.
    “As we were getting people trained, a couple of our trucks got blown up,” recalled Lattimore. “Then they blew up our production facility.” Unfortunately, the community relations officer was killed. Since it was clear that security was not possible, they picked up and went on to their next project, he said.
    Drilling the southern Java Sea wells started in July. “It’s challenging, exciting work,” said Lattimore, who lives in Jakarta with his wife, Marcia. “And it’s a seller’s market for someone with my skills. We ultimately need the stuff that’s underground.”

— David McKay Wilson


Drawn to the landscape


(photo by Andrew Daddio)

Michele Palmer ’82 needed graduate work to understand why she chose Colgate. Only after she enrolled for her master’s in landscape architecture at Cornell University did she realize how much Colgate’s campus factored into her decision.
    “When I visited Colgate with my mother, it was a beautiful fall day, with the sugar maples bright red and the gold dome of the chapel above the trees. It had what I wanted academically, but I fell in love with the classic, uncluttered landscape.”
    Years later, she influenced that landscape herself, with her design of the wall and garden in front of Merrill House at the top of the rise above Oak Drive. The Class of 2002 gave the wall and garden as a place for reflection following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Palmer consulted with the class and others in planning her approach. “I wanted it to look like it had always been there, simple and clean,” she concluded, “and let the plants be the exuberant part.” She chose plants that would come into season in the spring and fall, when students are on campus.
    That project reflects her architectural philosophy, which emphasizes the use of local materials, practicality, and “designs that match the natural landscape and its place in the world,” she said. “I was never interested in creating Tuscan villas in upstate New York.”
    When she graduated into 1982’s shaky economy, Palmer followed a path well worn by her fellow fine arts majors: retail. “For a lot of years, I ran stores — a home furnishings design store, an art gallery, things like that.”
    She finished her master’s in 1996 and worked with a landscape architecture firm based in Ithaca, along the way earning her professional license and state registration. In 2004, she struck out on her own, focusing on projects for clients in higher education, the public sector, and individual homeowners, and earning certification as a Woman Owned Business Enterprise in 2007.
    “Some landscape architects only do planning work, and some only design for construction,” she said. “I’m in the middle, doing both. I’ve always been interested in the built world, making things. I’m more technically oriented.”
    Palmer’s technical abilities earned her an opportunity to teach site engineering at Cornell, which she has done since 2009. “Super-creative, right-brain people sometimes have trouble with this course because they worry about the math,” she said. “But I’m no math genius. I teach them that it’s just understanding proportion. The ancient Roman surveyors calculated grade the same way we do today — a three percent slope is still a three percent slope.”
    She speaks about the ancient Romans from experience. Her former professor at Cornell recruited Palmer to an archaeological project at the ancient site at Stabiae. There, in 2008, they discovered traces of a huge garden, which has become a forensic study for Palmer. That, in turn, has led to speaking engagements and an invitation to help illustrate and co-author an essay for a new source book on garden archaeology.
    Late in 2010, she and her graduate assistant Tom Breiten, a landscape designer and builder, opened Templeton Landscape Architecture & Planning, based in Cooperstown.
Their first project is helping a community college integrate new residential units into its rural setting.
    Palmer said their designs are “simple and sustainable, based on the underlying ecology of the site. Sustainability is one of those buzzwords that people are starting to cynically call greenwash,” she said. “But landscape architects have always been interested in the environment and native landscape, so for us, adopting a sustainable point of view is a minor extension of what we’re already doing.”

— James Leach


Let’s talk about sex

(Photo courtesy of Philippe Cheng Photography)

For many women, their thoughts and feelings about their own sexuality often involve loneliness, embarrassment, and ignorance. That’s what Joyce Turcotte McFadden ’84 has found during 25 years as a psychoanalyst. But with her new book, Your Daughter’s Bedroom, McFadden is hoping to break that cycle.
    In 2005, she started an anonymous web-based initiative, the Women’s Reality Study, because she learned through leading therapy sessions that her clients were feeling shame and isolation about experiences that are, in fact, commonly shared. “I wanted them to understand that there’s a community of other women out there,” McFadden said. And although she told her clients that their experiences were not singular, she wanted to make that known to all women by creating a reference book.
    The ongoing study (at womensrealities.com) asks women about their varied experiences ranging from body image to careers to mental health. For the book, McFadden narrowed her focus to helping mothers teach their daughters about healthy sexuality. “I’m hoping it will help women and girls feel freer in their lives,” said McFadden, who also blogs about feminist issues for The Huffington Post. “There’s this huge chasm between women being the objects of other people’s sexual desire and women being the subjects of their own sexuality.”
    It starts with mothers giving their daughters the facts, she said. The mother of a teenage daughter herself, McFadden said she began educating her daughter about her body at a young age. “I started just by teaching her the names of her body parts — which sounds so simple, but a lot of women don’t know [the basic terms and functions],” she explained. “When they’re young, you can get so much more information in because when they start to mature, it’s too uncomfortable and scary for them.”
    Your Daughter’s Bedroom is structured around testimonials from those who have participated in the Women’s Realities Study, followed by McFadden’s analysis and advice on how mothers can support their daughters as they grow.
    McFadden credits Colgate alumnae with helping shape the book. Wanting to disseminate the study in a grassroots way, she initially sent it to just her female friends, family, and colleagues. Looking to widen her pool, McFadden advertised the study in the Colgate Gateline e-newsletter, after which she saw a flurry of activity on the site. The topics that these women most responded to were the ones McFadden addressed in the book. “They really turned on a lightbulb that made me start to keep an eye out for what women were talking about,” she said.
    To date, approximately 450 women have participated. “I wanted it to be large enough to be credible and small enough to be intimate; I really wanted to remember the questionnaires that I was reading as they came through.”
    Publisher’s Weekly is calling Your Daughter’s Bedroom a “fascinating and empowering text for women of all ages.” McFadden is hoping her own daughter will read it, but she admits that her daughter is “sick of having sexual conversations with me.” This indicates that McFadden has been successful in normalizing sexuality for her. “It’s as if I were talking about baking all the time, she’d be sick of me talking about cookie recipes.”
    To learn more, visit www.joycemcfadden.com.

— Aleta Mayne


Kicking stupid cancer

Matthew Zachary and Lisa Bernhard ’87, co-hosts of The Stupid Cancer Show (photo by John Sabia)

She’s eaten dinner with Bette Midler, flown to London to interview Paul McCartney in his office, and sat face to face with the King of Pop. Although she’s grateful for such extraordinary experiences, Lisa Bernhard ’87 said that those who have blown her away more than any celebrity are the young adult cancer survivors whom she’s met through her talk-radio webcast The Stupid Cancer Show. Bernhard co-hosts and co-produces the weekly show with Matthew Zachary, the founder of the I’m Too Young For This! cancer foundation.
    While children and mature adults with the disease get plenty of attention, young adults are often neglected, Bernhard said. “People don’t realize — and that includes many in the medical industry — that you can get cancer from 15 to 40, so one of the reasons [for the organization’s name and focus] is because those of us who were diagnosed in that age range heard ‘You don’t have cancer, you’re too young for that,’” she explained. “So, tragically, what happens is, a lot of young adults get misdiagnosed or diagnosed at a very late stage.”
    Bernhard was 29, climbing the ladder in the New York City media world, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She calls herself “one of the lucky ones” for a number of reasons. It took more than a year for Bernhard to be diagnosed, after her gynecologist twice told her that a lump in her breast felt like normal tissue and the initial test by a breast surgeon came back inconclusive. Fortunately, despite the time lag, Bernhard was still at stage 1. The oncologist told her: “You have an older woman’s cancer, and that’s a good thing” — meaning that the tumor was slow growing, which was rare for someone her age.
    After researching her options, Bernhard underwent a mastectomy as well as breast reconstruction. (Her informative article about her experience, and the available options that many women aren’t told about, appeared in the October 2009 issue of Self magazine.)
    Following treatment and recovery, she was back on track with her career, working as deputy editor of TV Guide, a Fox News entertainment correspondent, freelancing, and making guest appearances. But Bernhard always had in the back of her mind that she wanted to do something “to help the next ‘me’” — because when she was diagnosed, she didn’t know a soul her age to whom she could relate.
    In 2009, Bernhard appeared as a guest on The Stupid Cancer Show, and in January 2010, she officially teamed up with Zachary. With Bernhard on board, the show has exploded from 30,000 to 660,000 listens. Episodes can be heard through stupidcancershow.com or downloaded for free through iTunes. Bernhard’s celebrity contacts have helped her arrange guest bookings including Patrick Swayze’s widow, Lisa Niemi, and Darlene Hunt, creator of the Showtime series The Big C, starring Laura Linney.
    The show and I’m Too Young for This — or i[2]y, as it’s abbreviated — keeps their programming fresh for their audience. “We’re irreverent but always informative,” Bernhard said. “We have fun because, as you can imagine, talking about cancer day in and day out can take its toll. So, we want to give people a place where they can laugh, have some levity, have community.”
    The show has been nationally recognized by media outlets like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, as well as given an award by Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong organization.
    Counting 16 years without a recurrence of cancer, Bernhard hopes the worst is behind her. She’s still a freelance writer and video reporter, and her favorite assignments are those allowing her to intersect her “ridiculous amount” of entertainment knowledge with health topics.
    She recalled that her hair stood up on the back of her neck as McCartney told her about writing songs with John Lennon in his dreams — but, it’s the empowering survivor stories of her listeners that serve as Bernhard’s continuous inspiration.

— Aleta Mayne


A helping paw

As a child, Kelly Connolly ’96 was the “Dr. Doolittle” of her street. At Colgate, after an experimental psychology course, she rescued what became her pet rat, Ralph, from euthanasia, making him an unlikely popular resident of her sorority house. So, it’s not surprising that Connolly continues to both support animals and use animals to support people.
    Currently a student at Vermont Law School, Connolly was named an Albert Schweitzer Fellow last May. The fellowship is a national program that aims to develop graduate students into “leaders in service” by helping them design and develop a community service project dedicated to the health needs of underserved communities. Connolly is building a pet therapy program for the assisted-living center at Gifford Medical Center in Randolph, Vt.
    The project is in its infancy, but is quickly gaining momentum, even among Connolly’s busy classmates. She has built a core group who regularly volunteer their time — and pets — to visit the folks at Gifford.
    “Pets are becoming increasingly prevalent in people’s lives,” Connolly explained. “Their emotional and physical benefits can only help when you have someone in a facility who can’t speak, who doesn’t necessarily recognize their own family, or who may feel isolated. That’s why I decided to implement the program at Gifford.”
    Connolly’s familiarity with the benefits of therapy pets stems from her volunteer and career experiences. From 1996 to 1998, while working as a paralegal in New York City, she volunteered at night to gather data about the effectiveness of a pet therapy program at
St. Vincent’s hospital. “That experience cemented my interest in helping people with pets,” Connolly reflected.
    Connolly then earned a master’s in public policy with a focus on animal welfare from Tufts University in 2001, and her pet therapy involvement rose to the next level when she took a job with the Humane Society of the United States as an issues specialist for companion animals. There, she promoted the benefits pets confer onto their caregivers, including lowered blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and increased levels of endorphins, which lead to feelings of well-being. Connolly noted that “pets help maintain mental acuity. If someone is with an animal, they are more likely to interact with the environment around them.” Additionally, pets are proven to reduce feelings of loneliness and isolation. “It’s kind of like having yoga with paws,” she said.
    Even with Connolly’s background, building the program at Gifford had its obstacles. “It’s tricky because people always think that therapy animals have to be certified, but [in fact] there is no universal therapy program,” she explained. Initially, she hoped to use animals from Humane Society shelters, “but it’s difficult to analyze the behavior of a pet that has just been dropped off or rescued by a shelter. It became a little bit of a liability issue I had to work around.”
    Instead, Connolly’s program relies on volunteers’ pets, including one of her own cats, Paddington. Of course, she, too, experiences Paddington’s therapeutic benefits. Connolly’s pets have helped her manage the stress of returning to a busy school schedule. “They’re my own therapy animals!” she exclaimed.
    Connolly also might call her animals “career counselors,” because they helped give direction to her law career. “I always knew that I wanted to go back to law school and work on public policy issues,” she said, “but working with pets in a hospital setting has led me to pursue a career in health care and insurance policy reform. It’s a great way to combine my two greatest passions: public policy and animals.”

— Jason B. Kammerdiener ’10


Royally chosen


Managing director Gareth Harper leads a team at the Spring Jam, PeacePlayers
International–Northern Ireland’s largest annual event. (Photo courtesy of PeacePlayers
International)

The question of “What to give the couple who has everything” took on new meaning when Britain’s royal couple was married in April. In lieu of wedding gifts that the public might want to send, Prince William and Kate Middleton set up a charitable gift fund, and a Colgate alumnus’s nonprofit organization was one of the fund recipients.
    PeacePlayers International, the global nonprofit group co-founded by Brendan Tuohey ’98 and his brother Sean, was the only U.S.-based charitable organization of the 26 selected. PeacePlayers uses the game of basketball to unite and educate people in divided communities. It works to overcome sectarianism through a range of integrated sports activities, peace education, and leadership development. Launched in 2001, the group has reached more than 52,000 individuals worldwide.
    During their visit to Belfast on March 8, the royal couple met representatives of the Northern Ireland branch of PeacePlayers International, which works with young people between the ages of 8 and 25 in Protestant and Catholic communities.
    “Prince William told our managing director [that] as soon as he saw PeacePlayers and what we did, he said, ‘I knew this had to be part of our big day,’” Brendan told The Today Show. “Is there a bigger wedding in history to be part of than this? I don’t think so. We were both thankful and shocked.”


Sendach revealed


(photo by Andrew Daddio)

At risk of blowing his cover, the Scene talked to Jon Sendach ’98, who leads a double life — well, for at least four weekends a year. The health care professional dons a Colgate Campus Safety uniform for special events on campus, but his real job is as associate executive director of hospital operations at Long Island’s North Shore University Hospital.
    Back when he was a student, Sendach had worked for Campus Safety, transporting injured students to class, dispatching calls, and acting as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT). Although he had turned over his badge upon graduation, he fell back into his role working for the department when he attended commencement a year later. The campus was buzzing with activity, so when Sendach dropped by to visit his former co-workers, he ended up pitching in by dispatching calls. When the director at the time called and said, “I need to see you upstairs,” Sendach thought he was going to be reprimanded. Instead, the director had recognized Sendach’s value as a certified EMT and an alumnus — plus, he was often in the area visiting family — so he asked Sendach if he would work for them on his free weekends. Sendach took a few days off from his consulting job in Manhattan to complete the state training program and has been going “undercover” ever since.
    For move-in day, family weekend, spring party weekend, commencement, and sometimes other events, Sendach comes north to fill in, handling criminal reports, student motorist issues, disorderly persons, and medical emergencies. There’s also a fun aspect to the job. “My favorite is move-in day,” he said. “I’m a fixture on College Street, greeting every car, saying ‘Welcome to Colgate!’” Despite his gregarious nature, Sendach has never been recognized by a classmate — or even the students he has met representing the admission office at college fairs — when he is in uniform. “It’s like Undercover Boss,” he joked.
    Sendach believes his experience as a former Colgate student helps him relate to current students because “I was one of them,” he said, adding, “I made a lot of the same errors and acted out in much the same way.” His perspective is also valuable to the parents he welcomes at gatherings like the ice cream social on move-in day. “Uniform aside, I enjoy the public relations side of the job,” explained Sendach, who has several years of professional PR experience under his black leather belt. “I remember how excited I was when I got here, and I think that Colgate is an unbelievably special place.”
    Noting that he enjoys his “on-the-scene connection” with the university, Sendach sometimes trades his uniform for a suit to talk about the health care business at Real World panels and Career Services brown bag lunches.
    When he’s at home on Long Island, he continues to beat the drum for Colgate, attending send-off barbecues for incoming first-years, some of whom he’s helped recruit.
    And at work, Sendach often hires summer interns from Colgate. Once they’ve earned his trust, he lets them in on his secret identity. They oftentimes don’t believe him, so he pulls out a photo of himself in uniform that he keeps in his desk drawer — but they usually think it’s a Halloween costume.

— Aleta Mayne


Soul food, Thai style



Last fall, only days after opening his Bangkok restaurant, Soul Food Mahanakorn, Jarrett Wrisley ’02 found himself without a staff. They had all called in sick — hung over, it turned out, from a night of heavy drinking. It was the latest in a series of frustrations for the first-time restaurateur who, until then, had made his living as an Asia-based travel and food writer for publications like National Geographic and Food & Wine.
    First came the discovery that the space he had leased was reputedly haunted. Then there were floods and bad wiring, dishonest designers, and crooked cops. Last, and worst, was the realization that the manager he’d entrusted with keeping the books was, well, not trustworthy. “I’m fighting back bugs and sewer gas smells and furniture that is already breaking after only a month,” Wrisley wrote at the time on the Atlantic’s website, where he kept a column on his fledgling enterprise. “These are the joys.”
    When he decided to start Soul Food in late 2009, Wrisley shrugged off warnings from friends in the industry about the business’s risks and rigors. “Restaurant people like to say that,” he said. He likewise wasn’t discouraged by his relative newness to his adopted hometown — he and his wife had moved to Bangkok from Shanghai only a year earlier — or his “not very good” grasp of the language. He had cleared those hurdles twice before: on his semester abroad at Beijing University and after graduating, when he went back to China to find work. Growing up in Allentown, Pa., Wrisley was fascinated with Asia, passionate about food, and had “always wanted” a restaurant of his own. Little could dampen his optimism for his dream venture. “The restaurant might fail,” he wrote. “The food might stink, or the people might not come. But I don’t think those things will happen, or I wouldn’t be writing this.”
    Wrisley thought right. A year and a half (and several staffing changes) later, Soul Food is humming, its dining room is crowded each night, and its press coverage has included notices from the Daily Telegraph, the Thailand Tatler, and New York magazine. Named for the similarities between Thai food and America’s Southern cooking — fried chicken, slaw salads, smoked meats — and for Bangkok itself (Mahanakorn is the city’s Thai name), the restaurant is inspired by tapas and izakaya bars. Both, Wrisley explained, serve food meant to be shared over drinks; both follow “the same front-back philosophy. The dining area is casual, but the kitchen is very disciplined, very tight.”
    Wrisley is a constant presence at Soul Food, although, he admitted, his crew of 11 now operates smoothly enough that “I don’t really need to be here.” Sometimes he works in the kitchen, sometimes he tends bar, and sometimes he roams the floor, joking with regulars, welcoming newcomers, and offering travel tips — where to eat in Goa, beaches to visit near the Thai-Malaysian border — to all comers. He is also putting together a book of essays on the travels and foods that inspired Soul Food and already thinking of expansion: more places, new concepts, different locations.
    “I’ve done it once,” he said. “I can do it again. I know now to check people’s references. I know how to write a contract that will protect me. I know to trust my instincts.”

— Greg Herbowy