Home / Winter Table of Contents / Goodbye John Feudo / Profiles Above, Bill Mellen '49 points out a classmate in a photograph from the archives of the Du Bois Library.
THE YOUNG FACES of the Class of 1949 might have been cast in new wax. The eyes, some of which had seen World War II at close range, look full of hope for the future. The men's hair, grown out from G.I. buzz-cuts, is carefully pomaded, the women's immaculately parted and bobbed.
Half a century later, pictures of those same faces show smile lines, worry lines, and less hair all around. Class member by class member, the transformation from co-ed to grandmother, G.I. to golf player, sorority or fraternity officer to pillar of the church, is there to behold in the "memory book" compiled for the Class of '49 as they prepare to celebrate their fiftieth reunion.
Every spring since 1983 the alumni relations office has published one of these soft-covered tomes, which look something like a yearbook and read something like a newsy holiday letter, for the golden-anniversary class. Class members receive questionnaires in the fall asking them to share memories of campus as well as what they've done since graduation and who they've done it with.
In the resulting publication each graduate is given a page to tell his or her story. Some devote the space to singing the accomplishments of spouses and children, or to resumes of their own. Others impart only a self-effacing sketch. In the weeks before reunion, every class member who's been located receives the resulting book in the mail. "It makes them feel good about the university once again, and it acts as a trigger for bringing people back to campus," says Michele Girard-Basora, who as alumni events coordinator works with class editors to choose the archival photographs and news headlines that set the book's historical tone.
Old Chapel and its bells the visual and auditory centerpiece of campus life appear again and again in the reminiscences. Traditions long since disappeared beanies, hazing, rope pulls, Winter Carnival with its fabulous ice-sculpting contests, the courtly rituals that once accompanied Homecoming thread through the collective memory like sentimental songs. In an era when virtually no one had a car, transportation was by taxi (10 cents per passenger), bicycle, or shank's mare.
Many reflect on the remembered beauty of the campus and its surrounds, the tree-lined walk into town and the way dusk lit the winter sky as students walked from their last class to dinner. Professors passionate about their disciplines are praised; gratitude flows in particular for the late Doric Alviani, with many saying they still cherish the music to which he introduced them. Conversely, some retroactively roast professors who made clear their disdain for women in the sciences, or indulged a penchant for nodding off in after-lunch classes.
The generational stamp is clear on the Class of '49. These are alumni who recall the sudden influx of student-veterans returning to studies interrupted when whole fraternities donned uniforms immediately after Pearl Harbor. Israel was born and Gandhi was assassinated while these students were on campus. A recurring theme is where they were standing and what they were doing when they heard that Franklin Roosevelt was dead. The achievement of university status in 1947, marked by day-long ringing of Old Chapel's bells, was another indelible event.
This is a generation of alumnae who, in the "career" section of the questionnaire, write "homemaker" without flinching, whose jobs as lab assistants and teachers were most often folded into a primary occupation of raising children and encouraging husbands. But others of them were among the first to be admitted to the bar, or earned distinction as social workers and educators. Their male classmates nearly universally cite military experience first, followed by long stints in a work world that evidently offered much more stability than the one facing today's young graduates.
For those celebrating their fiftieth reunion, careers have now largely yielded to retirements filled with bridge, golf, and tennis; hobbies that range from sailing to gardening to astrology; and volunteer work for every good cause imaginable. Respondents are asked to supply a current photo, and many do. So the memory books are full of pictures of alumni at children's weddings and grandchildren's birthday parties; globe-trotting alumni against the backdrops of the world's cities and monuments; alumni couples whose fifty years together have molded the two of them into the very same shape. The widowed, the divorced, the never-married, the remarried: all their stories are between the covers of the memory book, ready to be expanded upon over food and drink on campus in June.
This year's co-editor, William Mellen, says he hopes his efforts and those of classmate Barbara Rowe Sprague will at the very least help reunion-goers avoid embarrassing lapses of memory. If you haven't seen someone in fifty years, you probably won't remember them without a little help, he says.
Two additional uses of the books: as a surrogate reunion for those who can't get to Amherst in person, and as a dose of inspiration for those whose "fiftieths" lie in the future.
"We're still cooking, some of us," says Mellen of the active class commemorated in the memory book. "We're still getting around."
-Ali Crolius
CAN YOU BELIEVE HE already had those kids in Husky shirts? They were all still yelling for UMass, though. This photo of ALISON, TONY and JOHN ("TURNCOAT") FEUDO was taken during the Minuteman basketball team's home-court win over Duquesne on January 14, a few weeks after the former associate vice chancellor and executive director of the alumni association announced his acceptance of a similar position at UConn.
The Feudos will continue to live in Amherst, where John's many friends praise the town-gown amity and spectacular growth in the alumni association that were sparked during his six years at UMass. "He leaves alumni relations and the alumni association far stronger and more involved because of his leadership and direction," says vice chancellor for advancement ROYSTER HEDGEPETH.
Says John, As difficult as it is to leave, UMass will always have a special place in my heart." Says alumni director SUSAN MATTEI, "Join the association for John!" (Memorial sign-up info, 1.800.456.UMASS.)
Kari Bodnarchuk '92 / Everett Harman '84G / Philip Cohen '72 / Fred Becker 
EXPLAINING the political hot spots of the planet in ways comprehensible to an eighth grader: that's the ambitious aim of Lerner Publications's "World In Conflict" series. An upcoming volume in the series details the centuries-old animosities among Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda: an especially knotty topic, given the recent disastrous conflicts in that country, but one for which author Kari Bodnarchuk '92 was uniquely suited.
For one thing, Bodnarchuk, whose UMass education was in English, journalism, and art history, and whose master's work at Clark University focused on intercultural communications, is both a versatile reporter and a meticulous one. But Bodnarchuk brought something more than research skills to the project: Rwanda is in her heart.Bodnarchuk visited Central Africa in late November, 1994, in the chaotic aftermath of a civil war that had displaced 2.3 million Rwandans and resulted in the death of an estimated one million others. The experience had a profound effect on her prose. Though years passed between that visit and the book assignment, when she sat down to write "I could picture the countryside," Bodnar-chuk says. "I could picture the people I had talked to."
Among them were refugees who had walked hundreds of miles after seeing their families slaughtered before their eyes. "And they were still moving," said Bodnar-chuk with some wonderment this winter. "They still had the life inside them to get up every day and go make a fire. People had opened little boutiques and restaurants in some of the refugee camps. They were surviving. To be there and see people going about their daily grind was amazing."
At that time, Bodnarchuk was both a part-time graduate student at Clark and a full-time reporter for the Middlesex News. Accompanying her to Africa was a shipment of medicine and money donated by the newspapers' readers at her behest. She filed a series of dispatches from Rwanda and Zaire in early December, and a two-page wrapup appeared in the News on Christmas Day, 1994. That report won a human interest story award from the New England Press Association.
The experience also whet Bonardchuk's appetite for travel, which she indulged during a year-and-a half of globetrotting beginning in late 1996. The journey included Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia (where she was caught in a flash flood while camping and nearly drowned), Singapore, Thailand, Laos, India, and Nepal.
Bodnarchuk returned to Worcester last year with ten full journals, one stomach bug, and an unsatisfied itch.
"It only took me a month before I was back at the travel shelf in the bookstore," says Bodnarchuk. "I don't know that I'll ever reach a point in my life where I say, `Okay, that's enough.'"
- Sam Silverstein '91
SOMETIMES GOOD LUCK comes disguised as bad press. A couple years back, Everett Harman '84G set out to study women's potential to perform U.S. Army jobs that required heavy physical labor. Harman, a research physiologist with the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, had a plan to subject a cohort of women volunteers to training ranging from fast-paced marching to long hours in the weight room but no advertising budget with which to solicit volunteers.
So he put out a press release. Which caught the attention of an Associated Press bureau somewhere. Which led to a flurry of controversy: why was our government spending money to, in the words of a particularly indignant Washington Times article, "turn the average woman into the average man, strengthwise"?
When Harman's study eventually got the green light, after a "cooling off period" of several weeks, he discovered no shortage of women willing to volunteer. What's more, they were steamed. "A lot of them were very interested to prove that women are capable," says Harman, who earned his Ph.D. from UMass in exercise science. "We had some who were so interested they traveled up to fifty minutes each way to be here. They were inspired."
This reservoir of resolve came in handy during the six months of training that ensued. Harman's subjects worked out an hour-and-a-half a day, five days a week. They pumped iron. They tossed medicine balls. They hiked, five miles at a time at a pace of at least four miles per hour, while carrying packs weighing up to seventy-five pounds. The routine was carefully prescribed to develop the ability to handle cumbersome loads; the Army's definition of "heavy" labor is any job that requires lifting more than 100 pounds. Indeed, when the results of Harman's post-test were tabulated, the number of women who met this standard jumped from 24 percent to 78 percent. Conventional basic training produces a fraction of this success. More surprising than the study group's performance was the difficulty Harman had in dispersing it when his experiment was finished. "We didn't anticipate the power of it," he says. "It was very inspiring how they bonded and supported each other. Their attitudes toward themselves and toward other people improved so much.
"I think most of them were pretty sad when it was over."
"GET YOUR HOME, OFFICE, CAR IN PERFECT ORDER." That was the phrase that'd got me in such a rude mood as I looked through a brochure for the "personal coaching" firm that Philip Cohen '72 and his wife, Laura Hess, operate by phone and e-mail from their suburban Las Vegas home.
And now here I was, standing on these nice people's front steps, looking much more critically at their flowerbeds than I ordinarily would. These flowerbeds looked as bad as mine. "Perfect order, huh," I thought bitterly.
It's the heartbreaking attractiveness of the idea, of course, that's galling. You long for order. (Which for me, at least, includes flowerbeds.) You see it on Philip and Laura's list of "Things Clients Want Most," which they, implicitly, offer. You just know your heart's going to be broken again. It makes you irritable.
But then Philip answers the doorbell, smiling and chubby in his purple "I COACH U WIN" T -shirt and perfectly clear on what is important to him, personally and professionally, to have in order. (Flowerbeds, no. Neat work in a nice house in a sunny town, yes.) And in half an hour's time, he's made coaching sound almost as sensible as it sounds attractive.
Which of course speaks well for Cohen's business acumen. He probably operates so credibly at this crossroads of self-help and enterprise because he's no arriviste in the latter zone. His grandfather was a Springfield livestock dealer who did business with Mass Aggie. Philip is an SOM grad. He's a CPA, and until 1993 had a conventional accounting practice in Boston.
But 1996, he said with joy last year, was his "first and last tax season in Las Vegas," where he and Laura, also a CPA, moved to do what they want, where they want, through the magic of telecommunications.
Both had gotten interested in helping clients with more than accounting. Both were aware of clients' desires to work on all kinds of problems, from those involved in their businesses to those involved in their homes, cars, and relationships. And both were more and more sold on the coaching approach, which establishes a trainer-like relationship with clients.
Phil is deft on the differences between coaching and consulting, coaching and therapy. Consultants typically assess your situation, offer advice, and leave, he says. Coaches help you assess your situation and provide continuing support as you work to change it. (The consultant is an expert. The coach is a Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder.) As for therapy, that's more about understanding the past, says Cohen. Coaching is about taking present action.
The virtual aspect of it all is a plus for Cohen. He says he finds he can listen better when he's not worried about how he or his flowerbeds look, or distracted by how the client does. Not to mention the convenience factor: with a phone headset and Internet access, he can interact with anybody, anywhere, anytime.
The entire telecommunications revolution looks like a very good deal to Cohen, though he holds that it will never replace the need for real-time/face-time in human interaction.
"It's not a replacement, it's an add-on," he says. "What it means is that you can be someplace that really feeds your soul, and still do business."
Fred Becker, Public Building, 1935-39, wood engraving, courtesy University Gallery. "I WAS NOT A NATIVE NEW YORKER, but I became one in spite of my foreboding. I had arrived in New York in Sept. 1933 from my native land, Hollywood, California..." Thus begins a memoir by art professor emeritus FRED BECKER in the Spring 1998 Massachusett Review, which published, as well, a porfolio of fourteen prints from Becker's tenure with the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administrtion in 1935-39. This winter on campus the sequel was on view, when "Fred Becker: Prints 1939-99" was mounted at the Herter Gallery. Becker taught printmaking at UMass from 1968 to 1986. He lives in Amherst.
