“Let ’em Loose”
Thank you for the outstanding article on Professor Deborah Butler [“Let ’em Loose,” WM Fall 2011]. My husband, Bill Gehl ’73, and I have lived in Bucharest, Romania for the past 13 years. I work as an editor and an associate professor with the Theology and Social Work Department of the University of Bucharest.
I shared Professor Butler’s story with my class. I told my students, “This is an article about a teacher like me and about students like you.”
Romania has not been in a good
spot for several years now. After 45 years of communism, consumerism caught us completely unprepared. While the “centrally planned” typically communist economy led to a general lack of commodities, the recent opening of the markets has brought a flood of products, along with great pressure to buy them.
Young people are especially targeted by the media to consume more and more. But money and work opportunities are scarce. Young men and women like my students may feel trapped and discouraged. They are hesitant to build real dreams and pursue them.
That is why I found Professor Deborah Butler’s story so inspiring. It teaches two important things:
• With every choice comes a renunciation (not a very popular idea nowadays, but nevertheless a reality);
• Every challenge brings an oppor-tunity (“And therefore,” I told my students, “open your eyes and grasp it!”).
My students’ reactions to Professor Butler’s life story were mixed. The women were touched by her youthful struggles and her father-daughter relationship. But one male student (who was going through a life crisis at the time) said the article was of no significance to him. This was in the winter of 2011.
I saw this young man again on campus during the summer, after he had graduated. He made it a point to tell me that he had decided to join the seminary and become a priest. He was radiant. He now had a dream and was actively pursuing it.Thank you for inspiring us.
—Liana Gehl, Bucharest, Romania
As a former newspaperman and then a public relations manager both for the Air Force and then Boeing, I just want to say I am continually blown away by the content, makeup, writing, artwork and general overall quality of WM.
—Tom Cole ’51, Issaquah, WA
“It’s Complicated”
At age 25 I feel like a crusty alumnus who looks forward to reading about the last class I knew at Wabash. Professor David Krohne’s pieces are my favorite [most recently, “The Interminable Tedium of I-90,” WM Spring 2012].
What really caught my attention, though, was “A Refining Fire” [WM Spring 2012]. The pictures are incredible. The glowing metal is amazing, and the fact that we mere humans can do this is incredible.
That damn dumptruck pictured, though—Caterpillar: Biggest earthmovers in the world. Trucks that have tires twice as tall as a man are rarely used for things that don’t cause ecological and humanitarian ruin.
I don’t want this to turn into a sermon on the evil of industry. I don’t think its intent is evil. It’s more tragic. We have the capacity to make these incredible things, so we use them to blow up mountains. Where are our imaginations? Why aren’t we stretching our hearts and minds to higher goals?
I think of the sentence you wrote [in a blog covering my internship with Mountain Justice and Coal River Mountain Watch in 2008] calling it the most teachable moment you ever had.
I read WM and I get inspired. I get humbled, too. I’m a professional complainer. Yet hopeful. I’m really writing to thank you for what you do. We’ve got a world to love, and it’s complicated.
—Nathan Rutz ’09, Campaign Organizer, Ohio Citizen Action, Cleveland, OH
Editor’s note: In 2007, I traveled with Rutz
to Rock Creek, WV, to write about his internship with groups trying to stop mountaintop removal coal mining and the damage it’s doing to people, communities, and the environment in the Appalachians. I wrote: “Nathan had a front row seat to an American tragedy of our own making, and he took the stage to try to stop it from getting any worse—awful lessons but essential ones if one is to learn to live, as Wabash insists, humanely in a difficult world.“It was the most teachable moment I’ve experienced during my time at Wabash,” I concluded. A Caterpillar earthmover
is clearly visible in a photo from that day with Rutz overlooking the destruction of a mountain.
So That’s Where It Comes From
The article about Evan Bayless ’12 and his pottery in the Spring 2012 WM (“The Gift Of Creation”) reminded me of a bit of trivia: By 1890 Stoke-on-Trent, England had become a center for pottery. There was ample red clay about, and the potters often, especially in the winter, dug up red clay from the roadways. Thus, creating potter’s holes, or pot holes!
—Jim Thomas ’52, Penobscot, ME
They’re Still There!
When WM Summer Intern Ian Grant ’13 wrote a blog entry on the Wabash Web site about Professor Eliot Williams H’53 and his 1960s research on box turtles, he wondered how the professor tracked the turtles. We received these informative comments—and a question—from the professor’s wife and son: Eliot eventually mounted tiny transmitters on the turtles’ carapaces, and the students who helped with his research tracked the turtles down via receivers tuned to the transmitters’ frequency. When they found a turtle they marked its location on a map of Allee Woods that had been divided into a grid. If a turtle had previously been moved from its habitual
location, it would invariably find its way back.
Eliot’s purpose was to learn how this homing instinct worked. By the process of elimination, he found that sight was not involved; the turtles either found their way by smell, or (more likely) by something related to earth’s magnetic field.
—Jean Williams H’53, Crawfordsville, IN
In the summer my brother and I would drive down to Allee Woods with a Wabash student working and traipse through the woods with a large hoop aluminum antenna on a pole, headphones, and a radio receiver strapped over our shoulders. We would locate the turtles and mark the spot where they were found.
Once Dad had the local ophthalmologist Dr. Alexander sew the eyelids of several turtles temporarily shut. Then we moved them and waited to see if they would wander aimlessly, or still find their way home.
Validating a hunch that the turtles did not normally progress as well on cloudy days when they could not see the sun,
the temporarily sightless terrapins were as clueless to their whereabouts as Dannies at the Wabash-Depauw football game.
Dad told me stories of how he and Bob Petty put a grid of metal stakes allover Allee Woods with numbered aluminum tags on each stake so that theycould locate flora an fauna on a map that they made. This was during the days before GPS.
I wonder if those stakes still exist?
—Bob Williams
WM passed Bob’s question on to Franklin & Marshall College Professor Timothy Sipe ’78, who continued research in Allee Woods this past summer:
Yes, the metal stakes with tags are mostly still there. They were placed at 100’ x 100’ intervals in a grid that spanned the entire tract. The stakes served as sampling and reference points for many decades.
A fair percentage of the stakes have fallen or lost their metal tags, but we still use them to orient ourselves when necessary and possible, especially when we’re hiking or working in a new area.
—Timothy Sipe ’78