SPRING 2012 MONTANAN

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THE MAGAZINE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA | SPRING 2012

The Great Outdoorsman

Steven Rinella, M.F.A. ‘00

BIG THINKING

The Bakken is Rockin’

Oil Rush Keeps UM Grads Busy

UM’s New Global Leadership Initiative

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PUBLISHER James P. Foley

EdItoR-IN-CHIEF John Heaney ’02

dESIGNER Eileen Chontos

PHoto EdItoR Todd Goodrich ’88 EdItoRIAL tEAM Andrea Lewis Rita Munzenrider ’83 Jennifer Sauer ’01 Cary Shimek Allison Squires ’07 CoNtRIBUtING EdItoR Brooke Andrus ’10

INtERN Alyse Backus ’12 AdVISoRY BoARd Denise Dowling ’82 Daryl Gadbow ’75 Beth Hammock Charlie Hood ’61, M.A. ’69 Bill Johnston ’79, M.P.A. ’91 Jed Liston ’82, M.Ed. ’00 Ginny Merriam ’86 Carol Williams ’65 Kurt Wilson ’83

AdVERtISING Eric Elander ’77 REPRESENtAtIVE 406-360-3321 [email protected]

Spring 2012 VoLUME 29 NUMBER 2

EDITORIAL OFFICES

University Relations 325 Brantly Hall The University of Montana Missoula, MT 59812-7642 406-243-2488VOLunTARy SubSCRIpTIOn: $15WEbSITE: www.umt.edu/montanan E-MAIL: [email protected] uM WEbSITE: www.umt.eduThe Montanan is produced by University Relations. It is published three times a year by The University of Montana for its alumni and friends.ChAngE OF ADDRESS: 877-UM-ALUMS or [email protected] Please allow eight weeks for mailings to reflect changes.

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PLEASE RECYCLE YoUR MontananFacebook is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.

www.FACEBook.CoM/MoNtANANMAGAzINE

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ON THE COVER:An oil rig near Sidney is silhouetted as the sun sets.

COVER PHOTO BY DAVID GRUBBS

FEATURES

14 The Bakken BoomBy Ed Kemmick� e Bakken, a vast oil formation that sits below parts of eastern Montana, western North Dakota, and two Canadian provinces, is putting thousands of people to work, including many UM graduates.

20 Call of the WildBy Nate Schweber ’01Steven Rinella, M.F.A. ’00, is a modern-day hunter-gatherer who turned his passion for the outdoors into an adventurous career. His time spent in UM’s Creative Writing Program helped make it happen.

24 Learning Locally, Thinking GloballyBy Erika Fredrickson ’99, M.S. ’09UM’s new Global Leadership Initiative is an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to preparing students for an increasingly interconnected global society.

DEPARTMENTS 3 Letters 5 Around The Oval29 Raising Montana 31 About Alumni 52 Artifacts

WWW.UMT.EDU/MONTANAN MONTANAN SPRING 2012 | 1


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THE MAGAZINE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA | SPRING 2012

The Great Outdoorsman

Steven Rinella, M.F.A. ‘00

BIG THINKING

The Bakken is Rockin’

Oil Rush Keeps UM Grads Busy

UM’s New Global Leadership Initiative

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Steven Rinella, right, bowfishes for pacu, a herbivorous

piranha, in Guyana’s remote Rewa River with a member of the Makushi tribe.

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UM alumni, students, faculty, staff and campus guests have exclusive access to our award-winning University Catering Services. We are ready to serve you at the location of your choice – either on or off-campus.

Let our exceptional service team make your next event something your guests remember. Our chefs will use their expertise to create a menu which perfectly suits your taste and budget. Our menus are created using a wide variety of local, regional and ethnic foods to offer a diverse and satisfying dining experience.

406.243.4899 • www.umt.edu/catering

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FAMILIAR VOICESIn 1967, I was a twenty-two-year-old Marine stationed in Okinawa, Japan, where I saw The University of Montana Jubileers perform not once, but twice. For a Montanan so far away from home, their songs were a welcomed relief to the realities of military service.

Thanks again to the Jubileers for uplifting soldiers’ spirits across the Asian Pacific.Robert Borberg ’72Billings

SONGBIRDSI was downright excited to read the article “Bird Songs” in Around the Oval in the winter 2012 Montanan. As a lover of birds, I have always fed chickadees, robins, finches, etc. What a wonderful idea to create Chickadee Symphony!Avis M. Schmitz Zoanni ’42Helena

THAT RINGS A BELL I read the recent article “The Saga of the Sigma Chi Bell” [winter 2012 Montanan] with interest. I was there when Don Bennett recovered the bell in 1978 and again when the bell was retrieved by Bill Johnston in 1998. As president of the Sigma Chi Beta Delta House Corporation, I oversaw installation of the bell into the Adams Center lobby at Homecoming 2000. The dedication ceremony included a speech by then-University of Montana President George Dennison and was attended by area news media. The Sigma Chi Bell is dedicated to the community of Missoula and members of the Montana armed forces, particularly those who died in combat.

The fraternity is a longtime and proud partner of the University. The Beta Delta chapter of Sigma Chi was chartered in 1906. UM’s first president, Oscar Craig, was a Sigma Chi brother, and a portion of the UM campus came from a land grant by a Sigma Chi.

Thanks for the memories. Rich Thompson ’73Portland, Ore.

The Montanan welcomes letters to the editor. Please sign and include your graduating year

or years of attendance, home address, and phone number or e-mail address.

Send them to: Montanan Editor, 325 Brantly Hall, Missoula, MT 59812 or [email protected].

Because of space limitations, we are not able to include all letters sent to us. Letters may be edited for length or clarity. While universities are places of discussion where good people do not always agree, letters deemed potentially libelous or that malign a person or group will not be published. Opinions expressed in the Montanan do not necessarily reflect those of The University of Montana.

WANTED:YOUR OPINIONS

The Montanan would like to thank the following people for recently donating to the magazine: Dennis and Nina Paulson, Matt Mulligan, Laird Black, Anita and Thomas Gioconda, Alene Kann, William Peery, Edgar and Marilyn Schooley, and Robert Burns.

THAT RINGS A BELL, TOOI just want to express my pleasure in reading the story entitled “The Saga of the Sigma Chi Bell” in the winter 2012 Montanan. I was a member of the Beta Delta chapter of Sigma Chi in the 1940s and remember when the bell was stolen. There aren’t too many of us left from those days.

My education was interrupted by World War II, during which I served in the Pacific for a little more than three years. I returned to school and received degrees in both business and law, with honors. I also was selected for membership in Silent Sentinel, a senior honor society.

After college I was employed by Shell Oil Co. as an attorney in the legal department with duties relating to exploring and drilling for oil and gas. I’ve been licensed to practice law in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Texas. I retired in 1977.

I am now ninety-one years of age. It was nice to see a story in the Montanan that was of great interest to me.Albert C. Angstman ’41, J.D. ’46Kingwood, Texas

“Sigma Chi is a longtime and proud partner of the University. The Beta Delta chapter of Sigma Chi was chartered in 1906. UM’s first president, Oscar Craig, was a Sigma Chi brother, and a portion of the UM campus came from a land grant by a Sigma Chi.”Rich Thompson ’73

UM alumni, students, faculty, staff and campus guests have exclusive access to our award-winning University Catering Services. We are ready to serve you at the location of your choice – either on or off-campus.

Let our exceptional service team make your next event something your guests remember. Our chefs will use their expertise to create a menu which perfectly suits your taste and budget. Our menus are created using a wide variety of local, regional and ethnic foods to offer a diverse and satisfying dining experience.

406.243.4899 • www.umt.edu/catering


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Community replaced my knee, not my lifestyle.For orthopedic treatment, come to Community, we have an entire unit dedicated to orthopedics, and offer the region’s leading rehabilitation programs. We provide western Montana with the best overall orthopedic outcomes, from outpatient procedures to complex total-joint replacements. We’ll help you keep moving

in all directions, especially forward.

If it’s orthopedic care, of course it’s Community. Visit communitymed.org/ortho

Winner

Hiker

communitymed.org/orthoCommunity Medical Center is an independent, local, non-profit hospital.


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The Magazine of The UniversiTy of MonTana | winter 2012

Eye On The TigerJohn Seidensticker ’66, M.S. ’68

Erin Go Bragh

Irish Studies Program

Flourishes at UM

Clean and

GreenUM research Helps rivertop renewables reshape Chemical

industry

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The Sigma Chi Bell, which originally hung from the USS Montana, is displayed in the Adams Center.

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Order tickets online or call the Northern Quest box offi ce: 509.481.6700

JOHN FOGERTY JUNE 15RINGO STARR JULY 13EARTH, WIND & FIRE JULY 19KELLY CLARKSON JULY 22JOURNEY, PAT BENATAR & LOVERBOY JULY 29DARIUS RUCKER AUGUST 4SUGARLAND AUGUST 16HEART SEPTEMBER 9HEART SEPTEMBER 9HEART SEPTEMBER 9HEART

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Lineup is subject to change.

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There came a point during the Big Sky Conference Tournament

championship game when Wayne Tinkle just sat back, crossed his legs, and enjoyed the show put on by his Grizzlies.

“The guys were in a flow,” Tinkle says of that moment, which came in the midst of what he calls the best half of hoops he’s seen in his six years as UM men’s basketball head coach. “All the hard work and effort the group had put in was culminating right there. And to be able to witness that front and center was a thrill.”

The Grizzlies trounced Weber State University, 85-66, in front of more than 7,000 fans squeezed into Dahlberg Arena. The Griz trailed by five points at halftime, but outscored NBA-bound Damian Lillard and the Wildcats 54-30 in the second half. The victory punched the Grizzlies’ ticket to the NCAA Tournament and put an exclamation point on one of the best seasons in program history.

It was the team’s fourteenth straight win, a school record. That streak also was tied for the longest in the nation heading into the Big Dance. The Griz went 15-1 during Big Sky play, including a 7-1 mark on the road, both school records. The title was the program’s eighth, equaling Weber State’s mark for most league championships, and UM won twenty-five games, the second-best mark in school history.

It was the first time since 2000 that UM hosted the Big Sky Tournament and the first time in twenty years the team won the title at home. The Griz earned the right to host by claiming the regular-season championship with a win over the same Wildcats a week prior.

“Having the tournament back in Missoula and cutting the nets down in front of our home faithful was probably our proudest moment,” Tinkle says. “To do that in front of a packed house and for our campus and community brought us a great sense of pride.”

The Griz, who made the program’s ninth trip to the NCAA Tournament, received a thirteen seed and drew the fourth-seeded University of Wisconsin Badgers in Albuquerque, N.M. The game was played in The Pit, a historic venue on the University of New Mexico campus.

Tinkle liked the seed but knew his squad was in for a challenge with the Badgers of the Big Ten Conference.

“A lot of people really liked our draw, thinking it was better than playing teams like Baylor or Missouri,” Tinkle says. “But I knew Wisconsin was a pretty darn good team.”

Though they were competitive for a while, the Griz were outmatched by the Badgers, who won, 73-49.

“The guys didn’t show as well as they wanted to,” Tinkle says. “But the loss will hopefully add some fuel to the fire to get back there next season.”

Tinkle, named Big Sky Conference Coach of the Year, will have three starters returning, including the starting backcourt tandem of Mid-Major All-American and Big Sky Defensive Player of the Year Will Cherry and Big Sky Tournament MVP Kareem Jamar. Forward Mathias Ward, the team’s third leading scorer, also will be back.

Before his thoughts totally shifted to next season, Tinkle took time to reflect on what an incredible run his team had.

“Looking back and having digested it,” Tinkle says, “it’s amazing. When you look at all the records we set, it obviously rings out that it was pretty remarkable. It’s just a real feeling of joy for all the effort that we put in and where it led.”

www.umt.edu/montanan Montanan spring 2012 | 5

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Dance FeverGriz Earn Second NCAA Tournament Berth in Three Seasons

Left: Griz coach Wayne Tinkle cuts down the net after the Griz won the Big Sky Conference Tournament championship at Dahlberg Arena in March.

Below: Senior Derek Selvig shoots over Wisconsin’s Jared Berggren in the second round of the NCAA Tournament in Albuquerque, N.M.

Order tickets online or call the Northern Quest box offi ce: 509.481.6700

JOHN FOGERTY JUNE 15RINGO STARR JULY 13EARTH, WIND & FIRE JULY 19KELLY CLARKSON JULY 22JOURNEY, PAT BENATAR & LOVERBOY JULY 29DARIUS RUCKER AUGUST 4SUGARLAND AUGUST 16HEART SEPTEMBER 9HEART SEPTEMBER 9HEART SEPTEMBER 9HEART

OUTD RSUMMERCONCERTS

Lineup is subject to change.

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LIGHT IT UP

Griz football fans clad in maroon and silver migrated across campus toward Washington-Grizzly Stadium. Youngsters scurried around as their parents made their way to their seats. It looked like any other fall Saturday when the Griz play at

home, except it was April 14, and this wasn’t a typical home game. The crowd—8,731, to be exact—turned out for the annual spring game, marking the first

time the Grizzlies took the turf under the new permanent lights that surround the stadium.Usually the Griz play the spring scrimmage on the road to show appreciation to fans

around the state, but this year the Grizzly Scholarship Association wanted to do things a little differently. With the addition of the lights, it felt like time to bring the scrimmage home.

“First of all, it’s been over a decade since the scrimmage has been played in Missoula,” says Greg Sundberg, GSA executive director. “It’s a great opportunity to bring a piece of the fall back to the spring. It gets that football fever going, and it’s a great way to get people back into the stadium.”

The scrimmage resembled a home game as close as possible, including a tunnel run, announcer, and, of course, Monte and Mo. The GSA sponsored a full tailgate party that featured music, food, and games for kids hosted by student-athletes.

Eric Schindler, a season-ticket holder, traveled from Helena to watch the Griz play.“I think this is a great idea to have the game under the lights,” Schindler says. “I have

traveled to Butte for the scrimmage and watched it in Helena, but this is a great crowd.”All proceeds from the scrimmage benefit UM athletic facilities projects.The game came less than a month after President Royce Engstrom chose not to renew the

contracts of head coach Robin Pflugrad and Director of Athletics Jim O’Day. Mick Delaney, a UM assistant coach since 2008, will be the interim head coach through the 2012 season, while Senior Associate Athletic Director Jean Gee will serve as interim AD. Engstrom plans to have a permanent athletic director in place by autumn semester 2012 and a permanent head coach in time for the 2013 season.

Even with the change in leadership, the team shined under the bright lights. The offense played sharp, scoring fifty-two points and amassing 545 total yards. Four quarterbacks combined to throw for 390 yards and four touchdowns.

“It’s good to see the strength, pride, and tradition of the Montana Grizzlies carry on through the adversity they face right now,” says former kicker Brody McKnight.

The Griz open the season at home September 1 against the University of South Dakota Coyotes, who are led by former UM coach Joe Glenn. —Alyse Backus

Left: Permanent lights shine on Washington-Grizzly Stadium.

Below: Interim head coach Mick Delaney talks to defensive end Josh Harris.

Griz Play Spring Game Under the New Lights

BY THE NUMBERS13: Number of consecutive semesters UM student-athletes have maintained an average cumulative GPA above 3.0

3.06: Cumulative GPA of UM’s 272 student-athletes, compared to 2.91, the cumulative GPA of UM’s general student population

3.69: Cumulative GPA of the women’s cross country team, the highest of UM’s sports teams

20.5: Percentage of student-athletes on the autumn semester dean’s list

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8 | SPRING 2012 MONTANAN

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Green ThumbsStudents Reap Benefits of MemorialGreenhouse Renovation

A disarray of storage bins, discarded junk, and various odds and ends. Until recently, that’s what took

up most of the space in UM’s Memorial Greenhouse.

Today the greenhouse no longer serves as a storage unit. It’s a bustling hub of research that benefits students in the College of Forestry and Conservation.

Where dust once accumulated, students now watch over tiny seedlings, which will be harvested and used in reforestation efforts. Thanks to a recent and ongoing renovation, the greenhouse, which sits next to the Forestry Building, provides students with hands-on learning opportunities that didn’t exist before.

Decades ago, the Memorial Greenhouse was the answer to the University’s concerns that graduate-level forestry students couldn’t complete the needed greenhouse studies. Montana’s inclement weather conditions made year-round fieldwork impossible, and professors actually began discouraging students from pursuing the master’s program in forestry because of the lack of greenhouse space.

Plans for a new greenhouse were taking shape when tragedy struck Montana. In 1949, the Mann Gulch wildfire claimed the lives of thirteen smokejumpers in the Helena National Forest. Six of those firefighters were UM students, three of whom belonged to the School of Forestry. In 1950, the University dedicated the greenhouse to those whose lives were lost. When the building opened its doors in 1951, it became the only structure in the state specifically dedicated to the victims of the Mann Gulch tragedy.

While the greenhouse always remained partly functional, its technology fell behind and lacked modern means to really provide the forestry program with what it needed.

In 2011, after three decades of limited use and with three Dumpsters full of junk removed from the interior, the greenhouse

was modified into 2,500 square feet of bays for potting, sowing, fertilizing, and irrigating seedlings. The greenhouse now supports a seedling nursery program and houses 20,000 seedlings of about fifteen different plant species. Students sell some of the seedlings to conservation partners, which generates revenue that goes directly back into the seedling nursery. UM’s Wildland Restoration Program also uses the greenhouse to grow plants. In addition, the greenhouse hosts elementary school classes and other community groups to teach about the process of growing the seedlings.

Chris Keyes, the director of UM’s Applied Forest Management program and one of the key players in the renovation, says the seedling nursery relies heavily on student greenhouse volunteers and a growing number of community members.

“The vision is to teach not only the University, but bring in the community as well,” Keyes says.

Another goal of the nursery is to turn out UM graduates who have experience in forest regeneration. Keyes says there are more disturbed forests worldwide, and the demand for workers well-versed in reforestation is rising. Many different majors, from wildland restoration to international conservation, can benefit from greenhouse experience.

“It’s not just about growing seedlings,” Keyes says. “It’s about problem solving to go out there and do it. Students should be involved every step of the way.”—Alyse Backus

and irrigating seedlings. The greenhouse now supports a seedling

UM students tend to seedlings in the Memorial Greenhouse.

WHERE’S YOUR GRIZ BEEN? ANDREW STOCKWELL ’01 dons his Griz football jersey on top of Uhuru Peak, the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. It was taken the morning of February 10. At 19,340 feet, Mount Kilimanjaro is the tallest mountain in Africa. “My father and I traveled to Tanzania to climb the mountain as a way to celebrate his sixtieth birthday,” Stockwell says. “This was a return trip. We first climbed Kilimanjaro together in February 1992 to celebrate my thirteenth birthday and his fortieth.” Congratulations, Andrew. You have won a $50 gift card to The Bookstore at UM. Do you have a photo of yourself wearing your Griz gear in an amazing place or while on an incredible adventure? If so, send it along with a brief description to [email protected]. Winners will see their photo published in the Montanan and will receive a $50 gift card to The Bookstore at UM. To be considered, photos must be in focus with the UM or Griz logo clearly visible.

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Greetings!

Welcome to the spring 2012 issue of the Montanan. This is an issue that highlights so many of the wonderful accomplishments of

our students, graduates, and faculty. The people who are associated with The University of Montana are what make it a great institution, and I take tremendous pride in what those individuals and groups have accomplished and what they contribute to the University, to Montana, to our nation, and beyond.

The past several months have presented an especially challenging time for the University. Unfortunately, like college and university campuses across the country, we have experienced a surge in reports of sexual assault and related matters. Those of you who have followed the news media know that we have been dealing with this matter in an ongoing and high-profile way. We have taken as proactive of an approach as possible, with our goals being to bring a halt to sexual assault on our campus, to care for those who have been assaulted, and to rid our learning environment of those who commit assault. Many people have poured their hearts into this effort. We have made tough decisions, and we are emerging from this episode as a stronger, safer, and smarter campus.

Along the way we have kept our nose to the grindstone; we have kept our focus on our strategic directions outlined in UM 2020: Building a University for the Global Century. Our vision is to be one of the nation’s leading institutions, with a globally focused approach to education, research and creative scholarship, and outreach. I am proud to say we have taken many important steps toward fulfilling that vision.

For example, we recently launched the Global Leadership Initiative, a program for undergraduate students that runs parallel to their coursework and activity associated with their major field of study. The first class of GLI Fellows, selected from the incoming freshman cohort, embarked upon its examination of the “big questions” through special interdisciplinary small seminar courses. In subsequent years, the Fellows will participate in a Models of Leadership program, a major experience beyond the classroom such as study abroad, and a capstone course in which they work with one another to design, research, and propose a solution to a significant problem or opportunity with global implications. Our GLI kick-off event occurred just weeks ago, and you can read about it in this issue of the Montanan.

We strengthened our portfolio of graduate research programming through the addition of a new Ph.D. program in systems ecology, an interdisciplinary approach to the study of ecosystems on a scale from molecules to mountain ranges. The first group of students has already enrolled. Supporting that effort was the establishment of an Institute on Ecosystems in cooperation with other institutions in the state.

Another exciting new program is the addition of a minor in Arabic studies. At the strong encouragement of our students, faculty members designed and received approval for the program, and some students will graduate this May having fulfilled the requirements for the minor. Our Mansfield Center has operated a highly successful Defense Critical Language and Culture Training Program for the past few years, and I recently had the opportunity to see firsthand students immersed in the study of Pashto.

The University of Montana is moving forward into the future, focusing on educational opportunities for students that will position them to be the leaders of our state and nation. I hope you enjoy reading about their success in these pages. Thank you for your interest and support!

Royce C. EngstromPresident

The National Science Foundation has awarded Sunburst Sensors a $2.5

million contract to provide instruments for its studies.

Sunburst Sensors is owned by Mike DeGrandpre, a chemistry professor at UM, and Jim Beck, the company president.

DeGrandpre invented Sunburst’s Submersible Autonomous Moored Instruments [SAMIs]. The instruments measure pH and the amount of dissolved carbon dioxide in bodies of water. More than 100 of these oceanic instruments will be manufactured in Missoula.

DeGrandpre developed Sunburst Sensors in 1999 as a way to bridge his research to the private sector. Beck, a mechanical engineer, joined the company in 2005 to diversify and improve Sunburst’s product line. The company employs a lab technician, two engineers, a research scientist, and an accountant.

DeGrandpre and his company will work with the Consortium for Ocean Leadership, a nonprofit organization that represents ninety-nine leading public and private ocean research and educational institutions. Its mission is to advance research and education to promote effective ocean policies.

“Awarding the Ocean Observatories Initiative contract to Sunburst Sensors is affirmation of the quality of our technology and is a credit to the hard work by my business partner, Jim Beck, and the employees at Sunburst Sensors,” DeGrandpre says. “Through this contract, Sunburst Sensors will become a leading contributor to our understanding of the ocean carbon cycle and ocean acidification.”

Sunburst Sensors got its start in UM’s MonTEC business incubator and now has an office located on West Broadway in Missoula.

UM PROFESSOR’S COMPANY EARNS $2.5 MILLION CONTRACT

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The President’s Perspective

interest and support!

Royce C. Engstrom

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224,884: Record-setting number of rides given by ASUM’s bus service during autumn semester 201168: Percentage of UM faculty who spend at least one hour

each week engaging in community or public service, compared to 50 percent at other public institutions

THE BOTTOM LINE:

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Until this past autumn semester, student-veterans at UM had one place on campus to call their

own: a desk in the back of a cramped room in the Emma Lommasson Center. This is where they would go to check on their education benefits and report any difficulties. The desk, piled high with paperwork, and the harsh light from overhead fluorescent bulbs didn’t make for a very welcoming environment, especially for those coming back from a war zone.

The new Veterans Education and Transition Services [VETS] office, however, has changed all that. The office is a converted house that sits on the southeast edge of campus, serving as a one-stop shop for administrative tasks dealing with student-veterans’ education benefits, as well as a place to decompress and transition into the college lifestyle.

“I tried to make my old office as inviting as possible, but it just couldn’t be done,” VETS Director Justin Raap says. “There was no privacy. I used to see vets

only when they needed their money, and now I see them all the time. They actually come in and talk now.”

College is different for vets. They go from a world of intense structure to total freedom. The transition from starched uniforms, rigid daily schedules, and the stress of war to textbooks and college football games can be difficult. Many are still transitioning back to civilian life and can feel a loss of the camaraderie they experienced in the military. Raap, a veteran himself, envisioned a place that alleviated that sense of loss and addressed student-veterans’ roles at the University.

“Vets are a very distinct subculture,” Raap says. “We definitely have a series of shared experiences that greatly differs from a standard student. It’s going from making no decisions to doing whatever you want. I get a lot of deer-in-headlights expressions on that one. Freedom of choice is a completely foreign concept.”

For Chris Goidich, a first-year UM student who came to Missoula after serving more than twenty years in the Navy and Army, the VETS office is a safety zone.

“This gives vets a place to go to be a unit again and have a home,” Goidich says. “It is a feeling of belonging again.”

The goal is to give vets some breathing room away from the hustle and bustle of campus. Oversized couches line the walls, and flat screen TVs often play movies while a warm pot of chili simmers in the kitchen.

The VETS office runs under Raap with the help of six work-study students, including Goidich.

“We really care about being here,” Goidich says. “Justin has taken people and given them lives again. I had nothing when I came out here, and he gave me support.”

In addition to providing assistance with administrative needs, a computer lab is available for student-veterans to print, copy, and fax for free. The center regularly hosts cookouts, military celebrations, and get-togethers for UM veterans and their families, as well as providing a space just to talk.

Raap hopes to extend the office’s services to include more peer-to-peer mentoring and programs focused on student retention.

“I really want to be able to pull back and let vets find answers themselves,” says Raap. “That’s what they are used to doing.” —Alyse Backus

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“Dang! This fish is really taking me to school!”

Meet Grizwald, The University of Montana’s cartoon bear. In the winter 2012 issue of the Montanan, we asked readers to submit captions interpreting Grizwald’s actions in a humorous way. This issue’s winning caption was sent in by JIM DALBEC of Great Falls. Congratulations, Jim, you’ve won a Griz stadium blanket.Stay tuned! In an upcoming issue of the Montanan, a new cartoon featuring Grizwald will need a caption. You could be the next winner!

NEW DIGSVETS Office Helps Student-Veterans Transition to College Life UM student-veterans Nick Jones, front right,

a senior in finance, and Daniel Buchholtz, a sophomore in marketing, relax in the new VETS office before class.

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UM STUDENT ZACHARY BROWN recently was awarded a $30,000 Truman Scholarship and—for the second time—a $5,000 Udall Scholarship.

Brown, a junior, majors in environmental studies with a minor in climate change studies. He is a 2009 graduate of Bozeman High School.

“This just makes me feel very grateful,” Brown says. “The process for these scholarships is very intensive, and it takes a group effort among a lot of folks on campus to make this happen. I never could have done this on my own, and I appreciate how they helped create this life-changing opportunity for me.”

Brown is UM’s twelfth Truman Scholar and thirty-fifth Udall Scholar. He also is a Presidential Leadership Scholar in UM’s Davidson Honors College. He plans to study and then work in water law with an emphasis on water allocation, land resources conflicts, and public diplomacy. He intends to work for a nonprofit organization and engage in politics to advocate for water policy and other environmental issues.

Many leadership activities helped Brown win the prestigious scholarships. He served as a board member, project coordinator, and grant writer for 1,000 New Gardens-Montana. His work on that project led to him being one of three students invited to attend the first Clinton Global Initiative-America meeting in Chicago in June 2011.

As outreach coordinator for the UM Forum for Living with Appropriate Technology, Brown managed the donation and installation of a 2.8-kilowatt solar array. Brown also represented the state of Montana at the Henry Clay Center Student Congress in June 2011. He served as a watershed restoration intern for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition during summer 2011 and co-wrote a thirty-page research report on watershed restoration and climate change.

In addition, Brown co-founded and organizes events for the Montana Student Environmental Alliance, which brings students from schools across Montana together for environmental training and planning at regional conferences. He also is a project developer for the Kless Revolving

Energy Loan Fund energy-saving projects and currently is working on developing an energy-efficiency initiative for the Montana University System.

Brown participated in a UM climate change studies study-abroad program to Vietnam, and as a freshman served as one of the UM student representatives to the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

This year, the Truman Scholarship Foundation, established by Congress in 1975, awarded fifty-four scholarships to students who demonstrate outstanding potential for public service and are committed to making a difference through careers in government, the nonprofit or advocacy sectors, or education.

UM student David Schaad also won a $350 Udall Honorable Mention award.

45: States represented by visitors to the Montana Museum of Art & Culture at UM during the past two years 774: Career wins for Lady Griz

coach Robin Selvig in his thirty-four seasons at UM14: UM’s rank for producing Peace

Corps volunteers among schools with 5,001 to 15,000 undergrads

UM Student Awarded Prestigious Scholarships

the Montana University System.

Brown and former President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative-America meeting in Chicago this past June

The University was rocked in recent months by allegations of sexual assaults involving UM students. The news prompted President Royce Engstrom to launch a special investigation

into the matter conducted by outside investigator Diane Barz, a former Montana Supreme Court judge.

Engstrom released his final report on the matter in late March, which brought the investigation to a close.

“The events of the past few months have delivered a critical message to the University,” Engstrom writes in the report. “We have learned much that will help us to be a safer community, fostering a learning environment in which our students can fulfill their dreams. Now we must focus on the goal of eliminating sexual assault from our campus. I will expect and hold accountable every member of my administration and indeed every member of the campus as a whole to do his or her utmost to address that goal.”

The report details steps UM is taking to improve student safety. These include educational programs, such as requiring all students to take an online tutorial about sexual assault and working with

the Missoula mayor’s office on a program that emphasizes calling 9-1-1 to report a crime. UM strengthened its partnerships with individuals and programs in the community that provide resources to survivors and work to end sexual violence. UM also will continue a series of public forums and discussions regarding sexual assault, as well as other educational efforts.

The administration also revamped UM’s Student-Athlete Conduct Code, creating an Athletic Conduct Team to enforce policies and impose penalties. Code infractions are now clearly defined, with penalties outlined for each category.

The University created a seven-member team, which includes the president, that will convene when a sexual assault is reported. UM also will hire an additional police officer to increase patrols of residence halls, and campus police will immediately contact city police in the event of assault, according to the memorandum of understanding between the two organizations.

Engstrom’s final report is available online at www.umt.edu/president/sexualassault.

UM Takes Steps Toward Creating a Safer Campus Environment

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The Montana Board of regents recently approved a new minor in Arabic studies at UM. Coursework in the minor is designed to help students achieve an advanced level in Arabic based on standards of foreign language proficiency established by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. The content of the Arabic studies minor includes linguistic and cultural components such as the orthographic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, and sociolinguistic systems of the Arabic language; and the literature, history, politics, geography, religions, economy, and cultures of the Arab world.

The regents also approved a new interdisciplinary minor in global public health at UM. Coursework will emphasize a global perspective on issues of public health policy and science and applications to international and domestic situations. students will learn about public health challenges, such as parasitic and vector-borne diseases, HiV/AiDs prevention and treatment, tuberculosis, climate change impacts, trauma and violence, avian influenza, obesity, and the role of indigenous healers. Courses will use insights from disciplinary approaches that include epidemiology, anthropology, biology, political science, community health planning, communication studies, and ethics.

UM recently created its first Retirees’ Association. The association will provide all UM retirees the opportunity to remain involved with the University community through a variety of specially designed activities, events, and service opportunities. “The creation of this new association acknowledges the significant contributions retirees have made to UM and facilitates their active engagement in the campus community,” says Amy Kinch, UM faculty development coordinator. The UM retirees’ Association is open to all faculty, staff, and administrator retirees of UM, including those from the College of Technology, as well as their spouses/partners and the spouses/partners of deceased retirees.

Washington Post popular culture critic Hank Stuever will be the 2012 T. Anthony Pollner Professor at UM’s school of Journalism. stuever will teach a course on pop culture coverage and will mentor students working at the Montana Kaimin, the campus newspaper. stuever joined the Post in 1999. He was a feature writer for a decade before becoming the paper’s TV critic in 2009. The pollner professorship was created in 2000 to honor the memory of UM alumnus Anthony pollner. it brings to campus each fall a nationally prominent journalist who teaches for the semester in the journalism school. “i’ve always secretly hoped i would get a chance like this someday, to not only teach a class and share what i know, but also learn from a group of committed students who care deeply about journalism and writing,” stuever says. “And i’m impressed by what [UM] and the pollner family have created with this unique position.”

A team of students and instructors with the UM College of Technology tested the limits of an

energy-efficient vehicle they spent several months building when they traveled to a national competition this spring.

The team—led by Brad Layton, director of the COT’s Energy Technology Program, and energy tech student Grant Myhre—brought its aluminum-framed, solar-powered car to the Shell Eco Marathon March 29-April 1 in Houston.

The competition challenged teams of high school and college students from around the country to design, build, and test energy-efficient vehicles. It took place on the city streets of downtown Houston.

Though the team experienced some technical difficulties during the competition and was just shy of the fifteen mile-per-hour pace needed to post an official run, Layton called the Eco Marathon “a fantastic learning experience.”

“My team really went above and beyond my expectations and built a car that we are really proud of,” he says. “And it definitely turned some heads at the competition.”

Layton says the team built the entire vehicle, which they’ve worked on since September, with minimal outside machining assistance, including all the design, solar cell soldering, fiberglass layup, circuit design, welding, and assembly.

“Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this entire competition is that the car must complete the six-mile race with more energy than it had at the starting line,” Layton says. “It’s essentially like finishing a trip without ever stopping for gasoline and having more in the tank than when you left. The trick is to pull in more photons than you burn.”

In next year’s competition, Layton says, the solar division will be combined with the electric one, which should make for some interesting vehicles.

“In fact, my students are already planning for next year’s competition in hopes of another solid performance,” he says.

UM COT Team Competes in Shell Eco Marathon

The team, from left, Assistant Professor Brad Layton, Jeremy Manning, Kelsey Malsam, Shaun Raunig, Grant Myhre, Andrew Machain, Jessie Sedler, and Michael Eidum.

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Clayton Christian didn’t take the traditional route when it came to college. He bounced in and out of school for ten years before completing his degree in business management and finance at UM. The Montana native left college twice to take ranch management positions in Hawaii and Montana. Before graduating from college, he bought his first business, Stewart Title of Missoula County, Inc. Christian values higher education, in part because he took a different route to earn his degree. He recently assumed his new role as Montana’s commissioner of higher education after serving six years on the Board of Regents, four of those years in the chairman or vice chairman role. Christian has three children. His daughter Lauren is a UM senior. Lyndsey, his youngest daughter, is a freshman at Montana State University, and his son, Colter, is an eighth-grader in Missoula. His wife, Dawn, completed her doctoral degree in physical therapy at UM.

Why did you return to school? We moved back to Missoula when my wife enrolled in physical therapy school. I went back to school at that time. It always felt like I would finish. It was just a matter of blending it in with life. From the day I left, I assumed I would return and finish my degree, and I got the opportunity to come back and finish at UM.

What was it like to be a nontraditional student at UM? At the time, I was working full-time and had a family. In a lot of ways, it really helped me focus on what was important. As an older student, you are on a different track. I was there to get it done. I took a lot of credits and it took me a couple of years to finish.

What was your experience like on the Board of Regents? Like any new board member, you have a sense of what you are getting into, but really don’t know until the work begins. It really became a passion for me. I’ve always appreciated higher education. I feel like it’s the driver behind not only personal success but also economic success for the state. It creates opportunities for individuals, states, and countries. As a board member, I felt it was

extremely rewarding to help set policy for the state and help the 48,000 students in the system.

When the search began for the next commissioner of higher education, you were surprised to hear about your nomination. What was that like for you? I was thrilled to be chair of the Board of Regents and really liked working at that level. My family has been very supportive of the work I have done on the board. I spent time with my family in discussion about the job of commissioner. They know I find it really valuable, and that it has become a passion for me to invest myself in higher education. But the commissioner nomination took me by surprise.

What are you looking forward to as you take over the role of commissioner? I have worked closely with [outgoing] Commissioner Sheila Stearns. I think we have an excellent system, and we are moving in a good direction. I am not looking to change directions. I feel I can bring some continuity and keep moving down the same path. Our focus is access, affordability, and efficiency. My priorities for the past six years as a board member will be my priorities as commissioner.

What have you learned from Commissioner Stearns? I have learned a lot from Sheila. The most important concept is that we are in public education and we are publicly funded. Sheila had an incredible ability to reach out to Montanans and policymakers across the state and disseminate the message of what higher education can do for individuals and the state.

What are your goals for the Montana University System? As the board’s CEO, it was important for me to understand the

regents’ priorities and the direction they want to go. It’s mostly what you would expect. For example, support for faculty and staff, need-based aid for students, graduate education and research, and an integrated information system. The integrated-systems approach is something I have a real interest in because I think it would improve the experience for students. It allows students to move more freely between universities. From a student’s perspective, instead of having to choose between fourteen different institutions, they can choose the MUS.

What do you think are the strengths of the MUS? The overriding strength is we have been able to attract an unbelievable amount of talent in our faculty, staff, and administrators. That’s our greatest strength and greatest challenge. We have to figure out how we can retain that high-quality talent.

What were some of your favorite classes at UM? I really enjoyed the business classes that I took. But roadside geology is one that sticks in my mind as one of the best classes, which is the great thing about a college education. It provides a broad set of opportunities out there, in and out of your major.

—Interview by Alyse Backus


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regents’ priorities and the direction they

New Montana Commissioner of Higher Education Clayton Christian

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The Bakken BoomJohn Olson has lived in Sidney for forty-eight years, so he’s seen oil booms. But he’s never seen anything like the Bakken boom now rolling across eastern Montana and western North Dakota.

The Bakken Boom

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Oil Rush Keeps Many UM Alums Hard at Work

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A truck hauls oil away from a rig near Sidney.



seeing it for yourself. On a recent trip there, he says, he counted thirty-one semi-trucks lined up at one intersection, trying to turn onto Highway 2.

Tom Richmond, administrator of the Montana Board of Oil and Gas Conservation, was exaggerating, but not by much, when he described the housing situation in the Williston area.

“Those chicken coops are starting to look pretty valuable,” he says. “The chickens are going to have to find another place.”

The Bakken is an oil-bearing formation that stretches beneath 200,000 square miles of Montana, North Dakota, and two Canadian provinces. It was named for Henry Bakken, the Williston-area farmer

on whose land the formation was discovered. Vertical wells have been tapping the Bakken since the 1950s, but it would take another forty years for the right combination of technology to make it possible to really capitalize on the vast reserves of oil.

That combination involves horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing—the forcing of sand, water, and a mix of chemicals under tremendous pressure through perforated steel pipes thousands of feet underground. The “fracking,” as it is known, creates fissures in the rock, through which crude oil trapped in the formation slowly seeps out, ready to be drawn to the surface. Fracking is controversial in many parts of the country, but Richmond says in the Bakken, the deepest reservoirs of freshwater sit 7,000 feet above the layers where the fracking takes place.

In any case, if you combine the new technology with high oil prices—they were hovering around $105 a barrel in late March—you’ve got the Bakken boom. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are about four billion barrels of recoverable oil using existing technology in Montana and North Dakota.

Those kinds of numbers keep a lot of people busy, including many UM graduates.

Layaka Mann, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geology from UM, loves the excitement of the oil business.

“Anytime there’s a new, big thing, I want to be the first one there,” she says.

Mann says she stayed at UM to earn her master’s because she wanted to study

S idney, whose population was pegged at 5,100 in the 2010 census, is expected to gain another 6,000 to

9,000 residents in the next few years. Three new motels are expected to open this spring, and their 225 beds will double the number available in Sidney. Apartments that rented for $300 a month barely a year ago are now going for $1,500 or even $2,000 a month.

There are obvious benefits for business people like Olson, who graduated from The University of Montana with a bachelor’s degree in education in 1962. He is the president and owner of Blue Rock Products, which distributes soft drinks and wholesale beer and wine in eastern Montana and western North Dakota.

“Our sales have gone right through the roof,” he says. “I guess we’re the number one Pepsi plant in the country right now, so we’re enjoying some notoriety.”

The downside is that office assistants who made $11 to $13 an hour a year or two ago now command $17 to $21 an hour. Truckers with a commercial driver’s license can make $80,000 to $110,000 a year in the oil fields, with overtime.

“It’s pretty hard to compete with that kind of situation,” Olson says.

And Sidney is not the epicenter of the Bakken boom. That would be Williston, just over the border in North Dakota. Its population has doubled since the 2010 census to reach 25,000, and projections are that it might hit 60,000 in three to five years.

In early March, North Dakota officially became the third-highest oil-producing state in the country, behind Texas and Alaska, and it is expected to overtake Alaska within a year. North Dakota had 6,600 wells producing oil in January, and the state has been flooded with job seekers from all over the country and beyond. In January, North Dakota had the lowest unemployment rate—3.2 percent—in the country. In second-place Nebraska, the rate was 4 percent.

Olson says the scale of activity in Williston is hard to describe without

This page: Sidney has seen a significant increase in traffic on its main streets.Opposite page: A flare burns off gases near an oil rig in Richland County.

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under geology Professor James Sears. It was Sears who suggested in 2004 that she apply to work for Sunburst Consulting in Billings. She was the company’s eighth hire, and she spent her early years with Sunburst as a field geologist in North Dakota. She worked long hours many days in a row, and she was the consulting geologist on one of the first exploration wells in the new phase of the Bakken boom. It was a dry hole, unfortunately, but she got her opportunity “to be the first one there.”

Drilling in the Bakken is enormously complicated, and Mann’s job when she started was to interpret a steady flow of information coming up from underground and make sure the drill bit was staying on track.

“When you’re going two miles horizontally, two miles underground, you have to use a lot of data,” she says. “You have to make sure all the trends you’re seeing make sense. But by the time we get the information, the bit might be 100 feet ahead of the information you’re getting.”

She likened her job to driving down the interstate looking in the rearview mirror while trying to stay between the lines.

Mann is now a partner in Sunburst, which employs 125 full-time and contract workers. Sunburst also has nineteen UM-trained geologists on the payroll. Mann spends most of her time in the Billings office these days, but she knows she’ll get back in the field again.

“I’m waiting for that special project to come up that I can’t stand not doing myself,” she says.

Another UM graduate with a degree in geology, Patrick Montalban ’81, put himself through college by working as a roughneck during the summers. His father, Joseph, started as a roughneck in Alberta, Canada, and went on to establish several oil companies. Patrick’s son, also Joseph, a 2009 UM graduate with a degree in business marketing, was the one who pushed Patrick toward the Bakken.

Patrick spent so many years drilling for oil in Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and Texas, he never thought he’d get back to Montana and North Dakota. His company, headquartered in Cut Bank, now has an interest in seven wells in Sheridan and Roosevelt counties in northeastern Montana and two counties over the state line in North Dakota. The company also has acquired 24,000 acres in Sheridan County.

A friend of Montalban’s and a fellow ’81 graduate of UM, Carter Stewart, played a big role in discovering the western end of the Elm Coulee oil field in Richland County, where virtually all of the Bakken activity in Montana is centered.

Though the Elm Coulee is not as big as the plays in North Dakota, most of the 700 active wells in Montana are there, and some industry observers expect increased activity in Montana. As it is, taxes on oil and gas production in Montana brought in about

“Anytime there’s a new, big thing, I want to be the first one there.”

Layaka Mann

From left: Carter Stewart, Joseph Montalban, and Patrick Montalban


Bakken Feature.indd 17 4/18/12 12:14 PM

$2 billion for local and state government from 2000 to 2011.

The Bakken boom has had a big ripple effect on the economy, creating opportunities for hundreds of other businesses and dozens of trades and professions. That was brought home to Billings Area Chamber of Commerce President John Brewer on a recent trip to Williston. Brewer says Target Logistics is the biggest operator of “man camps” in the Bakken. The company provides more than 3,000 rooms for oil field workers and has a staff of 350—chefs, housekeepers, builders, and maintenance people—to meet their needs. Target Logistics serves 9,000 meals a day, Brewer says, and he learned that most of those meals are provided by Sysco Food Services in Billings.

In addition, Brewer says, an engineering company in Billings is working on a 3,000-home subdivision in Williston. Partly because of the housing shortage, many Montanans, from Billings and all over the state, commute to the Bakken, often working for two weeks and then returning home for a week.

“It’s just like migrant workers working in Dubai,” says Patrick Barkey, director of the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at UM. “They’re working and shipping their money home.”

Above: These man camps are set up near Trenton, N.D. The camps dot the countryside around the Bakken.

Left: Steve Ruffatto, left, and John Lee are attorneys at Crowley Fleck in Billings who work on oil and gas projects.

One indicator of the size of the boom, Barkey says, is a comparison of wage and salary disbursements across the state. The bureau tracks those figures in the seven largest cities in Montana, and in the rest of the state separately. Last year, nearly all the major cities performed below the state average, mostly because the oil- and gas-producing counties are doing so well. A growth rate of 4 percent a year would put a county in the top quartile statewide, Barkey says, and from the second quarter of 2010 to the second quarter of 2011, wages and salaries grew 16.2 percent in Richland County and 11.9 percent in

Fallon County.In Richland

County in particular, Barkey says, “this has not been kind of a one-quarter

wonder here. This has clearly taken off.”Barkey acknowledged that high gas

prices, while good for the oil-producing counties, can put a drag on other sectors of the economy. But higher energy prices are still a net benefit for Montana because energy production is such a large part of the economy, he says.

Barkey says the Bakken boom appears to have some staying power, mainly because emerging economies around the world are adding great numbers of people to the middle class, creating an enormous

“It’s just like migrant workers working in Dubai. They’re working and shipping their money home.”



demand for natural resources of all kinds.Steve Ruffatto, an attorney with the

Crowley Fleck law firm in Billings, says the Bakken boom does appear to be different from booms in the past, mostly because it is driven as much by advances in technology as by the price of oil.

But Ruffatto, a UM law school grad who focuses on natural resources and has been with Crowley Fleck since 1976, says he probably is more cautious than most people, having been through a couple of booms. Crowley Fleck, the biggest law firm in Montana and North Dakota, has been hiring in recent years at a time when many firms scaled back, and it now has thirty-five attorneys doing work in oil and gas development matters.

John Lee, chairman of Crowley’s energy department, remembers doing title work on what turned out to be the discovery well for the Elm Coulee field. It was also the first horizontal well in Richland County.

“It basically kind of snowballed as the technology evolved,” Lee says.

Despite the continuing boom, Ruffatto says he can’t help but be wary. “I just expect that circumstances will develop that will cause it to diminish,” he says. “I’m

the one who’s saying, ‘This will pass.’ It’s a cyclical business.”

Over in Sidney, few people are trying to figure out how long the boom will last. It’s all they can do to deal with its everyday effects.

Olson, the owner of Blue Rock Products, mentioned “the horrendous increase in traffic,” new demands on law enforcement and schools, and the never-ending need for new roads and increased water and sewer capacity.

All the heavy truck traffic is crumbling roads in the county, Olson says, which takes a toll on his fleet of delivery trucks. And it’s so hard to find a mechanic in Sidney that he sometimes has to have his trucks towed 270 miles to Billings for repairs.

“The list goes on and on,” he says.Cami Skinner can sympathize

with Olson. A native of Dagmar in northeastern Montana, Skinner earned a business administration degree from UM in 2003 and an M.B.A. in 2006.

Ed Kemmick studied journalism at UM in the 1970s and has worked for newspapers in Minnesota and Montana for more than thirty years. He is now a reporter and columnist for the Billings Gazette. His work has appeared in Montana Quarterly, Parade Magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, and the recently published anthology West of 98. The Big Sky, By and By, a collection of his stories, columns, and essays, was published last year.

She is now an agricultural and business banker for Wells Fargo in Sidney and, as of January, president of the Sidney Area Chamber of Commerce.

Skinner says the population of Sidney is still given as 5,000, but if you add the people living in RVs, nearby man camps, motels, and trailers, the population has been estimated at anywhere between 6,000 and 9,000.

Despite all the impacts on Sidney, Skinner says “in many regards, daily life seems very much the same,” while “every business, for the most part, is seeing growth.”

The school district is trying hard to keep up with the growth, and it is working with the city and county to accommodate all the growing pains, Skinner says, “but I don’t know if you can ever get ahead of the curve we’re in right now.”

In a part of the state that has struggled for decades with periodic drought, wild swings in agricultural commodity prices, and the persistent feeling that its needs are ignored by the powers that be in Helena, most people are unabashedly thrilled with the boom. You can put Mann, the consulting geologist, in that category.

“I can’t tell you how wonderful it’s been,” she says. “It’s given me the opportunity to stay in the place I love. And now I have the opportunity to offer other people that chance.”

An oil drilling rig near Trenton, N.D.



Modern-Day Hunter-Gatherer Steven Rinella ’00

Turns Passion for Outdoors into Adventurous Career


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alumni profile

It’s part of author and journalist Deirdre McNamer’s job to hear wild stories. After all, she teaches creative writing at The University of Montana.

One story she overheard in the late 1990s still stands out. A charismatic student who regularly brought her “little bloody packets of deer meat for my freezer,” a guy who wrote a memorable essay for class about once expecting to die after eating a mess of mountain mushrooms, said he had a big snapping turtle that he planned to make into soup.

“He was a big hunter, forager, and gatherer,” McNamer says. “He had a fervent and detailed interest in where food comes from and the outdoors, and he had just fallen in love with Montana.”

The student was Steven Rinella, author of two books and host of The Sportsman Channel television show MeatEater. Rinella is a Michigan native, who now finds himself living in New York City, whose zest for the outdoors met its perfect match in Montana’s wilderness. While earning his Master of Fine Arts degree in UM’s Creative Writing Program, Rinella made the outdoors his second classroom. His adventures under the Big Sky were the template for a career spent circling the globe, writing about hunting and advocating for the habitat that wild food needs to grow.

“There’s an energy and urgency to his writing that’s almost as if there wouldn’t be anything for dinner if he didn’t get it done,” says best-selling author Ian Frazier, one of Rinella’s early mentors.

Rinella’s exploits have taken him from an unexplored river in the Philippines on assignment for Outside magazine; to South America, Vietnam, and Hawaii to film TV episodes; to the Alaska wilderness for a bison hunt that became the hook for his second book, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon. His career trajectory was set, says his brother Matt Rinella, by his move from the Midwest to Montana.

“Steve’s interests were pretty much galvanized by the time he was twelve,” says Matt Rinella, a U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist in Miles City. “And he came to Montana because it seemed like the ideal place to chase those pursuits.”

Opposite page: Steven Rinella glasses for blacktail deer on Prince of Wales Island in southeast Alaska.

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Rinella rafts out a load of moose meat in the Alaska Range.



Grand Valley State University, the price of muskrat pelts nosedived. Rinella thought he might try his luck writing.

He road tripped to Montana, and it set his mind reeling. He remembers gazing from Interstate 90 out at mountains bigger than any he’d yet seen and wondering, “What is the delivery mechanism by which you go from being on the road to being on the top of those things?” He fished Rock Creek one day, and at night he and his brother caroused downtown Missoula, ate a MacKenzie River pizza, and shut down Charlie B’s, that quintessential North Higgins Avenue dive. The next morning, on a whim, Rinella walked over to the UM creative writing department, took an application from program director Kate Gadbow, and applied.

Gadbow says Rinella, who was in the program from 1997 through 2000, proved to be a great student because of his gunscope focus. He just wanted to write magazine articles about the outdoors, not fiction, not poetry. Rinella helped revitalize the program’s nonfiction curriculum, which had atrophied some since the recent retirement of heralded professor and Montana wordsmith William Kittredge, Gadbow says.

“Steven had a real directed idea of what he wanted to do,” she says. “He was really helpful in nurturing the idea that nonfiction could be a separate part of the Creative Writing Program, and a valid one.”

For Rinella, the classroom came second to that big Montana wild. He set about trying to walk every game trail in the state. His partner in exploration was his brother Matt, then a student at Montana State University in Bozeman.

“We lived in the mountains,” Rinella says. “We hit it so hard that by the time I finished grad school, I knew that state better than a lot of guys who grew up there.”

Rinella hunted black bear near Thompson Falls and scoured the Sapphire Mountains and the Lee Metcalf Wilderness Area for elk. He picked morel mushrooms by the North Fork of the

Flathead River and thought he might die by an Idaho riverbank after eating seven different species of wild fungus. He ate sushi made of Flathead Lake mackinaw. Fatefully, in September 1999, he found an old bison skull deep in the Madison Mountains, kickstarting an obsession with that animal.

“Steve was a guy that you could always have a great outdoor adventure with,” says Ben Bloch, a Madison Valley artist who was friendly with Rinella when they both

lived in Missoula. “And he carved out a pretty interesting niche for himself as an honorable sportsman.”

One day, working as a range picker at the University Golf Course for extra money, Rinella says he had “a nervous breakdown,” driving inside a cage, getting pelted by little white balls. He suddenly was struck by the

“I actually wanted to be a professional trapper until about the time I was twenty,” Steven Rinella says, leaning back on a furry couch cushion made from the pelt of a beaver he caught in Wyoming. It’s unusual décor to see, and an awfully unusual statement to hear, in New York City. The traffic route to Rinella’s fashionable Fort Greene neighborhood in Brooklyn courses through the borough’s gritty, urban downtown, where the only trace of Rinella’s writing subjects is a storefront chicken shop called Buffalo Boss. He lives on the ground floor of a handsome brownstone building that is far more Cliff Huxtable than, say, Jack London.

And street parking? Fuhgeddaboudit. The irony isn’t lost on Rinella.“My life’s goal was to spend time in wild places. It’s been the

guiding principle of my life, so it’s perplexing to me how the achievement of that, the fulfillment of that, is to live here,” says Rinella, age thirty-eight. “I spend more time outdoors than anyone I know.”

Rinella’s conversation is like his prose: open, autobiographical, and filled with funny anecdotes. Dressed in Levi’s and an untucked button-down shirt, Rinella poured rum and coconut water over ice and cooked snook that he caught two days earlier on a fishing trip with his brother in Belize. Less than a week earlier, he’d given a speech in Missoula.

He was born and raised in rural Michigan, where he figured out early that selling two muskrat pelts paid better than mowing a lawn.

“He was always just real comfortable outside, very gung-ho about it,” says his brother Dan Rinella, a freshwater ecologist at the University of Alaska.

While his brothers opted for careers studying ecology and biology, Rinella felt he didn’t share their aptitude for science. After he earned his undergraduate degree in English from Michigan’s

Above: Rinella and the buffalo skull that inspired his second book, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

Top: Rinella surfcasts for striped bass and bluefish on Fire Island, N.Y.

“There’s an energy and urgency to his writing that’s almost as if there wouldn’t be anything for dinner if he didn’t get it done”



writer or did something lucky just happen?” he says. “Looking back I’m astonished at how accidental it was.”

A few years later, he had another funny, lucky break. Rinella wound up on TV in New York City.

Around the time Rinella’s first book came out, he met in New York with his publicist, a fellow Michigan native named Katie Finch. The idea of him starring on TV came up.

“I remember thinking, no way, he’s too rough around the edges,” says Finch, who married Rinella in 2008. Together they have a two-year-old son named James.

After Rinella moved into Finch’s Brooklyn apartment around 2006 and finished his buffalo book, TV producers started calling. He hosted a show called The Wild Within on Travel Channel in 2010. In 2011, he shot episodes for MeatEater, and the show premiered on The Sportsman Channel in January. Director Morgan Fallon says Rinella’s energy and enthusiasm make the show compelling.

“We get moments of absolute magic,” Fallon says. From his metropolitan home, Rinella says he is

amused by the funny paradox by which living in the city allows him to spend more time in the wilderness.

“As much as I like to hunt and fish, I work in the entertainment business,” he says. “And there are certain benefits to being in New York if you’re in the entertainment business.”

He says he just finished edits on his third book, a hunting memoir that will soon take its place on the bookshelf in his dining room that also holds volumes with titles such as The Roadside History of Montana and Visions of the Big Sky, plus that Escoffier cookbook from McNamer.

Between the books sits a Montana black bear skull and that storied bison skull from the Madisons. His other bison skull, a porcelain Alaskan trophy, hangs in the living room. Beneath it lies a toy train that belongs to his son, who’s sleeping in a back room not far from the closet with the extra freezer where Rinella stores meat from his hunts.

Wait, an extra freezer? For wild meat? In New York City?

“Well, yeah,” Rinella explains. “I give a lot of it away to friends.”

You can take Steven Rinella out of Montana, but you can’t take Montana out of Steven Rinella.

notion that modern American society had “traded the fecundity of the wild for pleated pants and manicured greens.”

He quit, rode his bike to his girlfriend’s apartment in the Wilma building, sat down and typed the first article he ever sold, this one to a trapping magazine. With guidance from Frazier, whom he recently had taken mule deer hunting in a canoe along the Missouri River Breaks, Rinella sold his next story to Outside magazine for a considerable hike in pay. Soon, that magazine sent him to Montauk, N.Y., to write about a shark fishing tournament, and then to the Island of Luzon in the Philippines to raft the mysterious Chaco River.

With his magazine career gaining speed, his first book project sparked when he invited McNamer and some classmates to his Rattlesnake neighborhood apartment to eat that snapping turtle.

McNamer gave him her copy of Georges Auguste Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, a collection of gourmet French recipes from the turn of the twentieth century. One was for turtle soup. Rinella used that text as a muse for his first book, The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine, where he chronicled his quest to harvest ingredients for a forty-five-course Thanksgiving feast using only Escoffier’s recipes.

In the mid-2000s, Rinella entered an Alaskan lottery for a license to hunt a buffalo in a remote river valley that held a small herd descended from overflow stock introduced from Montana’s National Bison Range in 1928. Though his odds were less than 2 percent, Rinella scored one of the coveted tags and set forth to complete a story arc that began when he found that old Montana buffalo skull in the Madison Mountains.

His books were heralded by critics, teachers, friends, and family. Frazier described Rinella as “the best writing student I ever had.” His brothers both complimented his grasp of science and his ability to write about ecology.

Looking back, Rinella described his journey as “luck journalism.” He reflected on the odds of his drawing that bison tag.

“If something happens that’s too lucky, it’s like, are you a good

Nate Schweber is a freelance journalist who graduated from UM’s School of Journalism in 2001. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Time magazine, Budget Travel, and The Village Voice. He lives in New York City and sings in a band called the New Heathens.

“There’s an energy and urgency to his writing that’s almost as if there wouldn’t be anything for dinner if he didn’t get it done”

It doesn’t stop here! Visit www.umt.edu/montanan to read a Web exclusive Q&A with Steven Rinella.

Rinella bowhunts for elk in southwest Montana’s Lee Metcalf Wilderness Area.



STORY BY ERIKA FREDRICKSON

PHOTOS BY TODD GOODRICH

Three years ago, University of Montana President Royce Engstrom, then provost, asked a group of faculty members to come together and brainstorm about how a UM education could change the world.

“I asked them where education should go in this Global Century,” he says. “I asked them what kind of experiences we should be giving our students and what kinds of topics and conversations we should try to enable for them.”

But the undergraduate years can be a challenging time as it is. Students often see general education requirements as something they just have to survive. Even when those courses are compelling, students still end up wading through—sometimes aimlessly—the sea of introductory courses, taking notes, and sweating exams, without quite knowing how any of it will apply to their futures.

Engstrom and the faculty talked about ways in which an undergraduate education could be designed by students in a more deliberate and interdisciplinary way. If, from Day One, students were engaged in coursework that interacted with global issues, they might better understand how their general education could make an impact. And wouldn’t that make them better citizens and leaders?

“So, out of that first discussion group,” says Engstrom, “came an experiment.”

That experiment, a donor-funded pilot program called the Global Leadership Initiative, launched this past fall. About 150 students were selected—not just honors students, but students

who reflect UM in its variety of majors and backgrounds. Those select freshmen, or “Fellows,” began attending seminars, such as “Doing the Right Thing: A Global Strategy for Good Business,” which teaches ways companies can make a positive global impact through ethical corporate citizenship, and “Issues in Global Public Health,” which discusses policies that address current and future challenges to global health.

Each year, GLI Fellows will move on to another phase. The second-year component, Models of Leadership, includes off-campus retreats and engagement with national and international leaders in business, law, science, the arts, humanities, social sciences, and public service. Arlene Walker-Andrews, associate provost and GLI committee co-chair, says this component will help students see leaders as people, just like them, who took steps to go on to greater things.

“Students can meet people who are successful and who can talk about what they do and how they do it,” she says. “It helps them understand that we’re not all born with a silver spoon in our mouth and just got to our positions by luck. And I think it helps

students see that you can be a banker making money and be doing volunteer work in Africa. You can be the head of an NGO and help people, but you can also be a pharmacist and help in the community.”

In the third year, Fellows get a passport paid for through GLI fundraising. They can use the passport to study abroad, but they also have other options: regional and local internships, service-learning coursework and research, or creative scholarship, all of which can be potentially donor-funded.

In their final GLI year, Fellows work in small groups of students from diverse majors to actually tackle a global problem with a specific project. Successful Fellows are awarded a certificate at graduation.

“This initiative focuses on all kinds of areas,” Walker-Andrews says. “There are classes on global public health. Gender issues in the world. Mortality. I always laugh when I say that one only because a faculty member in the humanities rightly says that we can’t forget the enduring questions, you know, what makes us human. So, mortality! These may not be the questions that students stick with the whole time, but we’re asking them to think big.”

Learning Locally, Thinking GloballyUM’S NEW GLOBAL LEADERSHIP INITIATIVE CHALLENGES STUDENTS TO TACKLE BIG QUESTIONS


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Learning Locally, Thinking Globally



they aren’t actually. And if they are, we’ll try to promote them to the University. We want to see if it would save money in the end and if it would be greener.”

The class, which counts as an introductory natural sciences requirement, is taught by biology scientist Art Woods. Like all the GLI seminars, the class is small—only nine students—providing an intimate environment. The students learn about ocean rise and acidification and the causes and effects of carbon emissions into the

atmosphere. They discuss climate change models and the effect of climate change on certain populations, and they analyze current policy.

“The class is structured so we’re doing a mix of basic science,” says Woods. “What’s the science that contributes to the understanding of global climate change? What sorts of effects do we think are going to happen in the next fifty or one hundred years? And then how are they going to affect our world? As part of the class, I charge all students with developing their own project. And that project has to involve doing something about climate change and taking a public stand.”

With the idea of taking action in mind, the already small class works in even smaller groups on projects. They rarely take notes, but they read a lot and everyone participates in discussion. UM Regents Professor of Ecology and climate scientist Steve Running, climate ethics expert Dane Scott, and Clark Fork River Coalition scientist Chris Brick all have visited the classroom as guest speakers. Experiments like the power strip one give students a hands-on project that engages them in climate change solutions.

“It’s an informal atmosphere,” says Woods, “almost like you’re sitting around a kitchen table talking about these things. It’s amazing what the students know and think and can say, and often that gets buried when they’re in a class of fifty or one hundred, and they never get a chance to speak up. I’m impressed with them.”

The students are across the board: different majors, backgrounds, and abilities, which contributes to the GLI philosophy, says Woods,

Rising Tides“Truthiness” means preferring facts one wishes to be true, rather than facts known to be true. Or as satirist Stephen Colbert, who coined the term, says, truthiness is “truth that comes from the gut, not books.” Journalism Associate Professor Ray Fanning has taken this humorous, pop-culture idea and applied it to his GLI freshman seminar, “News Literacy: Truth v. Truthiness.”

“Stephen Colbert defined it on his show,” Fanning says, laughing. “And there is a lot of truthiness going on in the world. Particularly in journalism there’s this blurring between news and opinion, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which one you’re getting.”

In his class, students study the way news is gathered. They deconstruct articles to seek out when journalists are using direct or indirect evidence. They examine article sources and discuss whether that source is informed and authoritative, and in what ways that source also may be self-interested. Critical thinking, like being able to dissect the news, fits the purpose of the GLI program perfectly. It’s not just about being able to sort the truth from the truthiness, it’s knowing how to take that knowledge as a leader in the global economy and use it to solve problems.

“All majors need this skill of critical thinking,” Fanning says. “This class is universally important. We all have to be citizens, and hopefully we’re exercising our rights as citizens by being informed and then being able to act upon that.”

In another seminar, “Global Climate Change: Science, Society, and Ethics,” students also learn how to think critically and take action. Homework for freshmen Hailey Michelson, Emmitt Stangel, Rebecca Singleton, and Colin Soos, for instance, requires plugging power strips into outlets to compare green and conventional technologies, then calculating the watts to see which ones conserve the most energy. When they’ve gathered their evidence, the students will publish the results in a campuswide report.

“We want to see, first of all, if they are really effective,” says Michelson. “There are a lot of products that say they’re green, but

“This class is universally

important. We all have to be citizens,

and hopefully we’re exercising

our rights as citizens by being

informed and then being able to act

upon that.”

GLI Fellows, from left, Riley Acker, Katie Stevens, Tyler Trucco, Elizabeth Schmidt, Rachel Reynolds, Danielle Howlett, Hunter Pauli, and Taylor Preston



Leadership component of the program. The first day began with a panel on human rights and ended with a talk from Priya Jaisinghani of the U.S. Agency for International Development, who spoke about mobile banking and its role in building economies in places like India.

The following day brought in a large spectrum of leaders speaking about international business and global citizenry, including Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer. The range of speakers and issues illustrates something else that the GLI promotes: the idea that you can be a banker or pharmacist or writer, you can be politically conservative or liberal, and you can still think globally. In fact, it’s exactly that variety, says Walker-Andrews, that we need to solve the big issues.

“That’s why we say this is an education for the Global Century. It’s about using your general education and major to address these big problems. And it’s this need to collaborate—because I don’t think any one of us is likely to eradicate malaria in Africa by ourselves.”

The freshmen who were the first of the GLI experiment are almost ready to move onto this next phase, and the GLI committee is preparing to invite 200 incoming freshmen to come on board.

This is the kind of education Walker-Andrews hopes will define UM as the GLI continues and expands. Not too long ago, UM graduate surveys tried to measure the school’s success by asking alumni three questions: “Do you have a job?” “Is it in your area of study?” and “How much money do you make?”

“I think that’s a pretty crass set of questions,” Walker-Andrews says. “So we decided to change it.” The questionnaire now asks about the more nuanced terms of success, trying to find out if they learned the types of world-leader skills that GLI strives for.

“We decided to make it useful,” she says, “in the sense that this is an accredited institution where we claim that we teach students to think critically, to do quantitative analysis, to do X, Y, and Z, and so we need to be accountable to that.”

that rising tides can lift all boats. Stangel is a baseball player studying sociology. He heard about the program and saw it as an opportunity to be part of a new way of learning.

“I thought it was a really cool idea,” he says. “I liked everything about it. It’s cool to be the first class here to ever do it, and I’m interested to see how later down the road it can help me in life.”

Michelson, who’s thinking about majoring in journalism, is enrolled in two seminars. Besides the climate change course, she’s taking “The Net Effect,” a class about how the Internet is changing the world. Some students are studying how social media interacted with the Arab Spring. Because of her potential major, she’s also exploring how the Internet is changing journalism.

“That’s what drew me to the program,” she says. “I felt like I had an opportunity to take relevant classes about things that are going on now. You can experiment in different fields, and it’s not just glazed-over, huge classes and lecture. It’s recent stuff. It’s more hands-on. It’s relevant.”

She laughs. “I’ve said that twenty million times,” Michelson

says. “But everything does seem more relevant when you’re in these kinds of classes.”

Relevancy is exactly what Woods is going for. “The whole idea of the GLI program is to raise the

bar for undergraduate education. And to have small groups of incoming students grapple with really big questions,” he says. “Solving problems associated with climate change is going to need engineers, it’s going to need philosophers, it’s going to need biologists. It’s going to need all these different kinds of people working on different angles. I think it’s really going to help them to have some awareness of that interconnection.”

Measuring an Education Walker-Andrews believes there are three reasons young people go to college: their parents tell them to, they want a job, and they want to change the world. And that big challenge—wanting to change the world—is the one she believes is foremost on the minds of incoming freshmen. And, she says, that’s the perfect time for it to happen.

“That’s when you have the energy and ideas,” she says. “And we probably should bank on that if we want the world to change.”

In late March, GLI students, faculty, and community participants assembled on campus to kick off the Models of

Erika Fredrickson is the arts editor at the Missoula Independent. She graduated from UM’s Creative Writing Program in 1999 and received a master’s degree in environmental studies in 2009.

“I felt like I had an opportunity to take relevant

classes about things that are

going on now. You can experiment

in different fields, and it’s not just

glazed-over, huge classes and lecture.

It’s recent stuff. It’s more hands-on.

It’s relevant.”

GET INVOLVEDUM is working toward a goal of securing three years of funding to support 600 Fellows. This goal totals $3 million. Philanthropic gifts for the GLI will assist with advising and mentoring for Fellows; stipends for faculty who lead seminars; scholarships and passports for experiences beyond the classroom; Models of Leadership retreats; and capstone projects.

You are invited to support innovation at UM by making a gift to the GLI Fund. Call Ric Thomas, senior vice president for development at the UM Foundation, at 406-243-2598, to learn more about how to become involved.

Fellows take part in UM Professor Lee Banville’s GLI seminar titled “The Net Effect” in Don Anderson Hall.



CONGRATULATIONS TO BEN MURPHY for receiving first place in this year’s young artist division of the Music Teachers National Association composition competition. Ben, a senior from Barrington, Ill., is recognized for his creativity and self-expression in his composition. This is one of the most prestigious music awards for university students, and we are proud to congratulate Ben—as well as all of our UM Stars.

Gifts to The University of Montana Foundation Excellence Fund help support Odyssey of the Stars scholarship recipients. The partnership between the University and its supporters enriches the student experience and fosters student success.

For more information about a gift to the Excellence Fund, please contact:

Lauren Clark, Director of Annual Giving – External CampaignsThe University of Montana Foundation800.443.2593 or [email protected]

SupportUM.org | Facebook.com/UMFoundation

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Dr. Cathy Capps is recognized for her work in strengthening the bond between UM and the community.

CONGRATULATIONS TO BEN MURPHY for receiving first place in this year’s young artist division of the Music Teachers National Association composition competition. Ben, a senior from Barrington, Ill., is recognized for his creativity and self-expression in his composition. This is one of the most prestigious music awards for university students, and we are proud to congratulate Ben—as well as all of our UM Stars.

Gifts to The University of Montana Foundation Excellence Fund help support Odyssey of the Stars scholarship recipients. The partnership between the University and its supporters enriches the student experience and fosters student success.

For more information about a gift to the Excellence Fund, please contact:

Lauren Clark, Director of Annual Giving – External CampaignsThe University of Montana Foundation800.443.2593 or [email protected]

SupportUM.org | Facebook.com/UMFoundation

served as co-president, treasurer, and current scholarship chair for the Missoula Symphony Guild. She and her husband, Dr. Tom Rickard, funded many vocal and instrumental scholarship endowments. They also support the Buddy DeFranco Jazz Festival, Montana Rep Colony, and other arts activities. On top of that, for the past twelve years, she’s served on the Dean’s Advisory Council for the College of Visual and Performing Arts, most recently as the council president.

At the awards ceremony, she encouraged others to become involved with their communities. She summed up her thinking by paraphrasing a quote from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, saying, “Service, like mercy, is twice blessed. It blesses he who gives and he who receives.”

Capps speaks fondly of her involvement with UM.

“I think UM is so respectful of your wishes—they’ll ask you where you want the money to go, then actually follow through with it. They’ll work with you to make it happen. Plus, you get to see the immediate results of where your money goes. You meet the kids who have been helped, who are grateful for the opportunity. It’s just so personal and so meaningful.”

Listen to Dr. Cathy Capps’ stories about her life, and you may jump at your next chance to volunteer.

Capps extolled the benefits of giving and receiving at this year’s Charter Day Awards ceremony, where she received the Neil S. Bucklew Presidential Service Award. The University of Montana Foundation presents the Bucklew Award each year to a Montanan who has enhanced the bonds among the community, state, and University.

Capps, an orthopedic surgeon, moved to Missoula twenty years ago. Since then, she has thrust her heart and soul into supporting the arts, both in the community and at UM.

“You get out of life what you put into it,” Capps says. “I’ve been part of so many exciting things because of my involvement in local arts. I recently had a role in a movie produced for a student’s Master of Fine Arts project, for instance. And I go to local performances, and know so many of the kids performing. That makes it so much more fun when you know people personally. In so many ways, it’s like having a group of friends.”

Capps, a longtime board member (and occasional cast member) for the Missoula Children’s Theatre, also has

Make a gift online at www.SupportUM.org

Dr. Capps Receives for All She Gives

That immediate connection with students is what drew Capps into so many volunteer efforts in the first place. Years ago, her voice teacher, Esther England, introduced her to faculty and students in UM’s School of Music. Some of the students she met needed to get to Spokane, Wash., for auditions, but had no way of getting there.

“They didn’t have snow tires or a good car,” Capps says. “They didn’t have money to stay anywhere decent. One kid, I remember thinking, he can’t go up on stage in those old shoes.”

Seizing an opportunity, as well as the steering wheel of her four-wheel-drive vehicle equipped with snow tires, she began driving students herself, buying them food, lodging, and yes, even shoes.

Capps shrugs off those efforts, and all of her volunteer efforts.

“It starts with little things—being nice to people, passing along whatever breaks people gave you to get ahead,” she says.

She obviously puts those words into action, and she believes strongly that others should as well.

“When people hear the word giving, they automatically think about money. It’s not just about money,” Capps says. “Get involved, even if you aren’t personally giving money. I’ve sat in a ticket booth selling tickets for a Jazz Fest fundraiser. That didn’t cost me any money.

“People don’t think giving to UM is a reciprocal relationship, but it is. I get to see things, to be involved—I get so much out of it.” She pauses, then adds a closing thought: “Just as with anything in life, you’ll get out of it what you put into it. If you don’t put effort into anything, you’ll get nothing back.”

Words worthy of Shakespeare. Congratulations, and thanks, to Dr. Cathy Capps for putting effort into helping countless UM students.


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STEPHEN T. MILLHOUSE ’85, Missoula, completed a 1,460-mile walk from the Poverello Center in Missoula to the Hospitality Kitchen in Los Angeles in a campaign to raise awareness and money for the homeless and the hungry. The distance was based on Stephen’s calculation of the number of miles the average homeless person walks in one year. It took Stephen—a Marine Corps veteran—five months to complete the journey, which he called “My One Man March.”

Stephen faced many challenges along the way, both physically and mentally. When he began to

feel pain in his left foot, he stopped at a VA clinic in Twin Falls, Idaho, where he was diagnosed with a stress fracture. Although the doctor advised him to stop the march so his broken foot could heal, he pressed on after resting for only a few days. When he wasn’t walking, Stephen volunteered at homeless shelters and food pantries. “In many communities, food pantries are the basic safety net keeping people out of homelessness,” he says. The experience was eye-opening. Stephen was shocked by the prevalence of hunger and poverty in America, especially in rural areas. “I was humbled by the response I got,” he says. “I met so many people of so many different stripes that believed in the need to help homeless people.” He finally arrived in L.A. at the beginning of January, elated, exhausted, and thirty pounds lighter than he was when he began his march in August. “It wasn’t until the very last block came into view that it hit me that I was about to finish,” he says. “It was an overwhelming moment, and I just let the tears fall.” Stephen, who will donate the funds he raised to programs in the four states through which he traveled, sees his effort as a way to pay it forward to all those who helped him during his own period of living as a homeless person in both Missoula and California. But even though the walk has ended, Stephen’s journey is far from complete. “I am in the process of putting together a PowerPoint presentation that I can take on the road,” he says. “I have walked the walk, and now I want to talk the talk.”

Keep Us Posted. Send your news to The University of Montana Alumni Association, Brantly Hall, Missoula, MT 59812. Go to www.grizalum.com and click on “Submit a Class Note,” fax your news to 406-243-4467, or call 1-877-UM-ALUMS (877-862-5867). Material in this issue reached our office by February 28, 2012. Note: The year immediately following an alum’s name indicates either an undergraduate degree year or attendance at UM. Graduate degrees from UM are indicated by initials.Snowbirds/Sunbirds—Anyone! Whenever you change your mailing address, please contact the alumni office. Let us know where you are and when. Thank you.

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TOP: Stephen, left, chats with Gregg DesElms, an advocate for homeless veterans in the Vallejo, Calif., area.ABOVE: Stephen pauses in front of a mountain range in Idaho, about three weeks into his five-month journey to Los Angeles.


ALUMNI ASSOCIATION BOARD OF DIRECTORSChair

Eric D. Botterbusch ’87 Everett, WA

Past Chair

Thomas J. Dimmer ’85Williamston, MI

Board of Directors

Alina Alvarez ’99Denver

Leon G. Billings ’59Bethany Beach, DE

Brandon Byars ’93 Portland, OR

Susan C. English ’72 Missoula

Alison Fuller ’05 New York

Dawn Houle ’94Gaithersburg, MD

Barrett Kaiser ’99 Billings

Jim Kolokotrones ’81, ’86Daly City, CA

Karin Larson-Pollock ’93 Mercer Island, WA

Ken Lawrence ’63 San Antonio

Allan Murphy ’65 Bend, OR

Marnie McMeel Prigge ’73 Butte

Rachel Schneller ’95Washington, D.C.

Greg Stahl, ’82Missoula

Greg Sundberg ’01, ’03Missoula

Ed Tinsley ’92, ’07Helena

Patrick Weasel Head ’71, ’73Missoula

Pat Weber ’73Yardley, PA

UM Alumni Association

Bill Johnston ’79, ’91PRESIDENT AND CEO

406-243-5211877-UM-ALUMSwww.grizalum.com

about alumni


with the team. He and his wife, Patcee, plan to serve on a church mission together.

’70sMAE NAN ELLINGSON ’70, J.D. ’76, retired from legal practice after spending the last twenty-eight years as a public finance lawyer for Dorsey & Whitney in Missoula. Over the course of her career, Mae Nan has had a hand in several landmark projects, including the introduction of open space bonds in Missoula and the establishment of the city’s first easement on Mount Sentinel. She also was the youngest delegate to attend the Montana Constitutional Convention in 1971 and 1972, when she was twenty-four years old. MARGARET JOHNSON ’71, Missoula, recently published her second book, The Drama Teacher’s Survival Guide #2: Activities, exercises

’50s IVAN O’NEIL ’50, Kalispell, was the subject of a recent feature story in the Flathead Beacon. An original founder of Kalmont Distributors and Western Building Center, Ivan still enjoys frequent hikes and ski trips despite being legally blind. He also continues to help manage Western Building Center, which owns ten retail supply stores across Montana. “There’s no quit in him,” current general manager Doug Shanks tells the Beacon. “He’s been very successful and there’s so many things that he’s done that he doesn’t talk about or beat his chest about. He’s just an amazing guy. We all look up to him.”GARY JYSTAD ’56, Rollins, received a certificate of distinction from the Montana Medical Association in recognition of his fifty years of service as a medical doctor. He and his wife, MARY ELLEN ERICKSON JYSTAD ’56, have three children and seven grandchildren.DELYNN COLVERT ’57, M.F.A. ’58, Missoula, recently published the fourth edition of his book Play Winning Cribbage, in which he explains his

signature Twenty-Six Theory. DeLynn has won the national cribbage championship four times and is currently the top-ranked lifetime player in the American Cribbage Congress.

’60s THOMAS BULLOCK ’61, West Covina, Calif., published Montana Memories, an e-book containing a series of recollections of his experiences growing up in Montana during the middle of the twentieth century. The stories recall the childhood adventures of young boys who spend

their days hunting and fishing as their families face the challenges of tight budgets.CLAIT E. BRAUN, M.S. ’65, Tucson, Ariz., recently received the Gunnison Sage Grouse Stewardship Award. Clait is a co-discoverer of the Gunnison species of sage grouse. He currently operates Grouse Inc., a consulting firm specializing in grouse issues in the western part of North America.LINDA MARTIN ’67,

Homer, Alaska, received a master’s degree in poetry from Pacific Lutheran University this past August. Her poetry has appeared in Bloodroot Literary Magazine, Rock & Sling, and Cirque. She and her husband own and operate a glass shop in Alaska.TIM POWERS ’68, Provo, Utah, will retire from his position as the head swimming and diving coach at Brigham Young University at the end of his thirty-seventh season

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about alumni

DANA CHRISTENSEN, J.D. ’76, Kalispell, became the seventeenth U.S. District Court judge for Montana following unanimous approval by the U.S. Senate. He has worked as a partner at the law firm Christensen, Moore, Cockrell, Cummings & Axelberg PC since 1996 and has tried more than fifty trials in his thirty-five-year legal career.

U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen is helped into his robe by his son, Ben, and daughter, Cassidy, after his swearing-in at the Russell Smith Federal Courthouse in Missoula.

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CAROL WELLS COONEY ’35, celebrated her 100th birthday

in February at the Bee Hive retirement home in Choteau. Sixteen family members and three friends surprised Carol with a party on her special day. A lifelong Griz fan, Carol still tunes in to cheer her beloved Grizzlies to victory whenever she has the chance. She also remains in contact with EMMA LOMMASSON ’33, M.S. ’39, a dear friend from her college days in Missoula, who also recently celebrated her 100th birthday. Carol’s family has kept the UM tradition alive, with two of her children and one of her grandchildren graduating from the University.

’30s

Cooney


and techniques for the theatre classroom. Margaret retired from the classroom after teaching drama at Sentinel High School in Missoula for thirty-seven years, but she remains active with the Missoula Community Theatre. TERI WHEELER WAHL RAPPE ’71, Wenatchee, Wash., is celebrating her fiftieth year of teaching music. She has taught classroom piano at Wenatchee Valley College for twenty-six years and was a church organist and pianist for forty-four years.ARLYNN FISHBAUGH ’74, Helena, was elected president of the board of directors of the National Assembly of State Art Agencies. As the executive director of the Montana Arts Council, she hopes her service on the national board will benefit Montana arts. “Representing NASAA allows Montana to have unique visibility with other funders that could be of benefit to NASAA and a state like Montana,” she says.HUGH SOAPE, M.B.A. ’74, was hired by Texas Agrilife Extension Service as an extension agent in Gregg County, Tex.TIM LONG ’78, joined the New York office of Protiviti, a global consulting firm, as a managing director specializing in the U.S. financial services practice. Prior to joining the

company, Tim spent thirty years working for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in Washington, D.C.

’80sKELLY MILLER ’83, Asheville, N.C., was named president and chief executive officer of Tampa Bay & Company, a tourism and economic promotion organization based out of Hillsborough County, Fla. GINGER ALLEN ’84, Cranesville, Pa., owns Crowley’s Restaurant & Irish Pub with her husband, Charles. When they find time to sneak away from the restaurant, they can be found fly fishing on local rivers. Ginger learned how to tie flies when she was a student at UM, and she spent several years as a fly-tying instructor.ROBERT KEANE, M.S. ’84, was appointed to American Forests’ new Science Advisory Board, which will help create and evaluate the organization’s forest restoration projects and public policy initiatives. Robert is a research ecologist with the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station at the Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula.GUS CHAMBERS ’85, Missoula, received a

Programming Excellence Award from American Public Television for his documentary Glacier Park’s Night of the Grizzlies,

which chronicles a night in 1967 in which separate grizzly bear attacks in Glacier National Park left two women dead. The film was the highest-rated local program in the history of MontanaPBS when it premiered in May 2011. Gus is a producer at UM’s Broadcast Media Center and MontanaPBS.DOUG DECKER ’85, Portland, Ore., was selected as Oregon’s new state forester by the Oregon Department of Forestry. In his new role, Doug, who joined the agency as a public affairs specialist in 1987, will be responsible for the management of about

830,000 acres of state land and the coordination of fire protection on about sixteen million acres of private, state, and federal land. ANDREW GOULD ’86, Yuma, Ariz., was appointed to serve on the Arizona Court of Appeals, which reviews cases from

superior courts across the state. Gould has been a member of the Yuma County Superior Court since his appointment in 2001.PAM USCHUK ’86, Bayfield, Colo., published her fifth poetry collection, titled Wild in the Plaza of Memory.Co

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Activities, exercises and techniques for the theatre classroom

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2 Senior Send-Off, 4-6 p.m., UC Ballroom 10-12 Commencement reunions, classes of 1942, 1952, 1962, campus 25-JUNE 5 International travel: Historic Reflections Luxury Cruise

5-18 International travel: British Isles Odyssey Luxury Cruise 14 Alumni event, Denver 14-16 UMAA Board of Directors meeting, Denver

19 Alumni event, Flathead Valley

1 UMAA-sponsored Out to Lunch, Caras Park, Missoula 10-21 International travel: Baltic Treasures Luxury Cruise 16 Eighth annual UM Alumni Night with the Missoula Osprey

16 Homecoming 2012 (Sept. 16-22) 16 Homecoming kickoff celebration, Southgate Mall 19 UM dorm and office decorating contests 20 House of Delegates annual meeting, all day Homecoming buffet dinner, Food Zoo 21 Davidson Honors College all-class reunion, all day Hello Walk UM department open houses and receptions Distinguished Alumni Awards ceremony and reception Pep Rally All-Alumni Social and Dance 22 Homecoming Hustle – 5K race Homecoming Parade Homecoming TV Tailgate Homecoming football game: Montana Grizzlies vs. Northern Arizona University 17 112th Griz-Cat football game, Missoula

ALUMNI EVENTS 2012For more details, call the Office of

Alumni Relations, 877-UM-ALUMS, or visit www.grizalum.com.


about alumni

Decker



KATHY DUNNEHOFF ’87, M.F.A. ’91, Kalispell, published three e-books since starting her own small publishing company last year. Kathy, who also works as an instructor at Flathead Valley Community College, hopes to eventually publish hard copies of her books. E. SCOTT MCGHEE ’87, Clarkton, N.C., earned his American Bladesmith Society Journeyman Smith Certification at the All Forged Blade Expo in San Antonio, Tex. There are fewer than 175 ABS Journeyman Smiths in the world.LORI HARPER SUEK ’88, J.D. ’91, Billings, was one of 163 members of the U.S. Department of Justice recognized at the twenty-eighth annual Director’s Awards Ceremony in Washington, D.C. Lori, who is an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Montana, was honored for her outstanding efforts in promoting justice in Indian Country. CARIN SULLIVAN ’88 received the 2011 E.B. Craney Award for radio station promotion of the year. Presented by the

Montana Broadcasters Association, the awards honor the memory of Montana broadcasting pioneer Ed Craney by recognizing excellence in all aspects of electronic

media. Carin has worked in the broadcast field for more than twenty years and is currently an on-air announcer and producer for Cherry Creek Radio in Butte.KURT WILSON ’89 and reporter Vince Devlin earned a 2011 Lee Enterprises President’s Award for excellence in news for their coverage in the Missoulian of Marine and Ronan native Tomy Parker during Parker’s recovery from the loss of his legs and most of one hand in Afghanistan. The awards are handed out yearly to recognize outstanding efforts in journalism. Kurt is the Missoulian’s photography editor. This is his fifth President’s Award in eleven years.

’90sBRENT PEASE ’90 is the new offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach for the University of Florida Gators. A former Grizzly quarterback who had a brief NFL playing career in the late 1980s, Brent coached several college teams over the course of his career, most recently serving as the offensive coordinator for the Boise State University Broncos.KATHLEEN JENKS, J.D. ’92, was appointed as head judge for Missoula Municipal Court following the retirement of JUDGE DONALD LOUDEN ’77, J.D. ’80. Kathleen, who currently studies psychology at UM, is a former general prosecutor for the Missoula bureau of the Montana Attorney General’s Office. Before that, she worked as the supervising attorney for the Child Protection

Unit of the state office, also in Missoula.JEFFERY WEHR ’92, ’96, Odessa, Wash., was one of three educators in the nation to receive the 2011 Siemens Founders Award. The annual honor recognizes individuals or schools for encouraging

students to participate in math, science, or technology research programs and working to enhance math and science education in American high schools. In

addition to $15,000 for their affiliated school or institution, recipients are given the opportunity to participate in a summer research immersion program at Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee, which Jeffery plans to attend.

JOE JOHNSTON ’93, Missoula, completed his first season as a football official in the Pac-12 Conference this past fall. Joe, who is originally from Butte, has been officiating football games for more than twenty years, eight of which were spent in the Big Sky Conference. He

and his wife, Kory, have two children: seven-year-old daughter Jayden and eleven-year-old son Jack.JIM MCGOWAN ’93 was named publisher of the Missoulian and the

Ravalli Republic, both Lee Enterprises newspapers. Jim originally joined the Missoulian staff as a digital director in 2002.JAMES E. BROWN ’94, Helena, was selected to be the executive director of the Montana Independent Bankers Association. James, who has six years of congressional staff experience in Washington, D.C., spent the past five years working for the law firm of Doney Crowley Bloomquist Payne. BRIAN TOVSON ’94 recently graduated from the Montana Law Enforcement Academy. Upon graduation, he received the Alex F. Mavity Outstanding Student Award, which is given to the highest-performing student in each graduating class. Brian works as a police officer in Great Falls.


about alumni

Jeffery and Julie Wehr

Sullivan

ARIC SCHNELLER ’90, Huntsville, Tex., directed the Sam Houston State University Bearkat Marching Band when it played the national anthem prior to SHSU’s Football Championship Subdivision semifinal game against the Montana Grizzlies in December. Aric, whose father LEWIS SCHNELLER ’67, M.Ed. ’75, was a lineman for the Grizzlies, has been the director of the Jazz Studies program at SHSU since 2008. “I’ve gotten some friendly jabs from people in Montana,” Aric told the Missoulian before the game. “A couple have suggested they sacrifice me on the fifty-yard line before the game, or maybe hang me from the goal post, like a sacrificial lamb.”

Schneller


SUMMERSEMESTER 2012

School of Extended and Lifelong Learning

formerly Continuing Education




SHEL HANSER ’95, M.Ed. ’03, Billings, received The University of Montana Educational Leadership Excellence Award, given out each year by the University to an alum working in education.

The award recognizes the recipient’s significant contributions to education through their vision and action. Shel has been the principal at Billings Central High School since 2002. During his run as the longest-tenured principal in the school’s history, he has seen standardized test scores consistently exceed state and national averages.

ERIC SCHUCK, M.A. ’95, McMinnville, Ore., spent eleven months as a naval reservist in Kuwait, where he participated in both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation New Dawn. As a logistics department leader, Eric oversaw supply engineering and boat maintenance. He also was

responsible for providing security coverage for vessels entering and exiting ports. Eric currently is an economics professor at Linfield College.CLAYTON CHRISTIAN ’96, Missoula, is the new commissioner of higher education for the state of Montana. A businessman

by trade, Clayton was appointed to the state Board of Regents in 2006 and served as its chairman for more than two years. He succeeds SHEILA STEARNS ’68, M.A. ’69, Ph.D. ’83, Helena, who will retire in June. RYAN SCRENAR ’96, Helena, was appointed to represent the St. Peter’s Hospital Foundation on the St. Peter’s Hospital board of directors. A certified public accountant, Ryan is senior vice president and audit director for Glacier Bancorp Inc., where he has worked since May 2000.DAVID ROBERTS, M.A. ’98, Seattle, served as a panelist at the American Philosophical Association’s annual conference in Washington, D.C. The discussion panel was titled “From Philosophical Training to Professional Blogging.” He currently works as a blogger and writer for Grist magazine.JOE SCHAFFER ’98, Ed.D. ’10, is the president of Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne, Wyo. Before

accepting the position, he was the dean and chief executive officer of the Montana State University-Great Falls College of Technology.SAMUEL FREDERICK ’99, Mason, Mich., was elected as a new shareholder for the law firm Foster Swift Collins and Smith, PC. Sam specializes in the areas of intellectual property protection and information technology, specifically in trademarks,

trade secrets, copyrights, and software licensing. SUE MALEK, M.A. ’99, Missoula, was one of forty-eight state leaders across the nation selected for the prestigious Toll Fellowship Program sponsored by the Council of State Governments. Sue, who is serving her second term as a representative in the Montana Legislature, attended the weeklong seminar this past fall.


about alumni

Keith, far left, and ranchers Bob and Ben Lehfeldt stand near a sheep-herding wagon.

KEITH ANDERSON ’98, Woodstock, Va., is the vice president of marketing at Ibex Outdoor Clothing, which recently expanded its wool source to the Lehfeldt family sheep ranch in Lavina, Mont. The company will use the wool for its line of Shak Lite garments, produced with 100 percent U.S. resources.

RANDY RUPERT ’93, Missoula, published a children’s book, A Dog-Gone Tale, which tells the story of three puppies who must find their way back to their parents after wandering off in the park. The book is based on a bedtime story Randy created to teach his young son the importance of staying with his parents in a way he would understand. Inspired by his son’s love of the story and aided by the encouragement of his wife, Coryll, Randy set out to re-create the tale in print. A marketing professional by trade, Randy hopes his first effort as a children’s author will help other parents teach a valuable lesson while having fun with their children.

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SUMMERSEMESTER 2012






A gift from Dick Morrison helped Chery Sabol attend UM, where she earned her creative writing degree with high honors. But for Chery, an even higher honor was Dick’s interest in her studies. “Dick initiated a personal correspondence with me,” she says. “I can’t express how meaningful it was to me that a stranger would support and encourage my education the way he did.” Dick went even further and made an additional commitment to support the scholarship through an estate gift. Like Dick, you can support the University in your will, or through another type of planned gift such as a trust, gift annuity, life insurance policy or other asset by contacting Theresa Boyer, director of gift planning, at 406.243.2593 or [email protected].

SupportUM.org/PlannedGiving | Facebook.com/UMFoundation


MARY ANN MCCRACKIN, Ph.D. ’99, joined the faculty at Virginia Tech as the university veterinarian and director of the Office of Animal Resources. She previously was the director of laboratory animal resources at UM and an adjunct professor of small animal medicine at the University of Georgia.

’00sBILLIE JO KIPP, M.A. ’00, Ph.D. ’05, is the new president of Blackfeet Community College in Browning. Billie, who dropped out of college once before going on to earn an advanced degree, hopes her achievements will help inspire struggling students. She plans to add more four-year college programs and job-training courses to the school’s curriculum. HUGH POWELL, M.S. ’00, Ithaca, N.Y., is a science editor at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and a contributor to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Oceanus and other publications. As an environmental journalist, Hugh tries to connect his readers with the issues he reports on. “It can be easy to think that by providing the right set of statistics—number of acres remaining or tons released into the environment—readers will become as passionate about the topic as your sources are,” he

tells Mongabay.com. “But people read stories to find out what happens to the main characters, so I need to make sure people have enough detail to go

on that those characters are real.”CASEY CONNORS ’02, Helena, was promoted to commercial loan officer at Mountain West Bank.

He also is active in his community, donating his time as a YMCA basketball coach and a Head Start volunteer.TRISHA MILLER ’02,

Missoula, won the Rock ‘n’ Roll Arizona Marathon in Phoenix in January with a career-best time of 2 hours, 49 minutes, and 12 seconds. Trisha, who


about alumni

McCrackin

DAVID PELLERIN ’98 and his wife, BRANDI PELLERIN ’99, New London, N.H., have found success on a national level with Indikoi Sinks, a small business they started together in 2010. After getting a lot of attention for the hand-crafted ceramic sinks he sold at craft fairs, David, who also runs a pottery school called Wellhouse Farm Pottery, decided to create an entire line of sinks. Over the past two years, the pair have worked side-by-side to grow their company, which now offers thirty-six different sinks and has more than fifty showroom accounts across the U.S. David makes each sink from start to finish, and Brandi handles sales, marketing, and bookkeeping while caring for their children, three-year-old Remster and newborn twins Jarvis and Magnolia. Even back when they were both fine art students at UM, Brandi and David knew they eventually wanted to start their own business. “I will never forget when Professor Catherine Mallory said in my senior thesis class that you are not going to find a job in the paper for an artist. You have to take something you are passionate about, like art, and figure out a way to make a living at it,” Brandi says.

Pellerins

JESSICA NOYOLA ’04, San Diego, Calif., placed tenth overall in the female pro division of the 2011 XTERRA World Championship triathlon. Originally from Whitefish, Jessica discovered her hidden talent for endurance sports while finishing her master’s degree in exercise physiology at San Diego State. At the request of one of her professors, she completed a bicycle fitness test. Her performance was so impressive that she decided to give competitive mountain biking a whirl. Eventually, she began racing XTERRA triathlons, which include swimming, biking, and running segments. When she’s not busy training or racing, she runs her own chef and catering business, Fit Food by Jess, which has become popular among competitive athletes. Her most recent catering gigs have been with triathlon and cycling camps, including The Cycling House in Tucson, Ariz. She attributes her success in both business and athletics to her fearless attitude. “If I didn’t like to do things that scared me, I’d never be in this position,” she tells the Missoulian. “My advice is find something you’re passionate about and commit to it. Don’t be afraid of failing.” Noyola

A gift from Dick Morrison helped Chery Sabol attend UM, where she earned her creative writing degree with high honors. But for Chery, an even higher honor was Dick’s interest in her studies. “Dick initiated a personal correspondence with me,” she says. “I can’t express how meaningful it was to me that a stranger would support and encourage my education the way he did.” Dick went even further and made an additional commitment to support the scholarship through an estate gift. Like Dick, you can support the University in your will, or through another type of planned gift such as a trust, gift annuity, life insurance policy or other asset by contacting Theresa Boyer, director of gift planning, at 406.243.2593 or [email protected].

SupportUM.org/PlannedGiving | Facebook.com/UMFoundation



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has completed seventeen marathons, hopes to qualify for the 2016 Olympic marathon trials. KENDRA MYLNECHUK ’03 played the lead role in the short film OK Breathe Auralee, which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The movie tells the story of an Inuit woman who is desperate to have a baby. Kendra and her husband,TYLER POTTER ’02, live in New York City. JOSEPH DUSATKO ’04 recently graduated from the Montana Law Enforcement Academy and became an officer for the Great Falls Police Department. Before that, he specialized as an aircraft and avionics technician for the U.S. Navy.ALAN PANEBAKER ’05, Montpelier, Vt., is the first full-time reporter for the growing online news source VTDigger.org, a Vermont-based website dedicated to coverage of state politics, consumer affairs, business, and public policy. He covers

health care and energy issues for the publication, which is a project of the Vermont Journalism Trust.JACQUELINE FALLON ’06, Cle Elum, Wash., plays flute and marimba in the Chiroto Marimba Ensemble, based in

Moscow, Idaho. She is the director of the twenty-first annual Zimbabwean Music Festival, to be held in Moscow in early August. The event features workshops and concerts by a wide array of performers and teachers. CAITLIN COPPLE, M.A. ’07, became the first openly gay councilmember to be elected to the Missoula City Council last November. Caitlin, who received her master’s degree in journalism, says her interest in politics developed after she came out and became an active member of the LGBT movement.LUCY BEARD ’08 received the United States Eventing Association’s Christine E. Stafford Groom of the Year Award for 2011. A former member of the UM Equestrian Team, Lucy now works at Jarba Farms in Kalispell as a horse trainer, groomer, and competitive rider.

RACHEL COOK ’08, Bakersfield, Calif., is a breaking news and nighttime general assignment reporter at the Bakersfield Californian.COLIN SCOTT’08, Whitefish, is a member of Literacy Volunteers of Flathead County, an organization that provides assistance to those who are struggling with literacy problems or learning English as a second language. He currently is working toward a Fulbright Scholarship that would allow him to spend a year teaching English in Croatia.

PAIGE BROWNING ’09, Spokane, Wash., was hired by Spokane Public Radio as a news host and reporter for KPBX 91.1 and KSFC 91.9. Paige previously served as a disc jockey for UM’s radio station, KBGA 89.9 FM,

and helped produce and direct four shows for MontanaPBS.SHANNON KUHN ’09, Anchorage, Alaska, is the founder of Anchorage Food Mosaic, a popular blog and Facebook community dedicated to promoting culinary diversity and the use of fresh ingredients.COLTER NUANEZ ’09, Bozeman, was named Sports Writer of the Year by the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association for his reporting work with the Ellensburg Daily Record in Washington. He was selected from a pool of portfolio entries from more than eighty daily newspapers. He joined the staff at the Bozeman Daily

Chronicle in June 2011 and was promoted to the position of sports editor in December.TIM ROBBINS, M.B.A. ’09, Great Falls, received the Great Falls Area Chamber of Commerce’s Ambassador of the Year Award. Tim served on the selection committee for Habitat for Humanity for the past four years, is a partner in the Great Falls Workforce Development Initiative, is the chairman of the Missouri River Community Management Team, and is on the Job Service Employer Committee. He works as the manager of the Great Falls Job Service.

’10sBRIDGET DAVIS ’10, Richey, is in her second year as the K-12 music teacher in the Richey School District. A former Grizzly Marching Band saxophonist, Bridget says her goal as an educator is to broaden her students’ experience with music. Last year, she took them to Missoula to see UM’s world percussion ensemble in concert. She hopes to organize a student drumline to perform at school basketball games.JASPER MILLER ’10and FENN NELSON ’10are the owners of one of Montana’s newest microbreweries: Higherground Brewing Company in Hamilton. Jasper and Fenn, who grew up together in the Bitterroot Valley, are both twenty-four years old, making them the youngest brewers in the state. SARAH RED-LAIRD ’10, Ashland, Ore., is the founder of the nonprofit organization Bee Girl,


about alumni

ERIC TOLLEFSON ’06, Juneau, Alaska, released his second album, The Polar Ends, early this spring. Eric gained local recognition and notoriety following the 2008 release of his first CD, The Sum of Parts, which he recorded while living in Bend, Ore. He believes his second effort—which blends rock, soul, blues, and folk—is even better than his debut, telling the Juneau Empire, “Everything I could have put into this, I did…it took a lot of work, two and a half years, every day.”

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which seeks to educate hobbyist beekeepers about strategies for promoting the health and survival of their bees. Although the insects and their byproducts provide numerous health benefits to humans, Sarah says many people do not know how to properly care for their hives. “It’s important to baby your bees,” she tells the Ashland Daily Tidings. ANDREW SELLE ’10, Billings, coaches quarterbacks for the football program at Billings West High School. Andrew, who

graduated from Billings West in 2006 and went on to play quarterback for the Grizzlies, also teaches algebra and geometry at his alma mater.JOHN MACK, M.B.A. ’11, recently joined the Great Falls Police Department.JAIMIE THIBEAULT ’11 signed a contract to play professional volleyball for the Lavoro Doc Pontecagnano club in Italy. The former Griz volleyball star and three-time first-team All-Big Sky Conference selection also made the national team in her

native Canada and is expected to represent her country at international

SUMMERFIELD BALDRIDGE ’78 and JULIE MARTIN BALDRIDGE ’79, Whitefish

DAVID BELL ’96 and BRITTANY BELL ’98, Sandys, Bermuda

CHAD BURCHARD’93, Spokane, WA

PAUL CALLAHAN, M.S. ’96, and LYNN DANKOWSKI ’90, J.D. ’96, Missoula

TERRY CARTER ’70, Liberty Lake, WA

ALEXANDER CARTWRIGHT ’78, Lake Tapps, WA

JOHN CLOTFELTER ’76 and DEBRA CLOTFELTER, Yorktown, VA

SCOTT EAMES ’87, Purdys, NY

KELLEY KOSTELECKY ’96, Coeur d’Alene, ID

TIMOTHY LONG ’78, Arlington, VA

MARK MCCUE ’98, Denver, CO

ROBERT MCCUE ’83, Missoula

SYDNEY MCCUE, Missoula

TIM MCCUE ’95, Seattle, WA

BILL MUSE and MARY MUSE, Missoula

BRIAN OEVERMANN ’92, Issaquah, WA

KARIN LARSON-POLLOCK ’93, Mercer Island, WA

TERI WHEELER WAHL RAPPE ’71, Wenatchee, WA

CARL RUMMEL ’76 and ANNETTE RUMMEL, Missoula

LARRY RYAN ’72, Lenexa, KS

BARBARA SHONKWILER ’72 and THOMAS LEE, Kalispell

MARTHA SPOHN ’74, Worthington, OH

MARY GAIL SULLIVAN ’79, M.B.A. ’00, Butte

ASHLEEN WILLIAMS ’11, Snohomish, WA

NEW LIFETIME MEMBERS The following alumni and friends made a commitment to the future of the UM Alumni Association by becoming lifetime members. You can join them by calling 877-862-5867 or by visiting our website: www.grizalum.com. The Alumni Association thanks them for their support. This list includes all new lifetime members through February 29, 2012.

MIKE HAUGE ’11, Edina, Minn., completed the 2011 Northshore Inline Marathon on behalf of First Descents, an organization that offers cancer fighters and survivors a free weeklong adventure experience designed to help them reclaim their lives as they conquer the great outdoors. Mike, who was diagnosed with Stage III testicular cancer during his sophomore year of college, participated in First Descents after his cancer went into remission following several surgeries and chemotherapy treatments. He and fifteen other young cancer survivors traveled to North Carolina for a weeklong whitewater kayaking excursion. Inspired by the experience, he decided to compete in the long-distance inline skating event to raise money for the program. The day before the race, a final push of donations put him over his goal of $1,000—the amount it takes to give one cancer survivor the chance to participate in First Descents. “The race itself was a struggle, as I did not have the top-of-the-line equipment that some of the veterans had,” he says. “However, anytime I was going up a hill and thought my legs were going to give out, thinking of all the survivors I met who have been fighting their whole life kept me going through the finish line.” Mike plans to raise more money for the program by competing in a triathlon sometime this year. He currently works as a financial representative at Northwestern Mutual.

competitions through the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.KEEMA WATERFIELD, M.F.A. ’11, was awarded a $1,000 prize from the online literary journal Mason’s Road for her creative nonfiction piece, “Inside Passage.” The memoir integrates

descriptions of a slow-moving Alaskan ferry with scenes from a divided family. Keema, who splits her time between Missoula and rural Alaska, is currently working on a collection of essays about growing up in southeast Alaska.


about alumni

Thibeault



When John Mattelin graduated from UM in 2008, one of the most important lessons he’d learned actually came from his grandparents: the importance of giving back. He established the Mattelin-Weeks Scholarship in honor of his grandparents—as a way of paying tribute to them, and as a way of paying forward some of the same opportunities he had as a scholarship recipient.

Like John, you can become part of the President’s Club with a gift of $1,000 or more. To find out how, contact Lauren Clark, Director of Annual Giving – External Campaigns at 406.243.2456 or [email protected]. Give now at SupportUM.org/PresidentsClub

MNTANAN

Become a donor and show your support for the Montanan. There are four commitment levels, each with a

di� erent gift that shows our appreciation.

Donations can be sent to Montanan editor, 325 Brantly Hall, The University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812. For credit card contributions, call 406-243-2488. Donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law. Please allow a week from receipt of payment before items ship.

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Show your true colors!


’30sELEANOR MACDONALD ECKER ’34, Lake Havasu, AZELINOR R. CLACK ’37, Monument, CAWILLIAM HOPKINS WICKES ’37, Columbia, MOALLISON M. VINAL EASTERLING ’39, Missoula

’40sCHARLOTTE ALBERTA FRITZ DISSLY ’40, El Paso, TXDORIS MARJORIE WEGER KAMERAD ’40, HelenaALISON MERRIAM PAYNE ’40, Springfield, VAWILLIAM ROBERT PIATT ’40, Ridgecrest, CAALICE M. COLVIN ROSE ’40, HamiltonTHEOLA MAE MEULI SEDERHOLM ’40, BozemanJOAN M. KENNARD FOPP ’41, Great FallsJACQUELINE DESCHAMPS KENNEDY ’41, Issaquah, WAELIZABETH MARIE “BETTY” RATCLIFF LARUE ’42, Hot SpringsJAMES “HAROLD” LARUE ’42, Hot SpringsCOLIN OSCAR “SCOTTY” MACLEOD ’43, BillingsCHESTER B. “CHET” SCHENDEL ’43, BozemanELDEN HARRY SAUERS ’45, Palm Desert, CAJOAN ENGELKING CHRISTENSEN ’47, PolsonMARIAN AVIS LACKLEN ’47, BillingsARTHUR B. MARTIN, J.D.’47, Miles CityBENJAMIN RIDDLE “BEN” DAVIS ’48, MissoulaCECELIA F. WILLIAMS ANMEN ’49, BoulderLOUISE KIECKBUSCH DUNNING ’49, Tucson, AZFRANK CHARLES OWENS ’49, Deer Lodge

’50sROBERT N. “BOB” DENTON ’50, Prescott, AZGREGORY MCLAREN HALL ’50, MissoulaGLORIA DEMPSEY HAUCK ’50, HelenaJAMES D. HOFFMAN ’50, GlendiveJOHN E. “JACK” MCCOURT ’50, Bellingham, WAJOHN D. MCRAE ’50, MissoulaGRETCHEN A. RASMUSSEN RAGSDALE ’50, Kenmore, WABRUCE F. SAINT ’50, Spokane, WALOUIS ORVIN STRAND ’50, M.Ed. ’55, Big TimberRUTH M. VOORHEES VOELKER ’50, DenverWILLIAM ALLEN WORF ’50, MissoulaMARGARET M. ALVIS ’51, Montara, CAJOHN B. CAGE, M.Ed. ’51, Waukesha, WIKEITH P. “SKIP” JOHNSON ’51, ButteRODNEY LANGUM ’51, Ramona, CAJOHN LUKE MCKEON ’51, AnacondaMARY LEE POWELL ALKIRE ’52, Taylorsville, UTNANCY MARIE CALVERT BURKE ’52, ButteCLARENCE T. “CHRIS” CHRISTOFFERSON ’52, HelenaMARY JO PETERSON CONNELLY ’52, Missoula

JEFFERSON VEACH DOGGETT ’52, White Sulphur SpringsARTHUR JOHN HOLTER ’52, Racine, WIFRANK DON HUGHES JR. ’52, KalispellJOHN ALBERT LAHR ’52, ButteROBERT LEE LINDBORG ’52, BigforkGORDON THOMAS LITTON ’52, Spokane, WAJOHN MICHAEL PECARICH ’52, MissoulaJOSEPH FRANK “JOE FRANK” POBRISLO ’52, Tucson, AZJAMES E. PURCELL ’52, J.D. ’58, ButteBETTY I. BERNHARDT WILSON ’52, Sun City West, AZMARLENE ANN CARRIG JACOBSEN ’53, WhitefishLEE A. JORDAN ’53, Bradenton, FLMEREDITH L. BEAR MOTT ’53, M.Ed. ’65, Destin, FLELIZABETH GRACE “DINNY” GIBSON NELLIGAN ’53, MissoulaFAY LOUIS BUCK ’54, ChoteauDON EDWIN ERICKSON ’54, Lincoln, CAPHILIP CHARLES HANSON ’54, BigforkBOB J. LERUM ’54, MissoulaGERALDINE THERESA ST. ONGE ’54, New YorkARCH DUDDEN ’55, M.Ed. ’63, ButteWILLIAM L. POULSON ’55, Tremonton, UTFRANK J. BREMBERGER, M.Ed. ’56, Oshkosh, WIHARRY D. EYLAR ’56, Cypress, CAROY WILLIAM “BILL” HAMMER ’56, StanfordEVAN ELLSWORTH CHAFFEY ’57, Providence, RIWILLIAM “BILL” CLARK KAISERMAN ’57, Spokane, WAALFRED W. LABER ’57, M.S. ’60, Mims, FLDONALD LAWRENCE SORTE ’57, M.A. ’60, Great FallsJOHN GARFIELD BISHOP ’58, M.Ed. ’71, ButteMARY TRAVIS FORMAN ’58, SeattleTHOMAS DANIEL GRADY ’58, Hayden, IDDANIEL JOSEPH RYAN ’58, Duvall, WAELOISE KINGSTON RUSUNEN ’59, M.Ed. ’78, Vancouver, WAJAMES NOEL SMITH ’59, Bozeman

’60sARTHUR M. BULS ’60, Pauma Valley, CAJAMES PETER “PETE” JARDING ’61, Peru, INWALTER LOUIS LENINGTON ’61, Orem, UTCONRAD “HARRY” TAHIJA ’62, Escondido, CAJUDITH E. BLACK WOLFE-HOPFINGER ’62, Sutherlin, ORTHOMAS L. LONGAN ’63, Dixon, ILJOHN EDWARD SNYDER ’63, M.Ed. ’68, CorvallisPATRICIA ANN “PATTI” O’NEILL ’64, ’66, Renton, WANELSON BRADLEY TEMPLEMAN ’64, Eugene, ORJAMES ELLIOT WERNER ’64, HelenaTHOMAS J. MOHOLT, J.D. ’66, Visalia, CAFRED DAVID APPELMAN ’67, MissoulaWILLIAM J. “BILL” BEAMAN ’67, M.B.A. ’72, HelenaROBERT JAMES KEMP ’67, Harrisburg, PARONALD WAYNE PATTERSON ’67, Eden Prairie, MNJOSEPH WARREN BEAN UPSHAW ’67, Tuscola, ILWILLIAM WESLEY WERTZ, J.D. ’67, Tallahassee, FLLORIN DENNIS BARNES ’68, Bremerton, WADORIS COATES FORKIN ’68, Columbia FallsKATHERINE G. MCCONNELL ’69, Deer LodgeMICHAEL HENRY MINOR ’69, Tacoma, WAJOSEPH E. TOBIN ’69, Billings

’70sDAVID H. DUNCAN ’72, West Hollywood, CAJOY M. GIRVAN ’73, Eugene, ORWILLIAM E. PATTON, Ed.D. ’73, MissoulaNANCY ANN O’LEYAR MACDONALD ’74, ’75, Anchorage, AKROBERT DEE SUMMERS JR. ’74, BozemanJACQUELINE LEE GIBSON ’75, M.A. ’88, HelenaCHARLOTTE LEE KILBOURN EASTER KRESS ’77, SeattleFREDERICK GORDON WILLIS ’77, BillingsMICHAEL LEE GILBERT ’78, Manhattan Beach, CA

’80sSHIRLEY PARKS ABEL ’80, HamiltonERIC SPENCER “BUCK” CRAIN ’80, ChoteauMICHAEL WILLIAM BROGAN ’81, La Mirada, CAJAMES R. MCCORMICK JR. ’81, Great FallsCINDA MARIE TOMPKINS ’82, HelenaPEGGY MAE PERCIVAL JOHNSON ’83, MissoulaSTEVEN LEE YOUSSI ’84, Fort Worth, TXDAVID RUSSELL JANDT ’85, Enterprise, ORJERRY BURL WILLIS ’86, MissoulaJERRY L. LANE ’87, MissoulaNANCY CLAIRE HOON LOGOZZO ’88, Great FallsPATRICIA JO BRANOM FELLOWS ’89, Great Falls

’90sKYLE JAMES CLAYTON ’91, ButteSUZANNE KAY BONIFAS BEHAN CAMPBELL ’92, TroyGRACE ARDIS MCKINNON SCALES ’93, MissoulaSCOTT WILLIAM PETERS ’94, BillingsTHEODORE EDDY BARNEY ’96, MissoulaERIC RICHARD PERSICKE ’98, MissoulaMATTHEW MYRON SAMPSON ’98, PlainsMATTHEW LAWRENCE “MATTIE” GIBSON III, M.S. ’99, Missoula

’00sMARIAH ELIZABETH PETERSON, M.S. ’03, Seneca Falls, NYSTEPHEN KENT GREEN ’04, LoloJELENA STOJAKOVIC ’06, M.A. ’09, Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina

FRIENDSRAY AVERY, Rock Creek DONALD JOE BEDUNAH, Missoula NATHANIEL BLUMBERG, Bigfork EUGENE A. “GENE” BROSOVICH, Billings CHARLES KAY BUCKINGHAM, Missoula JULIE MARIE PETERS CAUFIELD, Carson City, NV ROBBIE “ROB” DWIGHT FOSTER, BigforkSCOTT LESTER GREENE, Missoula BETTY RANDLES HAIGHT, Helena BONNIE ROSE FELKER HAMILTON, Missoula BRIDGER WYETH HOLT, Havre EVELYN TOWLER HUGHES, Missoula DAPHNE BUGBEE JONES, Missoula JULES ALEXANDER KARLIN, Missoula JULIEN H. LEPAGE, Missoula RAYMOND WALTER MEADOWS, Stevensville SHERENE ANNE “SHERRY” PETERSEN, Missoula LINCOLN QUAPPE, Sayville, NY EUDORA ANDERSON REICH, Spokane, WA GORDON H. SIMMONS, Missoula JOHN GOODRICH WATKINS, Niwot, CO JOHN HENRY WICKS, Missoula

IN MEMORIAMWe extend sympathy to the families of the following alumni, faculty, and friends. Names without class or degree years include UM alumni, employees, and friends. To be included in “In Memoriam,” the UM Office of Alumni Relations requires a newspaper obituary or a letter of notification from the immediate family. Material on this page reached our office by March 6, 2012.


about alumni



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M O N TA N A

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Fly Tying & Rod Building Classes

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Summer Gallery Hours: Wed., Thurs., Sat. 12pm-3pm Fri. 12pm-6pm

Edith Freeman: Montana Seasons

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Permanent CollectionMay 31, 2012 - August 25, 2012

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Leave a lasting mark on the Oval by buying an engraved brick that helps support The University of Montana. Each $150 brick makes a great gift, memorial, or tribute to UM alumni, students,

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Philip J. Hess Memorial Studio Fund

“Join the campaign to name KUFM's newly remodeled performance studio in honor of Phil Hess, who founded the UM radio station in 1965 as Chair of the Radio-TV Department.

Now known as Montana Public Radio, Phil’s dream

continues as a network serving 500,000 listeners across Montana and beyond.” Phil Hess Studio Fund Chair, Randall Morger

“Join the campaign to name KUFM's newly remodeled performance studio in honor of Phil Hessthe UM radio station in 1965 as Chair of the Radio-TV Department.

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KUFM-FM circa 1965 Future Phil Hess Studio 2012

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Experience the American West like Never Before.

Featured Exhibitions:

Montana Painters Alliance: Historic Ranches of Montana

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Order greeting cards and campus photos at http://umt.edu/urelations/market or phone orders will be taken at 406-243-2522.Order greeting cards and campus photos at http://umt.edu/urelations/market or phone orders will be taken at 406-243-2522.


It’s Chicago in the early 1980s. The economy has tanked and jobs are scarce, especially in the financial industry.

Brian Wesbury, fresh out of UM with an economics degree, is competing against people with master’s degrees and extensive resumes for the few jobs that are available. His immediate future looks a bit uncertain.

Unbeknownst to him, however, Wesbury possesses one distinct advantage: He happens to be a veteran of UM economics Professor John Wicks’ empirical research design seminar. The experience gained in that class, Wesbury has since been told, is one of the key reasons he landed his first job in the storied economic department at Harris Bank.

“That’s what started off my career,” says Wesbury, who is now considered one of the top economic forecasters in the United States.

Wesbury is just one of thousands of “seminar veterans,” which is what Wicks called students who successfully completed his legendary class.

“You wear that name like a badge of honor,” says Bob McCue, a seminar veteran from the late seventies.

Wicks started teaching the class shortly after he arrived at UM in 1964. It was open to UM students in most majors, but it took more than just signing up for the class to enroll. A new student needed a recommendation from a veteran, and he or she also had to sit for an interview with Wicks. The class, which typically had ten to twenty students, gathered once a week on couches and chairs in the living room of Wicks’ home on South Higgins Avenue, just across from Dornblaser Field. Each student also was required to meet with him once a week at his office on campus.

Every semester the class tackled a different project, exploring economic issues ranging from finding the variables that make it more likely for a person to steal music off the Internet to local food production to determining the value

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Above: Wicks’ alter ego, The Great Pumpkin, was a Halloween fixture at Shakey’s Pizza in downtown Missoula. The Missoulian featured The Great Pumpkin on the front page in the early 1970s.

Top: An avid outdoorsman, Wicks enjoyed fishing Montana’s mountain lakes.

of Missoula’s quality of life. Students would research the topic, design a questionnaire, go door-to-door to conduct the survey, and finally analyze the data. The results would sometimes generate articles Wicks published in peer-reviewed journals.

While the course content was valuable in itself, the practical lessons Wicks taught beyond economics is where he was most impactful.

One of his famous lessons was that of the Seven Ps: Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.

“I still use the Seven Ps today,” Wesbury says. In fact, he mentions them in his most recent book, which acknowledges the role Wicks played in his career.

Wicks also had a unique method for honing students’ public speaking skills.

“He would ‘ding’ parenthetical ‘you knows,’” says Andrew Pryor, a seminar veteran from the early 2000s.

“Every time someone said ‘you know,’ he would say ‘ding.’ And he expected you to keep going and not break your concentration. It really helped students’ speech patterns, whether you liked it or not.”

Wicks also was known for his notorious Pitkin Premium homebrew, affectionately known among veterans as PP. The beverage was concocted in a plastic garbage can in Wicks’ kitchen.

“We were welcome to have a glass if we wanted,” McCue recalls. “Some did actually like it, and some said they did to kiss up to John.”

Pryor, who lovingly describes PP as an “almost nonalcoholic beer that had different flavors and consistencies each time it was brewed,” was lucky enough to be entrusted with the secret recipe.

It wasn’t a special type of hops or flavoring or brewing technique. Ever the economist, Wicks’ secret was using the most inexpensive ingredients available.

“I’m sure he had measurements for the yeast and sugar and other ingredients,” Pryor says. “But they had to be the absolute cheapest possible price you could find. That was the secret to the success of PP.”

The final seminar Wicks taught was spring 2011. He died February 25, 2012, at age seventy-five.

His legend, however, lives on.“His students loved him,” UM economics Professor

Doug Dalenberg says. “John was a bit of a character. He was old-school but generated lots of lasting relationships with students.”

Wesbury and a group of veterans started a fund in the economics department in Wicks’ honor. He hopes to perpetuate the seminar because “it really does provide undergrads with things that they don’t get at other schools.”

Many veterans gathered in April for a celebration they dubbed “The Final Seminar” at the Doubletree in Missoula.

“He still had about six cases of Pitkin Premium left,” McCue says. “So we passed out a little bit to everyone and toasted John one last time. And that was the end of the PP.”

And the end of an era, too.


BY JOHN HEANEY ’02

AND OTHER LESSONSTHE SEVEN PsTHE SEVEN Ps

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MONTANAN325 Brantly HallMissoula, MT 59812-1301MPR004


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