Knapp House Alumni Newsletter
 

Fall 2004

 

Greetings to all Knappers, new and old!  This is the first ever edition of the Knapp House newsletter.  This newsletter is dedicated to our nearly 250 alumni, spread around the U.S. and abroad.  As many of you know, on October 24th (Homecoming weekend), we held our first Knapp House Alumni Brunch and Open House.  All alums were invited and the current Knappers were delighted to meet those who could attend, including Julius Adler, Warren De Vries, Don Pienkos, John Rosenberg and Allyn Ziegenhagen. We also thoroughly enjoyed the correspondence we received from our alumni.  This newsletter is a compilation of updates and stories from the alumni who wrote to us.  We hope you will enjoy them.

 

We plan to continue hosting an alumni brunch every year on the Sunday of Homecoming weekend and we hope to see more and more of you each year.   Help us make this possible by forwarding our newsletter and web address to other Knappers who may not be on the current email list.   We encourage you to keep us up-to-date with your contact information and we’d love to hear about exciting developments in your lives and careers.

 

Visit us on the web at http://knapphouse.rso.wisc.edu and for alumni relations, contact Stacey at sdsmith4@wisc.edu.  You can also write to us at Knapp House, 130 E. Gilman St., Madison, WI, 53703.

 

 

 

News from Knappers

 

Julius Adler (PhD 1957, Biochemistry; adler@biochem.wisc.edu) was a professor of Biochemistry and Genetics from 1960 to 1996.  He is now emeritus and continues his research on sensory reception and decision-making in fruit flies.

 

James Davis (PhD 1965, Geology; jamesdavis93@comcast.net) lives in Sacramento, California and recently retired from the position of State Geologist and Chief of the California State Geological Survey.  He continues to chair the Department of Geology and Geophysics Board of Visitors, which provides both support and feedback to the Department on a variety of issues.

 

Warren DeVries (PhD 1975, Mechanical Engineering; wdevries@nsf.gov) is a faculty member at Iowa State University and is currently the Director of Design, Manufacture and Industrial Innovation Division of the National Science Foundation http://www.eng.nsf.gov/dmii/ .  Dr. DeVries also received an award this fall from the College of Engineering at UW for his achievements.

 

Fred Firestone (PhD 1958, Economics; fffirestone@verizon.net ) joined the faculty of Wellesley College after earning his PhD.  Of his time there, he says,

 

“I discovered that Wisconsin's alums teaching there were a welcoming group; UW was the only university whose grads felt such an affinity there. We were second in number on the faculty only to alumni of a nearby university which had aspirations of rising to the UW level -- a place called Harvard.  Some of my UW-trained colleagues were delighted to find that I was not illiterate in their fields -- a tribute to Knapp House.” 

 

From Wellesley he went to Lehigh University and then to teaching in an inter-disciplinary program at the Claremont Colleges in California. He later moved on to a chairmanship at Illinois State and then took a sabbatical.  At the age of 49 he entered a one-year master's program (MSL) at Yale Law School, to which five professors of various disciplines were admitted each year.  Of the experience he writes,

 

“I was hoping to brush up my knowledge of labor law, which I dealt with in the labor economics courses I taught.  The aim of the program was to infuse other academic fields with legal methodology.  Thus no graduates of that program could apply for admission to the J.D. program. (My wife still threatens to write a book about our year at Yale, to be titled, "I never expected to spend my menopause in student housing.")  I was so enthralled with the study of law that I applied to several other law schools to come as a second-year transfer student and simultaneously as half-time visiting professor of economics.  My first choice came through, and I went, in those capacities, to the University of Virginia.  As you might guess, I opted for the tougher courses.  After I received the J.D. and was admitted to the bar, the Economics Department at UVA asked me to stay a further year there, teaching full time, which I did. Though I was the oldest student both at Yale Law and UVA Law, I didn't feel I was getting on in years until a brief event following one of my lectures to my 275 introductory economics students at UVA.  I'd discussed wage and price controls during the Korean War, in a context making it plain that I had watched the process and its various errors as they happened.  As usual, I talked with some students after the lecture, then started to leave the lecture hall.  Two students remained there, deep in conversation as they sat at the end of a row.  Oblivious to my walking by them, one asked the other, "Did he say Korean War or Crimean War?"

 

After UVA he taught law in Oklahoma for four years and later served as an Administrative Law Judge there.  He has now settled in Virginia Beach, VA and spent fifteen years as a Legal Aid attorney before retiring.  His wife, Lois also retired from her job as Nursing Supervisor of a large children's hospital in nearby Norfolk.

 

Robert Hanrahan (PhD 1958, Chemistry; hanrahan@chem.ufl.edu ) left the house in the fall of 1957, married Mary Ellen Hogan of Green Bay (a grad student at UW then) and went to Leeds, England for a year as a postdoc.  He then became a professor of Chemistry at University of Florida where he worked for 45 years. He retired in May of 2003 but his lab at the University remains active. 

 

Dwayne Huebner (PhD 1959, Curriculum and Instruction; dhuebner@mac.com ) was on the faculty of what is now Northern Illinois University for three years, then spent twenty-five years at Teachers College, Columbia University - retiring early as a full professor and Chairman of the Department of Curriculum and Teaching.  Upon retiring, Yale Divinity School asked him to take a chair in Christian Nurture, and he ended up as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs - a total of twelve years at Yale before retiring. He was one of our first Knappers and kindly provided the picture below.

(Seated are: Yorke, Leo Charles,   Margaret Rennie,  and  Shamma, Maurice.  Standing are:  Mccall, Raymond G,   Hicks Jr, Leslie Hubert,      Hinson, Kuell,  Jones, Keith W,   Neill, Alistair,  Huebner, Dwayne E,  Vanden Heuvel, Richard,   Addison Jr, John West,   Rennie, Wayland Walden, and Murray, Raymond C.  Missing was Bill Grey who was majoring in Romance Languages.

 

Dr. Huebner recalls that Margaret was the wife of Wayland Rennie, and they served as house guardians.  Wayland was also a student and they lived downstairs while the fellows lived upstairs.  The fellows did not use the kitchen then or take meals in the house although Dr. Huebner recalls that Margaret and Wayland once prepared a dinner with Yorkshire pudding!

 

Artur Minkin (PhD 2003, Economics; aminkin@deloitte.com) currently lives in Boston and works for Deloitte & Touche.  In an interesting twist of fate, his roommate is a Knapper, James (Jamie) Bugni (PhD 2001, Oncology) and he lives down the street from another Knapper, Ya-pei Kuo (PhD 2002, History; yp.kuo@tufts.edu).  Jaime is a post-doctoral fellow at MIT and Ya-pei is an assistant professor at Tufts. 

 

Tor Nilsen (PhD 1968, Geology; tor_nilsen@msn.com ) worked for Shell Oil Company in Ventura, CA and the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, CA in between a two-year stay in the US Army Corps of Engineers.  He was later head of a couple of consulting companies in the San Francisco Bay area and now works individually as a consultant in San Carlos, CA.  He was married twice, with four children, and the second marriage (to a geologist) is entering its 21st year.  At the moment he is teaching courses in Indonesia.  In his letter, he shared a great Knapp House story … “What stands out in my memory, however, is running into the naked wife of Governor Warren Knowles one afternoon;  I was there when the modern Governor's Mansion was undergoing renovation and Gov. Knowles and family moved to Knapp House, forcing us Knappers to other quarters for the year in a high-rise south of the main campus.  However, I had to go back there one day to look for some things that I had left in a box, and surprised Mrs. Knowles in an upstairs bathroom.  It still is a vivid memory, she thinking that I was an intruder and I wondering who the hell she was, obviously not a graduate student..”

 

John Peck (PhD 2003, Physics; peck@ieee.org ) has moved to Sunnyvale, California where he works for Stanford Research Systems as a design engineer in the electrochemical tools group.  He has also started taking dance lessons at the Starlite Ballroom and claims that he dances a mean two-step.

 

Don Pienkos (PhD 1971, Political Science; dpienkos@uwm.edu                                                                                                                                                                http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/Polsci/faculty/pienkos.html ) is currently a professor of Political Science at UW- Milwaukee.

 

Susan Ramirez (PhD 1977, History; S.Ramirez@tcu.edu) moved from DePaul University in Chicago about a year ago to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth to take a dream job: an endowed chair; two courses per year at the doctoral level; a research assistant, etc.   She remains in close contact with another alum - John Davidson (PhD, Political Science), who currently lives in Lincoln Park in Chicago and is running an investment/hedge fund and expanding his real estate holdings.

 

Jim Reiels (PhD 1961, Education; jjreiels@newnorth.net ) worked at Nicolet High School from 1958 to 1990, as principal and superintendent.  His professional career included membership on several state and regional boards as well as leadership in the initiation of the Chapter 220 voluntary integration and the special education legislation as it impacted schools in Wisconsin. He married in 1960 to Jean Costello, a business education teacher at Nicolet HS and had three sons, Michael, John and Brian (all married and collectively gave us 7 grandchildren). Mike and John were both in the Badger Marching Band.  Since 1990 they have lived in Upper Michigan (Watersmeet).  They've traveled widely from New Zealand and Australia, to Alaska, Russia, Europe and several trips to Spain, Morrocco, Portugal as well as throughout the USA. Their free time is taken up with local boards (school, Ottawa Forest, Fish & Game), church councils, and several community choirs.  He has also taken up piano and watercolor to fill out the days.

 

John Rosenberg  (PhD , Mathematics; jrosenberg@matcmadison.edu http://matcmadison.edu/faculty/jrosenberg/ ) currently teaches mathematics and computer science at Madison Area Technical College.

 

Jeanne M. Schueller (PhD 1999, German; jeannems@uwm.edu http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/faculty/schueller.html

http://www.uwm.edu/~jeannems ) worked at UT-Austin in the Germanic Studies department but moved back to Wisconsin in 2000.  She is currently an Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics at UW-Milwaukee. Her husband, Mark Louden, was at UT-Austin and got a job at UW-Madison in the German dept., where he is a full professor. They have a 17-month daughter, Clara (below).

 

Bill Shephard (PhD 1962, Physics; Shephard.1@nd.edu) lives in Granger, IN and retired last year after 40 years as Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame.  He still does elementary particle physics research with his group on the Dzero experiment at Fermilab. He also enjoys the traveling in his free time with his wife Nancy.

 

Jim Stahl (PhD 1990, Poultry Science; jlstahl@medicine.wisc.edu) is currently an Associate Scientist with the UW Department of Medicine, doing ocular allergy research. 

 

Jon Strolle, (PhD 1968, Spanish; jstrolle@miis.edu ) is a professor of Hispanic Studies in the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey California.  He was Dean and Associate Professor for a number of years, but has now returned to the faculty and will continue to teach.  Recently he wrote an OpEd piece that ran in the San Francisco

Chronicle (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/04/21/EDG8067KE11.DTL)

In his letter he shared a great Knapp house story…

“My former wife, Margaret (Betsy) Strolle worked at the University Hospital and treated Nathan Feinstein, a law school professor and well-known labor negotiator who had helped settle the New York Times strike of the early sixties.  He came over for coffee one evening and told us stories of sitting in the Knapp House (then governor's mansion) living room while Robert LaFollette took a call from Franklin D. Roosevelt on

election eve.  It was a congratulatory call for the 1936 election….”

 

Paul Zeitlin (MS 1966, Computer Science; zhat2000@msn.com ) is currently living in the Los Angeles area and working at the Information Technology department of Infonet Services Corporation.

 

Allyn Ziegenhagen (PhD 1962, Chemical Engineering; lorlyn@execpc.com ) worked in research and product design for companies including Shell Development Co., Stauffer Chemical Co., James River and Union Camp Corporation and he specialized in packaging innovations, for example, creating flexible but water-resistant packaging.  Also, he taught Chemical Engineering courses using Spanish at La Universidad Del Valle in Cali, Colombia, South America (1964-65). He currently lives near Pewaukee, a town just west of Milwaukee.